Putin’s Wildest Dreams Come True

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Welcome back to Pod Save the World.

I'm Tommy Vitor.

I'm Ben Rhodes.

Ben, did you catch the USA-Canada Four Nations hockey tournament?

I didn't.

I heard many good things about it, and I heard we won.

The only thing that matters is there were three fights in the first nine seconds.

Literally.

Well, I mean, there's a lot of, you know, there's lots of booing

frustration.

Yeah, there was.

All the conflict, all the Trump-Trudeau conflict was spilling out onto the ice, and these dudes were beating the life out of it.

Well, it's like the Cold War used to heighten the drama of like the U.S.-Soviet hockey games.

It's weird that now that's Canada.

Like Canada's standing for our geopolitical Rocky 6 is maple syrup based fighting trench warfare or something.

Yeah, it's interesting times.

Yeah, weird times.

This is a weird, I mean, it's crazy that this show is like a seismic shift.

in U.S.

foreign policy that we're going to talk about today.

This is a historic pot se of the world.

I mean, that's one in the...

You should stick around to the end of this one.

Yeah, this is in the Syria one.

It's just like, I can't believe this is all happening in the same kind of timeframe.

We're going to talk about this shift away from Europe by the United States towards Russia and the complete and total selling out of Ukraine.

We're going to get into J.D.

Vance's trip to Germany to the Munich Security Conference, where Ben just was, and how he was boosting the German far right ahead of their election next week.

And we'll update you on the far right in Austria just for fun, just because you need more neo-Nazis in your life.

We'll talk about how a crypto scam has created major political problems for Argentinian President Javier Mille.

Reports that the CIA is flying drones over Mexico, the latest on the impact of cuts to USAID programs abroad, how the Gaza ceasefire deal is still holding, which is good news and what comes next, and then some leaked intelligence reports about Iran's nuclear program.

And then, Ben, you did our interview a little bit earlier today.

What are we going to hear?

Yeah, for a long time worldos, you might remember Max Sedin, who's the Moscow bureau chief for the Financial Times, not currently in Moscow for obvious reasons.

Max was on a bunch at the beginning of the full-scale war in Ukraine.

So we had him on to talk about how the Russians are digesting this swing in American foreign policy,

how they're seeing things,

what the domestic political environment is in Russia, how Russia might have further ambitions in Europe or in the former Soviet space in this new world of carved up spheres of influence with the United States.

So as usual, Max gives a very smart take on just what the Russian side of all this is.

So everything we're about to talk about, Max, as an expert and a reporter, was able to kind of fill in here's how Putin might be seeing things, here how the Russians are seeing things.

So people should definitely check it out.

Yeah, the sound of champagne corks popping must be spinning.

Yeah, Max's head was spinning as I was talking to him.

It's hard to get your mind around what's happening right now.

Wild.

Okay, well, here's the backstory in all this.

So last week, President Trump called Putin to discuss the war in Ukraine.

They then announced via like Twitter readouts that the U.S.

and Russia are going to hold a series of bilateral peace talks about the war.

Trump said this could ultimately include a Putin visit to the U.S.

and maybe Trump going to Moscow.

But the call itself effectively ended three years of Western isolation of Putin and the Russians after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

And neither this call nor the diplomatic process that Trump and Putin agreed to included a role for Ukraine or for the Europeans.

Earlier today, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, and Trump's Special Envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, held the first round of these talks in Saudi Arabia.

And Ben, I do want to plant a flag right here and now and say that that is too many senior people in big egos for one set of negotiations.

I think they are going to knife each other.

Yes, yeah.

Well, also the Middle East envoy being in the Russia talks is interesting.

Yeah.

It goes to show how arbitrary the Trump foreign policy team is going to be in terms of who does what role.

That's a really good point.

And not there was Keith Kellogg, who was supposed to be in charge of diplomacy around this war.

Yeah.

So I mean, we talked about that with Max a bit, but the key point is that the Russians didn't want Kellogg in the talks because Kellogg had been pretty hawkish.

We talked about it on this podcast.

Kellogg was giving Fox News interviews, which Trump surely saw, about the need to escalate, ramp up weapons to Ukraine to put them in a stronger position heading in negotiations.

The Russians are like, yeah, we don't like that guy.

So the Russians kind of selected who they want to negotiate with, which is never never what you want in a situation like that, and sent Kellogg to what is literally the kids' table to Trump, which is Europe and Ukraine.

So I don't think Keith Kellogg is going to be calling the shots here.

No.

So Rubio, Waltz, Wickoff, they met in Saudi Arabia with Sergei Lavrov and Yuri Ushakov, top, like foreign policy officials with Putin.

Here's a quick clip of Rubio speaking in Riyadh about these talks.

For three and a half years while this conflict has raged, or three years while it's raged, no one else has been able to bring something together like what we saw today because Donald Trump is the only leader in the world that can.

So no one is being sidelined here.

But President Trump is in a position that he campaigned on to initiate a process that could bring about an end to this conflict.

And from that could emerge some very positive things for the United States, for Europe, for Ukraine, for the world.

But first it begins by the end of this conflict.

And so the only thing President Trump's trying to do is bring about peace.

It's what he campaigned on.

It's something the world should be thanking President Trump for doing.

He's been able to achieve what for two and a half, three years, no one else has been able to achieve, which is to

begin this process, a serious process.

Obviously, a lot of work remains before we have a result.

But President Trump's the only one that can do it.

He almost says bring the two parties together, but then he realizes, no, they didn't even try to do that.

Yes.

The U.S.

and Russia in the room.

So this is obviously the beginning of a long process.

And Russia, I don't think, is really incentivized to move quickly because they can just bleed Ukraine dry at this point.

But according to a report in Fox News, what was discussed today in Riyadh was a three-stage plan.

That includes a ceasefire, elections in Ukraine, and then a final peace agreement.

Ukraine is there operating under this martial law declaration.

Zelensky, I think understandably, says he can't hold an election in the middle of a war.

He needs the fighting to end to safely hold an election.

So this U.S.

demand that Ukraine hold new elections is pretty shocking.

Agreed to with Russia.

I mean, just think about that.

Yeah.

The U.S.

and Russia agreeing that Ukraine has to hold an election without talking to the Ukrainians about that.

That is wild.

I mean, yeah, the fighting's ongoing.

Putin's hardly a democratically elected leader.

There's a pretty recent history of the Russians intervening in meddling in Ukrainian elections.

So yeah, it's all a mess.

All of this happens.

These talks in Riyadh happened a couple of days after Pete Hegzeth gave a speech in Brussels at NATO, where he said it was unrealistic for Ukraine to ever join NATO or get back the territory they lost since 2014.

Trump kind of...

They tried to walk back the Hegzeth speech, then they walked back the walk back.

So it doesn't matter.

Ben, let's pause there.

It's like, we should not be surprised that these talks are happening given what Trump said he was going to do in the election, but it is still like we started, this is a seismic shift in U.S.

foreign policy.

There are global repercussions.

It comes after J.D.

Vance went to Germany and effectively told the Europeans to fuck off.

We'll get to that in a minute.

But what did you make of like the talks in Saudi Arabia that you've seen and the proposals that have leaked out so far?

Yeah, I mean, we'll get to the European piece of this and some of my experience in Munich.

But this is not just a change from three years of U.S.

foreign policy.

It's a change from 75 years of U.S.

foreign policy.

This is the United States, like overnight, like we've been talking about rug pulls, Tommy, in the crypto context.

Another one coming up.

This is a rug pull underneath Ukraine and the entire continent of Europe, which is...

Yeah, we're just accustomed to the United States being a guarantor of European security.

That was founded for two purposes.

One, to defeat the Nazis, and now we're for the Nazis.

We'll get to that with J.D.

Vance.

And two, was to kind of fortify Europe against the Soviet Union and then Russia, and that appears to be gone.

You cannot overstate what a dramatic shift this is in the U.S.

position.

It's absolutely absurd to think that you're negotiating the end of a war with only one of the parties of the war.

The Ukrainians have lost tens of thousands of people,

many more injured, many more displaced over the last three years.

And they were the ones invaded and they don't get to be at the talks.

And the Europeans are the ones that have been supplying the weapons with us in larger numbers.

If you add up the total number of

EU plus member states.

So we're just essentially saying our allies, our friends, and the people that were invaded are not allowed to participate in the peace talks that we're having with Russia that...

when you listen to the talks seem to also be about like oil and natural resources and you know rubio is talking about china um it's absolutely an insane i mean i i would have expected you know some kind of talks obviously given what Trump said but I actually would have assumed that the Ukrainians might be invited to the talks you know right so to cut them out for optics alone for optics alone to cut them out entirely is so extreme and and so punitive to the Ukrainians who did nothing wrong here they're the ones invaded that it's hard to to even get your mind around that that's the first thing well do you want to hear Trump's response when he was asked uh what he says to Ukrainians who feel disappointed they were not part of these talks he was also asked in the same clip about whether the U.S.

supports this Russian push for new elections in Ukraine.

