Assad Spins His Surrender From Moscow

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Welcome to Pod Say of the World on Tommy Vitor.

I'm Ben Rhodes.

Ben, less than a month until we're no longer under the nuclear umbrella of Joe Biden's administration.

How are we feeling?

Well, it feels like it's already here, though.

Is Joe Biden still president?

You know, he's not out there, but he's still in charge.

He's still in charge, I guess.

Well, we'll find out on January 20th just how much it feels differently.

Yeah, it could feel.

It's interesting watching Trump do all these events without any any of the responsibility.

He still can comment on things like drones in New Jersey as if

he's just a guy online offering an opinion, not the President.

You know what's so annoying about him and his supporters is they do that even when he's in charge.

Everything he does is great and they're proud of him, but anytime something bad happens, they blame the deep state somehow.

He's not responsible.

Well, tries to see how it goes this time around.

Drives me absolutely nuts.

I know this is our last show of the year.

I'm sad about it.

It's quite a year.

What a year.

Who won the year?

Who won the year?

Not us.

Good guys or bad guys?

Not us.

I would say.

Who did not win the year?

Bad guys.

Also, Ben, I think you have an important correction you have to make at the top here.

This is the most painful thing I've ever done in Padse of the World, which is I need to apologize to Met's Nation, Mets family out there,

and my exuberance.

over the Juan Soto signing.

You called him a five-tool player.

He is a five-tool player.

I stand by that.

But then I rattled off our growing Dominican contingent and mistakenly included Puerto Rican superstar, Francisco Landor, hero of my two daughters.

So I just want to apologize for that.

I think the people will forgive you.

Yeah, I was just so excited about Soto and just got wrapped up in the moment.

We just need to get some stock tips from Steve Cohen because he usually pays a guy who's got some info that can help you make some money.

I just accept the stewardship of Steve Cohen entirely.

And if there's any hypocrisy in that, I'm willing to live with it because I need some nice things in life.

And a very expensive New York Mets roster is about as good as it gets right now.

You know what they say?

It's like, you know how everyone hates Congress, but they like their Congressmen?

We hate hedge fund guys, but you like their camera.

We hate hedge fund billionaires until they buy your sports team and start paying $750 million for five-tool players.

That's so cool.

We got a great show to close out the year for you guys.

We're going to talk about the latest from the new government in Syria, as well as what Bashar al-Assad is up to.

He's sending little notes on Telegram, I believe, checking in with everybody.

And we're going to talk talk about how the Biden team is handling all of this change in the Middle East.

We're also going to check in on Trump's national security picks, see how they're doing in the Senate, and talk to you guys about some new opportunities for corruption.

If you want to bribe someone, they will do the latest from Gaza and why Israel and Ireland are in a diplomatic spat.

More on the fallout from the attempted coup and martial law declaration in South Korea, the official collapse of Germany's government, why things are not looking great for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau up in Canada.

And then we'll check in on everyone's favorite member of the royal family, Prince Andrew.

The pillar of integrity there.

Integrity, upstanding.

Some lists there.

I mean, there's no shortage of events.

Yeah, I cut a couple things too.

We had a Georgia thing all prepped, the country, and I just like, I would.

We'll be back at it.

We'll get back to it.

And then, Men, you're going to hear my interview with Layla Molana-Allen.

She's a special correspondent for PBS News Hour.

The last time listeners heard her on the show, she was reporting from Beirut as it was being bombed by the Israeli military.

Today, she called in from Aleppo, Syria.

She'd been all around.

Syria over the last week or so.

We talked about what she's been seeing and hearing.

We talked about the new government, what an accountability and reconciliation process might look like in Syria.

She's actually been to some of these prisons and intelligence detention sites where people were tortured and seen dead bodies of

anyway.

And we also talked about what the average Syrian person wants to see and expects to see from the West in terms of support for Syria going forward.

So really, you know, powerful, amazing reporting from Ern, great conversation.

Yeah, one serious point I'd just make, because I've been consuming a lot of the reporting from people like Layla the last couple of days.

And with Trump, you know, suing and seltzer, ABC,

you know, it's easy to.

shit on the media, but man, these are the people that are showing us what's happening in the world at great risk to themselves.

So remind yourself that the quote-unquote media isn't just podcasters and pollsters.

It is people like Layla that are out on the ground telling stories that we would have no idea about if it weren't for journalists.

At great personal risk.

You could run into the wrong person in Syria at any time.

Things could happen in Beirut.

But she's a total badass.

And I'm really, really grateful for the time.

Cause she was talking to us like 11.30 via a 3G WhatsApp connection.

And you're like, you know, I'm just a pamper little shit in LA.

And these people are doing the hard work, and we're grateful for them.

It's like my Amazon arrows not working well enough on my speed test on my internet.

Where's my postmates?

All right, Ben, let's talk about the latest in Syria.

So, the rebel leaders there continue to do and say all the things that, you know, people in Washington and think tanks and also, as you mentioned last week, like minorities in Syria want them to say.

Jolani, the leader of HTS, who has dropped his nom degere, as one does, and is now going by Ahmed Al-Shara, but we'll call him Jalani for ease.

He said they are going to dissolve and disarm rebel factions in Syria and create a real army.

The interim prime minister said they're taking applications for a police force.

Jalani is taking lots of meetings with foreign delegations.

According to the FT, officials from France, Germany, and the UK all have visited or will visit Damascus this week.

The former HTS leaders have ditched their military uniforms in favor of civilian clothes when they're doing meetings with foreign journalists.

Jalani did a big sit-down with, I think, eight or nine reporters, and during that conversation, he said, quote, Syria is tired of wars and we want to build a state and institutions away from conflicts.

He also tried to reassure minority groups.

He criticized Israel for taking more territory in the Golan Heights, but the New York Times, which had a reporter in the meeting, made the point that they characterized his comments as, quote, not a tirade against Israel, but by calling the moves a violation of the 1974 armistice agreement between the two countries.

So he didn't go on some like diatribe against the Zionist oppressors.

He was just like, hey, we got an agreement with these guys.

They're violating it.

And his family is from the Golan Heights that Israel annexed.

Yeah.

So, you know, he's showing some restraint there.

I think Abu Golani means from the Golan.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So in this conversation, he was also critical of Iran, less critical of Russia.

Interesting.

Tea leaves there.

That said, you know, there's recent satellite imagery that shows the Russian military packing up their equipment and withdrawing staff and equipment from its base in Syria.

So who knows what that Russian presence will look like going forward, but interesting to see them leaving, but also the HTS guys being a little less hard on Russia.

Jolani called on the U.S.

and other countries to remove sanctions on Syria and to delist HTS as a terrorist group.

Assad also made his first public statement since getting toppled and pushed out of Syria.

In it, he claims that actually he only left Syria after Moscow requested that the base he was at be evacuated.

back to Russia.

But then he goes on and talks about how brave he has been for all these years.

It's quite pathetic.

Ben, last week we saw, right?

We were recording, you and I were talking offline, I think, about how Biden's Secretary of State and National Security Advisor were going to the Middle East.

I figured one of them was going to dip into Syria for some meetings.

It doesn't seem to have happened.

The State Department says they've been in contact with HTS, but there's not been an in-person meeting.

They also haven't relaxed any sanctions.

I guess just my question again to you is, why not?

Why not have Biden lob in a call to Jolani?

Like, there's this historic opportunity now to shape what's happening in Syria, to stick it to the Russians, to stick it to the Iranians.

Lob in a call.

Like, Trump would do it.

Trump would do it in a heartbeat.

What is the downside?

There's no downside, and there's an absurdity to the current situation.

There is currently still a U.S.

$10 million rewards for justice

bounty on Jolani.

So, what?

If the U.N.

official or the British official makes a citizen's arrest, we're going to give that person $10 million.

Yeah, well, those reporters in the roundtable just

yeah.

I mean, it's, it just, if you want to win on the stupidity of American foreign policy, it's that, that that still exists and someone didn't just get rid of that.

And the reality is

these people are, you know, we talked about this last week, so I don't harp on it, but essentially all we're doing is obstructing a transition that can take place, obstructing assistance getting in.

We are designating people as terrorists who whatever their roots, if you listen to anybody in Syria and you look at the scale of the disappearances, just saved tens of thousands of lives by emptying those prisons.

Like these people,

whatever we think about them, and it doesn't mean that they're not going to do things we don't like.

It doesn't mean that they don't have associations that are troubling that we may need to kind of monitor with time.

But let's wipe the slate clean.

Let's, you know, you have to account for changes in circumstance.

And if ever there is a change in circumstance, this is it, to delist HDS, to lift sanctions, and to try to make this transition work.

The other thing that is painful to watch is that Syria, the biggest conflict risks it faces are from external actors.

So you've got Israel still bombing things in Syria, claiming territory.

You've got the Turks threatening the Kurds in the north, the US trying to broke an agreement there.

Keep us out.

We're bombing Syria.

We're bombing Syria with ISIS.

I mean, at a certain point, it's just you got to what you'd like to see is these external forces withdrawing from Syria, making agreements to not target each other's proxies and to kind of let a transition actually take place.

And

all the US U.S.

talking points are: we want to, you know, a transition that is Syria-owned, Syrian-led.

Well, they can't own it and lead it if they're sanctioned and designated and multiple countries are fighting in their territory.

So, again, there's reason to be careful.

There's reason to reserve some enthusiasm.

There's reason to say if we see a return to any kind of extremism, there's designations that can come back.

But I'd be wiping the slate clean.

These guys, just compare how these guys are acting to how the Taliban acted when they got into Kabul.

It's night and day.

And so we have to allow for that.

Yeah, and let's just, Ben.

So obviously, this is going to be Trump's problem pretty soon.

He weighed in on the situation in Syria during a press conference on money.

Let's listen to a clip.

Now that one of the sides has been essentially wiped out, but nobody knows who the other side is.

But I do.

You know who it is?

Turkey.

Okay, Turkey's the one behind it.

He's a very smart guy.

They've wanted it for thousands of years, and he got it.

And those people that went in

are controlled by Turkey, and that's okay.

It's another way to fight.

