South Korean President Declares Martial Law

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Welcome back to Pod Save the World.

I'm Tommy Vitor.

I'm Ben Rhodes.

Wow, man, a lot going on today.

Quite a day.

Quite a day in the WorldO portfolio.

It's one of those weeks where we could have done two episodes, probably.

This might be what the next four years are like.

Let's just...

acknowledge that reality.

Yeah,

a lot of geopolitical events are shifting.

A lot of tectonic plates moving underneath the surface.

Yeah.

Well, we're going to start with the president of South Korea declaring martial law.

There's that.

That's something that happened today.

That happened today.

Wild story.

Then we're going to talk about the events in Syria over the past week where you've seen the opposition take back territory on

battle lines that really haven't moved significantly in four years.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If not longer.

The past is back to the future here.

Yeah, exactly.

And we'll talk about what it means for the the incoming Trump team and how they might handle it given their past statements about Syria.

Then we're going to talk about a bunch of Trump personnel news, including an excellent nominee to run the FBI.

Yeah, we've been on Patel Watch for a while.

Nobody can accuse us of being latecomers to this party.

Ben, I got to say, we talked about Cash Patel a little bit about Pate of America.

I was a little, and I'd be like, oh, you guys just read the Atlantic profile on it?

Yeah, come on.

Yeah, come on.

McTracker.

I saw that profile before it was written.

You, me and Godly, have been talking about that guy for a really long time.

You might have to please him.

Since he questioned me in 2017.

We're going to talk also about some plum new gigs for Trump family in-laws.

Very exciting.

Some more tariff threats via social media.

The latest grim news for Gaza.

Some major elections and protest movements in Romania and Georgia.

Then we're going to talk about an election in Ireland.

Kind of cutting against the grain in that it was less interesting.

Yes.

Hard to compete with the plot lines

in the same genre.

Yeah.

And then you're going to hear my conversation with Natasha Hall, who is an expert on Syria.

We dive deeper into the players in the opposition, the groups fighting Assad, all the various countries that are got their mitts on Syria, treating it like a proxy war, and then some recommendations for what the U.S.

should do and what might happen next.

So a really helpful interview for understanding all this.

But let's start in South Korea, Ben,

because President Yoon-suk-yuul declared martial law in the country for the first time in in nearly 50 years.

And listeners might be thinking, that sounds a little drastic.

And boy, are you right.

What this means in practice was that the military was temporarily in charge of the government.

Troops were deployed to South Korea's National Assembly.

In this case, the military also announced a ban on protests, political activities by parliament, and they tried to put all media in South Korea under the military's control.

So big deal.

There's even reports that these military special forces that were sent to the National Assembly were trying to arrest members of the National Assembly.

So the Korean people saw this happening.

They took to the streets to protest.

The members of the National Assembly quickly assembled and they voted down the martial law declaration, making it invalid.

The vote was 190 to zero, which everybody who showed up.

No Republicans in Congress there.

Mr.

McConnell didn't abstain this one.

So basically, martial law was declared and invalidated in a matter of like six hours?

Yes.

President Yoon-suk-yule announced after, like, you know, sort of tucked his tail and made another speech saying he would lift the martial law declaration.

As of this recording, I don't know if it's officially happened because he needs to convene his cabinet to officially undeclare martial law.

Listeners are also probably wondering why, why did he do this?

President Yoon-suk-yul claimed the martial law declaration was, quote, aimed at eradicating pro-North Korean forces and to protect the constitutional order of freedom.

But really, he was, seems like he was just pissed at his political opponents.

They have controlled parliament since May of 2022.

They used that power to cut his budget, move to impeach his cabinet members, and highlight his extremely corrupt wife, who's done a bunch of stuff that's sketchy.

So, to try to understand all this, Ben, we reached out to our former colleague, Danny Russell.

He was Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.

Now he's the Vice President for International Security and Diplomacy at the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York.

Here's a clip.

A phenomenal amount of damage has been done by this.

He abruptly, unilaterally chose this route.

It was partly in response to log jams in the Diet, but his martial law decree, the declaration, the statement was really over the top and it included pretty scary things about exterminating enemies and so on.

The fact that this ended without actual bloodshed is miraculous and we should be grateful for that.

If Korean security forces had used violence against protesters, as has happened in Korea's pretty bloody history, it would have been just a disaster, a wound that would take a really long time to heal.

So it's been kind of a stress task for a democratic system, how it can be resilient in the face of a political crisis.

On the other hand, Surviving a crisis is one thing,

but healing is a very different thing.

And as I used to say when I was in government, there's no situation that's so bad that you can't make it worse.

Ben, so I guess a nice reminder for us Americans that politics can get worse.

Yes.

I mean, first of all, don't you sometimes just hear Danny want to sit with a Scotch in front of a fire and talk about Asian politics for a few hours?

Just tell me about the Japanese elections or whatever.

Look, on the one hand, politics in South Korea has always been a bit of a blood sport.

You know, successive presidents have been imprisoned.

You said a list that was incredible.

There's only one South Korean president that has managed to not be put in prison or deposed or killed.

Now,

that included a number of military dictatorships and coups until the massive democratic reforms of the 80s.

But even since then, it's pretty bare-knuckled, right?

We've seen presidents impeached.

We've seen presidents prosecuted.

On the other hand, big other hand, we have not seen the declaration of martial law since the transition to democracy.

And given the recency of that, you know, just a few generations ago, this surely struck deep cords of trauma and concern among the South Korean public, which I think explains some of the resilience we saw.

The people taking to the streets, the lawmakers coming together, members of the president's own party voting against him.

So that is all to the good.

In terms of like a couple of things that occurred to me about what to watch beyond Danny's point about how do they get out of this political morass?

Does the president get impeached?

Does the president get imprisoned?

You know, how do they just manage this transition?

It seems like it's going to be hard for this guy to stay out the rest of his term after he just lost 190 to zero vote about a coup.

So there's that to watch.

Then there's the U.S.

piece of this banner year for Joe Biden.

Because we'll remember that the kind of cornerstone of this, you know, I'm the guy that did the Pacific Basin strategy was the trilateral diplomacy that they did very good work on to get a summit earlier this year at Camp David.

He's had, you know, exchanged state visits with this guy.

You know, that now the Japanese leader is no longer the Prime Minister of Japan, and this guy doesn't seem like he's long for South Korea.

So, what that kind of means for this U.S.

strategy of having this trilateral alliance in Northeast Asia and networking our allies in the region, that's going to have to be watched as well.

And the last piece of this is, you know, you've heard me occasionally freak out a bit on this podcast about South Korea in general with Trump coming back.

Kim Jong-un has got to feel like he's got a buddy in the White House now.

He's got all this Russian military technology.

South Korea looks pretty messy and divided.

I do just worry about what this means for South Korea.

Does Kim Jong-un lash out?

And are there military provocations that he could pursue?

feeling like they're divided.

Does South Korea, you know, do they have to get closer to China because they can't trust the U.S.

anymore?

It's going to be a very fluid, you know, add South Korea to your list of countries to watch here for the next year.

Yeah, I mean, to your point about how much this must have freaked out your average South Korean citizen, the last martial law declaration was in 1979 when South Korea's then-military dictator was assassinated in a coup attempt.

And martial law has not been invoked since the Republic of Korea became a parliamentary democracy in 1987.

So this was shocking.

Danny did tell us in that call with him that the next step is probably impeachment, probably removal, and then a snap election.

So there could be a sea change politically in South Korea.

And he also mentioned what you were saying about North Korea, which is that they are watching these events very closely.

They are going to mine them for maximum propaganda value

and who knows what else.

So something to watch there.

You know, I was talking to another Korea expert who just made the point that Yoon Suk Yule is a career prosecutor.

He's used to having a ton of authority in that job.

He is, you know, tons of resources, like Korean prosecutors never lose.

And now he's stuck in politics with an opposition that has a supermajority in the unicameral parliament and just getting his ass handed to him over and over again.

And he's got this wife who created all these scandals.

She got took like a free Dior bag, and they've been going hard after her.

And it clearly just made him lose it.

And he just lit his political career on fire and might end up in prison.

Because,

look, martial law, the steps for martial law is in the Constitution.

You can declare it, and then the National Assembly can revoke it or can invalidate it.

But it does sound like the military was trying to prevent the National Assembly from meeting to

take this next step, to have this vote.

And in that case, it feels pretty coup-like.

Yes, it does.

I mean, you're right to point out he's a creepy guy with autocratic tendencies and whiffs of corruption around him.

And he, you know, he's been waging a kind of anti-feminist agenda.

I mean, it

doesn't seem like you're an ideal leader here.