Let's listen.

You know, they're upset about not having a seat.

Well, they've had a seat for three years and a long time before that.

This could have been settled very easily.

Just

a half-baked negotiator could have settled this years ago without, I think, without the loss of much land, very little land, without the loss of any lives, and without the loss of cities that are just laying on their sides.

You have those magnificent golden domes that are shattered, will never be replaced, you can't replace them.

Well, we have

a situation where we haven't had elections in Ukraine, where we have martial law, essentially martial law in Ukraine,

where the leader in Ukraine, I mean I hate to say it, but he's down at 4% approval rating.

And where a country has been blown to smithereens, when they want a seat at the table, you could say the people have to, wouldn't the people of Ukraine have to say like, you know, it's been a long time since we've had an election?

That's not a Russia thing.

That's something coming from me and coming from many other countries also.

So those from a press conference Tuesday at the White House.

I mean, every time he talks about this, he blames Ukraine for getting invaded and not ending a war they didn't start.

The only passion in his voice is for the golden domes and like the destruction or obstruction of architecture.

It's it's I don't know.

It's shocking.

I really don't want to go full 2017,

Tommy, but the reality is that if you were sitting in the basement of the Kremlin like a year ago and you're like, what is the absolute best case scenario?

It would be a president of the United States echoing Russian misinformation that it's somehow Ukraine's fault that the war started, that they missed all these opportunities to avoid the war when they were just repeatedly invaded.

And what sovereign country is going to say,

we're going to preemptively give up a bunch of territory to stop you from invading us?

Like,

it it makes no sense.

So, this is to a T what the Russians would want.

If you look at the Hegseth comments, the key elements of the negotiation, the key things that Ukraine would have to concede are territory that Russia currently holds and no NATO membership.

Some people may say, well, inevitably the negotiation is going to end up there.

Well, you don't publicly concede those things at the beginning of the negotiation.

That's the art of the deal, baby.

And so, everything I heard in Munich was essentially this was the most catastrophic NATO meeting anybody could remember because they didn't preview that with anybody.

They didn't say, hey, we're just going to go right for the end of the negotiation by making the concessions up front.

They didn't talk to the Ukrainians about it, who will have to agree, by the way.

I mean, the Ukrainians don't have to agree.

They're a warring party.

And so at some point, actually, the danger is that you're not bringing along the Ukrainians.

They could just decide to fight a guerrilla war for forever.

This idea of

Zelensky being at 4%, that's nonsense.

There's never been a poll that shows that.

I I mean, his approval writing may be slipping a bit, but he's nowhere near what Trump says.

The Russians have every interest in winning some totally destabilizing election that polarizes Ukrainian politics.

Even Zelensky's opponents, like Poroshenko, the previous president, has said, I don't think there can be

an election in this context.

So this is, you know, a Russian play to further destabilize Ukraine, maybe try to get some Russian-backed candidate to kind of be a disruptive force in the election itself.

Everything about this makes no sense.

And then even if you look at that table, like Sergei Lavrov has been the Russian foreign minister like my whole fucking life, you know, he's been there forever.

You got Mike Waltz, who was elected to the House of Representatives in 2016.

This guy is in over his head.

Let's just name it.

Marco Rubio, if any other Democratic president was doing anything like this, he'd be like lighting himself on fire on the Senate floor.

Oh, yeah.

He's Mr.

Russia Hawk.

Now all of a sudden, he's telling us all we should be thanking Trump.

Wait, Ben, let me read you a tweet from Marco Rubio in 2022.

Many in the West still don't understand that Putin is an expert liar.

He doesn't care about humanitarian relief.

In fact, if there's a ceasefire, it is because he sees some strategic or tactical benefit.

And beware of attacks on refugees Russia blames on Ukraine or NATO.

That was from March 9th, 2022.

He knows better.

How is anybody going to take this guy seriously?

If you sell your soul that hard that you do a complete 180-degree shift on the most important geopolitical issue in the world, arguably, you're just not like Sergei Lavros is going to look at that guy as if he's tiny little Marco.

Disposable.

He's just totally disposable.

He's totally afraid of Trump.

And leaves nothing.

There was also this Telegraph report that the Trump people passed Zelensky basically a demand letter that said that the U.S.

would get 50% of its recurring revenues from natural resources, meaning like minerals, rare earths, and seemingly maybe fossil fuels.

And it was described as

that Trump's demands would amount to a higher share of Ukrainian GDP than reparations imposed on Germany at the Versailles Treaty.

For being invaded.

For being invaded.

And so we're basically telling a country that we've been helping stay alive after being invaded that they have to give us all of their wealth to what?

To be invited to the negotiating table on how they're going to have their country dismembered and never have a security guarantee from the United States?

I mean, this is cruel stuff.

And I think to understand it, to pull back the lens here, and you and I were talking about this earlier, you know, what Putin believes in is that there are certain big powers that matter in the world that have kind of spheres of influence where they can do whatever the fuck they want.

And those powers, by the way, don't include Europe.

It's the United States and Russia and China, basically.

And then maybe, you know, the Saudis and Emiratis, just because they have a lot of money.

And that's the world that Trump likes.

You know, he doesn't care about allies.

He doesn't care about democracies.

He fundamentally believes in a highly transactional world in which if he can get some oil licenses from Russia, he can literally run a bus over not just Ukraine, but all of Europe in the process.

And the only thing that might keep him from kind of running the bus back and forth over and over again is if Ukraine signs off all their mineral wealth to the United States.

It's absolutely grotesque.

And it's a recipe for like a complete unraveling of any kind of international order that has any regard for

human life, for right and wrong, for alliances, for democracy.

And we all knew this was possibly coming.

I will say the people that thought, you know, maybe the madman theory would work, you know, like, this is not the madman theory.

This is a guy that just doesn't give a shit.

Well, and also forcing the Ukrainians to cut a deal with Russia that you kind of

makes them not really a country anymore.

And then us demanding all of their mineral wealth.

That is like a Yalta-like just dividing up of the country in some ways.

And to your point about Europe, I mean, They were completely blindsided by this.

Like, they tried to walk back Hegseth's comments about no NATO membership and not returning all the territory, but he was reading prepared remarks.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, so like this wasn't like a flub.

This wasn't a gaffe.

So Macron tries to pull together this emergency meeting of European leaders to figure out how to respond.

It doesn't work.

It's a complete flop.

I guess the UK and France expressed willingness to include some sort of troop presence from both countries in a post-war peacekeeping force in Ukraine, but Germany, Spain, Italy balked the idea.

Olaf Schultz was furious that it was brought up and discussed publicly in the days before his election.

He said he was, quote, a little bit irritated by the talks.

For Olaf Schultz, that's like lighting himself on fire.

He called it an incomprehensible debate at the wrong time about the wrong topic.

But the reason this, this

it's not at all clear that you could implement a peacekeeping force like this, because what they're talking about is what's called a tripwire force, where the Russians know if they invade Ukraine fully and there's this international force there, then that would immediately put them in direct conflict with the U.S., major powers in Europe, NATO, etc.

But for that tripwire force to be effective, they need to be backed by the United States.

Like all those countries need to know that if their forces are attacked, the U.S.

will come and get their back.

And Putin needs to know that, so he doesn't do it.

And also for this peacekeeping force to keep itself safe, to be logistically feasible, they need U.S.

air defenses, intelligence, logistics, none of which you can count on from the United States right now.

So, like, this is Europe sort of has no recourse at the moment.

Zelensky didn't know what to do.

He was supposed to fly to Saudi Arabia tomorrow, Wednesday, when this pod comes out.

He canceled that trip in protest, but no one cares.

None of the people there care.

Yeah, I mean, this is the challenge.

You know, the U.S.

is cutting Europe and Ukraine out of these negotiations.

If Ukraine is not going to get NATO membership, the only thing that, you know, might make it worth it for them to say, okay, we've sacrificed all these lives.

We've, you know,

been fighting off the Russians for three years.

We need a security guarantee for somewhere.

Because what the Ukrainians are worried about is they give Russia all the land that Russia currently occupies, and Russia just waits and cannibalizes a few more hundred miles of Ukrainian territory in two years or three years.

And so the question is, and this is why NATO membership mattered.

If Ukraine's going to lose 20% of its territory, they need to know that they're viable and secure on the back end of that.

Now the U.S.

is totally out of that.

NATO is totally out of that.

So then the question becomes, can the Europeans provide a troop presence in Ukraine that can make a security guarantee credible?

On paper, it's like, okay, well, if the Europeans are talking about putting troops in, that's a good thing.

Well, first of all, it's kind of weird that they're not even at the table.

If they're going to be a fundamental part of how an agreement can stick, they're not there.

The other problem, though, is in a world in which the U.S.

was actually committed to NATO and committed to Europe, yeah, number one, you might be able to make

a force like that stick because the United States would be supplying it.