But no, I don't think that I want to have our soldiers killed, but I don't think that will happen now anyway, because the one side's been decimated.

Turkey.

He talks to like a kid who learned about something for the first time and is excited to show off to the teacher about it.

I assume he's getting intelligence briefings.

Yeah.

And it is an entirely overly simplistic thing to just say, Turkey, you know, I mean, yes, Turkey has a lot of influence with HTS.

They support them in Idlib.

They have ambitions to, you know, have influence in Syria.

But if you think that's all that happened when you're watching the scenes out of Syria,

these guys, you know, are Syrian and they clearly want to govern Syria.

And

this is what's coming, like a very simplistic view of

the world as this kind of chessboard between some big powers and not a lot of nuance in the understanding of different factions inside of Syria.

Yeah, he was excited that he knew the answer.

He was excited that he knew that Turkey shared a border with Syria.

But also, it was weird the way he framed it.

He's like, yeah, I don't want U.S.

soldiers dying in Syria, but now I don't think they will because Turkey is controlling this faction, and I don't think they'll attack us.

I don't know.

It just made me once again feel like I don't really know what he's going to do with U.S.

troops in Syria or how he's thinking thinking about this.

Obviously, he has this kind of like nationalist America first, bring them all home, not our problem mentality towards almost everything, including Syria, because he tweeted as much the other day.

But I don't know, there was a little ambiguity there, I thought.

Well, I think he's always shaped by something that happened before that involves him, right?

And he wanted to take these troops out of Syria the first time, and there's a lot of uproar in the Republican Party, and he didn't.

The challenge is right now, those U.S.

troops are, you know, kind of the last thing standing between

Turkey

and

what could be a massacre of Kurdish forces that have helped us fight ISIS.

And so what he needs to be doing is negotiating with Turkey to have a place for the Kurds inside of Syria.

And there's been these negotiations between HTS and the Kurds about how could the Kurds have some autonomy within a new Syria and how could they feel comfortable being a part of a new governance structure.

And that should involve diplomacy with Turkey.

Yeah, we don't want the U.S.

and Turkey to get in a shooting war over

northern Syria.

That should require diplomacy.

It's just, do we think Trump is going to do that?

And I don't know.

I don't know.

So I wonder if some advisors would be like, sir, you have an unbelievable opportunity to permanently.

take a whack at the Iranians and the Russians and keep them down and solidify our power in the Middle East or beat your chest sir sir sir.

We'll see if he'll take it.

Ben, you know, we want to use, sir, by the way.

Thank you.

We talked in the last couple episodes about Assad and our hope that he's living somewhere really horrible in Moscow.

That's probably not the case.

The Financial Times reported that Assad's central bank airlifted $250 million in cash to Moscow in 2018 and 2019.

They said that Assad's extended family bought at least 20 luxury apartments in Moscow during that time using a complex set of companies and loan arrangements.

And as recently as May 2022, Assad's maternal cousin and sort of a member of the Syrian intelligence established a property company in Moscow, established by some other relatives.

So that's probably just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to all of the money that Assad has eluded from the country and repositioned in Russia.

Now, the question, I guess, is whether Putin says, oh, that's actually mine

or lets him live off it.

Yeah, I just don't know if you're betting on the over-under and for how long Assad is around, um I'd I'd be taking the under because he's not going to be able to go anywhere else other than Russia, pretty much.

And what use is he to the Russians?

I mean, that's the the thing.

I mean, they sure they took him in like, you know, the US took in the Shah or something, but um I I I can't imagine what use he is'cause he's he has no popular support in Syria.

So it's not like he could rebuild a base to return to Syria and restore Russian influence.

Um he's the most loathed human being in Syria.

So, you know, he's just going to be cooling his heels, I guess, in Moscow or wherever the hell is that.

Yeah,

some parody account of RT announced that he was starting a podcast.

That was very funny.

That's it for the Ben and I on Syria.

But later in the interview, you're going to hear me and Layla talk a lot more about this.

We also talk about the search for Austin Tice, the U.S.

journalist who's been missing in Syria since 2012, and his parents, Austin Tice's parents, request to the Israelis, to Nanyahu, to stop bombing parts of Damascus where they think that Austin Tice might be held.

They're worried that the Israeli could be killing.

Yeah, no, they're bombing military facilities, and that is, if he's alive, that's a place that he could very well be held.

Oh, my God.

All right, let's check in on Trump's national security nominees, Ben.

So the Hill had a good piece about Tulsi Gabbard's struggles to woo senators on Capitol Hill as she tries to secure votes to become the director of national intelligence.

One source described her as, quote, a little shallow.

And an anonymous Republican senator described her meetings as BS sessions.

These are people who ostensibly may support her.

Tulsi, she had a challenging path for this job, given her fondness for Assad and her total lack of qualifications for the job, but we'll see if Trump could kind of bully her the votes.

On Monday, he not at all, subtly suggested that he would support primary challengers for senators who oppose his people.

I assume she's among the list of folks he would fight for that way.

Pete Hegseth, the nominee to be Secretary of Defense, he seemed to be in very big trouble until the MAGA base started intimidating Republican senators.

The New York Times had a great story about the pressure campaign against Iowa Republican Joni Ernst.

She's a combat veteran.

She's a survivor of sexual assault who dared to suggest that Pete Hegseth's lack of experience and the allegations of sexual assault and basically near-continent drunkenness might be a problem for him as Secretary of Defense.

But, you know, it seems like Pete's very much on track to get confirmed now.

The crew over at Morning Joe did a segment where they looked at some of what Pete Hegseth wrote in his book about the military.

Let's listen, Ben.

Hegseth writes, America will decline and die.

A national divorce will ensue.

Outnumbered freedom lovers will fight back.

The military and police, both bastions of freedom-loving patriots, will be forced to make a choice.

It will not be good.

Yes, there will be some form of civil war.

In another section, Hag Seth writes that our present moment is much like the 11th century.

We do not want to fight, but like our fellow Christians 1,000 years ago, we must.

Arm yourself

metaphorically, intellectually, physically.

Our fight is not with guns yet.

Little Civil War Crusade, huh?

Yeah.

Decided?

This is clearly the most problematic of the nominees.

I mean, if I were to focus on one out of all of them, it would definitely be Hexeth.

It is, you know, the most important of the agencies.

And let's be clear: Trump is going to do a lot of things that are going to trigger a lot of us.

Two of the kind of existential things are the transformation politicization of the U.S.

military and the transformation politicization of the Justice Department.

Those are different order threats than even a weirdo like Telsey Gabbard being DNI.

And so having a guy that has had

these credible claims of sexual assault, credible allegations of being drunk all the time, is writing openly about civil war, defended war criminals, these are just the things we all know about.

This is not the person you want leading a nearly trillion-dollar enterprise that is in the chain of command, that has to respond on a dime to international crises at a time of great power conflict, that is in the nuclear chain of command.

It's just totally irresponsible

to even be entertaining this.

And the fact that somebody like Joni Ernst, who clearly didn't want to support Hexeth, and

if she withdrew support, it might have been existential to his nomination.

Well, that Steve Bannon and some people can

go.

Charlie Kirk, give these little right-wing

podcaster diversity.

Can scream on podcasts and all of a sudden she's in line should be terrifying to pick.

And they target her, right?

While a bunch of male senators hide behind her.

She's a combat veteran.

she's a sexual assault survivor, and these fucking cowards hide behind her, being kind of the public face of concern about things you should be concerned about.

Like this guy has credible sexual assault allegations.

He's drunk all the time.

He has no relevant experience.

He's never managed an organization of more than like 10 people.

And he's going to run the Department of Defense and oversee, what, 3 million, nearly 3 million employees?

Yeah.

And this is what Bannon does understand is that the reason they want to get him in is to prove that they call all the shots, that the Senate Republicans, John Thune, the Senate Majority Leader, are meaningless, that

they're just rubber stamps to Trump.

So this is a proxy for how the Senate Republican caucus will operate in national security and politics generally.

And Bannon says that.

He says it because he knows it.

He's not going to be on the show.

I listen all the time.

And one of the things, you know,

there's that Utah guy that was in the right place on Gates.

I don't even know his name, the new Utah senator, Republican senator.

So this is the guy who was elected to replace Romney.

I mentioned this guy for the simple reason that this guy doesn't come up for election until two years after Donald Trump's term ends.

You know, like Trump is not forever.

And if these Republicans, you know, are willing to basically risk the entire United States military and the Pentagon and a trillion-dollar budget because they're afraid of being criticized on Charlie Kirk's podcast,

why are you in public office?

That's the point.

We've said this before, but you have real power here as Senate Republicans.

And ultimately, it's on them.

It's on the Republicans to see how much they're going to allow Trump to crash the car, drive the car drunk, quite literally, in an excess case, versus whether they have any institutional prerogatives.

So watch that of all the nominations.

I'd like to think that Cash Patel would be raising these concerns, but it doesn't seem to be.

Cash seems to be coasting here.

Yeah, let's get to Cash.

John Curtis is the new incoming Republican from Utah.

I did Google, so I apologize.

Household name.

Adios Mitrami.

Yeah, so we've been watching Cash.

Like you said, he's been named to lead the FBI.

As you said, it doesn't seem like he's facing any real headwinds.

The New York Times dug into some of the lies he told about Benghazi.

They are as follows.

Patel has repeatedly said, both verbally on podcasts and in print in a book he wrote, that he was, quote, leading the prosecution's efforts at Maine Justice in Washington, so leading the prosecution of the Benghazi suspects.

However, that's not true.

He was a prosecutor in the counterterrorism section at DOJ.

He did work on the Benghazi investigation, but only in support of the prosecutors who were leading that prosecution at the D.C.

U.S.

Attorney's Office.

The Times also notes that Pattell left DOJ six months before the first Benghazi case went to trial.

So tough to lead that effort if you're not there.

He also reportedly lied about being asked to join the trial team.

Cash has complained that Obama's DOJ only prosecuted one guy and, you know, it took a pass on the others for political reasons.

The Times says that, in fact, the prosecutors had filed sealed complaints against over a dozen militants that were just kept secret.

