Breaking Down Trump's Gaza Deal

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Welcome back to Pod Save the World.

I'm Tommy Vitor.

I'm Ben Rhodes.

Ben, did you notice today the birds were chirping?

Everything feels a little easier, a little spring in your step.

It's because peace has broken out everywhere.

We have nothing but peace, thanks to Mr.

Trump.

Just feel like the soft, warm embrace of autocratic peace all around us.

Yes.

Quiet, impressive peace.

Quiet, enforced peace.

At the point of a gun.

Yeah, yeah.

And a lot of money.

Yes.

And a lot of surveillance technology.

We're obviously kidding.

We are.

We're going to spend a lot of time today digging into Trump's Gaza ceasefire deal and and the hostage release deal and just try to unpack it.

We're going to tell you guys what was in the deal, how the implementation is going so far.

We'll get into some of Trump's confusing and contradictory comments about what happens to Hamas now and what was accomplished at this big summit of world leaders in Egypt.

We will try to assess who deserves credit for what.

the backstory of how the deal came together, what work still has to get done, what comes next for BibiNet and Yahoo, and a lot more.

And then we're also going to highlight some new reporting about the much-discussed article by the free press that suggested that starving kids in Gaza were really just suffering from preexisting conditions.

We'll also look at whether success in Gaza might impact other peace efforts in Ukraine.

You're hearing that narrative a lot from the Trump orbit.

And then how Trump's $20 billion bailout for Argentina will benefit some hedge funds, why France can't catch a break or keep a prime minister, and then the Nobel Peace Prize drama's latest.

And then Ben, you did our interview today.

Who are we going to talk to?

Yes, I talked to Michelle V.C.

Bachman, who is an expert in maritime intelligence, which neither you nor I are, Tommy.

And we've been talking a bit recently about this Russian shadow fleet that's been alleged to do everything from busting oil sanctions to creating platforms for drone drone incursions into Europe.

Crazy.

So I thought it was a good idea to kind of dig a little deeper.

What is the shadow fleet?

How big is it?

How does it function?

What is it up to?

What can be done to try to stop stop it?

It's pretty fascinating

and also kind of doubles as a Netflix show pitch here.

You've got Chinese-owned vessels registered in the Seychelles, carrying Russian oil with Filipino crew and maybe drones.

It's pretty cool stuff.

I mean it's concerning, but also interesting.

As you know, it's tough to get stuff greenlit in Hollywood these days.

Could you and I just like go in on a Shadow Fleet tanker?

We could and just kind of do one of those documentaries that is also

start shipping stuff.

We probably could.

Apparently, I didn't know this, upwards of 20% of vessels on the high seas are

shadow.

Is that why they're all like Panamanian flagged or something?

Pretty astonishing number, actually, when you think about it.

It's a lot.

Yeah.

Given that it carries huge amounts of oil that could spill in the ocean, that's also not good.

It seems like a bad setup.

Yeah.

I guess I don't know much about laws on the high seas.

You know, you know why?

Because the the United States did not come into the law of the sea, but that's a whole other deep dive explainer.

I was going to say I'm the captain now, but I guess I'm not.

I'm an American.

Okay, well, stick around for that.

That sounds fascinating.

All right, Ben, should we talk about this Gaza deal?

Yeah, spoiler alert, we will not be fluffing like the entire American mainstream media has been.

No, we're going to try to stick to the facts.

Okay, so let's talk about what was actually agreed to.

So the 20 living Israeli hostages held by Hamas for over two years are now released.

They are back in Israel.

That is unequivocally a great thing for them, their families, really for everyone in Israel who's kind of been holding their breath since they were taken on October 7th.

Israel has released 1,700 detainees that they picked up in Gaza and held without charges.

I've seen a lot of Palestinian voices argue that those people should be called hostages too.

I get where they're coming from.

We also don't know all the specifics of all those cases, so I don't think we can adjudicate that here, but noted.

And then Israeli human rights groups also note that there's thousands more Gazans being held by Israel, often without trial, often in prisons where detainees have been allegedly tortured or killed or more.

