Biden’s Foreign Policy Farewell

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Welcome back to Pod Save the World.

I'm Tommy Vitor.

I'm Ben Rhodes.

So last week, prepping the show.

Seems like a long time ago last week.

Yeah, it's like Tuesday.

I sit in the office to look out the window.

You see this massive plume of smoke rising and building and building and building.

And then after we taped, it basically covered all of the west side of Los Angeles.

But we still had no idea.

I mean, it was ominous, but we had no idea what was going to happen.

Oh, God.

I remember last night.

Yeah, last week I had a dentist appointment in the morning, and it's on San Vicente.

Forgive non-Angelinos.

San Vicente Boulevard is a main thoroughfare in West L.A.

And as I was driving up San Vicente, the entire other side was closed and it was just all emergency vehicles.

I hadn't seen anything like that since 9-11 when I was in New York.

There were like dozens of emergency vehicles.

And that's when I came in here.

And then when I drove home, they had like closed off I-10, where it goes down to the Pacific Coast Highway, and I could see the fire.

I mean, not just smoke.

I could see like flames, right?

And we lost power that night.

You guys lost power early and for a long time.

Yeah, it was, well, it was that crazy night with the focus on, there was like 100 mile per hour gusts of wind in some parts of the city and everywhere else was just really, really windy and scary, ominous windy.

We had, uh, we had winds so strong that a tree and like a real tree, not like a small guy, um, fell over in our front yard.

Um, but we were never, you know, like you, we were safe distance in the sense that there's like three miles of concrete between us and the Palisades.

But man, just

a totally tragic and surreal few days here.

Horrifying.

And it's just that we're at the beginning of this thing.

I mean, we're talking Tuesday afternoon, January 14th.

There's going to be bad winds tonight.

Hopefully then things calm down going into the weekends.

And what we really need is some rain or for the winds to shift from blowing inland to offshore to blowing in, you know, blowing from over the coast in so we get some moisture in here.

But yeah, I mean, Hannah and I, we are, we're completely safe.

We're fine.

But on Wednesday night, um, we're watching TV, about to put our kids down, and

the local news starts showing the Hollywood Hills fire.

Well, that was, yeah, that was the,

that fire was a weird one, too.

I don't know if they figured out how that started.

Don't know how it started.

They, they got it out fast, I think, because they had the air assets available and they started dumping water on it from helicopters and planes, et cetera.

But when we saw that, Hannah and I said, we're getting out of here.

Just because those hills are uncomfortably close.

Yeah, and Hannah thought that that we might have been evacuated.

And so we just like threw everything we could.

But we also got, I mean, I will say, like, nine false

evacuation notices.

L.A.

response has been far better than, I mean, we can, I'm not even talking about Karen Bass, I'm talking about these firefighters.

They're incredible.

I mean, I have a bunch of friends on Mandeville Canyon Road.

And

the fire basically started to come up the ridge to this road, and they just stopped it.

I mean, with airdrops, with brush clearing, with fire retardant.

I mean, heroic, heroic work.

But the people that fucked up are the people that sent emergency warnings telling us all to evacuate.

Because I got like 4 a.m.

Yeah, I got an evacuation warning.

I'm like, this can't be right.

I mean, I'm looking out my window.

I don't see a fire, you know?

But anyway,

that's the least of the problems.

Absolutely terrifying.

Hopefully this thing is

well under control soon.

That doesn't mean, but there's going to be an enormous need for a very long time.

And if you want to help out, we set up a way for folks to donate if they want to a bunch of great organizations.

You can go to the Latino Community Foundation, the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, the LA Fire Department Foundation, United Way of Greater LA, and the California Community Foundation Wildlife Relief Fund.

If you go to votes of America.com slash relief, you can donate there.

Your money will get split to all five of those organizations.

We did it on Act Blue through this, this

setup because most of our listeners have all their information saved and it just kind of reduces friction and you can donate easily.

We raised about $100,000 for those groups.

Super grateful to the people for their generosity.

But man, I mean, Ben and I were just talking on the way in.

It's going to be a question of not can you rebuild a lot of these parts of the city, but do people want to live there anytime soon?

Pacific Palisades is kind of gone.

You know, I mean, it's just wiped out.

We know lots of people who lost their houses.

And yeah, I don't even know what it looks like to rebuild an entire neighborhood like that.

Thousands and thousands of houses.

I will say my one, you know,

lib comment here I'm going to make, but

for years, like this, it's interesting to live in a place where the climate effects are so obvious because

to shorthand this in 30 seconds, it's been raining much more here the last few years, which means much more vegetation.

And then it gets hotter and drier in the summer, which means that more vegetation burns faster.

You don't have to be a climate scientist to understand that we have a problem here.

And so there are places where it might have been safe to live, like 30 years ago, that people are going to have to think about

how to rebuild, if to rebuild.

Yeah, and how we're just going to manage going forward, knowing this stuff's going to happen.

Yeah.

Our buddy Peter Hamby is a great piece in Puck that I think really well encapsulates kind of the history of fires in the LA area.

Like, yes, it's absolutely being exacerbated by climate change, but you had horrible fires in the 90s that led to the same questions, the same political recriminations.

People, you know, you had people, you know, like Donald Trump Jr.

is now attacking like woke DEI initiatives as somehow responsible.

The idiot Republicans in the 90s were saying that like an excessive focus on LGBT rights was the problem and why the city burned in places.

Just the same super stuff.

Stupid never changes.

Amazing piece by Peter and Puck.

And I think captures how angry a lot of progressives are at Democratic leaders in the city.

The city is not the...

best government.

No, we're having a hard time.

But we are going to do a great show for you guys today.

We're going to talk about Pete Hegseth's confirmation up on Capitol Hill and democratic efforts to prevent him from becoming Secretary of Defense.

Doesn't seem like that's going to happen.

We're also going to talk about President Biden's speech Monday outlining his foreign policy accomplishments.

We'll cover news from both the Biden and Trump teams on immigration policy, the latest on international support for Syria, a new president in Lebanon, far a parties in Croatia, Austria, and Germany, and what it kind of means for the...

global international order.

And then what former Trump campaign manager or campaign chairman, I should say, Paul Manafort is up to.

And then Ben, you just talk to Ian Bremer.

Tell everybody who he is and what you guys talked about.

Yeah, Ian Bremer is the head of the Eurasia Group,

and they have a report out

the last few days about the top risks for 2025.

And given our risk watching here on this show, I thought it was an apt time leading to Trump inauguration to kind of look at the landscape and think about what is the most dangerous thing on the horizon.

It's the total absence of any international order.

It's the rising great power conflict.

Is it the future of the U.S.-China conflict?

Is it the way in which people like Elon Musk and other business leaders

have become

mini-states and more and more irresponsible?

And Ian's an interesting character to have on the show because he circulates in that world

of

political and business elites.

So

had, I think, pretty interesting insights into kind of the mindset of particularly the kind of business leaders who've kind of bought our politics.

So it's worth checking out.

Definitely.

Definitely worth checking out.

We got a new elite class running the show.

We need to understand their, we need to study their habits.

Speaking of global risks, Pete Hexeth,

Fox News weekend anchor, Donald Trump's nominee to run the Department of Defense.

He was up before the Senate today, Armed Services Committee, I think.

It's no surprise Hexeth got a warm welcome from Republicans, got some tough questions from Democrats.

Here's an excerpt from some of the grilling portion.

Your predecessor in a Trump administration, Secretary Esper, was asked and did use uniformed military to clear unarmed protesters.

He was given the order to potentially shoot at them.

Hilos flew low in Washington, D.C.

as crowd control.

He later apologized publicly for those actions.

Was he right or wrong to apologize?

Senator, I was there on the ground.

I saw that.

I saw the ground.

I understand, and I respect that.

I've been there But you're about to be the Secretary of Defense.

I was involved in that moment.

I also think that he was a very important person.

Was he right to the legality and the Constitution?

Was he right or wrong to apologize?

I'm not going to put words in the mouth of Secretary Esper or anybody else.

He said them himself, you don't have to.

What are you scared of?

Did he do the right thing by apologizing?

I'm not scared of anything, Senator.

And say yes or no.

You can say no.

The laws and the Constitution.

Are we going to abide by the Geneva Convention and the prohibitions on torture, or are we not?