The United States would be providing intelligence to it.

The United States, you know, Europe command for NATO would have some role in drawing up plans.

If you remove the U.S.

from the equation and the Europeans are just doing the most significant military mission in decades by Europeans without any U.S.

participation, they're flying a little blind there.

There's also the question of if it's French and Germans and then maybe they get some Poles and some Baltic countries to put troops.

Well, so you get whoever you can in a pickup team.

Who's in charge of this force?

If the Russians actually invade Ukraine, who is the commander on the ground going to call?

Bob Mullen.

Emmanuel Macron.

Exactly.

Well, that's the thing.

Are they going to call?

Is Emmanuel Macron in charge of British troops?

Is Kier Starmer in charge of French troops?

Where is the political leadership that would make decisions about what this force does and when it responds?

On paper, tripwire force sounds great, but in practice, there's like a billion questions, particularly if the U.S.

isn't involved.

And so this thing is moving really fast.

The Ukrainians can say, no, we're not going to participate in negotiations, but if the U.S.

withdraws support and Trump is hammering away at Zelensky and Putin is grinding away at the front line, Boy,

that could be an even darker outcome where the Ukrainians kind of start to collapse on that front line because they're not getting the support from the U.S.

The political support is evaporating.

Putin feels emboldened.

I mean, this could go wrong in a lot of ways.

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So, Ben, let's turn to J.D.

Vance's visit to Germany and his speech.

Here's an excerpt from what J.D.

had to say.

The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it's not China, it's not any other external actor.

And what I worry about is the threat from within.

When I look at Europe today, it's sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the Cold War's winners.

I look to Brussels, where EU commissars warn citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest the moment they spot what they've judged to be, quote, hateful content.

If you're running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you.

Nor, for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump.

Commissars are Communist Party officials usually responsible for some sort of political education.

So it's a very nice message from JD.

So, Ben, despite all that we just talked about, about the war in Ukraine going south, the death, the destruction, the hellscape for Ukrainian people over the last three years, JD decided to lecture Europe about social media censorship.

I do not recall him or Trump ever raising concerns about censorship with Viktor Orban during his many visits to the United States, for example, but consistency is not their thing.

And then on top of that, J.D.

Vance specifically criticized German political parties for refusing to work with the AFD, which is the far-right political party in Germany.

All of these German political parties refuse to work with the AFD or go into coalition with the AFD because they are so extreme and seen by many Germans to be the heir to the Nazi Party.

And while in Germany, J.D.

Vance blew off Olaf Schultz, the current chancellor from the Social Democratic Party, and he met with Alex Weitel, the head of the AFD.

And we've discussed on this show that Elon Musk has repeatedly boosted the AFD.

He did a Twitter spaces chat with Weitel, the AFD leader.

He spoke at an AFD rally.

And the reason this matters so much right now is because Germany has a federal election on February 23rd.

It seems quite obvious that Vance's comments were designed to help the AFD in that election or to pressure other political parties to work with the AFD down the road.

Right now, German political analysts think the most likely outcome of this election is the CDU getting the most votes.

The CDU is Angela Merkel's party, the traditional conservative party in Germany, and that they will go into coalition with the Social Democrats, will likely get third place, which would make the CDU's leader, Friedrich Mertz, the next chancellor.

But the AFD is polling at 20, 22%, something in there.

The firewall against working with the AFD amongst other parties has been weakened by some very stupid political maneuvering by Mertz that we can get into if you want, but just know that that has happened.

And, you know, the AFD, it draws votes from people that agree with their political views and sort of like hardline right-wing positions against immigrants and Islam, et cetera, but also just people who are really mad and see voting for the AFD as a protest vote to say fuck you to the government.

I was listening to a German pollster give a talk about how angry and frustrated Germans are and how the overwhelming majority of Germans do not think that the political system as currently constituted even has the capacity to fix Germany's problems.

So it's a pretty dark election right now.

So Ben, join the club.

Yeah, no kidding.

So you were just in Munich at the Munich Security Conference.

I think you were an official member of JD Vance's delegation along with Jack Pisobic.

How'd it go?

How'd JD's comments go over in the room?

I've never experienced something like it.

I really haven't.

There's no hyperbole this week

because

this is a conference that's all predicated on there being a transatlantic alliance, on there being differences between the U.S.

and Europe, that you kind of come together in Munich and you talk about them because you kind of agree that you're trying to get to the same place.

And without getting into

individual conversations,

I actually arrived at the venue right as J.D.

Vance was leaving from the speech, but I had been kind of following it.

I didn't need to be there for that.

Over the course of the next day or two, I was in rooms with European prime ministers, foreign ministers, like senior people.

They looked like they had seen a ghost.

I mean, it was like nothing I'd ever experienced in that not only

had the U.S.

done this rug pull on Russia and Ukraine, which was destabilizing enough because Europe is just trying to figure out, wait a second, how can we continue to support Ukraine, which is our own security, because they see Ukraine as an extension of European security.

It's this kind of bulwark buffer between them and Russia.

But then for J.D.

Vance to come, and let's be very clear, the AFD are the legacies of like German neo-Nazis.

This is the German far right.

This isn't even like, you know, the National Front in France or National Rally in France, which we don't like either, and is also Putin-backed.

These are German Nazis, you know?

They downplay the Holocaust.

They like use Nazi slogans and claim they don't know what they're doing.

Parts of the AFD are under surveillance by German intelligence because they're so extreme.

Been dubbed extremist groups by Germans themselves.

And for J.D.

Vance to go there and take his anti-woke ideologies and apply them to the entire continent of Europe to back the far right, to refuse to meet the sitting chancellor of one of the most important countries in the world is insane enough.

I will tell you that I was sitting in a dinner with some of these people when the news broke that he'd actually met with the AFD leader.

And these people are like looking at their phones like and it and it was literally like just not knowing what the world is anymore you know up is down down is up like this this suddenly the united states is aligned with far right movements in their countries against them at the same time that the united states is aligned with vladimir putin and his ambitions in ukraine against them and the ukrainians just think of the whiplash this is not to say europe is perfect it is to say that it's good if the far right is not in in charge in fucking Germany, okay?

It's good if Vladimir Putin can't run roughshod over Ukraine and they don't know what to do.

I mean, clearly they need to band together.

Clearly they need more of a pan-European policy.

That's hard when European has this kind of fractious politics to begin with.

So there's the immediate term question like you raised in German politics itself.

You know, Wurtz, Friedrich Wurtz, the CDU leader.

Look at you with the German pronunciation.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

How about that?

Well, I'm just back from you.

Someone just went abroad.

He's poised to win.

He's moving way right.

This is not on the Mercury.

Big time.

He's talking about sealing borders.

We should say, like, short version is he put forward a hardline anti-immigration vote in the Bundestag, knowing that it could only pass if the AFD voted for it, which is seen by almost everybody as,

if not like in practice, in spirit,

a breach of the firewall sort of agreement.

Yeah.

And what this could do is it could just break that consensus against AFD inside of Germany because, you know, if he moves so far right, he can't form a coalition with the Social Democrats, for instance.

Well, then all of a sudden you might be looking at the AFD being in the German government and having this kind of right, far-right government in Germany, right?

With a French election coming up

in the next couple of years that could bring the far right to power in France.

And then what kind of world are we living in?

This is starting to feel like the 30s a little bit and not in, well, there's no good way it could be like the 30s.

So JD Vance, he has this kind of smarmy note.

The guy's 40 fucking years old right um and and he's sitting over he has no experience in foreign policy really and he's just gonna go pull a pin out of a grenade and throw it in the middle of europe in 2016 he was calling trump a nazi yeah yeah this is just i i don't i words fail you know no i know it it again it just i think it's it's worth repeating that trump has more in common just sort of like culturally in terms of values with the russians and the saudis than he does with any of those leaders in europe and jd vance is there yeah that's it to sort of pair them he prefers that system the leadership style.

Trump prefers spending time with them.

The only good news I heard, Ben, is I was listening to an editor at Der Spiegel talk about the election and some of Elon Musk's bullshit.

And she said that it could backfire.

Yeah, so far it seems like it has in part because moderates don't really like Elon Musk.

They think he's a prick because they're smart.

They read the paper.

And AFD voters.

Some of them are anti-American or anti-capitalist, and it backfired in that sense.

So maybe J.D.

Vance's nonsense will do the same.

I was texting with someone in the Social Democratic Party the other day who said that like Vance's, it was such brazen election interference that it didn't go over well.

That said, around the same time, there was another horrific attack by an asylum seeker in Germany.

This guy drove a car into a group of people in Munich, killed a bunch of folks, which, you know, I think immigration was already probably a top issue in terms of salience in this upcoming election.

But, you know, it almost seems like you're seeing this happen again and again in Germany.