And then weirdly, Cash has said on podcasts that the military had, quote, rolled up 19 attackers when even today the U.S.

government has only been able to capture two of them.

And I think they prosecuted one at least, maybe both, just because it's very tough to operate in eastern Libya.

So we could keep going about all the kind of fabrications here.

But like,

this at a minimum raises questions about his credibility.

Yeah.

And when you hear things like that,

I don't know what's more alarming, Tommy.

Is it more alarming that he just makes stuff up or that he might actually believe these things that he says that aren't true?

Because he seems like one of those guys that may actually talk himself into grandeur.

Either way, you're putting this person who's not at all qualified in charge of the entire law enforcement apparatus in the United States of America.

And it doesn't seem to be raising any red flags.

And, you know, just because Pete Hegg said there's alcohol and women involved, it seems like that's, you know, more

easier to report on, but, but the kind of complete lack of qualification to see seemingly some of the more normy Republicans, like Tom Tillis from North Carolina, who's up in a couple years being like, oh, you know, he's going to reform the FBI.

Like, what does that even mean?

Reform it to do what?

How?

Yeah.

You know, there's nothing here about making the FBI more effective in prosecuting, you know, doing counterterrorism or counterintelligence or counter-narcotics.

It's wholly about making the FBI an extension of Donald Trump's political interests.

There's no other reason to select Cash Patel.

But that one, like I said, I think Hegzeth, there's a chance he's not confirmed.

Cash Patel, it seems like that ship is getting ready to sail.

It's sailing, that's for sure.

Also, listeners know, we try to keep an eye on

current and future foreign corruption opportunities by the Trump regime.

It is a full-time job.

Along those lines, last week, Eric Trump announced a new Trump tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

During his first term, Trump said he would avoid foreign deals such as this to avoid conflicts of interest.

This time, apparently, that no longer matters.

There's also plans for two Trump developments in Riyadh.

They're eyeing a project in Abu Dhabi.

This is all in partnership with this real estate company called Dar Global, which Reuters reports is the international arm of Saudi Arabia's Dar El-Arkhan real estate development company.

Again, our Gulf listeners are probably wondering, who do I bribe?

Is it Jared Kushner?

Is it Steve Witkoff?

Is it Tiffany Tiffany Trump's father-in-law?

Is it Don Jr.?

Is it Eric?

Do I just buy the Trump crypto or do I buy the DJT stock?

And the truth is,

I don't know anymore, Ben.

It also sounds like the Trump org is trying to get back the Trump Hotel in D.C.

and lease that back so they can do the rents 50 hotel rooms grift again.

I just, I don't have great advice for all our listeners in the UAE now.

It's just going to cost a lot.

Did you see Eric Trump in the UAE

a few days ago for some crypto conference?

And he's literally there hawking Trump family cryptocurrencies.

Talk to a coin.

Of course, they're going to invest in that.

You know, do you think that the missing piece in the Jeddah skyline is a is a Trump tower?

You know,

yes.

I mean, but the point is, this is just kind of, this is just rank corruption of a sort that we've never seen.

I mean, we've never seen.

And again, like, we spent four years doing a proctology exam on Hunter Biden's pretty hackish influence peddling.

You know,

did he try to get something for the big guy or whatever?

This is just the President of the United States sons going around the world doing deals that are entirely rooted in the fact that he's the president's son that are going to tally up to billions and billions of dollars.

And it's just like the sunrising and setting, you know.

And I believe the FBI informant who lied about Biden taking bribes actually pleaded guilty to lying.

yesterday.

Yes.

So there's that.

Also, Ben, you flagged this one for me.

Trump announced his next ambassador, Uruguay, Lou Rinaldi, and noted in the announcement, the tweet, that Lou was a great golfer and will be in a country with some terrific horses.

I liked that.

Did you see, though, that Nigel Farage was at Mar-a-Lago on Monday and he met with Elon Musk?

And that is significant because Elon has decided that he hates Kier Starmer, the prime minister of the UK, the Labour Party leader.

And there's concern that Elon could just decide to do what he did in the U.S.

and just dump like a couple hundred million dollars into the reform UK party coffers over in the UK.

UK.

And all of a sudden you have this,

the rise of this super right-wing party.

Yeah, well, you've already seen Trump and Elon, you know, trying to kneecap different people so they humiliated Trudeau.

You know, seems like that worked.

We'll get to that.

But this is really interesting because he's made these noises about giving $100, $200 million to the Reform Party, the crazy right-wing party of Nigel Farage.

First of all, that's kind of complicated.

They have different laws.

Well, technically, British political parties are not supposed to receive foreign donations.

I think what people have seen over the years, uh, including perhaps from some Russian oligarchs who gave money to the Tories, that they kind of create these shell companies.

And if Elon really wants to get a hundred million dollars in the hands of Nigel Farage, he could probably figure out a way to do it.

Um, Boris Johnson uh is in this mix too.

Um, and the question is: you know, Boris wants to be Trump and Elon's friend, too.

Does this money go to the Tories?

And Boris, does it go to Nigel Farage and the reform?

Either way, the notion of an American oligarch oligarch just kind of trying to select the leadership of various democracies of a far-right flavor, again, this is something we'll have to watch.

But

the early indications are this crowd is going to throw their weight around maximally.

And the longer Elon stays tethered to Trump, the more Trump has an unlimited,

just like the Gulf sovereign wealth funds are unlimited sources of wealth for him, Elon's an unlimited source of funding for politics in other countries.

Yeah.

Final Trump Trump thing.

He's going to do, by the way, to foreign politicians what he's doing to Republicans, you know, threatening primaries.

Same thing.

Like, oh, the Tories, I'm going to promote Nigel Frost.

He's basically trying to do on a global scale what he's done to the Republican Party.

Wonderful.

Last thing, Trump-related, I don't know if we talked about this, but Trump invited Xi Jinping to his inauguration, which I read and I was like, it's not going to happen.

I guess, kind of, who cares?

It's weird to only invite like the Chinese dictator to your daughter and no other heads of state.

Well, he was asked if you'd invite Zelensky and he's like, no.

But he can come if he wants.

You just want to have a ticket.

He'll be in the purple tunnel of the doom like we were in 2008.

But I was talking to a China expert today who suggested that actually

in Beijing, this might have sounded really insulting.

Because Xi Jinping's like, I'm Xi Jinping.

Yeah.

I'm like your peer.

And the idea that I'm going to sit in the crowd like a plebe next to Peter Navarro and Marco Rubio while you get inaugurated and I'm going to clap for you, get out of here with that shit.

And here's the other thing, and maybe this can be comfort to some of our listeners.

This is not forever.

You know, like Trump has got, this is his last inauguration.

He's got four years in office.

He'll probably really have two years until hopefully knock on what he loses a House of Congress.

Xi Jinping, guess what?

He's going to be there in four years, you know, barring a healthy business.

Yeah,

he might be there in 10 years.

Like, they're not that impressed.

I mean, that's the thing, is that everybody in this country seems to be caving, right?

Whether ABC News or whatever.

But these leaders like Xi Jinping are like, why would I fucking fly to

Washington in the middle of January to watch Donald Trump give a speech?

And in 2016, everyone was shocked that Trump won the election.

And every country, everywhere, was scrambling to figure out who he was, what he believed, and how to get to them.

And then a lot of them found a useful idiot in Jared Kushner.

I guess Kushner was actually pretty close or wanted to be close to Henry Kissinger.

And so the Chinese would go through him or they'd go through like Steve Wynne or other businessmen to pass along messages.

And then they would just kind of like forum shop to manipulate Trump.

Now he's a totally known quantity.

All the like tariff threats are out there.

The Chinese are ready.

Like they just put a huge trade embargo on the export of these four critical minerals, like gallium, germanium, things that our listeners have never, ever heard of, but are absolutely critical to high-tech industries, including I saw a report that the Chinese export ban on critical minerals to the U.S.

could disrupt more than a thousand U.S.

weapons production systems.

Like these guys are ready to play hardball.

You weren't talking about ready.

They literally are listening to all of Donald Trump's phone calls.

I mean, this is a thing that is happening that is not getting that much attention, but the Chinese hack of the U.S.

telecommunications means they have the capacity to listen to all phones in the United States.

We know from reporting that Trump and Vance were two of the people targeted.

We know that Donald Trump is always on his fucking cell phone.

He doesn't need to travel all the way to the United States when he can just listen to the guy's phone calls and get transcript of his phone calls.

Trump acts like he's the only one with leverage with these tariffs.

The Chinese have had eight years to plan for this trade war.

They can fuck with supply chains.

They can fuck.

We don't have access to that.

They just did an antitrust investigation into NVIDIA.

They're going after ours.

They're going after NVIDIA.

We don't have access to these critical minerals.

It's not like we can go find other sources.

The Chinese have kind of monopoly-level control over a lot of things that are fundamental to supply chains.

Elon can't make a lot of Teslas without China, right?

Apple can't make iPhones.

So this is not child's play.

I think what will be interesting over the next year is if Trump does push the envelope on things like tariffs, how much are we going to feel it in return?

And I think a fair amount.

Yeah, I think they're ready to counter punch.

Before we move on to a couple of foreign issues, Ben, you have a piece out in Foreign Affairs this week about where Democrats should go in foreign policy.

What can we learn?

Well,

you know, definitely check it out.

I wanted to write about kind of what lessons we should take away from this election, where we should go.

You know, I talk about essentially, as we've discussed on this podcast,

the rules-based international order that the Biden people were, you know,

upholding and talking about all the time doesn't exist anymore.

There's no going back.

Like the first time around, it was like, make Trump a one-term president and kind of restore leadership of this rules-based order.

The rules-based order is gone.

America is not coming back as it used to be.

The rest of the world is moving on, and Democrats have to adjust to that reality.

I talk a bunch about what that means in terms of broad policy and kind of coming back with plans to deal with big issues like climate and technology and great power conflict and putting more diplomacy forward.

A couple of things that you might like, Tommy, on these contentious issues like Gaza or like Cuba.

And this is the 10th anniversary of the effort to normalize relations with Cuba.