Is it going to

be a very good question?

As I've stated multiple times, the Geneva Conventions are what we base our.

But what an American First national security policy is not going to do is hand its prerogatives over to international bodies that make decisions about how our men and women make decisions on the battlefield.

America First understands we send Americans for a clear mission and a clear objective.

We equip them properly for that objective.

We give them everything they need,

and then we stand behind them with the rules of engagement that allow them to fight decisively against America's enemies.

So you heard Alyssa Slotkin, Senator from Michigan, and Angus King, senator from Maine.

I thought Alyssa Slotkin, I didn't watch the whole hearing.

I watched a lot of it.

I thought Slotkin was really good, both in substance and tone of her questions.

She'd be good on that committee for a while.

Yes, she is, and she has a lot of relevant experience.

You can't get value.

There were also been a lot of questions about Hexeth's drinking.

I'm reminded of the word, a great word, bibulous, which means like in a state of near constant drunkenness.

It's one I loved and stuck with me a long time ago.

Sounds like my freshman year in college.

Yeah.

His infidelity.

You know, there are allegations that have tanked previous nominees for senior positions.

But Republicans don't seem to really care about that stuff anymore.

So we're going to focus on Pete's responses to policy questions because it seems like he's going to get the job.

So, Ben, I came away thinking that Hegseth does not believe that women should serve in combat.

He doesn't seem particularly committed to the Geneva Conventions or the rule of law.

We know in the past he's lobbied Trump to pardon service members who commit war crimes.

He also would not rule out ordering the military to shoot American protesters if Donald Trump asked him to.

You heard Alyssa Slotkin ask him about that.

He's going to give unlimited support to the Israeli military to use in Gaza.

He is basically just a vessel for whatever Trump wants or says with no really relevant experience.

But did I leave anything out?

Any other takeaways from you?

Yeah, so I have a piece in the New York Times today that people want to check it out about.

the basic point is to understand Hegseth, I think you have to understand what's happened on the right,

really the far right, but it's now the right, I guess, since 9-11, where a guy like Hegseth, you know, after 9-11, it's rah-rahrah, we're going to go win these great victories in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Those turn out to be terrible decisions.

Those people feel somewhat betrayed by the bushes and cheneys of the world.

And then they do the thing that happens a lot when superpowers don't win wars, they, instead of kind of really focusing on the failed foreign policy, they kind of start blaming enemies within the United States, you know, the liberals, the Muslims, the immigrants, fifth columns, woke culture, fifth column stuff.

You know, and that's Pete Hegseth, right?

He's basically, he went, yeah, he went from cheerleading the Iraq war to castigating woke culture.

But I think that the thing that is dangerous, and some of that's an eclipse, is to just, you know,

he is actually arguing for a fundamental transformation of the U.S.

military.

We would no longer abide by international law in the Geneva Convention.

You know, he advocated the pardon of people that murdered civilians.

I mean, this is not

close stuff.

These are people that were actually prosecuted, right?

Yeah, these weren't edge cases.

These weren't violations of the rules of engagement.

These are pretty clear-cut war crimes.

Clear-cut war crimes, right?

At a time when Trump is threatening to violate other international laws by maybe like invading Greenland.

Which you got to ask about too.

Yeah, that too is concerning.

You know, how does the hostility international law go in that direction?

The kind of reverse social engineering of the military.

You know, we don't like gays in the military.

We don't like women in combat.

We don't like so-called diversity hires, including the currently black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

And then this question that Alyssa focused on, which is

will the United States military just become not only like a kind of MAGA military, like it's part of Donald Trump's social engineering, but will it be used in the United States to serve the president's political interests, to quash protests, as Trump wanted to do after George Floyd.

She also asked if Hegseth would ask uniformed military members to staff migrant detention facilities on the border.

Sounds like yes.

Or engage in mass deportations, right?

So this is very serious stuff.

And it is just worth.

pausing on the fact that it's absurd he's going to be confirmed.

I mean, putting aside the horrific sexual assault allegations and drinking allegations, just the fact that a Fox and Friends weekend anchor, you know, who's going to be there is crazy.

The Democrats, you know, some of them I think were the people that were focused on what he's going to do,

I think have the right approach.

One thing we should talk about is like, what's the Democratic approach and Resistance 2.0?

Focus on what they say they want to do.

You know, yelling at him about his drinking or his infidelities, I don't like those things, but like Donald Trump is the president.

I think we've crossed the barrier of...

infidelity being disqualifying for high office when the president of the United States was literally convicted and sentenced a few days ago for paying hush money to a porn star.

Yeah, one might argue also when Bill Clinton was elected twice.

That's fair.

People didn't care that much about that.

People didn't care that much about that.

Yeah,

when I turned on the hearing for the first time, it was Tim Kaine, Senator Tim Kaine, shouting about infidelity, and it just, it felt so off, and it was so wrong.

Tammy Duckworth tried to burn Pete for not knowing what countries were in ASEAN.

I'm not sure that was effective.

That probably endears Pete Hexeth to his supporters because he's like, fuck ASEAN.

By the way, I say that.

Nobody loves ASEAN.

I know you love ASEAN.

I would would never question you.

But here was another slightly less effective line of questioning than Senator Jack Reed.

I thought people might enjoy.

Well, by the way, would you explain what a JAG off is?

I don't think I need to, sir.

Why not?

Because the men and women watching understand.

Well, perhaps some of my colleagues don't understand.

It would be a JAG officer who puts...

his or her own priorities in front of the warfighters, their promotions, their medals in front of having the backs of those who are making the tough calls on the front lines.

Thank you.

So terrific.

Interesting.

What about that exchange was damaging to Pete Hagseth?

That's a huge win for Pete Hagseth in that exchange.

It's just terrible.

It's just a fundamental misreading of the room, the room being America, to think that you're...

you know, winning that exchange.

Or the U.S.

military.

That clip will probably go around to a bunch of service members who will think it's fucking hilarious that he's making fun of Jag officers and calling them Jagovs.

Yeah, it's not their way to go.

I'm one of them.

We should point out that Pete Hagseth has also written constantly about the existential threat to America of a Marxist-leftist ideology and has called for the categorical defeat of the left in this country.

So that guy running the United States military is maybe not the best thing for crooked media.

Pretty bad.

Pretty bad for everybody.

We're not Marxist, to be clear.

No.

But we are on the left.

Not even close.

Just to round out kind of updates on the team.

Marco Rubio has his confirmation here on Wednesday,

the day this episode comes out.

It sounds like he's a shoe-in for confirmation, Rubio.

The nominees that were seen as wobbly in terms of the, from the national security side of the, of the nominations front, Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence, Cash Batel to be FBI director, those are no longer seen as wobbly by the kind of mainstream press.

It sounds like they will make it through barring some other revelation or disaster at their confirmation hearings.

But, Ben, before we move on, I did just quickly want to check in with you on what Trump 1.0's team is up to.

This is a clip of Trump's first national security advisor, Mike Flynn, on some random right-wing podcasts called The Mel Kay Show.

Let's hear from General Flynn.

I mean, there were people while Trump was serving as president that were in his administration that we now know committed treason.

100%.

They undermined the sitting president of the United States while they were working for him, and they were in the executive branch of the government.

That's called treason.

So

some of them are over in the CIA, some are in the National Security Council.

So

there are going to have to be, you know, it's, I mean, I hate to use the phrase, the Night of the Long Knives, but because that's a really bad, bad phrase.

But there has to be a reckoning, right?

For those unfamiliar, the Night of the Long Knives was a major political purge ordered by Hitler in 1934, where he ordered the execution of rivals and political opponents.

Man, is it normal to suggest that your old boss should emulate Hitler?

Yeah,

when even Mike Flynn pauses and is like, should I actually say this?

Yeah,

you know, that what's coming is real special.

I mean, there's been this relentless normalization of these people since the election.

And Hegseth, who I don't think had the votes to be confirmed a couple days after his nomination, there was this, you know, we talked about this already, but essentially part of the story of all these confirmations is the degree to which Trump has completely neutered the center Republicans.

Because, you know, aside from tossing Matt Gates overboard, he's going to seemingly get all these people through.

And that's insane because Cash Patel and Pete Hegzeth are

Bobby Kennedy Jr.