I think in Austria, there was a knife attack where there's asylum seekers, Syrian or Afghans, who are attacking and murdering people almost as if their actions are designed in a lab to boost the far right.

Yeah.

I mean, we

unfortunately we're talking a lot about Nazis on this podcast,

but part of what's also dangerous is this historical revisionism, right?

Yep.

So first, you know, you mentioned the Brussels bureaucrats or the commissars as if they're like Stalinist because they have regulation in Brussels.

But let's go back to the Elon Musk thing when he did the dialogue with the AFD leader.

Yeah,

and they basically called the Nazis socialists.

And communists.

I'm shocked I have to do this, but I've been doing some deep reading on the Nazis just to kind of get ready for what's coming maybe here.

And let's bear in mind that Adolf Hitler literally came to power by forming a right-wing alliance.

And the way he was able to pull the conservatives in to his, you know, becoming chancellor was to kind of mobilize a right-wing front against the social democrats and the communists.

And then after the Reichstag fire, what he did is he basically killed all the leadership of the communists and the social democrats.

The night of the long knives, which you may have heard of, was literally the roundup and killing and imprisonment and concentration camp sending of the social democrats, right?

This is not the fucking left, okay?

This is the far right.

And

I hope this isn't working in Germany.

I hope that maybe there's some good nationalism in the sense of like, hey, stay out of our politics, J.D.

Vance and Elon Musk.

But what I worry about is this kind of erosion of just historical memory because the whole reason we have all these alliances and organizations and conferences is to not do that again.

And JD Vance seems to be

playing with the worst kind of fire in the worst kind of places.

Yeah.

So, I mean, this election's on Sunday.

We'll obviously cover it next week.

I mean, you know, maybe this will be okay.

There'll be the Grand Coalition, which is the CDU and the SPD.

Maybe combined, though, those two parties don't get to 50% and they can't form a coalition and they have to bring in another third party.

Maybe it's like the Green Party, which kind of sounds fine on paper, but in practice, they just can't agree on anything.

So you have an unworkable government.

And I think the government kind of failing like that or dissolving again will often boost the far right.

So this is a very important election, one to watch, and it really sucks that our own vice president is making it worse for all of Europe.

Quick update, Ben, just from neighboring Austria, because we're talking about neo-Nazis so much today.

Back in September, we talked about Austria's elections where the far-right Freedom Party or FPO won a majority without 29% of the vote ahead of the Conservative People's Party by about three points.

So

despite the fact that the far-right party won, the slightly more moderate Conservative Party was given the mandate to form a government first, but they failed.

There were a bunch of political maneuverings that then happened.

And then the far-right party, the FPO, and its leader, Herbert Kikol, were given the chance to try to form a government.

He tried and tried and and tried.

They couldn't come to an agreement.

And those talks fell apart.

And he was forced to sort of like give up the mandate that's given to you by the president to form a government last week.

And the sticking points were security, immigration, and the far-right party's pro-Russia stance.

And what's interesting about this is a lot of political analysts think that Kikul wanted these talks to blow up because one thing that might come from this is Austria being forced to hold another set of elections.

And his party has been doing even better in polls since the last round.

So the far right is just gaining and gaining and gaining.

So long story short, like we don't know who will be the next leader in Austria, but this is just another example of this trend of the growing strength of these far-right parties across Europe, including the most extreme versions of them in Germany and in Austria.

Yeah.

And I mean, the only thing I'd add is if Russia's at the casino and they're pulling the slots, like they're just coming up triples every time, right?

I mean, this could not be better for them.

And I'm not trying to see everything through that prism because it's bigger than that.

It's for the health of European democracies, too.

But you're right, they're pro-Russia parties.

Yeah, they are.

They're straight up pro-Russia parties.

And so this is just going to completely scramble the geopolitical deck.

And in the end, what it's going to do is make Europe much, much weaker.

Because if Europe is divided between center-left and far-right, and different flavors in between,

and pro-Russian, and

there's no, where, if you're not pro-Russian, if you're what used to be pro-American and there's no America to be, what are you?

Like, what is Emmanuel Macron or Kier Starmer?

Like, there's not, they have to have their own European identity now.

So this is just going to be an incredibly bumpy ride as an understatement in European politics.

Dan, we're going to take a quick break, but

weird President's Day, huh?

It's a tough timing for us

to be celebrating our president.

Yeah, it felt a little weird, didn't it?

It didn't.

It wasn't like I remember.

I just kind of worked through it.

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All right, let's switch hemispheres because Argentina's president, Javier Mille, could be in some deep shit thanks to his promotion of a meme coin crypto scam token called Libra.

The Financial Times said this was, quote, the biggest crisis for his administration since he took office in December of 2023.

So, Ben, some basics for our non-crypto loving listeners here.

A meme coin, it's basically a crypto token that is often sold as a joke or a reference to some sort of like online community.

The first meme coin was Dogecoin, which unfortunately has been appropriated by Elon Musk and his Doge bags.

But the Dogecoin was kind of designed to mock the absurd speculation happening in the crypto space.

And then all of a sudden, it got so popular that the market cap of Dogecoin, which to be clear, buying a meme coin gets you nothing.

Nothing.

Literally nothing.

It doesn't exist in the physical world, guys.

I hate to break it to you.

But the market cap at one point at its peak of Dogecoin was $85 billion.

Billion dollars.

Worthless thing.

It's all play money.

So

these things are a joke, but they can also be incredibly lucrative, which of course brings in the scammers.

So

great if you're Mark Andreessen.

Yeah, or Donald Trump, because you might remember Trump, Melania Trump.

They released their own meme coins right before the inauguration.

So that brings us back to last week.

Friday night, Javier Millé tweets about the Libra coin just after its launch.

This has the effect of shooting it up.

The market cap hits a peak of $4.56 billion,

and then the value of the coin collapsed 94% in 11 hours.

And in the meme coin biz, this is what looks like what is called a rug pull, where you have some insiders who own a bunch of these coins.

They own them early at the cheapest price possible.

They pump the thing on social media.

A bunch of people come in and buy them and then they dump all their coins, pocket the money, and everyone who bought in late is holding the bag.

You're stuck with this literally worthless thing and you lost all your money.

So this rug pull happens.

Millet sees it.

He tweets a statement saying he didn't know the details of the project.

He wasn't connected to it.

I think he then deleted his initial tweet.

He tried to like scramble away from the thing, but that didn't go over well with the people who lost money.

And also, he's clearly lying because Millay personally met with one of the partners behind the project, a guy who also worked on Melania's meme coin.

So, this is a mess.

Some parts of the opposition are floating impeachment charges, though that probably won't happen.

But, Ben, I mean, it does seem like Millay did a pretty good job of stating why, showing why his worldview of anarcho-capitalism is not really going to work out in the long run for the little guy, like if there's no rules, no regulations.

Yeah.

Well,

you can kind of play with fake money more easily if you're like Donald Trump and you have the whole U.S.

government and Elon Musk behind you.

I think we should just note, watch this crypto space again and again.

It's the quickest way to make the grift pay off

quickly if you're have all this inside information, you're making money off fees like the Trump people do, or you're tipped off on the rug pull like others, maybe in different transactions like this.

And I think what people need to wake up to around the world in this country, in Argentine, and everywhere else is like, there's this kind of weird, these guys are disruptors and they're shaking things up and they're breaking the establishment.

They don't give a shit about you.

They're just trying to get rich.

I mean, they're just like,

if the worst case scenario is there's some like Russian handmind everything, it could be quite simpler, which is like, these are just a bunch of corrupt plutocrats enriching themselves at everybody else's expense and laughing at us just like and laughing mainly at their own followers right like the people they had the least respect for because i'm not buying the fucking meme coin libra or melania it's fans of melee they're fans it's fans of melee fans of trump and they're just screwing their own people over and over and over again uh with these griffs and getting really really rich and and that you know melee

has been down at Mar-a-Lago.

I mean, it just shows you that they're just circulating these ideas and they're repeating these ideas.

And it's just, it's one of the most rampant forms of like looting and corruption that we've seen that these leaders are getting elected on kind of this weird masculine libertarian populism and then just relentlessly screwing the people that voted for it.

Fucking the people who voted.

Yeah, eight wallets

linked to the Libra team cashed out over $107 million.

They started the rug pull process only three hours after the debut.

And there's something called tokenomics with all of these coins.

And like like good tokenomics have an overwhelming amount of the supply, like 80-90% locked up over the course of several years.

So you can't rug pull.

But in this case, 82% of the supply was unlocked and sellable from the very start.

So this thing was designed for this exact scenario to happen.

And Millay clearly just didn't care.

I mean, he's an economist, but he didn't look into this.

But let me read you this response from Millay to his critics, Ben.

Quote, to the filthy rats of the political cast who want to take advantage of this situation and do harm, I want to say that every day they confirm how vile politicians are are and they increase our conviction to kick them in the ass.

Yes.

On the record quotes.