Maybe the Democratic Party should do something radical, Tommy, and actually adopt policies that reflect the views of its own constituencies

instead of tailoring their views

to a small number of pundits and interest groups in Washington.

That's one thing.

And then the other thing I talk about is maybe people who work in foreign policy should talk like human beings and should not use a bunch of jargon, should not be, quote, you know, deeply concerned about things we do nothing about.

That the way we talk about foreign policy, the people that run it, it seems designed to exclude people.

And that Trump may sound

stupid or like he's lying, but he sounds like a real person.

A little more candor, a little more blunt language about world events would be in order.

But check it out.

I tried to cover a lot of ground and

probably the first of many Critic

in the years to come.

Critic, I like that.

That's that jargon.

I will definitely get that.

Thanks.

Good hit, good hit, good hit.

It's a good détente.

All right, we're going to take a quick break, but you guys might have noticed that last week, Saudi Arabia was named the host of the 2034 World Cup.

Very exciting, Ben.

Season two of World Corrupt.

Roger Bennett and I, we explored how

an oil-rich nation like Saudi Arabia with a grim human rights record could buy its way to global influence.

And boy, did we nail them to the wall and prevent this from no, actually, exactly what we feared would happen.

So, if you want to hear, listen to that and the backstory there, check it out.

Also, and you can stay at the New Trump Tower when you go to watch the

great place to stay.

Also, if you want to dig into some more cool mysteries, Ben, check out Killing Justice.

Fascinating story about the murder of a judge in India.

And Narendra Modi's India.

Narendra Modi's India.

And what it tells us about the state of politics in India today and the state of the law in India.

It's a great podcast.

It's a great podcast.

Also, continuing on the international angle, Ben, you can listen to Dissident at the Doorstep, which is the amazing story of this Chinese civil rights activist who turned into a MAGA Trump supporter who was there at the Capitol on January 6th.

I think he may be Deputy Secretary of Commerce by the end of the week.

He's angling for a White House job.

Finally, if you want to understand how the NYPD came to be, listen to Empire City, the Untold Origin Story of the NYPD.

It's named one of the top podcasts of 2024 by the New York Times, The New Yorker, and lots of other places.

Lots of great outlets.

So check out these stories and more at crooked.com slash limiteds or wherever you get your podcasts.

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So, in Gaza, the Wall Street Journal reported last week that Hamas has made a major concession in ceasefire negotiations by saying they would allow the IDF to remain in Gaza on a temporary basis after the fighting stops.

According to the AP, what's on the table is a phased agreement.

Phase one would be a preliminary ceasefire lasting six to eight weeks that would allow for the exchange of approximately 30 hostages, three or four of whom are dual Israeli-U.S.

citizens, and up to 100 Palestinian prisoners.

Then, there would also be a massive influx of aid into Gaza.

The IDF would move out of some parts of the strip, but remain in strategic areas like the Philadelphia corridor, that border region between Gaza and Egypt, and the Netzerim corridor, which divides north and south Gaza.

Israel's defense minister said they are, quote, the closest we've been to a hostage deal since the last deal, that deal very early on, that allowed for a limited release of prisoners.

And Kharet quoted a Lebanese newspaper, Al-Akbar, as saying, quote, there is unprecedented willingness to get the deal done on both sides.

So, Ben, there's a few reasons why that might be right.

The Washington Post noted that Hamas is under pressure from Gazans to end the conflict after 14 months and just untold suffering.

And as the AP notes, Hamas is more isolated than ever since Israel's ceasefire with Hezbollah was reached, and Iran has been weakened after the fall of the Assad regime in Syria.

I should note, after reading all of that, I saw Axios had a report shitting all over this optimism and quoting a bunch of Israeli officials saying the gaps are still very wide, so who knows?

CIA Director Bill Burns is either in Doha or headed to Doha to negotiate as we speak.

Over the weekend, though, Israeli strikes hit several schools as well as a camp in central Gaza.

Among those killed was a cameraman for Al Jazeera.

There were videos on Twitter from these strikes that were absolutely horrific, the worst things you can ever imagine.

And those deaths put the Gaza Health Ministry's death count above 45,000.

which, as we've discussed, I suspect is another count.

Then on Potsdam America Monday, that came out Tuesday, we talked about things we'd like to see Biden do in these last months.

I said I'd love to see Biden just cut off aid to the war in Gaza, even if Trump turns it back on, because why not, you know, just try to end this horrific nightmare?

But a more limited thing he could do is say to Netanyahu, take this deal, or I will start unilaterally negotiating with Hamas to get out the Americans by the end of my term.

And I don't give a shit what you say about it.

I mean, the fact that we're not negotiating on behalf of just these Americans after 14 months is crazy to me.

Yeah, so it was a lot of things related to this Gaza policy.

I mean, I think the one reason that there's cause for actual optimism is that, you know, Bibi wants a ceasefire now.

You know, that he didn't, he was clearly as big, if not a bigger, impediment to a deal than Hamas at times over the last few months.

But now that Trump is coming in and Trump wants this loose end tied up, now Bibi has a real incentive to kind of deliver this for Trump.

And, you know, in a weird way, it's one more humiliation to Biden on the way out the door to kind of wait till the very end of his presidency to say, okay, now we'll do this deal.

And so I think the combination of Hamas, yes, being more isolated with what's happened to Hezbollah, and obviously Gazans wants this conflict to end, but also Israel wanting to do this for Trump because they're getting this message over and over publicly and I think privately from the Trump people, like, we want this thing wound up by John.

Now, that said, you know, even if this deal happens, and I hope it does, and hope as many hostages get out as possible, and hope as much aid gets into Gaza as possible, it's not like that's the end of anything.

I mean, what's the future of Gaza?

Who's going to run Gaza?

What's the Israeli presence going to be like?

Are they going to resume strikes in Gaza?

Are they going to settle northern Gaza?

Are they going to reoccupy the strip?

What happens to the West Bank?

I mean, this idea that this is a scorecard and you check it off when this ceasefire for hostage thing happens is not the kind of reality of what the conflict is.

On your list list of things that he could do, in addition to what you said, I mentioned this, I think, last week, but just to expand on it, the more I think about this,

Trump has no incentive to release any information about what the conditions are like in Gaza.

Israel has every incentive to suppress the reality of what's happening in Gaza.

Things like U.S.

assessments of casualties, things like U.S.

assessments of

the scale of destruction in Gaza.

Whatever the United States government has knows,

I would like to see transparency.

Because otherwise, I don't know what we may never get the truth of what has actually happened in Gaza.

Because between Netanyahu and Trump,

there's not a lot of incentive for transparency.

And if you think I'm being hyperbolic, why has there not been any access to international journalists to Gaza since October 7th?

I think it's a great idea.

I would love to see them do that.

My concern is for similar reasons that the U.S.

wouldn't push for it because we're complicit in this.

Yeah.

Well, yeah.

I mean, you're pointing the finger yourself because there's this question of has the U.S.

violated laws in providing arms to Israel despite credible concerns of both war crimes and restrictions on aid getting into humanitarian populations.

And yeah, I mean, that that reality is staring you right in the face.

And it's hard to see that that wasn't the case.

Yeah, and diplomatically, I mean, Israel is getting increasingly isolated.

The Israeli government is about to close its embassy in Ireland.

Israel's foreign minister, Gideon Saar, said that was because of, quote, the extreme anti-Israel policies of the Irish government, and quote.

His statement cited Ireland's decision to support the case at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza.

Here is the Taoiseach Simon Harris reacting to the closure.

Ireland is not anti-Israeli, but Ireland is absolutely anti-the starvation of children, is absolutely anti-the killing of civilians, and is absolutely pro-peace, pro-international law, and pro-human rights.

And we have been consistent in relation to our foreign policy position that there needs to be an immediate ceasefire, that the hostages need to be freed, and that there needs to be the flow of humanitarian aid into the Middle East.

What we're seeing unfolding in Gaza and in the West Bank is absolutely appalling, extraordinarily concerning.

I mean, no one should be surprised by this.

There's a lot of historic solidarity in Ireland for the Palestinian people because the Irish were occupied for so long by the British government.

That response, though,

from the Irish, you know, intensified the sort of diplomatic row, and the Israeli foreign minister issued a statement calling him anti-Semitic for those comments.

Why?

People need to call this out as complete and utter bullshit.

Cynical.

I mean,

first of all, the Irish solidarity with Palestinians is long established.

And by the way, it's not reserved to any one political party in Ireland.

What the Taoiseach is saying is a pretty widely held view in Ireland because they were colonized for hundreds of years and have a natural sympathy and solidarity with people who they see as being occupied, as is the case in Gaza and the West Bank.

And if you hear his language,

it's about actions.

It's not about religion or identity.

And this kind of performative outrage over and over and over again.

Really think that guy sounds like a raving anti-Semite?

No, he's talking about their genuine concern about what's happened to children in Gaza.

And if your reaction to that is to close your embassy, I mean, and part of what is so maddening about this is what you hear

we used to hear a lot out of Israel is a desire to be a normal country, to be kind of normalized.

That's not the behavior of a normal country that I'm just going to shutter my embassy because I don't like what the prime minister of this country said or did.

And point me to the thing that is actually anti-Semitic.

They don't like that they recognize the Palestinian state.

They don't like that they criticize them over Gaza.

But again,

as the Taoiseach said, this is a kind of a diplomacy of distraction and obfuscation and name-calling, and it does nothing to kind of advance anything other than it plays to a certain politics

in Israel and maybe in the United States.

I mean, I thought we used to like the Irish.

There's a lot of Irish people in this country.

Yeah, I think we love them.

Yeah,

I like that Irish.

I hear that accent and I get happy.

Like, it makes me think of my Irish friends.

Yeah, there's a lot of politicians here, elected officials even, who used to support the IRA.

Yeah, where they like to wear green ties on St.

Patrick's Day, but they probably won't say anything about this.

Or the Palestinian people.

Yeah.

Very cool.

Okay, Ben, let's turn back to South Korea because the last few weeks we've been covering the political crisis there after President Yoon-suk-yu declared martial law and seemingly tried to stage a coup, albeit a self-coup, because he was in charge at the time.