Yeah, Bobby, you know, 90% of that Senate, well, maybe not 90 these days, but probably half that Senate caucus is there.

They know better.

They wouldn't pick those people, you know, and they know better.

So it does show how much he's just enforced dominance.

But with the Flynn, you know, Flynn is a little bit more out there, but I don't know, man.

Take a tour through Pete Hegzeth's writings, and there's some good short ends.

You know, noted Neolib John Chait had had a piece in the Atlantic just summing up, reading his books.

These people talk in apocalyptic terms about the left.

Yeah, some fashion stuff.

Cash Patel talks about, you know,

tearing down buildings and sending people to prison.

I mean, it's not that far off from the night of the long nines.

And I guess what we'll find out in the next few weeks is whether they meant it.

Yeah, you know, how far off.

Yeah, yeah.

That's what we'll find out.

And it's an uncomfortable place to be.

And the fact that every, I mean, you know, I'm not, I'm not going to do the media criticism of, you know, the resistance.

It's more just all of our psychologies have to resist that these are normal people in these jobs.

You know, they're not.

For sure.

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For now, we're sort of in the warm embrace of the Biden administration, so we're going to turn to him because on Monday, President Biden delivered a speech at the State Department about his foreign policy accomplishments.

Here's kind of a big picture excerpt that gets at the thrust of it.

We have not gone to war to make these things happen.

During my presidency, I've increased America's power in every dimension.

Look at the Indo-Pacific.

We've made partnerships stronger and created new partnerships to challenge China's aggressive behavior and to rebalance power in the region.

Just consider Russia.

When Putin invaded Ukraine, he thought he'd conquer Kiev in a matter of days.

But the truth is, since that war began, I'm the only one that stood in the center of Kyiv, not him.

Putin never had.

All told, Iran is weaker than it has been in decades.

And if you want more evidence that we've seriously weakened Iran and Russia, just take a look at Syria.

There is nothing, I can tell you from my conversation with both Xi and Putin, nothing our adversaries and competitors like Russia and China would have liked more.

than seeing us to continue to be tied down in Afghanistan for another decade.

For all those reasons, ending the war was the right thing to do.

And I believe history will reflect that.

So a lot of different pieces there, Ben.

We talked about this a bit on Padse America Tuesday, so I'll be brief.

I mean, I think what I found lacking in the speech or less effective was that it was kind of a litany of accomplishments that didn't really at times match up with the reality of this uncertain moment that we're in.

Yeah, yeah.

This moment of peril that we just talked about with Mike Flynn.

Like, yes, we created new partnerships in Asia, but what happens to them now?

And also, by the the way, I mean, some of those partnerships and alliances like South Korea are a little rocky at the moment.

Yes, it's great that Biden went to Kyiv and Putin is not, but what happens to Ukraine now?

Yes, Iran is weaker, but they are closer than ever to getting a nuclear weapon.

So, look, you give it your best shot in these speeches.

You're trying your best to kind of lay down the first draft of history and your legacy and your accomplishments.

And on one score, like as part of the speech, I do give President Biden a lot of credit for ending the war in Afghanistan.

It's interesting that he's now highlighting that as an accomplishment when they didn't really talk about it for a very long time because it was seen as a liability.

But, you know, some of the stuff in there about

urging Trump to keep in place his AI policy or his climate work, like it just, it seems very unlikely.

And then Gaza was kind of an afterthought.

We can get to that in a second.

But like, what were your big picture thoughts on this?

Yeah, well, let's do Gaza, you know, next.

I think you put it well.

And, you know, listening to that even just now, and this, we should note, this is the last pod say of the world of the Biden administration.

It's not unlike the domestic piece in which

they have a communications,

and I don't think this is on the communications staffers, I think this is from Joe Biden himself, to be very clear.

They have a communication strategy that's constantly telling you about all these historic achievements.

And so on domestic policy, I would watch this, and he's constantly, you know, I passed this and that, and nobody's done as much since FDR.

And a lot of those accomplishments are real and important

but you know what like the cost of living sucks and the infrastructure bill is that's it's not the new deal it's the it can be good without being the greatest thing ever you know and it's interesting that they do the same thing on foreign policy and all these legacy tours because sure there are good things that they've done and if I go through the list uh that you know sure they they kind of restored good relations with our allies they at the critical moment with Ukraine kind of helped Ukraine survive and have a fighting chance.

And literally, that's all it is in this war with Russia.

I think they've done a lot of interesting things vis-vis China, whether it's kind of restricting technology to give the United States an advantage, whether it's kind of building this network of alliances in the Asia-Pacific, also kind of stabilizing the relationship with China in the last year or two.

They got that fucking spy balloon.

Shot down that fucking balloon, you know, rejoined Paris.

And they, you know, they're good things.

They're a huge climate investment.

Yes, huge, massive climate investments.

But because they over-torque it so much,

that it's like, to your point, Ukraine is not, they talk about it like it's some war that is over that was won.

And

it's not.

It's still a very difficult circumstance.

And also, we're not the main actor.

I'm more interested that Zelensky stood in Kyiv than Joe Biden, to be honest, you know.

And

on Afghanistan, they'd have more credibility in defending the withdrawal if they acknowledged that the withdrawal didn't go well.

I know that part of it.

And Joe Biden has never once said that he has any regret about how that went down.

You know, and if he just said, you know, I believe it was the right thing to do.

I believe we had to leave Afghanistan at some point.

I didn't want to leave this to another successor.

But, you know, we wish that it was less chaotic.

We are heartbroken at the loss of life of Afghans and Americans.

And we continue to care about Afghan women and people that are suffering under the Taliban.

The inability to just describe what everybody is seeing in the world, because nobody is going to only believe that speech, because we're still looking out at the world in which there's a war in Ukraine, in which there's a lot of unnerving conflict, in which the Middle East is a mess.

And we'll talk about that.

So I just, it's a lesson.

And the last thing I'd say on alliances, which I keep coming back to, it's alliances are a means to an end.

They're not an end.

I mean, the fact that we get along with countries we should get along with is not, that's great.

But, you know, what do you want to do with that?

You know, and what is Trump going to do with that?

And so I just think that there was just, it was so off the,

while there's a lot of substance in there that is right.

And we know a lot of people in this administration, by the way, who worked their ass off for four years.

And I'm talking about even down to people, like mid-level people.

These are not necessarily even just, you know, these are not the people negotiating in Gaza.

You know, I'm talking about people that went to work in a pandemic and are leaving with Donald Trump coming in, probably had a pretty tough four years and worked hard.

But this victory lap just felt kind of totally like, who's it for?

Yeah, no, I don't know.

It seemed like it was for,

to be blunt, Joe Biden.

Yeah.

Who wants to kind of like lay down what he thinks his record is and what it should look like.

And yeah, and I think he would be better served, at least taking on board, listening to, giving an inch on some of the more effective communications threat.

They'd They'd have a better chance at communicating a positive legacy if they acknowledge some error or some unease.

Yeah, for sure.

We have referenced the Gaza piece.

So here's a clip of President Biden talking about Gaza.

The Palestinians who have suffered terribly in this war that Hamas started.

They've been through hell.

So many innocent people have been killed.

So many communities have been destroyed.

The Palestinian people deserve peace

and the right to determine their own futures.

Israel deserves peace and real security.

And the hostages and their families deserve to be reunited.

And so we're working urgently to close this deal.

So, Ben, this was the part of the speech that frustrated me the most, which is totally the most off.

I think the Biden administration, a lot of senior officials often talk about Gaza and Palestinian suffering in the passive voice, is if we are not a party to this conflict when we're giving all of the weapons to the Israelis.

And I know that President Biden is desperately trying to get another ceasefire deal.

And there were a bunch of reports and rumors this morning that a deal was imminent and about to get done.

But nothing was finalized by the time we started recording at what, it's 2.43 p.m.

Pacific right now.

But even the deal that's being discussed will not end the war.

Netanyahu's like ruling out ending the war.

And now the reconstruction effort is going to get handed off to Donald Trump, who does not give a shit about the Palestinians.

So it is incredibly bleak.

We're the reason it got to this point because we've been arming one side of the conflict and doing nothing to

end it, in my view.

Yeah, I mean, it's been 15 months since October 7th.