It's like I've heard this kind of garbage from him for a while.

When are people going to stop falling for this?

I know.

Now you're in charge, buddy.

You've been running this country for a while now.

Like

these people are in charge of everything.

Everything.

I mean, this is a common theme on this podcast since Trump got elected.

You're in charge of everything and you're grifting your way left, right, and center.

And then whenever you get caught with the grift, you attack politicians who have no power.

Like you're fucking president.

You know, stop talking to me about politicians.

You are the politician.

I know.

Like you are the president of this country.

And you see all these right-wingers celebrating Mele on the internet and being like, wow, he got rid of their deficit.

But they don't also talk about the fact that poverty increased to like 53% in the first half of last year.

Because he dogged the country.

Like he got rid of all social services.

And so great, there's no deficit, but there's no food on the table.

All right, Ben, let's turn to Mexico because we're recording this currently in Hollywood, where we love a good reboot.

And so I thought you would be excited to learn that the CIA is rebooting the war on drugs to make it more like the war on terror.

That worked so well.

Both of those worked so well.

We're going to GWAT this year.

Merge them, yeah.

So John Ratcliffe, the new CIA director, he says he's going to shift CIA resources to a counter-narcotics mission and apply insights from the agency's two decades of combating terrorist networks to fighting drug cartels in Mexico.

This is a quote from the Washington Post.

Someone talked to them on background about the plan.

Quote: Lessons learned in the counterterrorism realm are applicable to the counter-narcotics missions and the counter-cartel mission.

The full weight of those has not been brought to bear on this problem.

The New York Times reported that the CIA began operating secret drone flights over Mexico during the Biden administration.

These drones hunt for chemicals that get emitted by fentanyl production plants, and then the CIA passes that information along to the Mexican government to raid them or whatever.

The Times said that the CIA's work with the Mexican military has been more durable and has continued even during periods of big tension, specifically when the U.S.

arrested the former Mexican defense minister on drug charges back in 2020.

Remember that?

Yeah.

I think they cut off work with the DEA at that time, but the CIA work was secret, so it probably continued.

So again, I assume the reason that the CIA is flying these drone missions is because it creates deniability for the Mexican government.

You can get like a presidential finding maybe and just make it a covert operation.

But what is not clear is whether the CIA is just going to collect intelligence or whether they're going to play the same paramilitary function that they played in the Global War on Terror.

Like,

what do you think?

What do you think the end game is here?

Do you think we're going to hear someday about a Hellfire missile strike on a fentanyl plant?

I think so.

I mean, the problem that we're facing is we also have this movement to designate as foreign terrorist organizations all these cartels.

They sent a list over to Congress with a bunch of them.

And by the way, that list isn't just cartels.

It's also like Venezuelan gangs.

Right, yeah, Tern de Aragua on the list.

And so you have the infrastructure, like drones, of the war on terror moving to this hemisphere, but you also have the legal architecture, right?

These terrorist designations.

And

what I wonder about is how much

is the Mexican government on board with this?

Because this is a left-wing Mexican government.

So

I can't see the Shane Baum administration having that high a comfort level with a growing CIA footprint.

I mean, these are literally Latin American leftists.

And so what happens when inevitably the U.S.

government captures more and more intelligence and there's all this drone footage and we're finding different places?

I don't think that the...

Mexican government is going to sign off.

So what happens if the U.S.

starts taking drone shots and stuff over the objections of Mexico, I mean, this is another thing that we have to entertain as a possibility.

What's the saying?

Like, when your hammer, every problem looks like a nail?

Yeah.

Right.

You can imagine a scenario where we're collecting all this intel on fentanyl plants in Mexico.

Trump's getting updates on the amount of fentanyl coming across the border.

It's not decreasing because the reality is mostly it's getting trafficked by American citizens who just stash it in their car because it's easy to do.

And they're like, well, what if we use this capability and we strap a fucking hellfire on this predator drone and

see what that does?

And look, for people who might say, well, at least then maybe he'll get at the fentanyl,

just look at the record of the war on terror over or sorry, the war on drugs or both.

Both.

The number of jihadists went up exponentially under the war on terror, and the amount of drug trafficking has gone up exponentially in the time of war on drugs.

Whatever short-term benefit you might get by picking off a cartel leader or a fentanyl lab is not if people in this country want to buy fentanyl, they'll find a way to to buy it, you know.

And that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to disrupt it and stop it.

But the idea that there's some discrete strikes and operations that can solve this problem in Mexico, there's like a 50-year history of drug policy that suggests that that's not the case.

No, and you'll probably cut off cooperation between the DEA and other parts of the Mexican government or any cooperation between the U.S.

and the Mexican government.

And also, it's a supply and a demand issue.

Well, exactly.

Which we never talk about.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, we also want to keep highlighting the fallout from this USAID freeze because, you know, these cuts are, we were learning about the cuts in Washington and the impact is starting to ripple out all around the world.

And we're hearing real stories about the people being harmed.

So we wanted to highlight that.

So a couple stories, Ben.

So the New York Times reported on aid programs to help victims of Agent Orange in Vietnam, which affected up to 3 million people there after the war.

There's including 150,000 children who were born with developmental disabilities.

So in addition to the mine clearing programs we talked about that were being stopped because of the aid freeze, there was a contamination removal effort from a former U.S.

air base that is now done away with.

And they're also, the U.S.

is now ripping away support from people who are disabled because the U.S.

dumped chemicals on them or their families back.

in the 70s.

So that's really great.

CNN's Ivan Watson had a report from a refugee camp in Thailand that holds 30,000 people who fled the civil war in Myanmar.

There used to be a hospital at this camp, but thanks to the USAID cuts, there now isn't a single doctor left, and the camp has been abandoned.

The nearest Thai hospital is a 30-minute drive away, and they're now dealing with a huge influx of new patients.

And then Crooked Media's newsletter editor Greg Walters spoke with Mackenzie Knowles Corson, who up until two weeks ago was working for USAID.

in Kenya.

He shared some harrowing details about the impact of Trump and Elon Musk's cuts to USAID.

There was a woman who showed up at one of the clinics who said, please just give me 18 months of ARVs, these antiretrovirals.

She was HIV positive, so needs this medicine to survive.

She said, please give me 18 months.

I want to see my son graduate.

You know, if I see my son graduate, I can die after that.

And they're having, you know, just lots of people that are showing up at their clinics the last three weeks, terrified, you know, breaking down, saying, please give me six months, give me 10 months, give me 12 months.

You know, and they're really worried about panic stockpiling that would also cause artificial shortages.

I was speaking yesterday with

this community health promoter, this woman named Jane, who supports 12 kids in the community that she lives in, some as young as two.

and five have already stopped being able to go to the facilities to be able to pick up their medication.

So nearly half have stopped being able to do that.

You know, this program

helps with transports, helps

get these kids to the clinics that they need to go to.

That means if these kids don't get this medication, they will die.

There's no other way around it.

Full stop, they will die.

I spoke to over this weekend, spoke to the head of a program that helps diagnose and treat patients with tuberculosis here in Kenya.

And they treat close to 100,000 people every year

with TB.

This program has completely stopped.

It's not happening at all.

And the consequences, I mean, they're already seeing that.

The head of this program said, you know, over these last three weeks,

they've had 330, over 330 people die as a result of this stop work order so far.

Reading the Times piece on Agent Orange last night in Vietnam.

I just felt so ashamed.

It's just like so cruel and immoral.

Like, these are people who are severely disabled because of something the U.S.

government did, right?

You can say, oh, you know, we can't save everybody around the world.

You know, the U.S.

can't, you know, be everywhere, be everyone's policeman.

But like, these are people we actively harmed, and we're just ripping this support away.

And just on a moral level, it's wrong.

And like, if you just want to be like a

Marco Rubio, pretend real politic, like, can you think of a better way to push Vietnam into the arms of China?

I can't.

Well, that's, I mean,

first of all,

for all the efforts that are going to happen and continue to happen from the Elon Musks and Doge bros or Doge bags, whatever you call them,

to highlight one opera in Ireland and make all of USAID that, this is the vast majority of what USAID does.

And people are dying because of Elon Musk and Doge and Donald Trump and their fucking supporters who think that this is like a big joke and a cool thing that Elon's doing.

And so just on a human level, like many many people will die and i think what people have to understand and you're hearing that in the clips usaid fills spaces where there's nobody else to backfill them like that's why they're there they're not in places where there's like a redundancy of hospitals they're in a place like the thai myanmar border or some part of africa where there's not health infrastructure and so if you remove it there's literally nothing else that can take its place and that should concern you on a human level.

If you are not a human being that has feelings for other human beings, if you're essentially a sociopath like Elon Musk,

Can you imagine how these people are going to feel about the United States for the rest of their lives?

The rest of their lives.

And these quote-unquote strategic, you know, Africa, Southeast Asia,

we are pissing off much of the world in ways that I don't know how we ever come back from it.