So just more context.

But also as part of this deal, Israel released 250 Palestinians serving prison terms in Israel, including many individuals who have hurt or killed Israeli citizens.

And just remember, the mastermind of the October 7th attacks, Yaga Sinwar, was released by Israel in a similar hostage deal back in 2011.

So this is a big deal.

It's politically explosive in Israel and was like a challenging pill for them to swallow.

As part of the deal, eight trucks are supposed to be searching into Gaza with at least 600 per day entering.

But on Tuesday, Reuters reported that Israel is still restricting aid into Gaza to 300 trucks per day, half of what they agreed to in the deal, and is preventing border crossings from opening.

Israel says those restrictions are in response to Hamas being slow in turning over the bodies of 24 dead Israeli hostages who are still in Gaza.

We've talked about the challenges of finding those bodies and getting them back, but apparently that's leading to aid restrictions already.

The Israeli Defense Forces or IDF has pulled back to the mutually agreed upon lines in the deal.

The BBC reported the IDF is still in control of about 53% of the Gaza Strip.

That is a lot.

The fighting is supposed to have stopped, but Palestinian news sources say that six people were killed in an IDF drone strike east of Gaza City on Tuesday.

And the BBC reported that hospitals in Gaza say at least seven people have been killed since the ceasefire went into effect.

Hamas has reportedly deployed thousands of fighters to Gaza's urban areas to kind of reassert control.

They've started fighting with other militia groups, including some some backed by Israel.

Hamas fighters publicly executed a bunch of guys in Gaza City on Monday, and they filmed it and they disseminated that video of the execution to kind of remind everyone they're there, I guess.

And then, oddly, Ben, a couple of days ago, Trump told reporters on Air Force One that the U.S.

had given Hamas some sort of tacit approval to kind of reassert authority and be in charge for a while in Gaza.

Here are those comments.

Are standing because they do want to stop the problems, and they've been open about it, and we gave them approval for a period of time.

You have to understand,

they've lost probably 60,000 people.

That's a lot of retribution.

They've lost 60,000 people, and the ones that are living right now were, in many cases, very young when this all started.

And we are having them watch that there's not going to be big crime or some of the problems that you have when you have areas like this that have been literally demolished.

Weird.

And then Tuesday, though, Ben, Trump had this to say about Hamas disarming.

They're going to disarm, and because they said they were going to disarm.

And if they don't disarm, we will disarm them.

They misrepresent it because we were told they had 26, 24 of dead hostages, if we can use those terms.

And it seems as though they don't have that because we're talking about a much lesser number.

But that's a very tough subject.

I want them back.

You know, they did take out a couple of gangs that were very bad.

Very, very bad gangs.

And they did take them out.

And they killed a number of gang members.

And that didn't bother me much, to be honest with you.

But we have

told them we won't disarm.

And they will disarm.

And if they don't disarm, we will disarm them.

And it'll happen quickly and perhaps violently.

But they will disarm.

Do you understand me?

Okay, so again, it's worth noting that the gang members, Trump, is cool with being dead or killed by Hamas, were armed and backed by the Israelis.

So Ben, we'll get into the Reconstruction talks in Egypt in a second, but like any initial thoughts from you on the deal, the kind of level of concern about this ceasefire holding, given the kind of chipping away we're seeing here, and these confusing answers from Trump about what Hamas is allowed to do.

Yeah, I share your relief.

I guess I don't want to say joy.

I mean, let me just say that part of, I guess, my meta concern about this whole last couple days is

there was this outpouring of adulation for trump and all these guys largely guys

um

many of them creepy uh meeting at a peace summit um

you know at least 60 000 probably over a hundred thousand palestinians are dead more israeli hostages are dead than needed to die.

I mean, this is an important point I haven't seen made enough.

I mean, if this deal, which is essentially the same deal that's been on the table for a very long time, had been reached earlier, we would have had more hostages back.

And so it's not, yes, it's joyful for those hostages and their families to be reunited, for the Palestinians who are being reunited with people who have been released from prison.

It's joyful that aid's getting, but

this didn't need to happen.