Every single plane that has dropped a bomb on Gaza is an American plane.

The 2,000-pound bombs dropped on refugee camps are American 2,000-pound bombs.

The United States has vetoed resolutions that tried to bring about a ceasefire at the UN Security Council.

We could go on and on.

The bottom line is is that Joe Biden used absolutely no leverage to try to end the war in Gaza.

And it sounds like the Trump administration, without even taking office, is using more leverage or at least playing a little more hardball at Nanyahu, according to news reports.

Well, yeah.

I mean, according to news reports, you know, Trump has clearly made it known that he wanted this war over by the time he took office.

Yes.

He said that publicly, and he said, I've heard from many people.

in the U.S.

government and in foreign governments that that's the message from Trump since the election.

And if you look at reports, you know, Steve Witkoff, who, you know, none of us had heard of two months ago, was harder on Netanyahu than anybody in the Biden administration.

Like, let's just be blunt about it.

You know, if those reports are true, I don't know.

And let's be clear, too, that's not because Donald Trump gives two fucks about the Palestinians.

That's because he wants to probably humiliate Joe Biden.

I wonder if you're trying to actually Jimmy Carter, which was, you know, Ronald Reagan takes office and hours later, the Hazy just get out of Iran.

He wants this kind of off the plate when he comes in.

He wants it out of the news.

But, you know,

I see some people are like, see, Donald Trump's better for the Palestinians.

Let's wait and see what happens in the West Bank.

Wait, because the West Bank is actually the thing that I've been most concerned about with Trump is whether he'll just look the way to kind of de facto, if not outright annexation there.

But look, there's no way getting around the fact that I know they, you can tell in all the legacy stuff, they don't want to be defined by Gaza, but this is the thing that has happened, that's the most prominent thing that's happened for the last year and a half.

And it's a huge part of this legacy.

And

all the language, passive voice about Palestinian suffering,

there was not really any action.

Tony Blinken's argument is it, well, it could have been worse.

Well, you know, I guess, but it was pretty fucking close to

the worst.

Not that much worse.

Biden also made a couple policy announcements on the foreign policy front that we just want to quickly mention.

On Tuesday, the AP reported that Biden is planning to lift the designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism.

Ben, can you just give us the quick explanation of how big a deal that is and a time estimate for how long it will take Marco Rubio to walk it right back?

So, you know, I...

I love this move.

I've argued for this move for years, but just to,

this is a really powerful sanction because when you're on the state sponsor of terrorism list, you're basically cut off from the international financial system.

I mean, the risk of anybody doing any business in Cuba is through the roof because of this level of sanction.

Obama removed them from the state sponsor of terrorism list as a part of the normalization process.

I want to add, as some person who negotiated that, Cuba was not a state sponsor of terrorism.

So it wasn't like a gift.

It was actually just an acknowledgement of reality.

They were on this list for wholly political purposes.

Obama removes them from the list.

Things start to get better in the lives of the Cuban people.

There's more travel down there.

There's more resources down there.

There's more internet connectivity down there.

Mike Pompeo, at about this time, the Trump administration in January of 2021 slops them back on the list, going out the door.

Cuba has been in an acute humanitarian crisis that we've talked about.

Look, this is a hugely positive step.

But the fact that they're doing it now makes you wonder why they didn't do it one year, two years, three years, or four years ago, because Cuba is not a state-sponsored terrorism.

So I mean, I'm glad they did it.

kind of begs the question of what's different now.

Cuba was no more a state-sponsored terrorism in any other day of the Biden administration than today.

And yeah, the risk is that Marco Rubio, who's

made a kind of political identity out of being a hawk on Cuba, may come in and just throw him back on that list.

So we'll see.

We'll see that happening.

The other immigration-specific thing Biden announced was the Department of Homeland Security announced an extension of temporary protected status for immigrants from Venezuela, Ukraine, Sudan, and El Salvador.

So that will protect 937,000 people from deportation for 18 months.

The thing, that's obviously great

because sending someone back to Sudan right now is unconscionable.

Sadistic.

But Trump has previously said he'd revoke TPS status for certain groups.

So it's just not clear to me how settled this is or if they could also walk this one back.

Yeah.

This begs

the question of there'll be legal challenges, I'm sure, but

I badly needed step.

But this is the same situation that was faced by the Haitians in the infamous Dogs and Cats episode, because the reason those people are legal is because of TPS.

But the reason that Trump and J.D.

Vance argued that they weren't legal is that they intended to revoke that status.

And so expect to see a lot of drama

tragically around whether people are here on temporary protected status can stay.

Yeah.

And then one last immigration thing that caught our eye that we want to mention before we move on.

Republicans are pushing legislation in Congress right now called the Lake and Riley Bill.

It is named after a nursing student in Georgia who was brutally murdered by an undocumented immigrant.

It became a huge sort of right-wing cause during the campaign.

The bill would do a bunch of different things, including require federal authorities to detain undocumented migrants suspected of theft of over $100 or more and do so without trial.

So basically petty theft will get you thrown in jail indefinitely, which is very strange and unconstitutional seeming.

But the one very surprising piece from a World O perspective is the bill lets states demand that the State Department not issue visas to countries that refuse to take back migrants we deport, which just seems completely unworkable to have like the state of Oklahoma making foreign policy determinations for the federal government.

But I don't know.

This bill is a classic case of a bill that was allegedly written to do a particular thing, which is deport criminals, and yet was written so expansively.

as to basically do away with any due process, as to kind of give the state of Oklahoma foreign policy powers.

And Democrats were so intimidated by the election that far too many of them went along with it.

Check out Andy Campbellissa Slockin, two friends of ours now in the Senate, who took a principled stand on this.

The one thing I'd add from a World Out perspective is this is actually not new.

It's out of a far-right playbook that we've seen in Europe.

So there have been efforts in Europe to use things like

traffic violations, get people deported.

It goes far beyond the kind of stated intent of deporting criminals.

It's basically, can we find any, you know, imagine if you were totally innocent and someone said that guy shoplifted and this person's innocent and suddenly they're getting deported under the Lake and Riley Act.

I mean, that's not great.

No, that's terrible.

Well, another one to watch because immigration will be something that moves fast, I think, in this next administration.

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So, Ben, you know, one of the big challenges that Trump is going to face as soon as he takes over is the future of Syria, assuming he cares.

Over the weekend, there was a big conference in Saudi Arabia with reps from across the Middle East and the West, including the EU's top diplomat, Kaya Khalis, as well as Syria's new foreign minister.

At that conference, Saudi Arabia called for getting rid of sanctions on Syria, with the Saudi foreign minister saying, quote, their continuation hinders the aspirations of the Syrian people to achieve development and reconstruction.

So pretty clear there.

And then in Europe, France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Finland all released a paper saying the EU should immediately begin adjusting their sanctions regime, while at the same time keeping a close eye on the human rights situation in Syria.

If certain conditions are not met, they propose sort of snapback mechanisms to put sanctions back in place.

But, you know, it's interesting that as Syria tries to rebuild, there are these European and Saudi pressures, you know, pushing in the direction of sanctions relief.

There's also this question of how to hold the Assad regime accountable, especially given the fact that so many of its senior leaders have fled.

We caught up with Ismail Al-Adullah.

He's a member of the White Helmets based in Aleppo.

We just wanted to hear what he had to say about what ordinary Syrians want to see happen next from their government.

Most of the West or the West audience are talking about who will lead Syria or who will

run Syria and this guy or this guy.

And for Syrian people, this is not their priority.

Their priority to get back to their homes,

have normal life.

And I can say on behalf of most of the Syrians, we don't need a president right now.

For five, six years, we don't need a president.

We need to get normal to our life, to normalcy, to live again, to go.

We need our children to go to school, their schools, good school, good education.

We need to rehabilitate everything.

We need a government to represent everyone, election.

But maybe this after one years, two years, three years, four years, maybe.

And we're not in a hurry to get a new president.

We have a president since

uh 50 years so we can live without a president we have we now maybe we are the most happiest heavier people in the in the world and on last month without president without anything we're living we're building syrian people are in the streets clearing the streets removing the trash helping each other Some good context from the ground there about what actually matters to people.

But Ben, on this sanctions question, I mean, why do you think the Saudis in these European countries are so much more forward-leaning than the Biden administration when it comes to getting rid of sanctions?