I mean, I hate to, you know, be, I mean, we can try, and I hope we do end up trying in a few years, but this is...

This is not an American news cycle issue.

You know, this is like a moral issue that will stick to this country forever.

And I don't think voters voted for this.

They might not like love foreign aid in a poll, but they also think it's 10% of the U.S.

budget, not less than 1%.

If you said to them, do you think we should cut off U.S.

support to a bipartisan program created by George Bush, supported by Barack Obama and every single member of Congress that has saved 25 million people, including kids with HIV/AIDS, they would say, of course we should continue doing that.

But we're just, we're killing off these incredible life-saving programs.

Some of the most successful things we've done as a country.

Yeah.

Yeah.

For what reason?

So Elon can do what he did at Twitter.

Pay for a tax cut.

Yeah, it's a six.

It's the richest people in the world down the road.

Well, there's that too.

Okay, two more things we'll get through before we get to Ben's interview.

So last week we were very worried about the ceasefire in Gaza holding after Hamas had threatened not to go through with the next scheduled hostage release.

And then Donald Trump said a bunch of insane shit that seemed designed to blow up the talks.

Fortunately, the deal held.

The hostage releases continued on Saturday with three Israelis coming home and a bunch of Palestinian prisoners being released.

This week, Hamas agreed to release six living hostages, which is actually double the original planned number.

They will be released this coming Saturday.

This is in exchange for the Israelis allowing mobile homes at the Gaza and also allowing in heavy machinery that can comb through the rubble for bodies.

Also, this week, Hamas is set to release the bodies of four hostages, dead hostages, including members of the Bibas family who are still being held.

Shari Bebas, her four-year-old son Ariel, and Kafir, their nine-month-old baby, were all taken on October 7th.

They all died during captivity.

Hamas says they were killed by an Israeli airstrike.

That has not been confirmed, but I think the fact that Hamas would kidnap two babies has become kind of like the defining example of their fucking evil and cruelty.

Yardin Bebas, their father, was released from captivity earlier this month.

He was one of the men who looked like a Holocaust survivor, and he gets to go home to a house with no one.

So this war is just hell on earth.

In response to these hostage releases by Hamas, Israel said they are going to free all women prisoners and prisoners under the age of 18 who are arrested since the October 7th attacks.

That has, I think, created a...

Pretty unreasonable debate, Ben, about whether you're a prisoner or a hostage if you were just kind of picked up for not doing anything after October 7th in Gaza.

But conversation for another day.

Bigger picture, the first phase of the ceasefire ends on March 2nd.

I mean, they're about, they've sort of sped up the release of the hostages.

So the first phase will be complete pretty soon.

The talks for the second phase have not officially begun.

Reuters says, Reuters reported that indirect negotiations for phase two are going to begin this week.

Steve Witkoff, Trump's Middle East envoy, seemed confident.

He says he told Fox News that phase two is absolutely going to begin.

That's a quote.

I saw earlier today, there's reports that the Israelis and Hamas are both going to send teams to Qatar to negotiate.

So those are all good signs of progress.

And I hope Steve Woodkopf is right and he's not too focused on whatever he's doing in Saudi with the Russians right now.

But Ben, I mean, the thing I keep thinking about is whatever political incentive Hamas had to actually get to phase three of this deal, the reconstruction phase, kind of went out the window when Trump decided that we're going to ethnically cleanse and occupy the thing.

I mean, like trying to understand how this works now.

Yeah, it's good that this didn't get derailed.

It's good that phase one is still moving forward.

I just think this gets exponentially harder at each juncture.

And And so long as the operating plan is the Riviera

in Gaza, we're not going to get there.

So

the thing to watch is how the phase two negotiations go forward, how people start talking about actual reconstruction, who's responsible for administering security in Gaza.

you know, whether there's still an ethnic cleansing plan on the table or not.

But this does show there seems to be a real mutual interest between, believe it or not, you know, the Israeli government and Hamas to not see the phase one go away.

And that's good.

And hopefully that can be a basis for getting to those more difficult issues.

And hopefully they can kind of, I don't know, I just don't think the U.S., I mean, Witkoff seems to have played like a constructive role here.

You kind of want Trump to

not be that focused on it because,

you know,

the Riviera plan is not going to be one that sells.

No, you want Trump to shut up.

I'd also love to see certain former Biden officials shut up and stop writing op-eds.

Yeah, Brett McGurk, we should just name this Brett McGurk op-ed in the Washington Post is totally bonkers alternative reality stuff.

Like, you know, that Israel did nothing wrong.

I mean, it was just...

On Hamas was to blame.

This is just not what anybody was reporting at the time.

And notably, nobody else in the Biden administration is even making that

exact case.

So not helpful.

Really gross and awful.

You know, the other thing I saw a lot, Ben, online was

there was a report in the AP on February 6th that said at one point the Biden administration had talked to the Egyptians about maybe moving Gazans out of Gaza for the war temporarily and then moving them back in long term.

This was picked up by critics of the Biden administration, of which we are very much in that camp, but who are trying to say, actually,

Trump's ethnic cleansing plan is the same as Biden's policy because Biden, according to this report, had an ethnic cleansing plan.

I reached out to a bunch of former Biden officials to try to just like understand what this AP report was about.

And what they said had happened was right after October 7th, Tony Blinken flew to Israel.

Netanyahu pitched them on the idea of moving civilians out of Gaza for the war in any other part of the world.

Like that's not a crazy idea.

But obviously given the history there and the NACBA and everything else that happened, like that's a non-starter for the Palestinians, for the Palestinian leadership.

Tony knew that, but Tony was probably thinking, I don't have to deliver this no to BB.

I'll take the idea to Arab capitals, including to Egypt, and run it by them and get the hard no from these guys, the LCC, and then bring that message back to Israel and relay it to Bibi.

I think that diplomatic process got relayed as the U.S.

pushing for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

But that's just not at all what happened.

No, and look,

people should be able to think enough.

And like, we've been plenty critical of the Biden-Gaza policy, but there's a difference between floating different ideas in private diplomatic channels and giving a press conference standing next to the Prime Minister of Israel and calling for ethnic cleansing and the construction of real estate hotels in Gaza.

It's just not the same thing.

Yeah,

I've seen people that I think are smart and respect equating those two.

And it's like, guys, we don't need to do that.

We can be critical of the Biden policy without turning it into a Trump cartoon.

Yeah.

Final thing.

Ben, I just want to highlight some reporting in the last couple of weeks on Iran's nuclear program.

So the Wall Street Journal had the headline, Israel sees opening for strikes on Iranian nuclear site, U.S.

intelligence finds.

The post seemed to have gotten the same document.

It said, Israel likely to strike Iran in upcoming months, warns U.S.

intelligence.

This intelligence said Israel is likely to attempt a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities in the first six months of 2025.

Trump had recently kind of, I think, truthed or tweeted,

quote, reports that the United States working in conjunction with Israel is going to blow Iran into smithereens are greatly exaggerated.

So that suggests he's leaning towards a more diplomatic solution.

But reading these reports, Ben, it reminded me of the first couple of months of the Obama administration when Jeff Goldberg, our buddy from the Atlantic, clearly did a reporting trip to Israel, got fed

by 50,000 Israeli cabinet officials that they were going to bomb Iran in six months, brought that story back to us.

We had to kind of deal with the fallout.

This is a little different because this reporting in the journal and the post is coming from some sort of leaked U.S.

intelligence product.

But the net effect is the same thing, which is a pressure campaign on the United States to do something with respect to Iran's nuclear program soon or else Iran's going to take action.

Now, I'm not sure how that pressure campaign works with Trump because like, I don't know, I just don't know what he thinks about this, but

it was weird to see these reports.

And I wonder what you made of these leaks.

I mean, it could be one of two things.

Either It's people that are in the U.S.

intelligence community who are worried about Israel doing this and are just trying to kind of get this out there to spark some debate about it.

Or, yeah, or it could be people that want Trump to kind of prioritize this issue and do something or else, you know, which is what it always was with us.

I will say, like, Trump himself does not seem to be that inclined for the Iran war.

I mean, you know, it seems lower probability than Greenland, you know, at this point,

which doesn't mean it couldn't ever happen, but he seems to always have been a little careful about, you know, getting into another Middle Eastern war.

So the question to me becomes, would Israel actually bomb Iran's nuclear facilities kind of over Trump's objections?

And

stranger things have happened.

But I don't know.

This feels like posturing.

Everybody knows Trump is going to possibly explore diplomacy or he might not and go the pressure route.

And I think this leaking is part of kind of the alignment of pieces

to kind of just try to accelerate the timeline in which something is done here.

But given the nature of the global environment, what I've always been worried about with Trump is that there's so much chaos that Israel's like, well, let's go now.

Because people's attentions are in nine different places.

But the problem is if they do that, then the Iranians could hit the Gulf and all bets are off.