This past Saturday, President Yoon was officially impeached by the National Assembly.

An earlier vote had been boycotted by Yoon's party, the PPP, but this time the PPP allowed their members to vote, and 12 PPP lawmakers voted to impeach President Yoon via secret ballot, which got you over the two-thirds threshold that you needed to actually impeach.

Now, Korea's Constitutional Court has 180 days to decide whether Yoon is guilty and to formally remove him.

I was talking to someone today who said that could take like a month or it could take, you know, several months.

We're not really sure yet, however long it takes a court to ascertain guilt or innocence.

The vote will require six of the court's nine members to support impeachment.

But as we discussed last week, there are currently three vacancies on the court.

So there's only six judges total and three of them were put in place or have ties to President Yoon.

So it's not clear how that vote will go.

If Yoon is removed, there will be a snap election in 60 days, and it's likely that the Liberal Party will take power.

If not, Yoon is restored as president, and God knows what happens next.

Actually, we know what happens next.

You guys re-elected.

It's Donald Trump, baby.

Yoon has declared that he's going to fight to the end, but some of his allies have already gone down.

The former defense minister and two former police chiefs have been arrested for their roles in the insurrection.

The defense minister attempted suicide in custody.

So it's very ugly stuff.

PPP's leader, Han Dong-hoon, resigned amidst a backlash for supporting the impeachment.

Good for him for doing the right thing.

The prime minister and acting president is a man named Hand Duk Soo, who was Korea's ambassador to the U.S.

from 2009 to 2012.

So we probably ran across that.

Yeah, I know.

I met that guy.

Pretty well-known quantity in Washington.

Yeah.

Technocrat, like kind of has things handled.

But I was, again, I was talking to a Korea expert today, Ben, who said he kind of heard two theories about what could happen next.

The first is the coup attempt was so egregious that this court, even if it's just six of them, even if they have have ties to Yoon, they got to toss them out.

The second theory, though, is Yoon's a former prosecutor.

He knows how to play hardball.

He knows how the process works.

He's rejected a bunch of off-ramps that could have made this easier on himself.

And he keeps saying he wants to fight it out.

That might suggest he knows something, which is that he has the backing of at least one of these six judges, which means he'll be president again.

Either way, U.S.-Korea relations seem likely to get a lot more complicated for the Trump administration.

Yeah,

let's not send Merrick Garland over there to give them advice on how to deal with these circumstances.

No.

The other dynamic here, though, is if he does try to

pull some judicial maneuver, there's someone who will do his bidding.

What you've seen is that there'll be huge street protests and huge unrest.

I mean, any effort to kind of reinstall Yoon just feels like that place goes berserk.

I think his approval is at 11%.

Yeah, so

it just feels like you would hope that they just kind of finished the work here of getting past this Yun era and this huge excessive power grab.

To your last point, though, again, if you look around the world, Korea is clearly going to be divided and internally focused for a period of time here.

Japan has had some bumpy politics of late.

Germany, their government just collapsed.

Macron is a lame duck with like, you know, what, his fourth prime minister.

Trudeau will talk about

the G7 is not doing that well, you know, or you could actually get a lot of people.

We're looking at the tectonic shifts part of the podcast.

There's a lot of mechanisms.

There's a lot of shit happens with big changes coming.

Yeah.

And maybe Trump doesn't give a shit about those countries, but I got to tell you, there's a lot of consistency at the top and Russia and China and some of those types of countries.

And this is going to be a very uncertain year ahead of us because you've got all this turnover and all these democracies, all these people inwardly focused, and a lot of instability.

And I don't know, we'll see how that goes.

That G7 family photo is going to look a little different than it did a year ago.

Very different.

Yeah, well, let's turn to Germany, where you have basically the opposite situation in South Korea because you've German Chancellor Olaf Schultz calling for a vote of no confidence on himself in the Bundestag Monday, knowing that he would lose it.

394 members voted no, 207 voted yes, 116 abstained.

He needed 367 yes votes for the vote of confidence to be successful.

So he got destroyed.

But Schultz called for this vote on purpose because he was out of options.

He has been floundering since his coalition fell apart in November after he fired his finance minister, who is part of the FDP party.

That led that whole party to withdraw from the coalition and left Schultz in charge of a minority lame-duck government.

Germany's elections were not supposed to happen again until September, but per the BBC, Schultz feels that his party would fare better in an earlier snap election.

So So he called for the only way to call to trigger a snap election was to lose a vote of confidence.

So he called the vote, face planted, and now there's an election in late February.

This election will be huge for Germany, huge for Europe.

The big fear is that the far-right AFD party could make substantial gains.

They're currently polling at around 18%, but my scared little American brain is worried about far-right parties outperforming their polling here and abroad.

The major parties I'll rule out working working with AFD, but who knows?

Friedrich Mertz of the center-right CDU party is leading the polls at 32%.

He describes himself as socially conservative, but economically liberal.

He's a longtime rival of Ankla Merkel's, but lost to her in the leadership election so badly that he ended up leaving politics for decades.

But he's a big supporter of Army Ukraine against a Russian invasion.

So Ban, again, this didn't happen because of a failed coup attempt like in South Korea, but it's another, it's a huge variable for Ukraine.

It's a huge variable for Europe.

Germany's got all these economic challenges.

And we got a U.S.

leadership change happening right before this one.

Yeah.

And, you know, MERT seems like the most likely outcome.

But again,

what does the coalition look like?

How well does the AFD do?

I mean, part of Schultz's problem is having a Social Democratic Party and a coalition with a hawkish Green Party and a Libertarian Party was kind of a strange mix, you know, and hard to get things done.

And the reality, too, is that anytime you have a turnover in one of these big European countries, like say France and Germany, you know, it takes a while to set up your coalition to figure out the fucking EU.

You know, like how are you going to work with the French and how are you going to work with these other European powers and how are you going to work with the EU and how are you going to deal with Ukraine?

It's just disruptive to have all these transitions.

Macron's got an election coming down the pikes.

So there is just, you know, a big void of leadership in Europe right now.

Weirdly, Maloney in Italy,

because she's maybe in the kind of far-right

zeitgeist these days, is like the most stable government.

Tusk and Poland to some extent, but Maloney now is riding high.

She's meeting with Elon.

You know, she's got her buddy Trump coming in.

So like the Italians,

like unusually for them, are the stable political force in Europe.

But boy, there's a lot of vacuums out there.

Yeah, I mean, the Brits are not EEO anymore, but yeah, I mean, the Labour Party went in, they were riding high, and they just kind of tripped right out the gate.

Now they're already kind of like resetting things.

So you're right, there's not a lot of stability.

They're resetting things, and they're also, again,

likely to be the only center-left leader left in the G7 by the time all the dust settles, you know?

So it's a different world for them in the next few years than they maybe imagined if it was a Democrat in the U.S.

and a social democrat in Germany and Trudeau or a liberal in Canada.

Yeah, and it's also an interesting kind of lesson in leadership style.

I mean, like, Merkel was buttoned up.

and serious, but I don't know.

She just had some sort of charisma.

She had a lot of leadership abilities.

I mean, Schultz Schultz was, they called him the Scholzomat because he was so boring and mechanical.

There's this great quote I saw, Ben.

On the evening of his election as mayor of Hamburg in 2011, he was being interviewed by a TV interviewer, a reporter, who said to him, Today is essentially Christmas and a birthday and one for you, and yet you seem about as euphoric as an English butler at tea time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Not a lot of, not all the charisma there.

It's like, come on.

Yeah.

And there was an opportunity after like, what was it, 15 years of Angela Merkel.

The pendulum was going to swing to the the Social Democrats, but

they didn't exactly seize that pendulum.

No.

Pendulum is swinging back.

Kind of like

her.

I don't like her.

Speaking of which, also, things are looking a little dicey for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau up in Canada.

On Monday, Christoph Freeland, his finance minister and deputy prime minister, left his cabinet, writing a rather pointed resignation letter.

She said that while they should be preparing for Trump's threat of 25% tariffs, Trudeau was instead preoccupied with, quote, costly political gimmicks like a sales tax holiday.

Long considered one of Trudeau's loyal ministers, her timing was very tough.

She left the day she was supposed to deliver the government's fall economic statement, meaning he was left scrambling.

Trump helpfully weighed in on Truth Social, weighed in on her resignation, writing,

The great state of Canada is stunned as the finance minister resigns or is fired from her position by Governor Justin Trudeau.

Her behavior was totally toxic and not at all conducive to making deals which are good for the very unhappy citizens of Canada.

She will not be missed.

One, two, three exclamation points.

She's really riding with this governor Trudeau thing.

The knife was twisted further by Jugmeet Singh, the leader of the lefty New Democratic Party, the kind of Bernie Sanders party up there, who up until September had an agreement with Trudeau's liberals that helped keep them in power.

Singh called for Trudeau to resign yesterday.

Here's what he had to say.

Right now, Canadians are struggling with the cost of living.

I hear it everywhere I go.

People cannot find a home that they can afford.

They can't buy their groceries.

And on top of that, we have Trump threatening tariffs of 25%,

which put hundreds and thousands of Canadian jobs at risk.

And instead of focusing on these issues, Justin Trudeau and the Liberals are focused on themselves.

They're fighting themselves instead of fighting for Canadians.

And for that reason, today I'm calling on Justin Trudeau to resign.

He has to go.

Will you declare no confidence in the Liberal government as soon as possible?

All tools, all options are on the table.

People are hurting.

People are struggling.

And so all options are on the table.

All options are on the table.

It makes me sound like you're going to nuke them.

Yeah.

So, Ben, elections are scheduled for next September.

Some people are saying Trudeau should resign early, maybe put the party in a better place in advance of the election.

I don't know.

Do you have thoughts here?

I mean, maybe just see if you can improve things in seven months, nine months?

I think it's hard.

I mean, the reality is we've talked about how in 2024, you know, Tommy, I saw a wild graphic.

You know, this is the first time in history that every single incumbent party in a democracy lost vote share.

So even the ones that won, like Modi, lost vote share, right?

Trudeau has been an incumbent for a decade.