And on the martial law piece, another thing, Tommy, it'd be interesting to watch is kind of where is the South Korean military on all this?

You know,

they were uncomfortably involved, it seemed like, at the front end with this operation on the capital, but or on the National Assembly.

But, you know, they also withdrew.

And so it'll be interesting to see in the recriminations that transpire, can the military make clear that it respects civilian control, does not have any aspirations to see this kind of policy pursued.

And this matters to the U.S.

too, because we obviously have 30,000 troops in South Korea.

We've got deep relationships with the South Korean military.

That is meant to include the kind of professionalization of civilian control.

That's my understanding of how the South Korean military generally operates.

It'd be important for them to kind of reaffirm that in the days to come.

Yeah, and the same person I was talking to,

if the military had gone all in with Yun Sukule, then it is, of course, a military coup.

But what makes that complicated in a society society like South Korea is you have conscription, mandatory conscription.

Everyone between 18 to 28 has to do, I think, 18 months of military service.

So everyone's got skin in the game now.

It's not just sort of like a one or two or 5% of the country that's part of the armed services.

It's everybody for some point in their life.

BTS.

Yes,

BTS is really.

The K-pop stars are not immune.

Ben, you mentioned President Biden and his relationship with Yoon Suk Yule.

Listeners might remember the South South Korean state visit to the White House in April of last year.

Here's a clip.

We know this is one of your favorite songs, American Pie.

American Pie,

yes, that's true.

Yes, when I was going to school, it was one of my favorite songs.

Well, we wanted to hear you sing it.

Long, long time ago,

something touched me deep inside

the day

the music died.

I remember talking to people at the time who were like unbelievably touched by that moment and said it was incredible.

And, you know, now I guess he's got a lot of people.

Well, now there's singing jail.

I was going to say there's a kind of more resonance to the day the music died.

Yeah.

You know, that put that on the guy's epitaph.

Today was probably the day the music died for that guy.

Democracy died.

Or your political career.

Yeah, or your political career.

Incredible story.

Great story.

I can't believe that.

Not great story, but I mean, amazing story.

Yeah, at least it looks like it could have been a hell of a lot worse, as Danny pointed out, if there had been, you know, live fire on protesters or something like that.

Okay, the other huge story this week has been the events in Syria.

So, the later in the show, you're going to hear my interview with Tatasha Hall about what's been going on, like how the opposition took all this territory in a week, the players involved, the proxy groups, all the details.

Ben and I also just wanted to talk about the challenge this creates for the United States, specifically President-elect Trump, because Trump's history when it comes to Syria is quite complicated.

So going back in the time machine a little bit, a lot of time machine stuff today.

What do we get to cash patel?

In 2018, Trump announced that ISIS was defeated and that all U.S.

troops were coming home from Syria.

The Pentagon slow walked a lot of that.

Jim Mattis, remember, that's when he resigned in protest.

That was the screen.

That was the scribe.

That was the thing.

Godfrey, we take 500 guys out of Syria.

That was the thing that got him.

And ultimately, I think most of those troops stayed in Syria or the region.

Then in 2019, Trump announced he was going to withdraw U.S.

troops for a second time, specifically the troops in the northeastern part of the country that were working with Kurdish forces to fight ISIS.

Those Kurdish troops also face a constant threat from Turkey, who view Kurdish separatists like the PKK as an existential threat to them.

Side note, you do wonder whether some of the corruption economic ties that Trumps may have with Erdogan contributed to that.

But anyway, just put that aside.

Yeah, we'll keep that one.

Until we get to the family.

Exactly.

Exactly.

So again, Trump in 2019 tries to pull back troops.

There's a huge backlash, including from some incoming members of Trump's national security team.

So here's two clips put together from 2019.

The first is Trump talking about Syria.

And the second, Ben, is his incoming national security advisor, Mike Waltz.

So Syria was lost long ago.

It was lost long ago.

And besides that, I don't want, we're talking about sand and death.

That's what we're talking about.

We're not talking about, you know, vast wealth.

We're talking about sand and death.

Well, I think we're just making a strategic mistake here.

There's no other way to put it.

I am very concerned that we are creating the conditions for ISIS to return.

I understand the president's frustration and many people's frustration for how long these efforts have taken, too hard, too expensive.

I understand that.

But I think there's a misconception amongst many that we had tens of thousands of soldiers there.

We had a few few hundred Green Berets that were actually preventing endless war.

They were a deterrent against war by establishing that buffer zone that by all accounts was working between the Kurds and the Turks and keeping everyone focused on keeping a lid on that Pandora's box.

That is ISIS.

They can and will return.

They will attack America again and we have to stay on the office.

offense.

We have to fight these wars over there, Stephanie, not back at home, and it will follow us home.

So interesting there.

Criticism from Waltz.

Marco Rubio, who's about to be Secretary of State, if confirmed, also criticized Trump at the time, saying the decision to abandon our Kurdish allies and withdraw American troops from northern Syria is a grave mistake that will have serious consequences beyond Syria.

But Ben, incoming director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, infamously flew to Syria, met with Assad, and in 2019 said Assad is not the enemy of the United States.

So Trump is inheriting a mess here, one of many.

I imagine that his team will get together and start talking about this and weigh some interests like concern about abandoning the troops, concern about a resurgent ISIS, the desire to deter Iran and Russia from solidifying their hold in Syria to the extent they need to, I guess, and then just the desire Trump clearly has to not have U.S.

troops all around the world.

Am I missing anything?

And where do you think they're going to shake out on this thing?

What do you think?

What do they do?

Those clips are really instructive about how much uncertainty there is about which Trump shows up.

Because, yeah, his instinct is what, sand and death, and who cares?

There's not natural resources there.

There's not wealth there.

It's really telling.

Yeah, he doesn't care.

Ten words.

Yeah.

Says it all.

And yet, you know, he has these people around him that see it in this geopolitical sense.

And Israel's at war with Hezbollah.

And so maybe there's kind of a pro-Israel push to, I don't know, make this a bigger L for Hezbollah and Assad in Iran.

I'm watching two things, because I'm sure you get into some of the details of all these groups and how complicated and alphabet sup it is in Syria.

The first thing is World War Watch, this is what we've been talking about in the sense that this is happening because of the intersection of Syria with the two wars.

So because Russia is more tied down in Ukraine and because Hezbollah has taken a huge hit in the Israel war, now we see fighting pop up in Syria that is related to that.

And when you start to see the blending of these crises and conflicts, I just think that's concerning.

It just shows you how much this kind of state of active war and conflict can move around the map.

And the second piece, you know, Arab Spring 2.0 watch may be something we have to watch, which is, you know, we've talked about Jordan's stability is tenuous now and could get worse if Palestinians are displaced there.

Egypt, very brittle with a military kleptocracy, dictatorship that is deeply unpopular.

Now we see this kind of return of the movement against Assad in Syria.

I think the Trump people are going to be managing a lot more instability in the Middle East than even what we've been dealing with to date.

And you're right, they're going to be deeply unpredictable in how they do that, which is also probably creating some of this sense of now is the time to move.

There's this transition in the U.S.

People's attention is elsewhere.

I think we could see a lot of things popping up in the Middle East in the coming years.

Where I thought you were going to go in your World War Watch is Northwest Syria is a place where you've seen Turkey fight directly with the Russians.

You've got a NATO member going after the Russians.

Good addition, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And also at the same time, there's complexity where the U.S.

is closely allied with the Kurds, but the Turks hate them because they think that they're worried about their own Kurdish population trying to break off and start an independence movement or be successful in an independence movement and have been attacking them.

Yeah.

No, just two quick things on the Turkey point.

I mean, one is that as NATO becomes less important because Trump doesn't care about it, Turkey is likely to start being a more independent actor militarily and strategically.

And this, I think, reflects that because they're clearly providing support to some of these guys who came from Idlib province down into Aleppo.

And the other piece is that Kurdish one, which is that, you know, the Kurds are the Americans' preferred partners, but that is not who the Turks want to win any civil war in Syria.

They see that as an existential threat.

If the Kurds have kind of some state or mini-state in Syria, they see that as a platform for Kurds inside of Turkey to

potentially attack the Turkish state.

And so that kind of clash could be coming between the kind of Sunni Arabs that are backed by the Turks and the Kurds that the United States has supported.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And then who knows what, you know, if Qatar or other Gulf

leaders are funneling money in there,

it's going to be a mess.

I remember the first time it wasn't great.

No.

Okay.

Well, at least I got a great team coming in to handle it.

Yeah.

The newest member is a guy named Cash Patel.

You know, I think we've been constantly, I think, week by week, trying to divine what the kind of personnel, national security selections tell us about Trump's priorities in the second term.