All this death and destruction

I don't think was necessary.

for Israel's security concerns

and certainly for the Palestinian people.

So that's kind of my,

you know, we all, it's important to note that this is a huge like positive step forward relative to where we were.

But I think we also have to measure it against the fact that this didn't need to happen in the first place.

And that's kind of a general discomfort I had with the kind of adulation that we've been experiencing in the coverage of this the last couple of days.

Yeah, so it's like not joy, it's like relief, right?

Relief is the word I felt more two years ago.

Thank God.

AIDS getting, thank God, these hostages are going home.

And look, I think that the two biggest sticking points remain, and they were prominently featured in your wind-up there, which is number one,

what happens to Hamas?

Are they going to truly demilitarize?

And frankly, you know, Trump, in a weird way, addressed complexity in his simple way.

If Hamas...

just absented Gaza tomorrow, there actually is then therefore no authority.

And then the armed people are either, you know, Palestinian Islamic jihad, other militant groups like that, or it's, you know, weird gangs created and armed by Israel.

And that's not exactly a recipe for security.

So there's this question about just what is the future of Hamas.

And then there's the question of who's going to run Gaza and what is the Israeli government and Israeli military's intention there?

Are they going to kind of resume some form of military operation once now the hostages are home?

Are they going to permit aid to actually actually get in?

Are they importantly going to permit international journalists to get in to see what happened there?

And we still know as little about that today as we did like last week when we were talking about this too.

And so, again, I have that relief combined with some discomfort with the way in which this whole thing is being received, which we can unpack,

plus a lot of questions about how do we get over the main hurdles of essentially who's going to run Gaza.

Yeah.

And like, remember, you know, Netanyahu kept telling us the war can't end until Hamas is disarmed and basically eradicated and not in control.

Destroyed, yeah.

Well, Hamas is still there.

They haven't disarmed.

I mean, I keep seeing reports that Hamas has agreed to give up their larger weapons, like rockets, but not small arms, in part because they're battling with these militia groups.

I don't know.

It seems like a big problem.

And also, we're going to get into the reconstruction issues in a minute, but

like a key part of that 20-point plan that Trump laid out was this international kind of temporary peacekeeping force, often sourced from Muslim or Arab countries.

These countries will never sign up to send in troops as peacekeepers if they are doing day-to-day fighting with Hamas, if Hamas is not disarmed.

Like that is going to be a non-starter for these countries to like wage war with Hamas.

But like...

How is this going to work if Hamas is not disarmed and if they're just sort of still there and they're still, you know, not only are they deploying fighters to the streets, they're also deploying its members to clear rubble and try to build and fix basic infrastructure.

So they're kind of like reasserting control in civilian affairs, too.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah, when Trump says we will disarm them if they don't disarm, I have a lot of questions about who the we is.

Yeah.

Is that not?

Him and Jared?

Yeah.

Well, certainly not him and Jared.

Is the we the U.S.

military?

Because I literally cannot imagine a scenario, but it's Trump, so who knows?

Everything's possible.

But a scenario in which the U.S.

military is in Gaza, you you know, fighting Hamas,

that would be

bad.

That's beyond unprecedented and not good.

Then is the we therefore this kind of group of countries who was meeting in Egypt?

Because, you know, I do think the one way this would happen,

because people can say, well, then what's your answer?

I think it is if the Arab countries, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, probably Turkey as well,

some collection of those types of countries.

Some of them are contributing significant amounts of money because they have significant amounts of money, and then some of them are contributing troops or peacekeeping force that could go in with an agreement with Hamas.

I mean, this is the important thing, you know, that essentially they would have to negotiate.

I don't think that to your point, they wouldn't want to go in and like fight Hamas, but particularly countries like Turkey and Qatar that have a lot of juice with Hamas, could there be some way in which you essentially negotiate an Arab peacekeeping force taking the place of Hamas and kind of midwifing the emergence of a new Palestinian leadership?

That is only possible if not only does Hamas agree to it, but if the IDF is not in Gaza.

Because similarly, those countries aren't going to go in and fight the IDF, you know?