So when you take the accumulative, you take the anti-incumbent mood everywhere and you stretch that out over the course of a decade, you add in a cost of living crisis.

Trudeau has got huge

political headwinds.

I call them political hurricanes.

Then you have this question about he's dominated the Liberal Party, and we should say, like, kind of brought them back from the wilderness.

But, you know,

like you start to get tensions as we've had in the Democratic Party.

Well, who's next?

Christy Freeland is someone that people have long thought could be a natural successor to Trudeau.

She could be making her play there.

You know, Melanie Jolie, who's the foreign minister, another person who's talked about there.

I think Trudeau, you know, Candace hosting the G7 again this year.

I think he wanted to do that again.

I'm not sure that's as fun a party as it may have seemed like it would have been once.

So look,

there's not really a good path for Trudeau here.

It does just seem like he's got a choice between do I step aside now and let a leadership fight take place so that someone else can lead this party into the next election.

They will probably lose, frankly, even with a different leader.

Or do I kind of play out the string here, kind of go through the tape at the end of my term?

And, you know, if I lose, I lose, and then then the party regenerates.

And, you know, that choice may not, you know, he may not get to make it because there could be enough liberal defections to kind of challenge his leadership, but it definitely looks like shaky ground for Trudeau.

I don't know what the right answer is, but he's got to figure out a response to this governor Trudeau bullshit.

You can't let this asshole bully you and kind of turn the other cheek and grin and bear it.

I'm not saying that you have to be like caustic back, but you got to figure out something.

And again, they're not trying to be all like love, actually.

And, you know, this is Hugh Grant kind of slapping around the Billy Bob Thornton George Bush character, but I don't know.

It's just, he's not going to stop doing it.

He's trying to run you out of office.

Like, this guy's not, it's not like a good-natured ribbon.

Yeah, so go out.

You're one of the longest, you know, together with your father, you're the longest serving prime minister in Canadian history.

You're a younger guy.

Take some swings back.

I mean, you know, he tried flying down there to Mar-a-Lago.

I mean, Freeland, what's interesting about what she did is she seems to be sticking out a harder line, you know?

Like, I'm not going to go kowtow at Mar-a-Lago.

And we can debate whether that's the right strategy or not.

But the reality is, you know, Trump's got to feel some pushback.

You know, and

maybe there could be an unplugged Trudeau if he's on his way out the door.

He can,

you know, take some swings back.

But as we've talked about, and we'll keep saying, Tommy, like, the charm offensive thing does not work with Trump if he doesn't like you or if he doesn't like your brand of politics.

And yeah, I think for the sake of Canadians,

it's probably be a good thing to do a little more pushback to the government, just think of that.

Like that's

we may, you know, people may chuckle about it, but it's like a country that it's like one of our closest allies and trading partners in the world.

They're in NATO.

They've fought with us in places like Afghanistan.

Like, I don't know.

I don't think that's that funny.

No, it's insulting.

And I think a lot of, I mean, I kind of wondered aloud what Canadians think of those kind of comments on a pod a week or two ago.

And I got a bunch of texts from friends or notes in the Discord being like, you know, we kind of think of these buffoons.

We don't really notice it, but there's other people who are like, we notice it, and it's insulting.

And it sucks.

Well, the sad thing is they probably don't notice it because they think that that's how Americans think in Germany.

Yeah, we're just thinking.

They were just assholes.

So that may be what he's counting on.

But yeah,

it's tough to watch.

But I mean, again, you have to see it from the prism of this anti-incumbency.

And like the right-wing guy in Canada.

What's his name?

Pierre Poliver?

Poliver.

Yeah, if he gets in, like, good luck.

Because guess what?

Trump's not going to do you any favors either with those tariffs.

No, no.

Finally, Ben, we're going to check in on everyone's favorite member of the royal family, Prince Andrew.

Perhaps missing his old friend Jeffrey Epstein, Prince Andrew, King Charles' 64-year-old brother, if you are not familiar with him, decided to make some new friends.

Andrew started hanging out with a guy named Yang Tengbo.

Yang went to Andrew's birthday party in 2020.

And according to the BBC, quote, was told he could act on the royal's behalf when dealing with potential investors in China.

This is not a great decision because now Yang's been barred from the UK for allegedly being a Chinese spy.

According to a High Court judge, Yang and Prince Andrew had, quote, an unusual degree of trust, and Yang is also accused of trying to build relationships between prominent British officials and then leverage them for political purposes.

for the Chinese state, for Chinese intelligence.

We're not exactly sure.

He didn't have like a clear instruction manual from his spy handlers, but he had lots of connections to various sort of carve-outs for the Chinese Communist Party and just some sketchy ties.

Yang denies all these allegations.

Either way, it's another embarrassment for Prince Andrew, who had already been stripped of his charity roles and royal duties by his mother, Queen Elizabeth.

Now to add insult to injury, he's reportedly been uninvited to the family Christmas celebration to avoid being a distraction, Ben.

Down another front.

I mean, the thing about Prince Andrew is that a lot of this, you know, in this world of espionage and influence peddling, you know, your vulnerability is that you could be blackmailed.

Right.

I mean, this guy is such a fucking utter train wreck that maybe he's unblackmailable, you know?

Yeah.

I mean, literally flying around with Jeffrey Epstein on his plane and doing God knows what.

It is kind of time to rethink this institution.

I mean, like narrowing the set of royals that are, I don't know, allowed out of the house.

I mean, what is going on here?

Yeah, I mean, sometimes they use them deftly.

Like they sent uh william to notre dame yeah to that's a good use of the ceremony and they had him spend a bunch of time with trump and trump is obviously in love with the royals loved the trappings loved to feel respected by the queen and king and prince and but you're right i mean prince andrew i don't know i'm so worried about uh the fact that he got his mom's corgis when she died hope those dogs are okay yeah i hope someone's feeding those dogs other than prince andrew yeah me too i mean it does raise this other question too of like the the extent to which i mean we talked about the chinese hack here like these countries are throwing their weight around in our politics and our institutions, and

we don't seem to have a theory of how to deal with it because we're so wealth-obsessed that, you know, Mr.

Yang shows up and suddenly you're like, oh, sure, whatever you want.

You know, this great institution, the British Royal Family, is basically for sale, you know?

Yeah.

And he was part of some club where he came in contact with all these other like senior officials.

I think Teresa May was on the list, like high-powered

members of kind of like the British elite class were just kind of bumping into this guy everywhere.

And it just, it seems like from some of the reporting that British intelligence thinks this is kind of the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Chinese efforts to establish these kind of ties or conduct espionage in the UK.

We know that London is just a wash of money.

London is just a wash of money.

Russian money, Gulf money, Chinese money, you know, it is just kind of washing around.

Thanks to very

pliant laws.

Yeah, I mean, I will say the labor people have tried to take some steps to combat kleptocracy.

David Lamy's had a couple announcements.

It's just going to take a lot of work.

Yeah, a long time.

And it's part of what's so complicated is part of London's comparative advantage is that.

It's this kind of financial capital and

this haven, essentially, for rich people from around the world.

But that cuts both ways.

Yeah.

Okay, we are going to take a quick break.

When you come back, you're going to hear my interview with Layla Molana Allen.

She is a special correspondent for PBS News Hour.

We talked from

wherever she was staying in Aleppo, Syria.

She'd been all over the country talking with people, going to some of the horrific prison sites and, you know, the intel gathering torture chambers.

It's an amazing conversation.

So please stick around for that.

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I'm excited to welcome back to the show Layla Milana Allen.

She's a special correspondent for PBS PBS News Hour.

The last time we spoke, she was in Beirut, and now she is in Aleppo, Syria.

Great to talk with you again.

Great to be back with you.

So first question, just what is it like?

I know you've been all across Syria.

What are you seeing and hearing from people?

Well, I think something that's made this a particularly powerful reporting experience for me is that I managed to get in undercover a year ago.

So unlike most of the reporters who are here at the moment who haven't been able to get in for years, I did.

And the difference is just utterly jarring.

You know, having previously had to kind of whisper everything and be constantly terrified of protecting everybody who dared to speak to you.

This is people running up to you on the street, asking you where you're from, desperate to speak to you, wanting to take photographs with you.

You know, the level of kind of shock and joy at this very, very sudden freedom.

that no one expected is really overwhelming because of course people who lived in the rebel-held northwest knew this offensive was coming, but nobody in regime-held Syria did.

So it really came out of nowhere and it's almost like the curtains have been opened and the light has come in and people are still adapting to how to see in that light.

It's incredible.

I mean, I know that I've seen some of the clips you've posted of these groups of young people just like filled with joy and excitement.

But obviously that sentiment can curdle pretty quickly if people don't have the basics, you know, food, water, electricity, other services.

How is HDS moving to take care of those basics for people in these early days?

Well, that's exactly it.

Now, of course, there have been issues with all those services here for a very long time, but that does mean that people struggle.

You know, electricity is terrible.

There's often no petrol available.

I mean, people are selling water-damp petrol on the side of the street.

A lot of it's being smuggled in from Lebanon now.

There's a lot of problems with basic road infrastructure.

You know, one of the issues is that the roads haven't been that much used, particularly between areas that were held by different groups for a long time, except for by military vehicles so they're shredded to pieces uh you know road signs are terrible so all of these things now that people are free to move around are things that they want to start to work and of course connectivity is a huge issue because when you were under such oppression and you couldn't speak to your family members and you couldn't contact people in the outside world on the internet that was almost less of an issue.

Now that people suddenly can, they want to be able to use that.

So there is a grace period, of course.

You know, people are delighted that the rebels have come down and liberated them, as they keep saying, but they are going to need to fix that soon.

At the moment, there's not a huge amount of work happening on basic services.

Really, what they're trying to figure out is road safety, for instance.

So checkpoints have started to come up, checking both whether stolen vehicles are being moved around, whether there are people who are complicit in the horrific crimes that we're discovering conducted by the Assad regime trying to escape.

So there's a lot of checkpoints coming up.

There's also now reinforcement of the borders.

The borders have been sitting wide open when I came in from Lebanon a week ago.

We sailed through.