And I think it's fair to say the selection of Cash Patel to be the FBI director tells us it's pure vengeance.

Yes.

Destroying your enemies.

That's what we're going to do here.

So Trump's last pick to be FBI director was Christopher Wray.

He has three years left left on his 10-year term.

Those long terms are supposed to insulate the FBI director from politics, but that is, again, the opposite of what Trump wants.

He wants them to be moved by politics.

So we're going to replace the guy, I guess.

Cash Matel's sole qualification is that he'll do whatever Trump wants.

His relevant experience in terms of his resume includes a couple of years as a congressional aide for Devin Nunes, a year or two on the national security staff, some time installed as deputy DNI director of national intelligence, and then like two months as acting chief of staff of the Pentagon.

But again, he will say or do anything for Trump.

Remember, Cash Patel is the guy who claimed Trump had declassified all these documents that he then took to Mar-a-Lago, even though that claim was absurd on its face and there was no evidence of it.

Cash Patel's own former colleagues say his primary focus was getting FaceTime with Trump and kind of feeding his paranoia about the deep state.

Patel's former boss at the NSC, this guy named Charles Cooperman, said Patel is, quote, absolutely unqualified for this job.

He's untrustworthy, and he called the selection a disgrace.

Cash tries to portray himself as a reformer of institutions or law enforcement or the intelligence world.

Ben here he is on a podcast called The Sean Ryan Show talking about what he'd do if he got the FBI job.

We need to decrease what I call government creep

with personnel.

The FBI's footprint has gotten so freaking big.

And the biggest problem the FBI has had has come out of its Intel shops.

I'd break that component out of it.

I'd shut down the FBI Hoover building on day one and reopening the next day as a Museum of the Deep State.

And I take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals.

Go be cops.

You're cops.

Go be cops.

Go chase down murderers and rapists and drug dealers and violent offenders.

What do you need 7,000 people there for?

Same thing with DOJ.

What are all these people doing here?

It sounds like he's sincerely asking.

Yeah.

Do your reform agenda as you take a bunch of people from one building and send them to other buildings?

You don't change their mission?

What do you think the Museum of the Deep State would look like?

I don't know.

It might be a good time.

I'd love to check it out.

Like

a John Brennan room or something?

This is the funny thing.

Cash Patel's idea of the deep state is like a bunch of random Obama employees, some people that worked for Trump that turned on Trump that Cash Patel now doesn't like, like John Bolton, Bill Barr.

What's her name?

Cassidy Hutchinson.

Cassidy Hutchinson.

It's just very random, but I don't know.

Look,

there's so many things you could say about this.

I mean, just to make a few points, the degree of his unqualification cannot possibly be overstated.

I mean, sure, he can stay on his resumes at the NSC for a couple of years, but he was there just like funneling paper to Trump.

He wasn't actually like managing the interagency process.

This guy has no qualifications to do this job.

And Trump knows that.

I mean, so this isn't a case where like Trump is aware of that and he likes him.

It's not even like a hexeth hexeth thing where Trump probably didn't even know the full story.

Trump knows exactly who Cash Patel is.

That's why he chose him.

Exactly.

We'll get to the prosecuting opponents, but it's in part he wants someone who's totally incompetent.

He has no respect for the FBI.

He doesn't want it to function well.

He wants it to be riven with internal disputes.

He wants an employee workforce that's up in arms because they're run by a guy who's trying to fire them or kick them out of their offices.

So it just shows that he wants to be a chaos agent in these agencies he doesn't like, like the FBI.

That should concern people.

I mean, the FBI is the

preeminent law enforcement agency.

It's supposed to be going after drug cartels,

gun running,

child sex trafficking,

Wall Street corruption and malfeasance, political corruption.

So all those missions are going to suffer badly if cash potentials are there.

I'm old enough to remember when we used to worry about things like terrorist attacks, and the FBI was supposed to prevent those.

And that's why you had people like Bob Bob Mueller, remember him, and

unfortunately, Jim Comey, selected by Obama, which leads me to the last point, which is

you really don't normally have the FBI director, even more so than the Attorney General, have any connection to the sitting president.

Bush didn't have a connection to Mueller.

Obama didn't have a connection to Comey.

The whole idea is to have this independence so that the president of the United States is not like reaching to pull a lever to control the FBI.

The reason for that is in part, that's what police states do.

That's why they're called police states, right?

Because they're police agencies that police the leaders' opponents, but also because of the geography abuses of wiretapping and running smear campaigns against Martin Luther King or doing whatever Nixon wanted done for dirty work.

So this is incredibly dangerous to just have just the idea that Trump would install someone to begin with who's a loyalist is scary.

To install this guy is extra scary because it shows how much he intends to use this as a tool of his own interest and I think that as much as people might you know in this kind of reconsideration of everything mood that we're all in including me could scoff at like well what's the big deal if there's a few annoying investigations for you know a handful of the people on that list I don't know it it'll just once you live in a country where there's a normalization of the pointless prosecution of the previous you know you previous government, I don't know that we know what that feels like.

I don't think that's going to feel good if we start seeing totally random and extraneous investigations and prosecutions launched at a whole range of former Biden and Obama officials or reporters that they don't like.

Yeah, and listen, like the Trump kind of origin story and anger at this, I guess it goes back to Jim Comey briefing him on the steele dossier and then the Mueller probe, which, by the way, way, his DOJ

put in place, right?

They named the special prosecutor to look into all this.

But then he's clearly really, really mad about the classified documents case and all the prosecutions of him after he left the White House.

We don't need to belabor kind of the validity of all of those, but their response to that anger is to be like, okay, now we're going to do it to you.

They're not trying to clean up the system.

They just want to put someone in place at the FBI that's going to go after all the perceived enemies on the Democratic side.

So that's not a good way to run a railroad.

Is that a reform agenda?

Yeah, I've always found the strange thing about this to be the fact that we've talked about this.

FBI always seemed to me to be a pretty right-wing organization.

I mean, it's cops, right?

I mean,

it's not exactly the progressive side of the house.

But that shows you, too, that this is not ideological.

It's not even like a right-left thing.

This is a, this needs to be a pure instrument of my will to go after my opponents.

But again, like, I don't think we're also considering what, if the FBI stops doing all the other things it's supposed to be doing or is deprioritized from doing those things or is firing or driving out the most competent people.

I mean, what if the most competent people in preventing, you know, drug trafficking or corporate fraud all- Cybersecurity.

With cybersecurity at a time of maximum...

I mean, actually, you know, espionage, foreign espionage.

Not to sound like I'm doing an MSNBC hit here, but like if I'm a foreign cyber adversary, I'm like looking at the cash patel thing, I mean, this is great.

Totally.

We're going to steal a lot of money.

We're going to use AI AI to scam a bunch of old people.

We're going to, you know, whatever the thing is, it's open season.

Yeah, well, while those 7,000 people at the FBI building are moving out to, I don't know, the Oklahoma field office, we're going to do some shit.

Also, Cash Patel's, his origin story is just this weird series of grievances.

Like, there's this anecdote, I think it was in the Atlantic story, where he had to fly from out of the country to a case in Texas.

He didn't have a tie with him, so he didn't wear one into the thing.

The judge yelled at him.

He's like so mad about that.

He can't let it go.

He also claims that he was leading the Benghazi prosecution at Maine Justice

of the prosecution of the Benghazi terrorists.

That was not true.

He was like on the team.

I think he was coordinating warrants and indictments and other sort of like paperwork.

But he was mad that he thought the DOJ

went soft on the Benghazi attackers and didn't indict enough people because they only indicted one.

They prosecuted one.

Well, they prosecuted one because I think they only managed to capture one.

Maybe later they captured a second guy and they brought charges against him.

But it's just like this weird series of grievances and anger and paranoia that he clearly feeds to Trump.

You can just tell that like Cash Matel is where a lot of Trump's

insanity about the deep state comes from.

Yeah, I mean, two things that I'll regret saying if he becomes the FBI director.

The first being that

he, and actually, as much as that's a joke, like it sucks that we have to

have a joke in the United States.

But

he is

driven by a grievance that is not

what is so dangerous about him, and you kind of get the same sense of Stephen Miller, although Stephen Miller is a little more ideological.

It's a personal grievance.

This isn't even like someone who is a right-winger or a left-winger who really wants to get in there and shake things up.

There are these weird personal dimensions to what his worldview is that are alarming.

Like people like that having power is kind of scary because they're not even trying to use it to change things to be a certain ideological way.

They're using that to like punish people that were mean to me.

Yeah.

And the other thing is that there's a casual dishonesty.

Like, if you, if you, if you listen to some of the reports of the people who've worked with him, they say, I mean, you covered well on PSA that the lie he told about getting approval for the raid, Navy SEAL raid in Nigeria.