Yeah, or be at risk of an airstrike.

Or be at risk, exactly.

So

that to me is the huge gap here.

You kind of know what the only option is to an alternative Palestinian leadership that can govern Hamas.

And so that gets the Israeli political will is, do they actually want that to happen?

Or do they essentially want this brief experiment to fail so they have a pretext to kind of resume control of Gaza?

And the fact that they're still in like 50% of the Gaza Strip, just sitting there taking shots at things.

you know, while some of the right-wing ministers in the Nanyal government are kind of beginning to say, oh, like, you know, we're never going to get past this phase, suggests that perhaps, you know, we still don't know whether the Israeli intention is to try to allow allow that success to happen or whether they're going to want to resume some form of direct control, if not resumption of ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

Yeah, and like Israel Katz, the defense minister a couple days ago, was saying they need to take out all the rest of the tunnels in Gaza City.

It's like that's

years of realization.

Okay, so yeah, there's a ton of unanswered questions about Gaza's future.

I mean, you mentioned a bunch of them.

Who will govern it?

Will Hamas disarm?

What role, if any, will the Palestinian Authority play in governance?

Who will provide security in the near term?

Who will organize and fund that reconstruction effort?

Like all a couple of details.

The summit of world leaders in Egypt Monday was supposed to begin to answer some of those questions, but it seems to have been more of a press event and more of just like a part two of the victory lap for Trump than a substantive meeting.

So Trump was hours late because his previous events in Israel ran long.

And I don't know if you saw this, but he actually was complaining about it during his speech to the Knesset, like bitching at BB, pointing Serenette and Yahoo being like, you talked for a while too.

It was kind of funny.

But when Trump finally got to Egypt.

But to be clear, he like all these world leaders waiting for, I think for like six hours, hours,

just sitting on their asses.

Yeah.

And then when he finally got there, like he gave a speech, he took some pictures.

The economist story said he gave them like five minutes of time to talk, and then he signed this document and they left.

Like that was it.

Here's a bit of sound.

He also had some bilateral meetings.

Here's some sound from his time in Egypt.

This is clearly, in my mind, I think in the mind of everyone in this room, probably one of the most important days for world peace in 50 years.

That's not an exaggeration.

Only 50.

Maybe 100.

I don't know what it is.

I like the tough people better than I like the soft, easy ones.

I don't know what the hell that is.

It's a personality

problem, I suspect.

We have Hungary.

Oh, Victor, where is Victor?

Victor, Victor.

We love Victor.

Victor, I call him.

I put

the little accent on it.

You are fantastic, all right?

I know a lot of people don't agree with me, but I'm the only one that matters.

I'm not allowed to say it, because usually it's the end of your political career if you say it.

She's a beautiful young woman.

Where is she?

There she is.

You don't mind being called beautiful, right?

Because you are.

Thank you very much for coming.

We appreciate it.

Everybody's going to join the Abraham Accord.

I like to say the

Avraham.

I love Avraham.

Okay, so that was that.

The Wall Street Journal.

That's peace.

That's what peace sounds like.

That was something.

The Wall Street Journal got a hold of the document that they all signed.

It was a bunch of kind of of gauzy, vague language, stuff like, quote, We seek tolerance, dignity, and equal opportunity for every person, ensuring this region is a place where all can pursue their aspirations in peace, security, and economic prosperity.

We pledge to work collectively to implement and maintain this legacy, building inspirational foundations upon which future generations may thrive together in peace.

Hopefully, there are more like kind of substantive working-level meetings happening that got into the details, Ben, but we don't know.

So, look, the summit came together quickly, right?

It would be unfair of us, I think, to suggest that these guys need to like hammer it all out in a day.

But at the same time, like, you got all these heads of state in one place.

Um, that's a big deal.

And you have all this momentum from getting this agreement.

Like, you really want to use that meeting to get some commitments or make some progress or like get people to like publicly sign up for stuff.

And it's just not clear that they did that.