I just think that if you don't get rid of sanctions, you have a much greater risk of instability,

of different groups fighting because there's a lack of resources, right?

And so if your concern is the stability of Syria, you actually want to get electricity in, food in, investment in, so that the place can stabilize, so that you don't have HDS beginning to get turned on by these other groups that are armed.

And so, if you're Europe, I mean, and let's face it, I mean, I'd like to think some of this is humanitarian.

I think it is, but you also want Syria that people can go back to.

Yeah, they want to send back Assad.

So, if you want people to return to Syria, you need Syria to be a success.

Saudi is very interesting to me.

It's interesting to me that this conference was in Saudi Arabia because Saudi Arabia and the UAE were the least enthusiastic about what happened.

They didn't like Assad, they hate Iran, but they don't like Islamists either.

Right, in the whole The UAE was apparently kind of the last holdout, you know, in terms of trying to work with Assad.

I think it was smart of the Syrians to

do this in Saudi, and frankly, of the Saudis.

You know, we don't have much good to say.

But I mean,

good to host this kind of gathering.

And I just would like to see the U.S.

follow suit because these sanctions aren't really accomplishing anything.

People will argue that they're leverage to get HTS and Syrian leaders to be inclusive and to protect minority rights.

But the European approach is the right one.

You can snap all that back.

If they start repressing minorities, you can sanction them.

And the last thing I just want to reaffirm that we talked about a little bit is that let's not make the standard perfection here.

Like coming out of the Assad regime and the trauma civil war, this place is not going to look like a...

you know, a paragon of democracy in six months.

If it's better than it was and they're trying to do the right thing, we shouldn't be holding them to like impossible standards either.

Because that's what happens sometimes with this stuff.

For sure.

And I think I heard the German foreign minister talk about the need for a peace dividend for the people of Syria.

Like got to make life better for them.

Post-Assad.

That has got to be the near-term priority.

And the rest of the democratic process is going to take some time.

Writing a constitution, it's going to take some time.

Well, you heard that guy, too.

Like, we're not in a hurry to have a president down there.

I mean,

it's a totally different comparison.

You know, they've like,

it'd be nice to not have a president here too.

Like,

I'll go pick up the trash, you know.

Right, right.

Well, speaking of a place that didn't have a president, let's talk about neighboring Lebanon for a bit.

They now have a president.

They now have a prime minister after two years of the caretaker government.

So you can get a lot done with the caretaker government, or actually get nothing done.

General Joseph Awen is commander of the Lebanese military and is required by Lebanon's sectarian power sharing agreement.

He's a Maronite Christian.

He was elected in the second round of voting with 99 votes out of the 128 and will resign from his position as Army Chief to take on the job.

It was his job to then appoint a Sunni Muslim prime minister, and he chose Nawaf Salam, whose job it is to now form a government.

For those who don't, Lebanon has a very strict sectarian power-sharing setup where the president has to be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister is a Sunni Muslim, the Speaker of Parliament, a Shia Muslim.

The list goes on and on and on.

Salam is an interesting background.

He's a former diplomat.

He's a current head of the UN's International Court of Justice.

But the big thing to note in all of this is how weakened Hezbollah seems to be after Israel basically decapitated its entire leadership structure.

Neither candidate was Hezbollah's first choice.

Ahwen even promised in a speech to parliament that he would, quote, monopolize the carrying of weapons, end quote, to the Lebanese state.

So an allusion to disarming Hezbollah.

Obviously, it's a good thing that one, Lebanon now is a government.

Two, it's a government that Hezbollah doesn't like.

The thing I'm trying to figure out, and maybe it's unknowable, is whether this is a durable change and whether Hezbollah is permanently weakened or whether they're just going to buy their time.

The Iranians will slowly feed them money and weapons and it will just kind of re-emerge.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: That is the question.

I mean, the headline from all these government formation moves in Lebanon is the marginalization relatively of Hezbollah

and the breaking of the log jam in Lebanese politics because of that marginalization of Hezbollah, together with what's happened in Syria.

This is a massive shift in the Levant, you know, and that's good.

That said, it's the Middle East and Lebanon has massive problems.

I mean, the financial crisis doesn't begin to describe it.

And so the question is, can this government, you know, both can Hezbollah regenerate, but also can this government perform?

Or else they're going to be blamed in a year or two years too.

So another reason to try to have

the, you know, Europe and the Middle East probably taking the lead and trying to help stabilize the Lebanese economy.

Yeah.

So those are some of the situations that Trump's inheriting in the Middle East.

We want to talk a bit about the political situation in Europe that lays at the feet of the Trump administration and kind of what that means for the world.

So, we're going to start with Croatia, Austria, and Germany, and then kind of expand it out.

In Croatia, the current president, Zoran Milanovich, was re-elected in a landslide with 74% of the vote.

The quick and dirty on this guy is he is pro-Russia, anti-support for Ukraine, and a harsh critic of the European Union.

Milanovic often gets compared to Trump, though I think it's more like style than substance.

But the Croatian presidency is not a, it's a ceremonial job largely, but I think his margin of victory, 74%, I think gives you a pretty good sense of the way the political winds are blowing in this European Union NATO country.

And that's something I think we should just clock.

And then in Austria, it is increasingly likely that the government will shift dramatically to the far right.

Herbert Kikal's Freedom Party got the most votes.

And last week, Kikal was given the chance to form a coalition and see if he can become the next chancellor of Austria.

The Freedom Party has promised to ban Islam, expel migrants, including ones who have become Austrian citizens, by the way.

Kikal likes to attack the EU.

He opposes support for Ukraine and he wants to roll back policies to prevent climate change.

So he opposes everything.

Everything I care about.

But even that, like, kind of policy list doesn't get at how extreme these guys are.

Kiko has repeatedly used Nazi-era slogans and language that he knows are Nazi.

You know, he knows the dog whistle he's using here.

And the Freedom Party itself was founded in the 1950s by former members of the SS.

So there's nothing subtle about these guys.

And then finally, Ben, Germany has elections coming up on February 23rd.

Most political analysts believe that Friedrich Mertz from the Christian Democratic Union or CDU, Merkel's party, will win and go into coalition with the Social Democrats.

But who knows?

These right-wing parties keep outperforming their polling, and the AFD, the far-right, extremely far-right party in Germany, is currently sitting at about 22%.

The AFD platform is also super right-wing, deportation of asylum seekers, exiting the Euro, leaving the Paris Climate Accord, so similar to Austria.

But this is the political context for Trump 2.0, right?

We talked about this last week.

Justin Trudeau out, far-right Austrians and Germans in.

Like, that's

not a good setup.

The diehard world, those who listen to the election series, might remember Zach Beauchamp from Vox was on on democracy.

And I remember it's something stuck in my head because I asked him what would be the worst thing for democracy about a Trump win.

And I had some answers in my head.

And he said the AFD in Germany, which is actually not the first answer I had.

And his point was that Trump's victory could kind of normalize the idea that a seemingly extremist right-wing politics can be in the mainstream.

Yes.

And I think what I take away, where there's differences between these three, the commonality is people are just, they're pissed off in Europe in the same way that they're pissed off here.

There's a kind of anti-incumbency, anti-establishment, anti-institutions.

Anti-COVID, anti-migration.

Yeah, post-COVID, anti-migration vibe that is the predominant momentum in European politics right now.

That's the first point.

There are different degrees.

The Croatian guy is kind of a bit more of a personality than like a deep ideologue.

And he's worryingly, you know, kind of seemingly pro-Russian and anti-EU and stuff.

But, you know, he has beef with the prime minister.

The Austrians, let's just be clear, Tommy.

You don't like Nazis starting in Austria, right?

This is...

Finishing in Germany.

Nazism that begins in Austria and then moves to Germany has traditionally been a very bad thing.

I mean, I was making a little bit light, but to take it seriously, like, this is like, you know, the mask is off here.

These guys are like super

scary, creepy, far-right guys who've party-built.

Like, they didn't come out of nowhere.

Like, they've been working their way to this.

And the risk of this jumping into Germany through the AFD and making significant inroads in the election is scary.

I think what it also means is the EU is going to have a hell of a time.

I mean, for those who don't follow the EU, it's most major decisions are like require a degree of unanimity.