But, but it's equally concerning in some ways, you hear from some of the former colleagues he had that he's just totally, casually dishonest.

He apparently tells people he gave the order to take out Baghdadi.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He'll just tell these lies

that don't suggest someone who's dealing with like a full deck.

Now, again, like that person in charge of the law enforcement and domestic intelligence capacity of the United States is that that's one to be concerned about.

Not a good combo.

Another one to be concerned about is Pete Hexeth.

Easy transitions.

So Pete Hexeth, the Fox News weekend anchor that was selected by Trump to be a Secretary of Defense, Jane Jane Mayer at the New Yorker, a sort of heavy-hitter investigative journalist, has a long report out this week on Hexeth's tenure as president of these right-wing, billionaire-funded kind of AstroTurf organizations on behalf of veterans that, like, you know, they advocated for continuing the war in Iraq or whatever.

They were called Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America.

The story is worth reading in full, but here's just like a couple of highlights.

One, Hexeth was reportedly drunk all the time, all the time, like blacked out, carried out of events, absolutely shit face.

One time he was so drunk, he was chanting, kill all Muslims at a bar.

That's excellent messaging for a Secretary of Defense.

Genocidal wound.

Yeah, that's good.

He also completely mismanaged these organizations financially and professionally, despite them being tiny.

So we're talking five to ten people with five to ten million dollar budgets.

Again, this guy is being asked to run the Pentagon with nearly three million employees and an $800 billion budget.

The New York Times also published a blistering email that Pete Hegset's own mother sent to him about his mistreatment of women, especially his ex-wife.

And we have also talked before about the sexual assault allegations against Hexeth from not long ago, from 2017.

So, Ben, I mean, again, given the Pentagon's very high-profile problems with preventing sexual assault in the military,

given some of the pretty serious disciplinary problems we've seen, especially in the special forces community, and remember that Hexeth is someone who lobbied Trump to

let war criminals off, to pardon war criminals.

It really seems that Pete Hegzeth is not just lacking qualifications for the job.

In many ways, he's kind of the worst possible leader when it comes to his character.

Yeah.

Yeah, the Jane Mayer piece is worth reading.

First of all, she's such an OG.

I feel like whenever, you know, like Trump gets elected or it's like this and Bush, all of a sudden you remember that Jane Mayer is there and you're really grateful that she's taking it.

And I have to say, the Astraturf part of this with these bullshit organizations with names like Concerned Veterans or Vets for Freedom, does remind you that the Koch brothers and people like them created people like Pete Hegseth, who became MAGA, who then cannibalized the Koch brothers.

So good job with your AstroTurf party.

Yeah, well done, guys.

But I was reading this article, Tommy, and

in a different,

I didn't feel bad for him.

It was like reading the Hunter Biden pieces.

I mean, this is a troubled guy.

You know,

this is someone who, for whatever reason, you know,

had no guardrails on his personal behavior, on his drinking, on his treatment of women, on the things he was willing to do in public.

I mean, a deeply troubled individual relatively recently.

I mean, and we don't even know that he's necessarily cleaned up his act because these reports just cover this period of time.

And the idea that this person

would be

you know, anywhere near,

this person wouldn't get hired at the Pentagon.

No way this guy could go through any kind of cursory review review that they normally do to hire personnel, background check, calling references.

Like this guy could not get hired for a mid-level desk job at the Pentagon.

And we're talking about him being the next Secretary of Defense, being at the principal's committee table, being in the nuclear chain of command.

There will be military incidents.

I mean, I used to, you know, when I was in government, you, you know, I had the yellow phone in my house and some weird crisis pops up in the other end of the world and you got to get a few people on the phone and the first first person the president asks what's going on is the Secretary of Defense, who is responsible for gathering the information and talking to the military commanders and literally giving military options to the president of the United States.

A guy that is this big of a train wreck and also an ideologue, putting him in charge.

And then the last piece, the treatment of women here, the insults to the

hundreds of thousands of women who serve in the United States military in the Pentagon.

I cannot imagine, given the horrible instances of sexual assault that were not punished because of an already clubby, patriarchal uniform code of military justice, you've got women in combat serving in dangerous places right now.

You've got women who are going to feel like maybe the

creepiest guy that is around them is going to feel empowered to get drunk and do things to them because if the sec death did it, why shouldn't I be able to do it?

This is a horrendous message to send to the women of the American military.

So this is one that

these two on the hierarchy,

you know, you're hoping the Senate Republicans, you know, have enough institutionalists to not let this go forward.

Yeah, and just compare them to some of their predecessors, like Jim Mattis and Lloyd Austin, right?

So Trump's first Secretary of Defense and Biden's Secretary of Defense.

Both of them were controversial because they were either in uniform or had been in uniform recently.

And there's supposed to be civilian control at the Secretary of Defense position.

But Lloyd austin you know commanded the forces in iraq he was uh the army vice chief of staff he ran central command i mean pete hexeth is the weekend anchor yeah at fox news i mean listen he he he served in combat he served in iraq and afghanistan he had two bronze stars like i'm not saying he hasn't uh done some bracelets know steve docey though but no but he is not there's no peter docey either all right we're gonna take a quick break but before we go if you want something a lot lighter and a lot more stupid check out my YouTube series, Liberal Tears with Brian Tyler Cohen, where we have some fun.

We rank things.

List week, we ranked Trump's cabinet picks, and also the loser of each episode has to endure some terrible punishment.

And Brian made me eat some sort of fish that was considered one of the smelliest, most disgusting things on earth.

Yeah, it's weird that I do this for a living.

So check that out.

This is where progressive influencing is going.

Yes, it is, my friends.

So check it out on the Pod Save America YouTube page.

And while you're there, subscribe to all the video versions of these great podcasts.

Plus great bonus content from hosts Ben and Alona do a lot of cool stuff on the Ponte of the World page.

We got a lot of stuff planned for that.

So look for that and look for Liberal Tears, T-I-E-R-S, on the YouTube search bar.

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All right, some other fun personnel news then, because it's nepotism week in Washington, both for the Bidens and for Trump.

So Trump picked Charles Kushner, Jared Kushner's dad, to be ambassador to France.

Plum, plum gig.

Charles Kushner once hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law so that he could secretly tape their affair and then send the tape to his sister in an attempt to intimidate her out of testifying against him in a financial fraud case.

So seems like a good guy.

Trump pardoned Charles Kushner back in 2020.

He also named Masood Boulos to be senior advisor on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs.

Boulos' son is married to Tiffany Trump.

So keep it in the family again here.

He's an important surrogate for Trump with Arab American voters during the campaign.

Became kind of a go-between between Trump and Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority.

I guess this guy got rich in the auto industry.

He's got some ties in Lebanon.

I think he ran for parliament, but no diplomatic experience.

He will be working with Trump's golf buddy, Steve Witcoff, who was named Middle East envoy last month.

So, Ben, these nominations, I think, raise a really important question, which is: if you're a golf autocrat,

who do you bribe?

Is it still Jared Kushner?

Is it Don Jr.?

Is it Eric?

Do you just buy the Trump crypto?

Do you buy the DJT stock on NASDAQ?

Like, what's the best practice now?

All of this is about these people getting as rich as they possibly can in the next four years.

And if we don't look at it that way, we're missing the actual story of what's happening.

Because again, this is what happens in other countries that are kind of corrupt kleptocracies.

And the thing is, you put these people in place, whether it's Beloos or, you know,

Charles Kushner in Paris, but the reality of this is, or this Witkoff guy, the Middle East envoy, the other Middle East envoy, I guess you got one for one set of Middle Easterners and another for another.

But the point is, yes,

if you are sitting in the Gulf or you're sitting in Turkey or you're sitting in any, in Central Asia, right?

You're sitting anywhere where you kind of control a sovereign wealth fund or you control a set of natural resources resources, or you kind of have slush funds for this purpose.

What you're doing is you're not necessarily writing checks to these people, but these people have associates.

I mean, this is the thing that's going to be, hopefully, there's going to be good investigative journalism, or if I'm in the Democratic Congress, I'm looking at this.

These people have associates who are like one degree removed from them.

The ultimate purpose is to make the Trump family and their friends as rich as possible.

And so there'll be other people where it's understood if they're going to the sovereign wealth fund of ex-Gulf country, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and they're saying, hey, like we really would like this investment in our new fund for blah, blah, blah, you know, it's going to be understood by those people that they are expected to pay there.

And this is what's going to be happening.

I mean, the thing that drives me, you know, Beloose, this could be very straightforward and transactional.

The Charles Christian thing got to meet on me because, you know, you could argue

he won't be a particularly substantive ambassador.