And I think, like, that speaks to what you were saying earlier, Ben, which is my biggest fear in this whole thing is that Trump primarily only cared about getting the hostages home and how he's viewed in Israel, and that he will get distracted and he will kind of just turn a blind eye to what's happening in Gaza if the reconstruction doesn't happen or if the airstrikes continue and if Netanyahu just breaks this ceasefire deal like he does most deals.

Yeah, I think

it's interesting because I'm actually not opposed to

the idea of getting a bunch of world leaders together to try to signal the importance of this, to try to create a sense sense of inevitability around it, right?

Oh, yes, it's smart.

I actually thought, okay, that's smart.

But the problem is that's not what this felt like.

This felt like a big commercial for Trump.

I mean, if he achieved something,

and we've said, like, he achieved something that Joe Biden couldn't achieve, which he squeezed Netanyahu enough to get this ceasefire across the line.

And I think Qatar and Turkey squeezed Tomas enough to get them there.

Now,

first of all, to the Rubio point, though, the biggest day for world peace,

this is, as with the Abraham Accords, I mean, this is part of what was so frustrating to me is that the Abraham Accords was similarly framed as a peace deal.

And look what happened.

October peace in the Middle East.

October,

in part because Hamas felt like the Abraham Accords was cutting them out of the process, right?

Precisely because the Abraham Accords wasn't a peace deal, we had a much bigger war in Gaza.

And I feel like we're seeing a repeat of this movie.

We don't know the future of the West Bank.

We don't know the the future of Gaza.

We don't know the future of the existence of the Palestinian people.

And to get a bunch of world leaders together who primarily, and let's be clear, all of them failed.

Everyone on that tableau in different ways failed or else this wouldn't have happened the last two years.

And to get them together, they looked relieved that just that maybe they'll have a little less pressure back home.

You know, maybe I won't have a protest.

Maybe I won't have my kid ask me why I won't call this a genocide.

Like, and by the way, some of the same media outlets feel the same way.

Like, maybe, you know, this is good.

We don't have to

look at this anymore.

But just because you don't have to look at it doesn't mean that Gaza is still not destroyed.

Doesn't mean that the West Bank is still potentially going to be annexed, right?

And so I felt like some of Trump's, again, so people don't just think I'm like trying to hate on Trump here.

Like, some of these instincts are not bad instincts.

Like, get everybody together.

Like,

make everybody accountable to be in Egypt and

try to get some momentum behind this ceasefire.

But the point is, it's a ceasefire.

Like, you're trying to get momentum so that a ceasefire can over time become a peace agreement.

And treating the ceasefire itself as like this world historic achievement,

not only does it plan to put the cart before the horse,

it diminishes the amount of work that has to be done to make this thing a reality.

Yeah, I mean, they're just like, they're just spike in the football on like the 50-yard line.

You know, there's a lot more to do.

I mean, I want to get to the backstory, kind of the credit issues and what's going forward in a second.

But just one quick aside before we leave Egypt.

So, Trump was busy in Egypt.

He just did a couple events and he talked everywhere, but it was good to see he also carved out some time for himself, a little me time, a little self-care, a little corruption time.

Because while he was in Egypt, a hot mic caught Indonesian president Proboa Sobianto asking Trump for a favor.

And so the audio was crappy, so we couldn't play it for you guys.

But what reporters could make out from the conversation was it went something like this.

So Subianto refers to the region being, quote, not safe security-wise.

And then he says,

can I meet Eric?

And Trump says, I'll have Eric call you.

Should I do that?

Subianto, yeah, yeah.

Trump, he's such a good boy.

I'll have Eric call.

A moment later, Subianto says, Eric or Don Jr.

Trump, I'll have one of them call you.

The Guardian pointed out in its reporting that Trump's company opened its first golf resort in Indonesia in March.

And the Trump Org's website says another property in Indonesia and a resort in Bali are coming soon.

So it's good to see that the firewall between official and personal business is holding up

here on the stage.

And this is a really important point because essentially, you know, at a peace summit, they're probably like having under the table conversations about essentially the development of more Trump properties in Indonesia, which, by the way, is how a lot of business gets done in Indonesia, which has huge corruption problems.