There was nobody there except a smiling young Free Syrian army soldier with a gun.

Now they are sending people down there.

The reality is at the moment they don't have enough fighters and manpower because all they've had in terms of administrative people is those people who are running the salvation government up in Idlib.

Suddenly they need politicians for the entire country.

So they're going to have to make decisions pretty soon about whether they're going to forgive and move on with the people who ran municipalities, with local politicians to get their expertise on board, or whether they're going to try and really staff all the ministries and all the municipality buildings with HTS fighters and other rebels.

That's not clear yet, but they are going to have to make some deals and bring some other people on board if there's any way they're going to run this country effectively.

At the moment, there has been a temporary government put in place run by Mohammed al-Bashir.

He's been appointed by Ahmed Shara.

That's the name of Abu Mohammed al-Jalani, who took away his jihadi name.

He lost that jihadi name and went back to being Ahmed al-Shara to kind of prove this liberalization agenda that he's got.

So he's assigned Mohammed al-Bashir as prime minister.

He was the man who was running the show up in Idlib.

And they've got till March 1st, essentially, to try and get basic services back on the road.

Then they're going to need to think about whether they're going to have elections and who's going to be involved in those.

It's just an enormous task.

You mentioned

the horrific things we're seeing coming out of Assad's prisons and torture chambers.

I know you visited one.

I know that human rights groups are starting to exhume mass graves and take other steps to find missing people, even if they're dead or otherwise account for Assad's atrocities.

Can you just talk a little bit about what you saw and whether there are conversations happening about some sort of process, a truth and reconciliation process, maybe that might lead to accountability?

So the first prison I went to here was Sidnaya Prison.

And this is the most infamous of the network of prisons that the Assads ran in this country.

For years now, through so many years reporting on Syria, it has been a theme of almost every conversation.

Desperate family members wondering whether their family members might be there, sometimes having been told they were and being manipulated by the authorities into kind of getting information from other people, going there and potentially being tortured themselves while trying to free their family members.

And many people who didn't know where their family members had been detained to assumed it was Sednaya, partly because it was the biggest.

It's this huge complex with multiple floors and also because as I say it's the most infamous now a lot of the torture was also conducted in the intelligence branch offices across the country but eventually people would be moved to these prisons and going inside we have heard so many stories but you really can't understand the full reality of it until you enter this space you know floors high enormous rooms that evidently had 30 40 people at least packed inside there are blankets everywhere the debris of human beings packed in closely together, video cameras monitoring their every move.

And then you go downstairs underground, and it's truly terrifying seeing these tiny little cells with marks etched on the wall as human beings tried to keep track of the days, tried to essentially interact with themselves in some ways.

There are even things like naughts and crosses, you know, as people just tried to keep themselves going.

tiny little cells that stink obviously because people weren't allowed out and then you see the torture that was being implemented.

From there was a hole in the floor that prisoners told us that the guards used to fill with human feces and submerge them in it to humiliate them and even simulate drowning, a wall full of nooses where public hangings would take place.

various machinery that seems to have been used.

I'm talking about industrial machinery to torture human beings and potentially even to dispose of their bodies.

And then you start to track where those bodies have gone.

And we went to several local hospitals trying to track down bodies that had been discovered in a military hospital and quickly moved.

These bodies were stacked on top of each other in various states of decay, some with limbs missing, all bearing the signs of torture.

We managed to track them down at a hospital where family members were coming to try and identify them.

And it's a real race against time because as bodies decay, their features change.

And so few of these people will have DNA on record.

They are trying to do DNA tests that really they're desperately sending these photographs around trying to trigger any kind of recognition because so many tens of thousands of people still have family members missing.

Unfortunately, as you say, many of those people, it does now seem clear, will be in mass graves.

There are multiple sites that people have suspected for years and now they're going to start looking at them.

I was at one of the first exhumations today.

of a small mass grave just outside Damascus.

Body parts found in flower bags, old bags of flour that they had put these body parts in, they didn't even have names on them.

They were labeled with prisoner numbers.

And so having to remove these body parts and then start to think about how you can identify these people while also wanting to give them a respectful burial is a huge challenge.

The people currently doing that are the civil defense.

Those are the very famous White Helmets who for many years have conducted rescue operations in northwest Syria, rebel-held Syria,

after Russian airstrikes and Assad regime bombardment.

They've now come down and across the country are trying to help with this.

And one of the massive issues is that families are starting to go to these grave sites where they think their family members might be buried and dig through them.

And of course, that both disturbs the grave and contaminates evidence, the only evidence that could be used to try and prosecute the people who are responsible for these crimes.

So if there's any possibility of being able to get this evidence on file, those

graves have to be exhumed properly, cleanly, with great attention to detail.

And the thousands of documents that we're finding in these prisons and in these interrogation cells in the intelligence branches have to be properly documented and preserved at the moment they're being walked across, they're being thrown in the air.

There's a real danger that all that evidence just disappears because there isn't a process in place.

Yeah, see, I've seen some of those images and those concerns as well on social media.

I mean, presumably there are lots of people who worked at these facilities still in the country.

I mean, they would probably tell you that they were, you know, captives of a system that forced them into doing these evil things.

But I imagine those excuses are not going to go over very well with the relatives of the people who are disappeared or murdered.

I mean, what is happening with the people that used to work at Sidnaya Prison, for example?

It's a huge challenge,

as it always is in these situations, and particularly where we are now, which is that there does seem to be, you know, without being too naive about it, a golden opportunity right now where HTS is feeling quite benign, certainly behaving very benignly to the majority of people.

People are overwhelmingly keen to reunite and have a Syria for all Syrians.

And that does mean some forgiveness.

I was speaking to one of the most famous Sidnaya detainees who managed to get out the other day.

And he said, look, you know, these people did the most horrifying things imaginable, but there are so many of them.

who were involved with this regime.

The reality is we're going to have to forgive some people.

Otherwise, we'll have hate in our hearts forever and we can't move forward.

You know, you can't prosecute and imprison however many thousands of people in the country.

So you've got to make a decision about what level of involvement and decision-making makes you complicit.

Now, of course, the people in the highest echelons, many of them have managed to escape.

You know, multiple

Assad aides have been seen fleeing to different airports.

We know the Assad family themselves are in Moscow now.

They've been given political asylum.

The other day, the governor of Sednaya prison was found and he was dragged through the streets and beaten to a pulp.

There were a lot of concerns from Syrians on social media saying, look, no matter what this man did, we need to set an example and we need to take him to a dock and convict him in a court, not have mob justice.

But of course, if there isn't a methodology in place, if there isn't a system for trying these people, then this is exactly what's going to happen.

They're going to be hunted down.

And of course, that in itself means that there'll be a whole new round of crimes that people are concerned about.

So

one of so many challenges that these very new authorities have is to try and figure out quickly how to do that and make people feel that there will be some form of justice and they don't need to implement it themselves.

Yeah, man, what an enormous task.

I mean, just stepping back on sort of like a DC perspective, I mean, there's this debate in Washington, a debate in European capitals about whether to recognize the new government, whether to lift sanctions, whether to remove the terrorist designation from HTS.

Do you have a sense of what kind of the average Syrians you're talking to want from the West, want from the United States?

I would say they want a lot and they expect very little.

You know, the majority of people I've spoken to say, look, you abandoned us in 2014 after the first chemical attack.

I was with families who were victims of chemical attacks the other day and they were saying, you know, you stand, you in the West stand on your morals and you say that you have these red lines and that there are certain things that aren't allowed.

And does it really matter how we're murdered?

But okay, you say it does matter which way we're murdered.

So at least are you going to look after us if we're murdered the way that you don't like?

Oh, no, actually, you won't look after us then either.

So they really expect very little at all as far as they're concerned.

You know, unless there's money to be made for the West here, not much is going to happen.

But they are asking for at least a little help.

You know, somebody says to me the other day, they said, we can never forgive you for abandoning us and watching us be killed in this way for over a decade.

But what we can ask is that right now you can do just a little bit to make up for it.

You can lift sanctions and allow this country that is collapsing.

And these sanctions have only ever affected everyday people.

They've never affected the government.

It's just everyday people who can't rebuild their homes, who can't have businesses, who can't have communication with the outside.

You can lift those sanctions.

You can send us proper aid money.

You can send in teams to help us with these huge challenges like the mass graves, like our justice system.

And you can, in this window, as many experts on Syria as well are deeply frustrated about, they're deeply frustrated about the Biden administration's attitude that we're going to wait and see and it's too soon, as they said the other day, to recognize this new government.

There is this window right now where if Western support comes in, it's possible that an actual liberal government can be installed.

And of course, the reality is that when people have prosperity, there is much less likelihood of fomenting discord and the old divisions breaking apart, of which there are so many in Syria after so many years of different conflicts, all of which have mixed up with the civil war.

So that's what people feel right now is they desperately just want some support and a chance to make this work.

And they feel that the West turning their backs on them is the most likely thing to make that implode.

Because of course, if they have no money, if HTS is still a terrorist designated organization, it's going to be incredibly hard for them to function.

So that's their main concern.

There are some countries who are starting to make noises.

Already France has said that they are sending a delegation now to interact.

with the leader of HTS and HTS as a new authority, the salvation government, to see what they can set up, potentially even open diplomatic services here again.

That's a real start in terms of at least opening a conversation and treating the people who are now planning to run the country as though they're friends, because otherwise the likelihood is that they'll look for other friends and they will probably be friends that the West is not friends with.

Right.

And look, I say this with humility, having worked in the Obama administration, but I think it's actually kind of worse than not just recognizing the government or removing sanctions or removing the terrorist designation.

The U.S.

is,

as as we speak, hitting ISIS targets in Syria.

The Israelis have blown up most of the Syrian military's big weapon systems.

They're taking more and more territory in the Golan Heights with seemingly, I don't know if it's support from the U.S., but we're not condemning it or stopping them.

Are people in Syria hearing about those events?

Does it anger them?

Well, exactly that.

I mean, the reality is that the U.S.

is supporting it, right?

By not engaging their Israeli allies and saying, don't do this right now.

They're not just taking out Syrian regime armaments, which, of course, remember, means that this is the army of the country.