Yeah, I think at the end of the day, Netanyahu's preferred outcome would be drawing the U.S.

into this

to do his dirty work for him, like with everything else, and bomb Iran's nuclear program.

But I hope Trump will resist that.

Yes, yeah, yeah.

And weirdly, Trump has resisted that to date, but

he can change on a dime.

He's been better at resisting BP's bullshit than more recent presidents.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, that's true.

Okay, we went very long, a lot to talk about.

We're going to take a quick break.

When we come back, you're going to hear Ben's interview with Max Sedden about how the Russian side is viewing all the machinations happening in Saudi Arabia today and in Europe last week.

So stick around for that.

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All right, I'm very pleased to be joined by Max Sedden, an OG guest on Pod Say of the World from the early days of the Ukraine war when he helped us figure out what was going on.

He's the Moscow Bureau Chief of the Financial Times, currently based in Berlin, given how difficult it is to be the Moscow Bureau Chief.

Max, welcome back to the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

So I just wanted you to really help us unpack.

There's been so much focus on how the Europeans are responding to the recent developments between Russia and the United States.

I was in Munich and got an earful about that.

Obviously, a lot of focus on American politics, but I really want you to help us understand how the Russians might be looking at this.

And just from your reporting and your analysis over the years, how do you think that Putin and the Russian government are

digesting this

call from Trump, this upcoming meeting in Riyadh,

this blowback from the Europeans and Ukrainians to Trump's policies.

Just generally speaking, how would you characterize your understanding of the Russian reaction to these events?

Well, the Russians have tried to play this down and express cautious optimism.

But I think looking at what Trump's team have said and Trump himself, this has really gone about as well for them as it possibly could have.

And the Russians didn't really have to do anything to make it happen.

They haven't budged an inch on any of Putin's pretty maximalist demands that are more or less unchanged since the start of the war.

And the United States has just, in a matter of about a week, completely fallen into their lap.

It's made some major concessions already

on U.S.

policy, and it appears to be ready to accept a large swathe, at the very least, of Russian demands.

So I think if you're Russia, you really have got to be pretty thrilled about the way this is going.

Think where we were a month ago and compare it, even two weeks ago and compare it to now.

It's like two different worlds.

The idea that you could have at the, you know, at the palace where this was taking place in Riyadh today, you had the U.S.

and Russian flags side by side.

That was completely inconceivable.

And now it's just the reality we live in.

Yeah, I mean, I'm curious.

I mean, you mentioned the changes.

I mean, Hegseph basically concedes that, you know, Ukraine is not going to be a NATO, that Ukraine is going to have to give up territory, kind of de facto acknowledging Russia's annexation of large swaths of Ukrainian territory.

Instead of the Biden approach of nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine, this is literally the opposite.

It's everything about Ukraine without Ukraine.

You look at the Russian press, the Russian media, which is a pretty good window into kind of what the Kremlin wants out there.

What has been the nature of the reaction reaction to this,

like as you just kind of look at Russian media and what might that say about how the Kremlin's looking at things?

I think it's very much a message that Russia's way of the world is winning out and that the U.S.

seems to share it, which basically means that Ukraine is going to have the

worst possible option for Ukraine, foist it on them, and the Europeans are also going to have to deal with it.

What this is really about,

if you're Russia, and Putin has been pretty clear on this, is that it's, you know, for all his obsessions with Ukraine, Ukraine has been, in his mind, the pretext to this war, which in mind is really about broader geopolitical confrontation with the West, chiefly the United States.

And what he's wanted is some sort of new Yalta conference, if you will, where the great powers can sit down like Roosevelt and Churchill did with Stalin, and they carved up Europe into spheres of influence.

And that's very much what he has been pushing for.

And it looks like with this very transactional view of the world that Trump has, that he's been able to push

the buttons of the U.S.

really spectacularly.

I was just watching again just now

this clip from the

TV spot that the American delegation did where Rubio was saying, you know, we're very excited that this all goes well, that we'll be able to partner with Russia on a whole range of issues.

And really, this has been Putin's dream.

This is the message that Russia has been putting out on TV and

through

all their official mouthpieces throughout this war, that

this is really a matter for two great powers to

discuss.

And

that is an enormous triumph for Russia.

Just the fact that this meeting even happened is a really gigantic step forward from them back in from the cold and with a seat at the table of great powers which is where they want to be yeah um i i mean i i when it gets into the i i i definitely felt that in munich uh you know that more was done to kind of sever the us european alliance in the last week than anything i can remember in recent times um

On the Ukraine piece itself,

if essentially if you read

what Hegset said and how you can kind of read between the lines of what is being indicated, it does sound like the U.S.

might be okay with

Russia essentially de facto controlling the parts of Ukraine that they're currently in,

the U.S.

taking NATO membership off the table.

Those are two pretty huge

Russian positions.

But is that enough?

I mean, you know, because you could also look at it and say, well, Putin has the advantage on the battlefield now.

Why not try to grind this out for another year, accumulate some more territory, solidify control of the parts of Ukraine that Russia has tried to, you know, claim as annexed?

Do you think that Russia might drive a harder bargain?

Or do you think that they could accept essentially a frozen conflict on their terms

that leaves them in control and kind of you know, diminishes the standing of the Ukrainians and, you know, fractures the Europeans?

Is that enough?

Or do you think Putin might want more?

So two things.

Firstly, I think it's important just to go back and say very simply what the Russian goals are.

They are for Ukraine to cease to exist as a viable state, to be so weak that it can't effectively defend itself and not integrate it enough into Western security architecture, NATO, or some NATO substitute.

that

would protect it sufficiently from Russia to ideally have a more pliant leadership.

Putin still seems to think that he could have some sort of Moscow-friendly politicians like the ones who ruled Ukraine for the first 15 years or so of its independence.

And again, when Viktor Yanankovich was president in the early 2010s, and going beyond that to what we just talked about, this new European security architecture, which is really dividing up the world into

spheres of influence, and rolling back U.S.

influence in Europe.

And

the thing is that if you, this brings me a second point, there are these very maximalist demands.

And it is pretty clear from

what I hear and from whatever intel appears to be out there that there's no real reason for Putin to stop unless he gets what he wants, because he is

getting a lot of that anyway.

He's basically already secured, even before Trump took power.

It wasn't realistic that Ukraine was going to get to NATO.

It It wasn't realistic that they were going to

give up their territories.

So it wasn't necessarily that Hexeth was wrong to say that because that assessment isn't that different from what you would have gotten from the Biden administration or European ally.

But the second point is that these things are supposed to be leveraged because these are policy steps that the United States can take, right?

And what is just extraordinary to me is the U.S.

has basically conceded all of that, some of it before negotiations even begun.

And again, today, there seems to have been a pretty big focus on the lifting of sanctions and on economic cooperation between Russia and the U.S.

This idea that American and Russian companies can invest together.

Let me remind you that

under US law right now, most of this is illegal.

because of sanctions.

So, and you would think that what is the point of sanctions?

You could argue a lot and people have looking at Russia, Iran, Iraq over the years, Venezuela about whether sanctions are effective in achieving political goals.

But the whole point of having sanctions, and Trump himself has said this, is that these are supposed to be the carrot.

This is the leverage that the United States has for making concessions.

And Keith Kellogg, the special envoy for the conflict, who has been, not only has he been sidelined from from talking to Russia and he wasn't there today, but the White House also let the Kremlin basically announce a personnel decision today.

Yuri Yushakov, Putin's foreign policy advisor, said that Kellogg wasn't going to be talking to Russia.

He was only going to talk to Ukraine and Europe and Trump was going to appoint someone else who was going to be the U.S.-Russia person on Ukraine.

He knows this well, and it was a big part of his plan.

He made this very clear, but it seems that that has all gone out the window.

And that is just what is, I think, the most remarkable thing about this is that evidently Trump wants to get a deal as quickly as he can, and he isn't very interested in using any of the leverage that the United States has.

And

if you're Russia, you can't be anything but thrilled about that.

Aaron Ross Powell, so there are two other ways in which which Russia could potentially flex its muscles or interfere in European security that I want to put to you and just get your assessment of what we should be looking at, worried about.

One is politics.

And so if I look at the J.D.

Vance speech in Munich about traditional Western values and the need to kind of embrace the AFDs of the world, the far-right parties in Europe, sounded a lot like what Putin's been saying for years.

You know, there are these traditional Western values that are kind of separate from democracy and they're kind of nationalist in nature and they're traditional Christian cultural values.

So the first question is, you know, how concerned should we be or how much of an opening is there for Putin to kind of come in behind?

You know, he's supported some of these far-right parties in the past, obviously has relationships with people like Orban that are better than other Europeans.

And then the other is just the near abroad of Russia.

If there are spheres of influence, if I'm in Georgia right now, if I'm in Moldova right now, perhaps even in the Baltics right now,

I suddenly am kind of concerned that Russia may feel like they have a carte blanche in the United States to have a sphere of influence.