There's protests across the country in part because of the corruption problems from Gen Z.

And this is the last thing I want to say before we leave Egypt.

Another thing that caught my eye, Tommy, is

there were these gigantic, you know, when the motorcade, the Trump motorcade was rolling down the street towards the Sharm el-Sheikh peace venue, there were these huge billboards with a picture of Trump and Sisi,

the president of Egypt, you know, kind of superimposed over flags and then under the banner, together in peace.

And I think in our dystopian reality, it's worth pausing on the fact that Cece presides over a military dictatorship where there's something like 60,000 political prisoners who are regularly tortured.

People disappear in prisons.

Trump wants to deploy the troops in the streets of this country.

Which Cece did.

He rolled tanks into Tahrir Square.

Yes.

Even in the back end of this ceasefire agreement, Israel's still got the Palestinians living under permanent occupation.

And what worries me is the definition of peace at the peace summit is literally like those autocrats controlling our lives with military in the streets and some corrupt deals about golf courses.

Like that, essentially, that's what peace is.

It's not like the Palestinians actually achieving self-determination and a better life.

And it's not even like the rest of us living without, you know, being under the shadow of this kind of creeping dictatorial tendencies around the world.

Yeah, did you catch Trump like praising Cece for his like tough on crime approach?

Yeah, you'd be like, oh, there's no crime in Egypt, which, first of all, what are you talking about?

Second of all, I mean, if you think, I mean, we know he thinks extrajudicial killings are okay when it comes to boats off the coast of Venezuela, but maybe coming to a city near you.

But to the backstory.

So let's talk about what we know of this backstory.

I'll try to do a little TikTok and kind of like, then we can suss out the credit.

So we covered the initial Trump 20-point peace plan when he laid it out a few weeks back.

I think both of us were quite skeptical that they would get through all of it, and they have not done that yet.

But basically, Trump kind of brought this plan to Netanyahu.

He let him shape it behind the scenes before it was public, make it more advantageous to Israel.

And then ultimately, though, pushed Netanyahu really hard to say yes.

And then just kind of ignored when Netanyahu was kind of talking out of both sides of his mouth back in Israel and shitting on the plan and suggesting he'd never go through with it.

That is the kind of pressure I think both of us always hoped that Biden would put on Netanyahu.

Like in fairness, right?

Like Trump was helped by the fact that it had been two years.

He was helped by the fact that Netanyahu made this colossal mistake of firing missiles into Doha last month.

And by Netanyahu ultimately knowing that he had lost the Democratic Party.

And if Trump cuts him loose, he has nowhere to go politically in the United States.

So there is context here, but regardless, Trump used his leverage and that was critical.

And then a couple of days later, Hamas responds with this partial yes to the Trump plan.

They're like, okay, we're good with the hostage release.

We're good with transferring governance to technocrats.

They ignore the rest.

They're like, we can talk about all the rest.

This is the moment where I think Trump.

had some political genius because or genius or just the narcissism because he didn't call Netanyahu and say, what do you think?

He didn't say, let's sync up, let's coordinate with Ron Dermer and get our teams together.

It said Tony blinking out for some consultations in the region.

He was just like, fuck it, we got a deal, huge win, true social, historic moment.

Like, this is incredible.

And that forced Netanyahu into these negotiations last week in Egypt, where, as you mentioned earlier, the Wall Street Journal had some great reporting about how Qatar, Turkey, and Egypt pushed Hamas really, really hard to take the deal.

Apparently, the message was like, say yes to this deal or no more diplomatic cover from us, no more political office in our capitals, no more us fighting for you to be part of Gaza's future.

And then Trump, again, in a move I think he deserves credit for, allowed Steve Witkoff, his golf buddy turned emissary, and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, to speak directly with Hamas to reassure them that Trump would force Netanyahu to go through with the terms of the deal.

They were concerned that if they gave up the hostages, they give up their leverage.

I know that sounds gross, but that's what they were thinking.

And this reassurance from Witkoff and Jared directly apparently helped get the deal done.