We don't run the relationship through this person.

In addition to just being kind of a fuck you to Macrone to have this guy coming out there to run the embassy, I've been to that embassy and that residence.

It's nice.

It's nice.

So

what they're going to be doing is they're going to have meetings in that fucking embassy, you know,

have dinners, have social parties.

You know, Jared and Ivanka will be staying at that embassy residence.

And it's a, it, the, this infrastructure of the U.S.

government, these beautiful residences, are just going to become spaces to do the shakedown, you know?

Totally.

Yeah.

And

I'm sure Jared will be the recipient of a lot of that money.

Yeah.

He's already gotten a lot of money.

They will be multi-multi-billionaires by the time this is yeah, yeah.

Uh, finally, actually, there's two more Trumps, maybe not Eric, but everybody else will be.

We'll see about that, maybe sell some of that crypto, but um, also, Trump named a former aide, I think it was chief of staff on the NSC, uh, retired Army general, Lieutenant General, Keith Kellogg, to be the special envoy for the Russia-Ukraine war.

Um, Kellogg, he's an interesting figure.

Uh, he recommended in some papers he did for like I think the America First Policy Institute that future military assistance to ukraine be conditioned on their entering into peace talks but that the u.s would continue to arm ukraine uh to strengthen its defenses and they also he recommended that to to sort of induce russia into talks that the u.s and nato should offer to put off nato membership for ukraine indefinitely in exchange for a peace deal um here's a clip of kellogg on fox a couple weeks ago talking about biden's decision to allow ukraine to use u.s missiles to hit inside russia what he has done biden through his action he's actually given President Trump more leverage.

Really?

Because now he can pull back, he can go left, he can go right, he can do something.

And I think what he did is he basically said, well, this is what I want to do.

And I'm hoping there's something to this.

I don't know, but it does give President Trump more ability to pivot from that.

Look, they should have been doing this a year ago.

But they've basically pulled back.

You do not fight,

you don't fight a war allowing other countries to have sanctuaries.

If you're going to fight a war, you fight a war.

And we've basically pulled back on letting Zelensky fight a war that he should have been fighting a long time ago.

I know the casualties were horrific.

Yeah, of course.

The advantages that he had this last summer are not there anymore.

He meeting Zelensky.

So it's an interesting clip, and it's just an interesting set of personnel because, I don't know, there's a version of this where Trump gets in.

He says, Zelensky, you're cut off.

You're not getting any more shit.

Get to the table.

And he forces him to cut a deal with Putin that's just unbelievably advantageous to Putin.

Putin decides to just take it, knowing that he'll invade the rest of the country either slowly or in a couple years.

Or there's a version of this where you actually have some more hawkish people in that administration that are going to keep funneling weapons to Ukraine.

Ukraine refuses to quit.

Putin won't come to the, like, the idea that

we're going to force Putin to the table if he doesn't want to come to the table, like he's ascended here.

He's going to do what he wants.

If he wants to give Trump a win, we'll give him a win.

If he doesn't, he won't.

But I don't know.

It just feels like it's a little more complicated than I maybe thought.

It does.

This whole Trump farm policy feels a little more complicated.

And it may be actually

not to be too cynical that what I was just talking about, the corruption angle, that's what Trump really cares about.

And this other stuff, you know, people

can kind of do their own thing and he'll get involved episodically.

I don't know.

One thing about Keith Kellogg, first of all, Tommy, you know, he took my office.

So that's what you used to sit or sits out of.

Yeah.

So just a fun fact about Keith Kellogg.

Enjoy the dead rats in the wall.

Yeah, I think he got rid of my full bar that I had.

Not Not any, well,

but

I should say that

there's another option to the one you said that Kellogg has kind of flirted with in his own comments, which is,

and first of all, it's funny in that clip how the Fox guy was surprised that he said something nice about Biden.

He's like, really?

You know, like, that's not what you were supposed to say.

But where they come in and actually go a little crazy and like let the Ukrainians do more and give them more weapons to just, you know, if they actually try the quote-unquote madman theory, you know, like the Ukrainians seem to be counting on that or want that.

The Ukrainians think Trump might come in and do some kind of shock thing where he like suddenly he's giving them a bunch of advanced missiles or something as a part of saying, okay, now let's negotiate.

And I don't know.

I just don't know.

There's a spectrum there.

I think the core point is what is probably not going to be there at all, given what Trump has said and what we know about his instincts, is kind of long-term support for Ukraine.

So the idea that next year, 2020.

Good luck with Congress.

Yeah.

And so I think

what this means is a very volatile Ukrainian war in the next six months where everybody's sorting this out.

Everybody's messaging each other.

Putin's showing his strength.

Ukrainians are showing their strength.

Trump people are probably divided and trying to figure it out.

So that's what I'd, you know, a bumpy ride into some negotiation.

Yeah.

Last thing, we sort of talked about this last week, but Trump is already acting like he's president.

So, you know, he threatened sanctions on the Canadians and Mexicans.

That led Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to make a pilgrimage down to Mar-a-Lago for a three-hour dinner where Trump reportedly joked that Canada should become the 51st state.

Funny.

Mexican President Claudia Schainbaum, she got a phone call.

And then Trump hopped on Truth Social to threaten tariffs on 100% of BRICS countries if they move away from the dollar as the world's reserve currency and create their own of some sort.

He said, quote, there's no chance that the BRICS will replace the U.S.

dollar in international trade, and any country that tries should wave goodbye to America.

End quote.

BRICS stands for Brazil, Russia, India, and China, and South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the UAE joined the group in 2024, which kind of ruins the acronym, but that's okay.

Here we are.

I guess we're just threatening tariffs on everybody now.

Last year, Putin suggested creating kind of an international payment system to get around U.S.

sanctions.

Lula Da Silva has talked about, you know, the need to limit reliance on the U.S.

dollar for trade.

It doesn't seem like there's been any progress towards that goal.

I think 58% of the world's currency reserves are still in the dollar.

And creating a new currency of some sort or system would require some political alignment from these countries that I'm not sure they currently have.

Crypto seems like an easier avenue for them to destabilize the dollar, but interesting.

Interesting to watch go after this.

The thing I find interesting is where they have made headways on sanctions evasion, as we've seen with the Russians, just finding ways around the U.S.

dollar-based financial system for certain transactions.

And this is interesting because that tweet from Trump is the perfect distillation of his foreign policies, short-term effects, and medium and long-term problems.

Because yeah, in the short-term, it sounds tough, like don't fuck with the dollar.

But actually threatening that is the single biggest incentive for these people to move away from the dollars that reserve currency.

You know, saying that you're going to weaponize tariffs to 100% because we don't like you is all the more reason for these guys to be accelerate under the table planning to do away with the dollars of reserve currency.

So they may not announce it next year because because they don't want the tariffs, but you can be damn sure that they're working on it because of what Trump said.

And that's something that has kind of not been communicated to the American voter.

Like he is creating a lot of fucking problems that are going to come due for the poor person that has to follow him.

Yeah.

Let's do a few more things here.

So

check in on Gaza, where unfortunately the news is quite grim.

UNRWA, the organization that provides aid to Palestinians, has stopped deliveries via the biggest aid crossing, the Krim Shalom crossing, in response to basically looting of aid trucks.

This is a clip from Louise Wateridge, the UNRWA senior emergency officer, who's helping us explain what is happening.

In the last few weeks and months, we have had drivers attacked, we've had drivers injured, and on occasion, drivers have been killed, transporting this humanitarian aid from the crossing to the population.

And in addition to that, the aid is being looted.

On one occasion in November, 109 trucks trucks with World Food Programme on UNRWA, over 90% of the aid was looted.

Under international humanitarian law, the Israeli authorities are responsible for the safe passage of aid to reach the intended population.

And we're simply not seeing this.

Last night, our partners, the World Food Programme, were able to use another crossing in the south.

This is the Gate 96 crossing, but it's not as big as as the Karim Shalom, Kerab Assalam crossing.

They were able to get some flour through.

UNRWA spent the day distributing this flour.

We reached around 9,000 families.

This is 9,000 families in a population of 1.9 million people.

CNN says the number of food trucks entering Gaza in November of 2024 was just 36% of the monthly average since November of 2023.

So it's way, way, way, way down.

Yeah, and in terms of the looting of these trucks, the Washington Post had a big piece last week or two weeks ago about the gangs that were doing this.

It doesn't sound like it's Hamas.

It's mostly criminal gangs that are looking for cigarettes getting smuggled into Gaza, which are being sold at astronomical markups.

I think they said reported $1,000 for like a pack.

It's crazy numbers.

But so that's one huge problem for people in Gaza in terms of the famine.