There's veto powers and things like that.

With Hungary, Slovakia, you know, like when Domino is potentially falling, I think one of the things we're going to have to watch in the next few years, and you and I were talking about this, is that some things are going to have to be done by kind of collections of like-minded countries.

Things like support for Ukraine, for instance.

You know, the

countries that are not going this route may need to find ways to do things collectively that are harder to do through the institutions of the European Union.

Because you're going to see some fracturing, and Trump is probably going to accelerate that by his own personality.

Yeah.

And so, like, you know, liberal-minded leaders in Europe are going to have to deal with Donald Trump, and they're going to have to deal with these right-wing parties in Europe.

But the other kind of grenade that America is just kind of rolling into the equation is Elon Musk, because he's become the biggest booster of the AFD.

He's doing it mostly on Twitter, but he also wrote a not bad.

We discussed some of this last week.

But the New York Times had a great piece where they wrote, they reported that AFD members are getting such a big boost from Elon Musk on Twitter on X that they have started tweeting in English and not German in hopes of getting noticed by him.

And last week, Elon Musk did a Twitter spaces chat with this AFD leader who wants to be chancellor.

Her name is Alice Vital.

During that conversation, Musk repeated his endorsement of the AFD party, and then he asked her a bunch of softball questions.

I sadly listened to some of this as I was sitting in Laguna having escaped.

My kids were taking a nap.

So what else would I do

with the AFD?

Very soon into this interview, Vital goes into this just absurd revisionist history about Hitler and the Nazis.

She was claiming that Hitler was not right-wing, but was actually a communist and a socialist.

In case you're wondering, that is nonsense.

It's literally the opposite.

Hitler used the threat of communism to get all the industrialists to finance his far-right Baltic.

Yeah, like Hitler was an ultra-nationalist.

He was a fascist.

He threw leftists, communists, socialists into concentration camps and murdered them.

Dumb and or dishonest people often point to the full name of the Nazi Party, the National Socialist German Workers' Party, and claim the inclusion of the word socialist means that Hitler was a lefty.

But I would recommend you look at actions, not words there.

Actions like executing communists and then invading the Soviet Union.

Yeah, and purging social democrats and like literally mobilizing your support by fear-mongering about the left.

Right, right.

But so Elon's response to Vital claiming that Hitler was a leftist was, quote, yeah, very much so.

They nationalized industries like crazy.

And so just an important thing to understand about the AFD in Germany is

they get support consistently.

Right now, their polling is at 22% or so.

But what has kept them out of power is all these other parties refusing to normalize them, refusing to go into coalition with them.

Literally labeled under German law as extremists.

Yeah.

And the concern is, and you have AFD.

party members saying this, the fact that Elon likes them is normalizing them and making the

intra-German efforts to ostracize them look ridiculous.

And that is really dangerous long-term.

Yeah, the world's richest guy who is kind of an icon to a bunch of people and is seated at the right hand of the president of the United States is the ultimate normalization seal that can be granted.

And he's just playing with...

I mean, this is a problem with Trumpism generally.

Like, it connects all the way back to some of the crazy shit Hexeth said.

They're playing with like historical forces that you kind of can't control when you unleash them.

This brand of nationalism, far-right politics, nativism, us versus them stuff.

I mean, they think they can control it.

And, you know, there were a bunch of German industrialists who thought they can control Hitler when he was back in Austria, and that's not how it ended.

No.

And you see also the Bloomberg News reported that Chinese officials are considering selling the kind of U.S.

TikTok assets to Elon Musk if they can't fend off this.

plan to ban TikTok at the Supreme Court.

So

that would just hand that guy

control

and TikTok.

Crazy.

I mean, it's weird that Steve Bannon is now calling Musk truly evil, and he's vowing to take him down.

There is this kind of intra-mega fighting, but I just saw a report that

Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg are going to be sitting on the dais at Trump's inauguration.

So it doesn't seem like Bannon's winning, Ben.

Well, you know, Ian Bremer talks about this.

It's pretty interesting about it.

Essentially, it is the case that there are these deep ideological differences underneath the umbrella of MAGA, you know, for sure.

Um, between the kind of guys that's tech and the

tech guys want to, yeah, you've talked about this, and but it this is actually globally the case too.

Like there are different flavors of the far right, you know, and Bannon really is a tear-it-all-down guy, and Elon really is a regulatory capture and make a lot of money and disrupt things guy.

And those are different ideologies, ultimately.

The problem is the weakness of all these institutions, right?

Like the weakness of the French government and the German government and the U.S.

government is kind of creating an opening for we're going to be living with the outcome of an intra-maga civil war that we don't get a vote in.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Speaking of the French government, the New York Times also reported that Paul Manafort, Trump's, you know, campaign, was he chairman?

I think he was a chairman.

Not manager, chairman.

I don't get that title.

Well, yeah, he's back on the scenes.

He's pitching his services again.

Remember, this guy went to jail for financial crimes, violating foreign lobbying laws, and then Trump pardoned him.

But the Times reported that Manafort has pitched his services to a French billionaire who is known for boosting right-wing political parties in France, including Maureen Le Pen and the National Rally Party.

So that's the election we have to look forward to in 2027.

The next thing down the pike.

A lot of podside of the world content.

A lot of bad content.

Finally, before we get to Ben's interview, we did just want to explain to you guys why the civility police are toasting at Cafe Milano this week after some major, major bipartisan news.

So President Biden announced that the next two Gerald R.

Ford-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers will be named after two great former presidents, Bill Clinton and George W.

Bush.

Because I personally can think of no one better to name a piece of massive military hardware after than the president who led us into Iraq and is responsible for tens of thousands of U.S.

service members being killed or wounded in a completely unnecessary war of choice.

Yeah, you know, when you have these deployments that we have to talk about, and it's like,

you know, the USS George W.

Bush is off the coast of the Persian Gulf, you know.

For nine months.

That's that's a good message.

You know, I don't know, Tommy.

I'm just going to go there.

You know, for the

maybe we're far enough along into the show that the political reporters have tuned out.

But

Barack H.

Obama

did not get a fucking,

you know, personnel carrier named after him.

Joe Biden did seem to revel, I mean, in

eulogizing Jimmy Carter and paying tribute to George W.

Bush and

Bill Clinton, this one other former president that,

by the way, could give a shit.

There's probably no one who would

care less about getting things named after him than ships and Barack Obama.

It is kind of weird to name ships after former presidents and people.

It's like, imagine if you had a ship named after you and it was just like launching missiles at some, you know, what would you want named after you?

I don't know, like the worst bridge in my hometown in Dedham.

Yeah, that's a good question.

I would do with like one of those benches in Central Park with

a clock on it.

Can you buy those?

Is that like a chair?

You can buy those, yeah.

That's a nice idea.

I should do that one of these days for myself.

Yeah.

That's a good question.

What would I want?

Obama's got actually a lot of stuff here in LA.

Yeah, he's got this.

Barack Obama Boulevard is actually a real street.

There's like a Barack and Michelle Obama Institute on Lincoln Boulevard.

What happens there?

That's what I don't even know what happens.

I drive by it all the time.

I'm always like, what goes on in there?

You know, so Obama's doing fine.

No, no, he's fine.

He doesn't need an aircraft carrier, but I did think it was a funny story from me.

Aircraft driver George Bush.

Like, oh, good.

Hopefully, we can launch another war of choice from this thing.

Yeah, doing a belly tap.

Oh, good.

Okay.

We're going to take a quick break.

When we come back, you're going to hear Ben's interview with Ian Bremer about all the geopolitical risk in the world.

So stick around for that.

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I'm very pleased to be joined by Ian Bremer, who is the founder and president of the Eurasia Group, which recently released its report on the world's top risks for 2025.

So Ian, I know we've been talking for a while about you coming on, but this seemed like an apt time to look at risk.

So welcome to Potsdam of the World.

Yeah, I would say so.

No, good to see you again, Ben, and happy to be with you.

Okay, so we talk a lot about risk on this show.

And I think everybody feels some sense of foreboding as we head towards the inauguration here in a few days.

I want to begin with what you describe as a top risk, which is essentially a G0 world,

essentially the vacuum of leadership in the world.

Talk a little bit about what you're trying to identify with that and how it might manifest in the year ahead.