I mean, where do you look for the potential for further Russian interference, aggression,

flexing in these kind of political spaces in this new reality?

So let's separate Western and Eastern Europe for a minute, because I think there are some important distinctions that need to be made.

I am a very ardent proponent of the theory.

This was sometimes hard to get across during the first Trump administration, but really

this was not something that Russia created.

These were tendencies that were happening already in American European society, the rise of populist parties and right-wing parties, backlashes against globalization, immigration.

We don't need to go into that.

And I think

Russia, you just look at European politics now,

you know, as well as Trump coming back.

And

there's this

book about the KGB's plans to influence the third world that's called The World Was Going Our Way.

And I think if you're Russia, absolutely, you do think the world is going your way.

In France, it's entirely possible that Marine Le Pen might finally become the president.

In Germany, the AFD is expected to do very well at the elections later this week.

In Austria, you have this party that is likely to form the government.

They are currently in coalition negotiations right now, if I'm not wrong, because I don't know very much about Austria, that is actually a partner of United Russia.

uh Putin's party.

They still have this partnership.

So I don't think they need to do very much.

I think there's enough that's going on in Western society where Western Western European society, where

if you're Russia, you feel very much like the things that Vance talked about in Munich

are going your way.

If you think about

the former Soviet and Soviet-occupied countries, I think

there is a bit of a difference there because

it's more about how Russia perceives threats.

Georgia, they've basically sorted that out.

You have this authoritarian, authoritarian, Moscow-friendly, in as much as any government in Georgia can be Moscow-friendly.

They've done an effective job of suppressing opposition to drifting into the Russian embrace.

There's no prospect of Georgia joining NATO.

Moldova

is more problematic for them to influence now, especially that's one consequence of the war, because Transnistria,

the enclave with a small Russian troop deployment there, is basically cut off now from Russia being able to influence it seriously.

And

the government just

about squeaked through the pro-EU referendum there.

But

the real issue

is the Baltics and not just the Baltics themselves, but what the Baltics means about

European security, because this is the absolute nightmare scenario, if you are a NATO advocate, is that

seeing how Trump feels about European security, which is basically, you know, you do it, you know, so much for the

American security umbrella that NATO is built on.

Go deal with it yourselves.

K thanks by.

And by the way, here's the bill.

And

what the scenario has always been is that

you have these NATO contingents in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia.

You have some some cities that have quite large Russian-speaking populations where there is still, some of them do sympathize with Russia to some extent on the border, like Narvian, Estonia, Dog of Pills in

Latvia.

And

you try something there and some sort of limited incursion doesn't have to be, you know, some big invasion.

I don't think Putin is interested in the Baltics the way that he is in,

you know, certainly not Ukraine or even the Caucasus in

Central Asia.

I remember a few months before the war, he said that the Soviet Union broke up into 12 states, not 15, leaving out the three Baltic states.

And an Estonian expert I know texted me in that moment and said, whew,

thank God.

But what they are important for is

using them to undermine NATO, because if the United States doesn't respond in any kind of serious way, that essentially shows that Article 5, the collective defense clause of NATO, attack on one members and attack on all, that shows that it's essentially paper tiger.

It amounts to nothing.

And Putin could feel that he's essentially...

dealt with the NATO problem once and for all.

And

that is

the scary problem.

I think not that he wants to...

You get these really extreme people in the Russian system like Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen dictator, or people like that, who say, yeah, we want to drive to Poland on tanks.

That is all for show.

It is,

I don't want to say that he's not interested in empire and not interested in, you know, gathering the Russian lands like Peter the Great because he is.

But really, more than anything else, this is about the new world order for him.

And I think that

anything he does with regards to Europe will be about achieving that.

Yeah, no, that makes sense.

So definitely watch the Baltics,

but do so with the caveat that it's mainly about undermining the West.

Well, one last question I want to ask you.

You know, in Russia itself, we're not just three years into the full-scale war in Ukraine.

It's been a year since Alexei Navalny died, and there was a...

a ceremony or event marking Navalny's death in Berlin.

What is your sense of the state of the Russian opposition at this moment in time?

And also just kind of your sense of, you know, we've been focused a lot on the positive narrative for Putin.

I mean, he has suffered enormous losses on the battlefield.

That's inevitably going to have some impact in Russian communities going forward.

How would you characterize the state of internal Russian politics at this moment related to kind of Putin's control and the absence of an opposition or the potential for there to be, if not opposition, at least dissatisfaction with how things are going there?

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: Well, if you look at the dissatisfaction in Russia, such as there has been any, it's mostly been with the economic impacts of the war rather than the actual war itself.

There's a great Russian sociologist, Greg Yudin, who has this analogy that for most Russians, the war is like rain.

you don't like the rain, you want to avoid it best as you can, but you think that it's this sort of know thing imposed on you externally that is completely beyond your your control to do anything about and that and that atomization has existed in russian society for for centuries because of the the way that the you know state has been formed and reformed the way that russians have been have been ruled it's uh very different from from a country like ukraine and uh

in in terms of what dissatisfaction that that uh you know there could be over over people dying in the war you have to remember that it was mostly around mobilization when

people were being forcibly drafted into the army.

They were, you know, hundreds of thousands of them fled the country to try to escape that.

But now,

what they switched to, and they've been able to do it pretty successfully and more or less replace men, casualties at the front lines with new recruits, it is just by paying people.

You have these enormous payouts that are

bigger than than

a year's salary

on average in a lot of these pretty poor regions where most of the recruiting is concentrated.

And

that combined with the low value that's been placed on human life in Russian society, that has encouraged a lot of people to

sign up.

And if you go on Instagram and TikTok, there's this whole subgenre of posts of the wives of these guys

on the days that the payments come in for when they're fighting or when they get a payments for

their husbands being injured or killed at the front.

They all go shopping.

And

there has been a consumer boom in Russia that has been...

driven in large part by this war spending.

So

that doesn't mean that there isn't a part of Russian society that is actively against the war, but it's never been the majority.

The majority has always been passive.

And the people who are actively against the war have been very effectively suppressed.

There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of political prisoners.

We know people, people like Davalny and

some of the dissidents who were freed in the Evan Gershkovich exchange, like Ilya Yashin, Lady Mir Karamoroza.

But there are hundreds and hundreds of ordinary people who in the far-fly bits of Russia who just get picked up because police have a quota.

They said something

on social media or at a bus stop or

in some sort of private setting, and

someone informed on them, and they're now in prison serving these often very draconian sentences.

So,

any kind of real opposition to how things are

going on is

pretty much impossible.

And for the opposition that are outside the country, they're in a very sad state right now

because

the longer this goes on, the greater disconnect they have with

Russian society.

They have been largely unable to swing that.

Navalny's death was obviously an enormous blow.

And

for

those of you who have read about the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks and the various other anti-Tsarist leftist groups in the early 20th century in exile or Soviet dissidents, you know, won't come as a surprise that they seem to spend most of their time fighting each other

over various slights and perceived differences and things like that, that are just a really big turnoff to the average Russian or the

average, well, whether they're in Russia or exile.

I think it's also worth making the point

that

really one of the most

active groups in Russian society society in trying to make sure that the truth about the war that gets out has been the media.

And one thing you're seeing at the moment with Trump's attack on USAID, firstly, that so much of the exiled

Russian media that has fled the country because you go to jail for telling the truth about the war, the extent to which they

were dependent on funding, I think many of them without them even necessarily realizing it, just how how dependent it all was on USAID.

And secondly,

they also have the same problem that it just gets harder and harder to reach audiences.

People are reluctant to speak.

And

they're really struggling.

And so it's a pretty sad scenario all around for those people, I would say.

All right.

Well, as usual,

you really helped illuminate what is a pretty shitty situation.

But we appreciate it.

We definitely are cursed to live in interesting times.

But Max, thanks so much for joining us.

And people should follow your reporting in the Financial Times and online

because you're, as usual, among the most astute observers of this dynamic.

So thanks again, and have a good night in Berlin.

All right.

Thanks so much.

Thanks again to Max for joining the show.

And

yeah, let's see what happens next week.

Probably a lot of shit.

Probably pretty bad.

But hey, Germany, turn out your liberal friends.

Yes.

Yeah.

Come on, guys.

Like, that's a big rally for the center to the left here.

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Pod Save the World is a crooked media production.

Our producer is Alona Minkowski.

Our associate producer is Michael Goldsmith.

Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor, and Ben Rhodes.

The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick and engineered by Vasilis Vitopoulos.

Audio support by Kyle Seglu and Charlotte Landis.

Madeleine Herringer is our head of news and programming.

Matt DeGroote is our head of production.

Andy Taft is our executive assistant.

Thanks to our digital team, Phoebe Bradford, William Jones, Kirill Polavieve, and Molly Lobel, who upload our episodes and videos to youtube.com slash podsave the world.

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