And then just in terms of like the entirety of the war and sentiment around it, Ben, the former Israeli defense minister, Moshe Yelan, gave a series of interviews over the weekend where he accused the Netanyahu government of ethnic cleansing and war crimes, specifically in northern Gaza.

Yelan was defense minister from 2013 to 2016, a time which included another conflict in Gaza.

Before that, he was the IDF chief of staff.

He also said that Israel is becoming a, quote, corrupt and lepros, fascistic, messianic state.

That's...

Pretty direct.

Pretty direct criticism there.

Yeah, I think we can see what's happening before our eyes, which, you know, it does look like ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza.

And you see these reports of the Israelis building structures that seem like bases in areas of Gaza where they've destroyed a lot of buildings.

Nothing that we're seeing suggests any interest in...

you know, quote-unquote, a ceasefire for hostages deal.

Well, we've talked about the disingenuous nature of BB trying to act like there's some negotiation when this is what they're actually doing in Gaza.

And, you know, they see maximum opportunity here if you're on the Israeli right with Trump coming in to inflict maximum punishment.

One additional point I make, Tommy, that I've been thinking about is that

we still don't have foreign journalists in Gaza.

I don't, you know, have you noticed not to be ghoulish that the death count in Gaza has been 40,000 for like six months?

Yeah, it's been stuck at 43 for a while.

And I wondered if that was because of a reduced sort of rate of operations or if just numbers are not getting talented.

I think they're not getting talented.

And this is is my point.

I think between the people that are in the rubble, between the decimation of the quote-unquote health ministry, I would be one thing the Biden people could do, and I don't know if they'll do it, is declassify their assessments of how many people have been killed in Gaza.

That's a good idea.

Because honestly, I've not heard people talk about this.

I do not believe that number is 40,000.

There have been some independent assessments that have put that number in the hundreds of thousands.

There is tons and tons of rubble there.

And if the U.S.

intelligence community has its own estimates of how many people have been killed, in part, because I don't know that, well, certainly the Israeli government's not going to want that number out there.

The Trump administration is not going to care.

I would like somebody who knows to give us an assessment because

there's some accountability and transparency here.

And I don't know that we have it at this point.

That's a good point.

And by the way, Moshe Yalon's point was he said he's hearing from like IDF commanders who are operating in the Northern Strip who are scared that they are committing or asked to be committing war crimes.

His quote was conquering annexing ethnic cleansing.

Look at northern Gaza.

I mean, he's like so crystal clear about it.

And these are, by the way, things, if you said on Twitter, you know, you'd have someone from the ADL telling you you're an anti-Semite.

It's just these are, this guy was the IDF chief of staff saying this.

Yeah.

I don't know how much more.

I don't know what other credential you guys need.

Also, last week we talked about this ceasefire between the Israeli forces and Hezbollah and Lebanon.

So far, the ceasefire is holding in that no one has walked away from it, but there are all these reports that mortars are being lobbed over the border all day.

It's weird.

It's like there is fighting.

It's a much reduced intensity, I think, but it's still happening.

Yeah, there's not bombs being dropped on Beirut, but there's just a lot going on at that point.

So last week, Romania had a shocking presidential election where an obscure far-right candidate named Colleen Georgescu came out of nowhere to get the most votes.

And we didn't talk about it.

And we didn't fucking talk about it.

So that presidential race will go to a runoff on December 8th.

So we're tracking that one.

And then this past Sunday, Romania held parliamentary elections where three far-right pro-Russia parties did extremely well, which means it's not clear how Romania will form a government.

And there's some very clear anti-Western, anti-NATO, pro-Russia sentiment on the rise.

And then across the Black Sea, in Georgia, there have been major protests after Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobokidze announced that Georgia would suspend its efforts to get into the European Union until the end of 2028.

This is a particularly big deal for the Georgian people because the aspiration of Georgia joining the EU is literally in their constitution.

It's enshrined in the constitution.

The Georgian Dream Party, the pro-Russia party, has governed Georgia since 2012.

They have tried to push the country away from the West and the EU and closer to Russia.

Georgian Dream claimed victory in last month's elections, but the opposition and a bunch of election observers say that there was fraud and irregularities, and the current parliament is is illegitimate because of that fraud and irregularities.

So, Ben, you know, Romania is already part of the EU.

They're already part of NATO.

Many Georgians would like to be.

But it was interesting to see these two significant inflection points in both countries where the leaders are going to decide soon whether to pursue closer ties with Europe or Russia.

Yeah, I mean, if Romania goes the way of this far-right movement and this particularly odious far-right leader, then you add that to the list with Slovakia and Hungary, these countries inside the NATO tent and inside the EU tent

who are profoundly potentially pro-Russian or far-right.

It's going to make EU decision-making more complicated.

It's obviously going to complicate NATO decision-making.

It'll be used by Russia as a wedge.

There's risks of conflict.

in the Balkans too, Serbia and Kosovo.

I don't have high hopes for

Rick Rinnell to parachute into that situation and solve it.

So instability and kind of dysfunction in parts of Europe is something we could be looking at.

And Georgia is one of these situations where it just feels like the deck is pretty stacked against these people.

They're clearly representing a majority of Georgians.

The EU found that that was a fraudulent election.

They are showing up in the streets in huge numbers.

And

they got Trump coming in.

Is he really going to get their back?

Putin clearly would like Georgia to become more like Belarus than Ukraine.

So Georgia is this fault line where I worry about

crackdowns on protests and kind of a forced integration of Georgia, not fully into Russia, but kind of in the Russian side of things against the will of the people.

Yeah.

And then the final election we were watching was in Ireland, where there was a rare case of incumbents not being thrown out of power.

So you have two centrist parties in Ireland that beat out the left-wing Irish nationalist Sinn Féin party.

The centrists will now have to form a coalition by bringing in some other party, but they've refused to work with Sinn Féin because of their past ties to the IRA.

I am getting my Irish cultural fix these days, Ben, by watching Say Nothing on Hulu, which is Patrick Radenke's book adapted into a TV show.

Also, my friend Jim Rooney has a new book out called A Different Way to Win that's all about Dan Rooney, who was the legendary owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers and then became Obama's U.S.

ambassador to Ireland.

So, two shameless plugs in there in this IRA.

Very well-integrated plugs.

The Rooney's are wonderful people.

The best people.

Yeah, I mean, it was interesting because there was dissatisfaction with those incumbent parties.

Sinn Féin did well.

You know,

if it was a straight plurality, they could win, but the two centrist parties together still have

an overwhelming capacity to form a government.

I mean, when you looked under the hood there, what you found was people are pissed about the cost of living.

People are pissed about the cost of housing.

But

they have enough faith in like a deal that has generally worked pretty well for Ireland of these two parties running the show that's delivered a lot of prosperity.

So, you know,

I'm always pulling for Ireland.

I mean, that's my bottom line.

Probably, yeah, I'm pro whatever the Irish want to do.

It's interesting to watch Sinn Féin become increasingly, incrementally a more mainstream party in Ireland and in Northern Ireland, obviously.

So in some ways, I think that's healthy.

You know, it just shows a kind of we're moving past the definition of all Irish politics being around the conflict.

Because Sinn Féin doesn't do well because of the history.

They do well because they're railing about the price of housing.

And there's something kind of normal and nice about that.

The best part about, well, everything is great about Say Nothing, the series.

It's just a quick.

And Ireland.

I mean, everything's great about that.

And Great Ireland.

But every episode ends with a disclaimer that says Jerry Adams has always denied being a member of the IRA or participating in any IRA-related violence.

Member of parliament for Sinn Féin, yeah.

I guess I don't, just for legal reasons, I guess they have to do it.

It's pretty incredible.

Jerry must have threatened some litigation.

Yeah, to keep that lie going.

It's amazing.

Anyway, congrats.

It's a great book, man.

Patrick is just one of the best writers I've ever.

I read, he had a long piece about the Russian underground and all the oligarch and Russian money in there and this kid who got swirled up in it and it led to his death.

It was a New Yorker piece six months ago, which I read the other night.

It was just incredible.

I have to say, this should be an era, this next few years, of just epic long-form magazine journalism because there's so many investigative pieces to be written and dark underworlds to explore.

That's what I like about he does.

He kind of finds the weak spot in these

undergrounds.

Yeah.

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

When we come back, you're going to hear my interview with Natasha Hall.

She is a Syria expert at CSIS.

We're going to talk about what happened in Syria over the last week, how these opposition groups took so much territory, who was doing the fighting, and what could happen next if the U.S.

or other outside parties get involved.

So stick around for that.

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My guest today is Natasha Hall.

She's a senior fellow in the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Great to see you.