I'm looking at a world where the United States

is unprepared to support

a global order of collective security, free trade architecture, promotion of rule of law, democracy, and no other country or group of countries can step in

to do the same.

And I think it's been coming for a long time.

There are lots of reasons why the U.S.-led global order has been starting to erode and fall apart.

One is that, you know, Russia, when the Soviet Union collapsed, didn't integrate into the West, into NATO, into the EU, irrespective of who you blame for that.

The Russians blame the U.S.

They're angry about it.

Now they're allied with like other chaos actors like North Korea and Iran.

The Chinese were integrated, particularly into the global economy, but on the presumption by the West, by the U.S.

especially, that as they got wealthier, they would integrate into our value system, into our worldview.

They'd become, as we called it and you've called it, responsible stakeholders.

They have gotten a lot more powerful and wealthier, but they have not integrated.

They've not accepted an American worldview.

And instead, something really interesting has happened.

The United States has increasingly adopted a Chinese worldview, much more transactional, much more about power, much more of the rule of the jungle.

But Trump is saying, you know, by the way, Chinese, Russia, you think you guys can play that well?

We can play that game a lot better than you can.

And we're going to get everybody to line up the way we want to.

And so now you have the confluence of those three things together at a time when the United States has consolidated a lot of power, both politically, because the GOP is riding Trump's coattails, not the other way around in 2017, because he's appointed all these loyalists in his administration as opposed to establishment Republican figures who were much more independent in 2017.

but also because the U.S.

is in such a better position than so many other countries.

Its adversaries are much weaker.

Russia's in serious decline.

Iran has just lost its empire in the Middle East.

China is in the worst economic position since the 90s, maybe even the 70s.

And America's allies not only are in an economically, technologically, and militarily much worse position, but their governments are also much weaker, much more fragmented, as we see with like South Korea and Germany and France and Canada all imploding right now, and even other governments like Japan and the UK facing huge, huge headwinds.

So, for all of those reasons, the top risk this year is not about one leader, about one country.

It's really structural, right?

And it's going to manifest in so many different ways with so many different actors around the world.

Yeah, it's interesting in looking at your report, and I wanted to step back and have this kind of conversation with you.

You referenced the, or there is a historical analogy, the 30s, obviously the pre-World War II period, the onset of the Cold War, which obviously felt like a very dangerous time.

I might add to that even like the pre-World War I days,

and in the sense that you have these competing great powers without an order governing it.

And I wonder what you make of the fact that you already have Russia and Ukraine.

You've got the Taiwan hotspot as a potential for Chinese military action.

We've obviously been living through a period of war in the Middle East.

And now you have Trump, you know, threatening territorial aggression again in Greenland and Panama.

as much as people may laugh at that, I take it kind of seriously.

What do you see as the risk of this kind of increasing great power aggression, like throwing your weight around in your neighborhood, leading to a risk of actual great power conflict?

Because usually in history, when great powers start with territorial ambitions, they end up bumping into each other.

How do you equate that risk for 2025?

So I've got three different things I can say here.

One is that traditionally, when we talk about that kind of changing global order leading to great power conflict, it's because one great power is declining and another great power is rising.

And, you know, we talk about that as the Thucydides trap.

Graham Allison wrote that a big book about 10 years ago.

Here, the United States is not declining at all, other than its political system, but I mean, certainly not in its ability to project power around the world, which Trump is very interested in doing.

So I don't see that.

In fact, right now, China is much more inclined to try to cut deals with countries because they're weak.

I mean, we see that on India.

They just had the first summit meeting in over five years, and they withdrew from their contested border to try to improve diplomatic and economic relations.

Same thing with their outreach to Japan.

Same thing with their outreach to the Europeans, to other countries around the world.

And Russia, of course, is in very severe decline.

That's another another very specific problem.

And Russia and China do not have an alliance, in my view, even though

their interests geopolitically are in many ways aligned and overlapping.

They're also many personal.

I would not put Russia in the same camp as Tony Blinken did in his recent Foreign Affairs piece with North Korea,

Russia, and Iran.

I think China is in a separate camp than that, in a different camp.

They're an adversary, they're a competitor, but they're not a chaos actor, and they're not always an enemy.

So that's one point.

But

the second

point

as to where

we are now heading compared to these adversaries that are other major powers with military designs on parts of the world, China with Taiwan and the South China Sea, Russia with Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, the Balts, all that kind of stuff, areas of the Balts,

is that, yes, I accept the idea that the Americans have been promoting rule of law and American exceptionalism, which was frequently hypocritical and not always well executed on, and certainly not always well implemented.

And the Russians and Chinese would constantly call us hypocritical.

And instead, we're now saying, actually,

no, you know, we got...

We're all just power players.

And that provides, I mean, what Trump is saying about the Panama Canal is very analogous to the arguments that Putin has made about Crimea.

Yeah.

Right.

Very analogous.

And completely undermines territorial integrity and sovereignty and the United Nations, which the U.S.

created, right?

All of that stuff.

So on the one hand, I completely agree with where your question is going there.

On the other,

the United States

is not prepared, in my view, not under Biden and not under Trump, to allow Russia to take over Ukraine.

And in fact,

Trump has been pushing European allies to spend a lot more money on defense, and they feel more urgency with that under Trump than they did under Biden.

You know, Mark Rutte talking about a 3%

GDP defense spend across the board.

And I assume they are going to make progress on that from the European leaders I've spoken with.

That's not something Putin wants.

And

taking a few months to get Ukraine in a stronger position to negotiate with Russia is not what Putin wants.

And it's not at all clear to me that even though Putin clearly prefers Trump in many ways to Biden and Harris, and the money that they spent in disinformation campaigns showed that to be the case, it is not clear to me.

that they suddenly get a free ride, you know, a hall pass on their territorial ambitions now that the Americans have said, okay, we're all about rule of the jungle.

And with China as well, I think the Chinese,

I think, were really concerned about Trump coming in.

And clearly, the Iranians, right?

Yeah.

I mean, you didn't ask about Iran, but I mean, let's face it, given where Israel is and given Trump's support of Israel in an even more strident fashion than the Biden administration had, you can easily see that Iran might feel like they're going to face being taken out their their nuclear program, at least, by the U.S.

and by Israel.

I don't think that's going to happen, but I think it's plausible, right?

Especially over four years of a Trump term.

Yeah, so on Trump, I mean,

he occupies a couple spots on your list.

One that has to do.

There are two ways.

Yeah, and I think it's accurate to separate out.

One is essentially that there are no checks on his power this time around.

He's got a cabinet.

Today we're talking, it's Pete Hegzeth's confirmation hearing.

That is not Jim Mattis.

And you can look across the board.

It's loyalist.

The Republican Party is completely in his image now, unlike in 2017.

And then you talk about his economic policies.

I mean,

one could listen to you and say, well, maybe Trump's onto something.

It's a transactional world.

Let's

discard with the hypocrisy and just, you know, throw our weight around where we feel like it.

On the other hand, though, you know, this brand of leadership tends to go to dark places.

I mean, what are you most worried about as we approach inauguration in terms of what a second Trump term could do for global stability and really the lives of people here in the U.S.?

Well, you know, I'm probably most worried about something long-term, which is that

a transactional U.S.

that is going to leverage its power in ways that will build a series of hub-and-spoke relations that work better for the U.S., which, by the way, is the Chinese worldview over the last 30 years.

That's what they've done.

Beltroad initiative from the U.S., right?

The Gulf, you know, some places in Asia, some places in Latin America, yeah.

Yeah, and the U.S.

dominates in AI, and the Chinese dominate in post-carbon energy transition.

And those are the two most structurally important technological drivers of like humanity for the next 20 years.

Like, it's that that is interesting.

And I might be, I don't like it.

It does not resonate with me

personally.

It doesn't touch my soul.

It's not who I am as a human.

But as a political scientist, I can see how that kind of a strategy could be quite successful if it could be, like China's, implemented strategically over a long period of time, which America's cannot be.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because the United States has an election every two years and a presidential every four.

And there are constraints on Trump in the sense that the elections are run by states and they can't be easily rigged.

And there is a professional military, and there is an appointed judiciary, which is independent, and that is still true no matter how many challenges and no matter how much erosion we've seen.