And that, you know, speaking directly to Hamas goes against traditional U.S.

policy.

We usually talk through intermediaries for rules that are stupid.

But if a Democrat had done that, like if Joe Biden had told Jake Sullivan to speak directly with Hamas, Lindy Graham would light himself on fire in front of the White House.

Or Hunter Biden.

Yeah.

That's actually the closer analogy.

That could have made it happen.

Being like the stockades in front of the White House right now.

But so obviously it was the right move to do that because it helped get the deal done.

So big picture, Ben.

I think Trump gets a ton of credit for like getting the ceasefire deal done.

Like you said earlier, I think he could have done it a long time ago, right?

Between January of this year and March, whenever the ceasefire ended, they were supposed to be negotiating phase two of the ceasefire and an end to the war.

If we pressured Netanyahu then, I think they could have gotten this deal done.

And then

like, just as a bit of a sidebar, there's all this sort of chatter and commentary.

Like you're seeing political playbook being like, and imagine if he hadn't bombed Iran, this never would have happened.

So there just couldn't be more unrelated issues.

And then finally, like, I give Trump credit where credit is due.

I'm so happy this happened.

It's not a Middle East peace deal.

And like

the reporting shorthand that's kind of taking that line, it's just, you look like, you look ridiculous.

And you're misinforming your public.

Right.

I mean, most Americans would wake up and literally think that there's a Middle East peace because that's what's been regurgitated to them by what is literally almost functioning like apply in state media.

And it's not just Fox News.

It's everywhere.

No, it's everywhere.

We own one on this one.

We own one.

You know, let's give him this one.

Right.

And yeah, I mean, look, Trump deserves credit for squeezing BB, which I think he did probably pretty hard.

Like, we probably didn't even see this stuff in private.

You know, it seems like he was fed up with this.

Yeah, the humiliation ritual of calling the Cutteries and saying sorry, like, that was.

Yeah, he, he, you know, he did, you know, now, um,

you make an important point, which is from March when the last ceasefire, because there was a ceasefire, uh, broke down, to now, I don't think Israel accomplished a single legitimate military objective, right?

I mean, they had already taken out Sinwar.

Like they, like, all they were doing is moving more people around Gaza, bombing more people indiscriminately, starving more people.

And so I do think that's important because there wasn't the follow-through done on the first ceasefire.

We had kind of a pointless several months.

When, by the way, the Israelis seemed to feel like they had a blank check because of the Gaza Riviera stuff.

So this is a more complicated record.

But at the end, Trump did squeeze Bibi.

I agree he was smart about kind of grabbing the Hamas yes when he could, which is something Biden would never do.

I think this Iran narrative, which is important because you hear it constantly now, I think what's happening there is the kind of more hawkish or kind of pro-Israel parts of the Trump orbit and Republican Party, which by the way doesn't seem to include Trump,

don't want to say that this is because he squeezed Bibi.

And so they've kind of seized on this narrative that, like, well, because he bombed Iran like several months ago, that got us to the ceasefire, made Hamas say, you know, we give up.

Like, that couldn't be a crazier, less counterfactual narrative.

And to see like American reporters credulously repeating it over and over again is absurd to me.

And if anything, what the Iran thing points to is, again, the lack of durability when you don't have a real peace agreement, because we don't even know what's going on with the Iranian nuclear program right now.

But it seemed like an effort to kind of impose a kind of hawkish pro-Israel narrative on the reality, which is that Trump actually just squeezed Bibi into this ceasefire.

Yeah, and so

like the built-out narrative about this you hear is like, oh, they've decimated Hezbollah and reduced that risk.

Assad is now gone.

The Iranian nuclear program is rolled back by Midnight Hammer.

Okay, all true, but that did not change the

security risk to Israel from Hamas, right?

It might have created political space for Netanyahu in Israel, but he still didn't want to take the deal.

Like, what changed things was the political pressure.

Most of those things happened before March, right?

I mean, Operation Midnight Hammer or whatever it was after.

But yeah, you're right.

I mean, the thing that changed here is that Trump was like, you know what, we've had enough of this.