Thank you for joining.

Thanks so much for having me.

So it's been a remarkable week in Syria.

Can we just start with the basics?

Can you just tell everybody what happened over the last week or so?

And how were these rebel factions able to retake so much territory from the Assad regime in just a couple of days?

Yeah, it's been truly shocking, even for me.

I've been covering this for 15 years.

We haven't seen a major shift in front lines in Syria in four years.

And these rebel forces were essentially able to take much of the western Aleppo countryside in Aleppo City, which is the second largest city in Syria within a couple of days.

So quite stunning to watch Assad security forces just kind of melt away.

We know that they've been planning this for months and they have significantly increased their capabilities along the way as well because they've taken some air defense systems, man pads,

which you might know from your Obama days that the

the rebels had been asking for for some time, but they found some cachets.

But initially, I think what happened was they had sleeper cells within Aleppo City.

They were able to infiltrate sort of a highly secure meeting within Aleppo, and that just created a lot of confusion amongst pro-regime forces initially.

But it was a bloodless...

They just walked into Aleppo City, it seemed like.

And so it was quite shocking.

They've also moved south

in recent days down the M5 highway, which links Aleppo and Damascus.

So they're about to enter Hamas city,

which is also extremely significant because these were very, very hard-fought victories for pro-regime forces, like years of siege, bombardment, chemical weapons to do what rebel forces have done over the course of our long Thanksgiving weekend.

Yeah, and so you said they found some, they found basically the lightweight kind of shoulder-fired missiles.

Does that mean that they were able to use those to take out, what, regime, helicopters or something that sort of enabled this rapid movement?

Is that what you're saying?

No, I mean, honestly, I think the thing that

allowed for this movement, because these are more recent gains, right?

Was the fact that the Assad regime is just sort of a husk of its former self.

And Iran and Hezbollah have been significantly weakened in recent months because of Israeli attacks, just the complete decapitation of Hezbollah leadership and decimated rank and file.

And Israel continues to hit arms shipments in Lebanon and Syria for Hezbollah.

So

Russia has also sort of drawn down some of its forces.

It's been busy in Ukraine.

So I think the rebels took this moment.

I think Turkey probably greenlighted some kind of offensive to sort of push Assed in the direction of greater reconciliation

because he remains pretty intransigent towards any compromise.

But all of those forces just came together to

create this perfect storm that allowed rebels to make these, I mean, really unprecedented, shocking advances.

So let's talk a bit about the players involved here, starting with an organization called HTS.

Can you tell us about them a little bit?

Yeah, sure.

Hayat Akhir Rashem is

back in the day, was Jibat al-Nusra, essentially, which is an offshoot of al-Qaeda.

Now, they have renounced their affiliation to al-Qaeda a long time ago, and in recent years, they have been trying to put on a more moderate stance to the Western press.

They are designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey and the United States.

And so they haven't gotten off of those lists.

because they are sort of the de facto government in Idlib in northwestern Syria,

you know, Turkey and others have to deal with them.

They're also the most powerful and disciplined, I would say, armed group in the Northwest at this juncture.

And they definitely sort of led this initial offensive into Aleppo.

The other sort of umbrella group is the Syrian National Army,

and they are basically propped up by Turkey, by Ankara.

But they were initially a hodgepodge of just all of the armed groups that have been fighting Assed for the past 13 years.

And, you know, they even come from various parts of Syria, but they've been displaced to this northern sort of corner of

Syria.

But they have come in sort of at

the later hour to fight in sort of northern Aleppo areas.

And so

basically somewhat, I would say, on behalf of Turkey.

I mean, I think you wrote about this.

I mean, one of the leader of HTS was once the commander of al-Nusra.

You often hear that, you know, they rebranded to HTS, they renounced al-Qaeda, et cetera.

But what does that mean to rebrand al-Nusra?

Is this lip service?

Do you think this is real?

I mean, how should we read this?

Yeah, I mean, that's a good question, and that's what I've been sort of studying in depth for the past few years.

So, I would say that we just look at what is going on in Aleppo City right now.

I mean, Aleppo City is a very heterogeneous city.

There are Christians, there are even pro-regime, I would say, families or those with links to the regime.

And, you know, these forces, which are being called jihadist forces in the media, have gone around to reassure minorities that they will not be harmed.

And I have to say that even people that I speak to on a regular basis in Idlib have been really surprised by sort of this responsible behavior amongst HTS.

I think they've learned quite a bit in the past few years.

Now, whether or not that is sustained, I don't know,

but they have definitely made a significant effort to show minorities in particular that they will not harm them.

Without a doubt, though, they have ruled with an iron fist in Idlib in the past and imprisoned and tortured people and

all of that as well.

Aaron Powell, and then I said that HTS claims to have about 30,000 fighters.

I think the Syrian National Army is estimated to have about 40,000 fighters, but they're a little more disparate and, as you mentioned at the top, sort of controlled by Turkey in a lot of ways.

Is that accurate?

Yeah, that's probably about accurate.

I mean, we don't really know.

And to be honest, with the SNA in particular,

their salary is really quite pathetic from Turkey.

So,

you know, whether or not all of those fighters are full-time is a totally different, I think,

question to ask.

So I think a lot of these people are kind of moonlighting as fighters as part of their

part-time job.

So it's difficult to kind of parse exactly what the manpower is.

Got it.

I think, I mean, part of what probably surprised a lot of people, at least, you know, non-experts, not like yourself, was that there was an assumption that the Syrian civil war was frozen, if not won, by Assad.

You know, we had heard about the United Arab Emirates, for example, leading the charge to bring Assad back into the fold.

Syria was reinstated into the Arab League last year.

Basically, he'd been treated like a winner.

And I'm wondering how much of the surprise about this last week was because that view was just fundamentally wrong versus what you mentioned earlier, which is over the last year or so, all these Assad allies like Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia have been distracted by other conflicts.

Well, I don't think the answer to those two questions are sort of mutually exclusive, right?

I think that if we've learned anything from the past year, it's that frozen conflicts aren't really frozen.

They're waiting for a right moment to erupt again.

And

I would say, you know, none of the conflicts, whether it's, you know, Gaza, whether it's Syria, Yemen, et cetera, if the drivers drivers of conflict remain, the conflict's not over.

It's just waiting for the next moment, the next cycle of violence.

I would say, on behalf of those that are claiming victory for Assad, I think that was kind of wishful thinking on behalf of those that wanted to not think about the Syrian conflict anymore, to be frank.

Even those who have historically supported the opposition in the early years,

they have also invested heavily in Assad's survival.

And so I think the fact that a group like HTS is making such advances is, in their minds, not good for anyone.

I would have a different take, but I think that that's sort of the answer to your question.

I mean, AssED did not control 30% of the territory and 70% of agricultural resources and energy resources in the country.

Billions of dollars to reconstruct.

you know, even government-controlled areas.

The currency has fallen in value tremendously.

It's hard to say that that's a victory, but I think a lot of people just want to move on.

Yeah, I mean, a victory in the sense that he remained in control.

And I imagine he, yeah, he survived.

And I think, you know, what is it, 12%, 13% of the country is Alawite.

So there is this sort of sectarian

sense of, you know, an all-or-nothing conflict for them.

It's existential for them.

If they lost, I think the narrative was that these Sunni extremist groups were going to come in and do something, you know, commit atrocities, right?

Well, I mean, the regime for the entirety of its existence, all the way to Hafiz al-Assad, so we're talking about half a century here, has fed that sectarianism.

I mean, I can tell you that I know Aluis that live in Idlib under HTS control peacefully

and they are not harassed.

So

this is a narrative that has unfortunately been pushed upon people, and it's worked.

It's worked rather well because the vast majority of Aloui communities and Christian communities, as you sort of alluded to,

have ended up supporting the regime for the fear that they would be exterminated essentially.

Aaron Powell, yeah.

In 2016, you know, you mentioned how Russia officially rode to the rescue and started hitting targets on behalf of Assad and really tilted the balance of the conflict militarily.

It sounds like they're ramping things back up.

There were some comments out of Hezbollah leadership or Iranian leadership about the need to support Assad.

What are you seeing in terms of the Assad allies potentially coming to his rescue or whether they can at this point?

Yeah,

that's a great question.

I think Iran and Russia cannot lose the Assad regime.

I mean, Russia has invested quite heavily in this war

reputationally and blood and treasure.

Well, not as much blood and treasure, actually.

It was a pretty cheap intervention as far as interventions go.

But it is their first warm water port.

And they've used Syria essentially as a launching pad into Africa, into the Mediterranean.

It has, you know, its first war, its first intervention, you know, beyond its near abroad was pretty significant.

to really establish Russia as a significant power in the Middle East, which had been traditionally

thought to be the United States' domain.