And so, the ability of Trump to ensure that if the Dems take the House in two years, which looks reasonably likely to me, that he's still going to be able to implement the way he can for the next two seems very constrained.

And after he's gone, when he's 82, and how much influence would he have, even if a Republican won,

you know, I would say very hard to implement a policy like that.

And that means that you have thrown away so much of what the U.S.

has worked to build.

I mean, these institutions that are now going to be on defense and maybe on life support, because the Americans are going to beat them up and ignore them.

And, you know, first and foremost, the ICC, the International Criminal Court, right, which the U.S.

hasn't even joined,

but also like the WTO,

the World Health Organization, the UN, if we choose not to provide dues anymore, and the Chinese are going to do it.

They'll pay dues.

So they'll have vastly more influence over who's appointed in the Secretariat and key positions for global governance and regulation, which is really important lots of places.

Like I certainly don't want to cede influence over U.S.-created,

U.S.-led organizations in return for a policy that we can't even implement on for a period of 10 or 20 years.

Well, might it

to be cynical?

Might it also just be kind of a

corruption period?

Like Trump is going to, you know, through his associates and family members, enrich himself in the Gulf and

in other parts of the world.

I mean, sometimes are we applying too much strategic vision to Trump when it may just be some bottom-line corruption that's going to take place?

Well, certainly in his first term, there was corruption.

And I mean, look, there's been corruption in lots of U.S.

administrations on both sides of the aisle and also in my own mayor in New York City right now.

And, you know, I mean, Jesus, like there's plenty, right?

But if I look at what I see as particularly unusual about Trump that really sets him aside from other American leaders, it's not his level of corruption, right?

I mean, because it's not actually, we're not talking about huge numbers.

It's not, for the leader of the so-called free world,

it's not really strategic corruption, right?

I mean, it's not like, I mean, Elon operates at a different level and he's going to make a hell of a lot more

disalignment with Trump.

We're going to get to a different story.

Yeah, we're going to get to it.

But for Trump himself, I would know.

I mean, when I look at strategic corruption, I look at like the Indian military-industrial complex over the last generation.

Like, that's strategic corruption, right?

Jared Kushner collecting a few billion dollars in the Gulf is different than creating institutions that are entirely corrupted to serve.

Clearly.

And Trump, I mean, saying Ivanka can get some handbags in China license and, you know, that foreign leaders should pay full rack rate at a Trump hotel when they go do a conference.

Like, that's just not strategic corruption.

Trump spends so much more time on other stuff than he does on how to enrich himself, which is interesting, right?

As president.

And I think where Trump is really unique is in having zero interest in promoting U.S.

values or even believing that U.S.

values exist.

I think he's fundamentally far more transactional and far more oriented towards getting deals done one-on-one.

That's where he's really unique.

Yeah, so this leads to the last thing I wanted to ask you about, which is,

you know, you are someone who's out there.

kind of on the circuit.

You know, in addition to talking to political leaders, you engage a lot with like business leaders, you know, the kind of people turn up at, you know, at Davos or the Shangri-La dialogue in Singapore.

And

one of the things I'm struck by is over, say, the last 20 years, like my time in active politics, those people were kind of stakeholders in the system, right?

In the in the international order that kind of created the umbrella of security for them to make enormous profits.

And yet we've seen all these problems

from climate change to

massive and growing wealth inequality to technological disruption, the kinds of things that breed disorder, breed, frankly, kind of fiscal bubbles.

I think, you know, I have some concerns.

I'm not usually a fiscal person, but

I don't really like what I'm seeing in terms of the U.S.

right now.

What do you make of,

Elon is the extreme example, but what happened to the responsible business leader?

You know, I mean, I just, I, because, because it does feel like we have a global elite that is, I don't know if they are following the political elites or leading them, but that are assuming a degree of risk that feels irrational to me

with their, you know, backing Trump, you know, everybody bending the knee.

How would you describe the mindset of the kind of business leader who, you know, 15 years ago, they might like low taxes and less regulation, but they wanted a a stable international system to endure.

Those people now seem to be, look, we'll take Elon as the extreme example, far more willing to be disruptors.

Why is that?

Well, I think that most CEOs that I know would still prefer a stable U.S.-led globalized system where capital

and goods and services and people can move freely with little friction because they make a lot more money in that environment.

And they would like smaller government, and they would like regulatory capture by them.

That is still the baseline.

And there are things they like about Trump, and the things they generally like about Trump are not

his being a chaos actor.

The thing they like about Trump is the fact that he lowered taxes in 2017 and will extend that for businesses and for high-net worth individuals, and that he's also pulled back on regulation, which they intend to do with Doge, and they'll have some success on, more success than taking money out of the budget.

And they also want to just generally reduce regulation to allow the private sector to do more.

That's pretty consistent.

What is problematic is the fact that the U.S.

political system, unlike other advanced industrial economies, has increasingly become captured by moneyed special interests.

Yeah, so like a post-citizens united kind of world.

Yeah, I mean, it's a $3 billion

two-year election, which, I mean, that's way out of whack with every other advanced industrial economy.

When you, as Elon, spend $250 million on a presidency, you expect a significant return, and I think he will be richly rewarded.

But it's not just him, it's everywhere.

And it's not just big business, it's also any special interest that can coordinate and get money, whether it's the NRA

or whether it's APAC or whether it's your local police union.

I mean, these are your problems.

And so, I mean, I think that what, and what that has engendered is a large number of Americans that really believe that their leaders do not represent them.

And it's much more toxic.

It's much more potentially violent.

It is obviously driven algorithmically in ways that are very dangerous for the United States and for the American citizens.

And what's interesting about Trump, what I find unique about Trump, especially after this election, is that there's a real gap that is emerging between what I would call dark MAGA and deep MAGA.

You know, where dark MAGA, Elon Musk, and you've got all of these, you know, quote-unquote shadowy forces that have a lot of money.

And what they want is to capture the state.

And they want it to work for them.

They want it to be as small as possible and let them just go and just make a lot of money.

And they want their H-1Bs and they're globalists.

And they're willing to give

some meat, some red meat to the base on anti-DEI and the rest, but that's not what really excites them.

That's not why they're going to give their money.

They're going to give their money because they're going to make a shit ton doing that.

But then you've got Deep MAGA,

which actually wants more benefits from the state.

They hate the idea that these corporates on the Uniparty, they believe it's all a uniparty and that the Mark Zuckerbergs don't care who they give to.

Elon Musk used to be a Dem too, and they're very, very skeptical of all of that.

They want a government that works for them.

Now, there's alignment on these issues in terms of, let's say, you know, getting rid of illegal immigrants.

There's alignment.

And there's some alignment as well in America Firstism in terms of industrial policy.

But there's less alignment every day.

I mean, Lord knows there's less alignment.

when Luigi Mangioni kills the CEO of United Health.

Yeah.

Right?

There's less alignment.

And that's a dangerous place to be, right?

I mean,

we're used to this happening outside the U.S.

Yeah.

Like we're used to you blow up, you go into Iraq, you go into Afghanistan, you do nothing with the Palestinians, and you see a lot of Islamic extremist terrorism.

Like we're used to that.

But we're not used to playing that out within the American political system.

Like completely homegrown.

We're not talking about lone wolves here.

We're talking about people that are deeply uncomfortable that their system has been stolen by powerful

elites with access.

Yeah.

And

that is a place where the U.S.

political system is uniquely broken.

Yeah.

Well, look, that's a really good answer and good note to end on.

And I agree.

I mean, watching the Steve Bannon versus Elon Musk side of this to shorthand it is going to be very interesting.

Ian, thanks for joining us.

You know, can check out your report on global risk from the Eurasia Group.

Look forward to keeping in touch in the future.

Thanks, Ben.

Glad to be on.

Thanks again, Ian Bremer, for joining the show.

And thanks to you, our listeners, for tuning in and for all of you who donate money to our California Wildfire Disaster Relief Fund because it has been horrible here and a lot of people need help.

And a lot of people need help.

I mean, it's,

we're in for a bumpy ride, and we got a little

awful early

reality here.

So thanks for doing that.

Do anything you can do.

There are going to be people that

right now are evacuated, but they're still going to be in dire straits in a few weeks when Anderson Cooper's not here anymore.

So

keep the eye on LA.

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