This is all the weaponry they have.

So they are removing whatever future Syrian state there is capability of defending itself.

They've also,

the Israeli Air Force has been systematically destroying the ports on the coast.

in the last few days.

Now, that's where the Russians have been based, but those are the only ports that Syria has.

So again, not only for defense, but for trade as well.

A whole new round of destruction, as well as, you know, the majority of the suburbs across the country that have been destroyed that they now have to pay to rebuild as well.

So Israel using this window of opportunity essentially to sneak in and do whatever they like to bring

Syria to its knees militarily is only going to create many, many more issues for this country moving forward.

And as you say, similarly, the US, the fact that the US with the coalition coalition in northeast Syria, of course, all they're allowed to do under that mandate they have is anything to do with ISIS.

And there are concerns that in that desert in Deir Azor, where I have been myself embedded with troops hunting down ISIS captains who are still in hiding there and trying to bring back ISIS dominance to that area, they're carrying out those strikes.

essentially to try and waylay any opportunity that ISIS might have to take advantage of this chaos in the area to come back.

But the reality is that's yet more destruction and yet more rebuilding that's needed for people here.

So I think what people here are seeing, and of course they know what's happening, they talk about it every day.

Syrians are deeply engaged not only in what's happening on the ground, but what Western countries, international people are doing within their country.

They're all talking about it and they can hear the airstrikes.

I mean, today, Israel was destroying an area of Damascus where a lot of Iranians live.

And actually the mother of Austin Tice, an American journalist who who was taken 12 years ago, made a statement saying, please stop bombing this area.

We know the IRGC was holding him.

And if you are bombing this area, this is the most likely place in Damascus that he's being held and you could kill him in doing so.

So the fact that essentially

Israel is using this opportunity to conduct whatever they like, whatever their long-term plans are, whatever, will help them in the future without any thought to what's best for a liberal future for Syria right now is very concerning because it shows people people here that there's no chance of them being ally and that their allies in the United States aren't really interested in the future of Syrians either.

Yeah, I mean, you mentioned Austin Tice and the search for him.

For those who don't know, Austin Tice, the journalist who went missing in 2012, he's believed to have been held by the Assad regime or its allies.

It would be a miracle if he were to be found alive over a decade later.

Is there like a group on the ground searching for him?

And you mentioned the ask to pause those airstrikes by his parents.

I'm just wondering what that search looks like on the ground.

Well, it's actually mostly journalists looking for him.

We got a tip the other day and we went to search this

former military base and there was no one there, but it really is journalists who are looking.

One of the huge problems with looking for Austin over the years has been that essentially the United States government, successive United States governments, have completely refused to engage with the Iranian authorities on this.

Now, we know that Austin was essentially Iran's prize.

So even when there were negotiations through Hezbollah officials, who were the ones who were holding him for quite a long time, through the Syrian government, offers outside of the US framework, because they refused to pay for hostages, but there were other possible plans to pay for him to try and make a trade every single time, it would be Iran's IRGC who would put their foot down and say no.

So it's very clear that he is being held

possibly in Iran, but most probably by an Iran-linked group inside the country.

And because the United States has never been willing to engage diplomatically on that, they really have no intelligence on it.

And the likelihood is that if they send a delegation, it's going to be a delegation of men with guns,

which isn't going to be the way to get him out.

So what's clear is he's not in one of the prisons that was liberated.

So he must have been being held on his own, as I say, as this sort of very particular prize.

And there have been a lot of rumors going around.

There have been multiple instances where kind of Syrians have said, oh, we found him.

And in one case, it was a different American who got lost.

In one case, it was someone who has nothing to do with him.

But it is clear that people realize what a big prize he is.

And that it may be that whoever is still holding him, if, as we hope, he's still alive, hopes they can trade him for something.

But it would also be.

a fantastic trade for HTS if they're able to liberate him, because they, of course, then have a big bargaining chip, or indeed just huge brownie points as a kind of a gesture of friendship towards the US government, if they're able to hand him over.

So, as I say, no one's really making efforts on the ground except for fellow journalists to look for him right now, but there is hope that there might be some sort of engagement to try and find out where he is because we know that as recently as two years ago, based on prisoners who were being kept with him, he was still as alive and well as you can be after a decade of detainment.

God, just hope and pray that he's okay somewhere and it would be a miracle.

Last question for you.

I mean, it's been remarkable.

It's an unbelievable couple of weeks, but also just more recently, seeing HTS do and say all the things that any Westerner or any minority group in Syria could possibly want them to say.

The question just comes down to, do minority sects in

Syria believe they mean it?

Do folks observing them up close believe that they mean what they say?

And they're not going to sort of fall back on previous iterations of behavior by HTS.

I know it's impossible to predict the future, but I'm just curious what you think and what you're hearing from people who might be Alawites or Druze who might not feel protected or safe in a Sunni-led future for Syria.

So one of the key issues here, of course, is that this organization, HTS, and indeed all the other rebel groups that they are working with, because they're not alone, they're just leading this rebel movement, is not a monolith, right?

Even though the leader is making these very strong, encouraging statements about being liberal, about protecting everyone, about women not having to cover, etc., that doesn't necessarily mean that the rank and file, all of whom will have joined at different times for different reasons, will necessarily agree with that.

And there aren't rules in place or a state in place.

So that is one of the reasons why it's so important to get sort of, you know, a new constitution, a new framework written up very quickly.

So there are rules to follow.

All the minorities I've spoken to thus far, I've been speaking to Alawites, I've been speaking to various sects of Christians, I've been speaking to the Druze.

They have all said look we were absolutely terrified these are terrorists because of course hds was javelinustra until 2015 um you know and when um when we heard that they were coming we thought that's it it's isis again we're gonna die and then they arrived and they were completely benign with us they let us know that the assads were gone that we were free to do as we liked that we would be looked after.

Now, that's been their lived experience thus far.

Of course, they are still deeply concerned that things may change.

This is all very, very new.

But what they have all been saying is, look, you know, Assad said he would protect us.

What he did was, okay, we're not dead, but we are utterly impoverished.

We've been separated from the rest of the Syrian people and watched hundreds of thousands of our people die.

And really, it was all for nothing.

He essentially just protected himself and his family and not us.

You know, it was incredible to speak to Alawites the other day in the Alawite heartland near the village where Assad was was born saying good riddance you know we were just as gagged as anyone else and we were simply living on a different side of this divide where we all feared death every day and were threatened every day and all we really want is for all of us to live alongside each other so there is a genuine investment and hope in that um you know a number of people in damascus said to me we were expecting these rebels to come down and shoot us all and all they've done is come here and help us uh you know try and support us as well i mean that there are lots of examples of these individuals at least individual individual fighters, clearly caring deeply about the Syrian people that they're helping with.

That we were driving back today and there was a family, a car full of a family all packed in there, far too many people.

But of course, people are trying to get across the country back to their old homes with very little in the way of resources.

Their car broke down and you know, in the pitch black, this HTS fighter jumped off his checkpoint and ran over and helped the teenage boys of the family push the van up the hill until it started moving again.

Now, of course, course, these are just little anecdotal moments.

They do not in any way demonstrate how a state's going to work, but at least how a lot of these individuals are interacting with Syrians from all over the country does suggest that they feel very Syrian.

And I think this is a key issue is that a lot of people say, look, before 2015,

Jeffaldanasar, as it was then, HTS was largely foreign fighters essentially coming to Syria to conduct jihad because of the chaos.

What's changed is that the majority of them are now Syrian.

In terms of the recruitment over, you know, it's been very interesting talking to HTS fighters about how much has changed over the last four years.

It's four years they've been planning this offensive, how they've managed to convince rebels and normal people in the northwest, men who previously would never have fought with the jihadi groups, that this is the right way to do it and that they do want to accept everyone.

And the majority of their makeup now is Syrian.

And so they actually do care about and connect with the people in this country as their fellow countrymen.

That's what they're trying to demonstrate right now.

Thus far, it seems to be playing out.

There are, of course, concerns.

We've heard reports from all over the place about women being told they won't be allowed to do certain things.

There are certain families being held in the Northwest of people who spoke out against HTS who still haven't been released from prison.

So there are certainly concerns.

But right now, there does seem to be a lot of optimism.

And as I said, really what people are asking for is some support in that optimism to at least give them a chance.

Wow.

Layla, well, this is just amazing getting to talk to you from Aleppo.

Not something I ever thought I'd get to do.

Thank you so much for your reporting and making time for us.

For folks who don't know, we're connecting at like 11 p.m.

Syria time via a WhatsApp web connection that somehow worked.

So truly thank you again.

Great to speak with you.

And yeah, I

wasn't sure I'd ever be able to report from Aleppo again either.

So it's such a privilege to be here at such an incredible time in Syrian history.

And I just pray for the best for these wonderful people who've lived for so long a life they didn't deserve.

And I hope they get the life they do deserve.

Absolutely.

Amen.

Well, thank you again and stay safe and look forward to watching all your stuff on PBS News Hour and everywhere else.

Great to speak to you.

Speak to you soon.

Thanks again to Layla for doing the show.

Happy holidays to everybody.

Happy holidays.

Merry Christmas.

Happy New Year.

Merry Christmas.

Happy Hanukkah.

Wait, are we saying Merry Christmas again now?

I think we did.

When Trump got elected, yeah.

I like when

every year there's some kind of MAGA dip shit who goes into a Starbucks and tells the barista his name is Christmas, and he's like, I got him.

Good for you, pal.

You guys win, I guess.

Yeah.

Wrote Christmas on your cup.

Happy everything to everybody.

Yeah, and we will be back.

Except the haters.

Not even the haters.

Well, that's what Trump always does, his messages where he's like, you know, happy Easter to the radical left.

Happy Arbor Day to my haters.

Governor Trudeau.

But yeah, we will be off for two weeks.

Our next episode is on January 7th.

So that's going to be a long one.

Can only imagine what is going to happen in two weeks.

Yeah, if we're doing a bonus episode over Christmas, we got some big problems.

But, you know, strange things have happened.

But thanks all for listening, and talk to you guys soon.

See ya.

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