So they will definitely come sort of to the rescue typically through air power, and that's what we've seen, unfortunately, in Idlib, and we've seen several hospitals destroyed in the last couple of days.

So sort of the old toolbox being used.

But it was interesting because in the initial days, the comments from Russia were quite mixed, actually.

And

you know, actually sort of just telling the Assad regime, you need to deal with this, right?

I think there's a bit of a frustration on the part of Russia that it's been trying to get the Assad regime to reconcile with Turkey or with anyone for that matter, and that has not happened.

And then to just watch their military just fall apart like this has been, I'm sure, frustrating for the Kremlin.

On the Iranian side, it's more complicated, as you might know,

because Hezbollah has been so dramatically weakened in the past few months.

So it's quite difficult for them to come to the the rescue.

Iran is just calling up everyone they can in terms of militia groups to send them over.

Syria, from what I've heard and reports, is also trying to forcibly conscript those who have not been conscripted before, even and just kind of round people up.

So they are coming to the rescue.

The question is, how effective will those forces be compared to the forces that took down Aleppo in 2016?

And that kind of remains to be seen.

But what I would say is that, unfortunately, I think time is on their side.

What they've done in the past,

because they have been weak in the past too, is come to a ceasefire agreement and just wait it out, regroup, recuperate, and then mount a counterattack.

Right, right.

I think I read a piece you wrote where you had argued that the U.S.

should work with Turkey to protect some of these opposition-controlled areas from Syrian attacks.

Can you just describe for listeners what the current U.S.

military presence in Syria and, I guess, neighboring Jordan is like and what they're doing on that counter-ISIS mission?

And then are you recommending that the U.S.

and Turkey go into direct combat with Assad and potentially, I guess, allies like Iran and Russia if it comes to it?

Yeah, so I mean, the U.S.

presence is fairly limited, but robust, influential, I would say.

There's just a few hundred troops in the northeast supporting Syrian Democratic forces.

These are sort of the Kurdish-dominated forces in the Northeast.

And then along the sort of the

border with Iraq in the east.

And this is,

I mean, they wouldn't say this, but this is primarily to sort of stem the flow of Iranian influence sort of

across Syria.

And also there's significant ISIS presence in these areas still and cells throughout.

So there's a number of different reasons for the few hundred troops that are still there to be there.

But the White House has been fairly clear in its recent statements that it has nothing to do with this offensive,

that it is there to fight terrorism, etc., etc.

So

their role is fairly limited, but they are preventing, I think,

more bloodshed.

There's also prisons in the Northeast holding a great deal of ISIS fighters that remain there in limbo.

So if the regime took over those prisons, I think we'd probably be in trouble.

And so,

that's the presence in Syria.

And I think, aside from that, the United States has tried to be quite hands-off when it comes to Syria, except for sanctions and humanitarian aid.

But what I was suggesting is that one of the tools in the toolbox for Assad and Russia is to bombard these areas into submission, to starve them into submission, besiege them.

And so, it's very important for the U.S.

to work with Turkey to maintain supply routes,

make sure they remain open to Aleppo City and all these areas that are retaken.

And I would say to work with Turkey in order to stop the bombardment if it continues.

So that doesn't mean the U.S.

going to war necessarily with Russia, but Turkey has gone toe-to-toe

with

Russia and Syria in the past

to basically stop an offensive in 2020, for example.

So I think there are other ways to do it.

It doesn't have to be sort of all or nothing.

Yeah.

And this is a bit of a complicated piece of business with Turkey, right?

Because where we could work with them to defend

the opposition, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, they also

really don't like the Kurdish forces that we work with on counter-ISIS.

So would that create complexity here?

Again, I don't think this is an all-or-nothing scenario.

Turkey wants to get things out of this too.

So I think there's a way to get a compromise out out of everybody.

It also doesn't want bombardment like we've seen in Idlib because it's already dealing with the largest refugee population in the world.

It doesn't want more people sort of streaming across borders and things like that.

And they've also invested quite heavily in these areas, I should mention as well.

I mean, most of them use the Turkish lira.

It's to that extent.

So I think there's a way to make everybody sort of in a better position than before.

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.

And

I'm I'm not sort of throwing cold water on your proposal specifically, just sort of providing the context for the listener about why this area is so unbelievably complicated, lots of different competing factions.

Last question for you.

I mean, you talked about, I mean, life has just been hell for the Syrian people for well over a decade now.

Hundreds of thousands have died, millions have been displaced.

There's refugees in neighboring countries or inter

or displaced from their homes, at least, IDPs.

What do you think is the best outcome for them here?

Yeah,

especially for the 4 million people in the Northwest that have been displaced sometimes over a dozen times.

I think that this seems like a crisis, but I do think you can turn a crisis into an opportunity.

The regime is on its back foot for the first time in a very long time.

And this could be the opportunity to get concessions.

out of the regime that suit U.S.

interests and the Syrian people.

I think that's what Turkey is trying to do, although it has ulterior motives, as you alluded to.

And,

you know,

if this moment goes away, that window I don't think is going to open again anytime soon.

And so I think the U.S., although it's a lame-duck presidency right now, if they can insert themselves in a way

that

are in the interests of a more sustainable peace, that address some of the drivers of conflict and displacement,

we could get to potentially a more stable region

and one that is more sustainably stable as well.

So I think that there is an opportunity there.

Whether or not it's taken,

I don't know.

Yeah, big open question and a big question about what the Trump team would do.

Natasha Hall, thank you so much for joining the show and providing some unbelievably helpful context to a complicated and fast-moving set of events.

So thank you again.

Thanks so much for having me.

Thank you again, Natasha, for doing the show.

And that's all I got.

Thanks for everybody listening.

I mean, God knows what's going to happen between now and next week.

Man.

It could be an entirely new slate of topics.

Some good news would be cool.

Good news would be good.

What do we got?

We got a German election coming up.

I'm not

prepared to go to the next stage.

That's going to be bad news.

The French government looks like it's about to collapse.

Yeah, we'll probably have to talk about that.

It'd be cool.

I mean, Maureen Le Pen might go to jail and get kicked out of politics for five years.

Well, there's that.

That could be cool.

I got that.

We got that going for us.

Any other stuff?

I don't know.

Christmas?

Telling my daughter about Santa has been fun.

She's pretty pumped.

I think my kids are still, you know,

I think my oldest might be pretending to still believe in Santa.

Santa piled.

And the youngest is all in on it.

So we're hanging on to Santa.

That's awesome.

I wanted to just last.

Hang on to Santa for as long as you can.

It's so fun.

The elf on the shelf is a little creepy.

Yeah, the motherfuckers just staring at you.

Yeah,

there's a creepiness to the whole elf subgenre.

When you're a kid these days, you grow up with a lot of surveillance in your life.

Your parents are taking videos of you.

You got the Nanit camera in the crib.

Some people just have like nanny cams everywhere.

There's like no video evidence of me ever being a child.

Everything is.

Yeah, yeah.

And there's actually, to be blunt, barely had cable.

There's not a lot of photographic evidence either.

Thank God.

I mean, which is good.

If my parents are sitting there,

I got a storage alert on my phone the other day.

And it said that I was approaching my limit.

And then I looked at my photos and there are 30,000 photos on my iPhone.

It's like, what the fuck is that about?

That's a lot.

My parents probably have like, you know, 30 remaining photos of me.

You have to do what I did, which is I didn't, I wasn't on the cloud for a long time because I don't know.

I fundamentally don't trust it.

And I would break a phone and just it would purge photos.

Oh, that's smart.

But I'd love to have them all back.

Well, because I'd like to get rid of them because one of the things is like, you know, you know my wife, Perfectionist, like she'll take 50 pictures to get the one.

So I got yelled at for my

me too.

So I want to go through there and actually delete a bunch of these things, but you know how long that would take it'd be like a day-long project we need some ai for that yeah we do okay well uh we'll invent that between now and next week uh but thanks for listening we'll talk to you soon

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Pod Save the World is a crooked media production.

Our producer is Alona Minkowski.

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On New Year's Eve, 1969, three men snuck into Chip Yablonski's childhood home and gunned down his family while they slept.

They killed them.

They killed them all.

Chip was convinced that the president of the United Mine Workers, one of the most powerful labor unions in America, was behind the murders.

And I'm saying, hang on, you son of a bitch, because I want you to get your just desserts.

Listen to Shadow Kingdom wherever you get your podcasts.

Friends of the Pod subscribers can listen to the full season of Shadow Kingdom right now.

Join Friendsofthepod at crooked.com slash friends or subscribe through the Shadow Kingdom Apple feed.