I'm going to squeeze Bibi, maybe because I won a Nobel Peace Prize, whatever the instinct is here.

I do think that there's another important point here, which is that you mentioned the kind of asymmetry of political space, right?

A Democratic president would feel like they couldn't necessarily engage Hamas directly or couldn't squeeze Bibi in that way.

By the way, that may be true that the Republican Party would make a lot more noise and make that a lot more difficult.

And the Democrats are more inclined to kind of defer to a president on this kind of stuff.

But that still is an excuse it.

I agree.

I think the lesson for Democrats should be we can talk to Hamas if we think it's the right thing to do.

We can squeeze Israel.

Look, just because there's an asymmetry, we kind of psychologically allow the asymmetry to exist by being so defensive.

So part of what Trump is doing that I think is useful is kind of blowing through all these, you know, weird, kind of hawkish national security establishment slash media establishment guardrails around what you're allowed to do.

Yeah.

He invited the Taliban to Camp David, for God's sake.

Not saying I would have done that, but hey, you know, there's another example.

Yeah.

Well, one thing I do want to know, Ben, and hopefully there'll be some more reporting on this, is like, I want to know if there are any secret deals between Trump and Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey to get them to pressure Hamas.

We probably know the Qatar one because Trump tweeted that they got an Article 5 security commitment from the United States.

And we all assumed there was.

And Hexeth announced,

coincidentally, in between the announcement of the deal and the Egypt summit, he announced some Qatar airbase in the United States.

That was so strange.

Which is kind of strange.

And then walked it back right away.

Bizarre.

But I wonder if, you know, like...

Turkey, Egypt, they are friends, but they have at times been frenemies.

Yes.

They have grave human rights violations.

There's some question about whether they might get more advanced military hardware or God knows what out of the deal, maybe like F-35s or who knows?

But watch that space, I'd say.

Yeah, I mean, I had one theory, which is also that Turkey and Qatar care a lot about Syria, and Israel was really going after Syria.

They were bombing them regularly.

They were threatening to kind of annex southern Syria.

And right around that Trump Netanyahu summit, you saw that kind of begin to dissipate and back off a little bit.

So I almost wonder whether there was some kind of trade-off where, okay, we're going to lean on Bib to stay out of Syria.

If you'll lean on Hamas,

I don't know.

I mean, I'm speculating here, but there is clearly stuff under the table.

And if you think that that is fanciful, just remember that it came out after the Abraham Accords.

All of the things that the United States gave away to get an Abraham Accords.

Big arms sales.

We gave away Western Sahara,

a piece of territory to Morocco, arms sales, you know, all these different things.

So I do think in this kind of transactional approach to things, the U.S.

was probably spreading a bunch of goodies around the region to get that photo op in Egypt.

Yeah, we'll learn what that is someday.

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Okay, so during Trump's speech to the Knesset, he gave Steve Wickoff a shout out.

And then just to troll us, I think he gave Jared Kushner a bunch of love as well.

Let's listen to a clip of that.

You know, Steve was chosen by me.

He never did this before, but he had tremendous negotiating skills.

But I know a lot of people that negotiate pretty well, although it is an art.

But most importantly with Steve, he's just a great guy.

Everybody loved him.

And then we called in Jared.

We called in, we need that brain on occasion.

We got to get Jared in here.

We got to get a certain group of people.

Steve started this all by himself.

I call him Henry Kissinger, who doesn't leak.

Okay.

I just want to say that, like, I'm on a spiritual journey here, Tommy.

I'm trying to get to a good place, but if I don't and they have been hell, they're going to be basically playing that clip on a loop for me.

All day long.

All day long.

All day long.

So, look, the Wickoff piece, like, Wickoff's been working this account since before Trump took office.

Obviously, he gets some credit for the outcome.

The Kushner role to me is just, look, I'm trying to be objective.

It seems a lot thinner.

And like, the brazen spinning to get him credit is a little gross.

Like, look, I don't think this deal got done because these guys formulated like the perfect plan and picked the lock with it.

Like, no, the gist of the ceasefire, as you said, had been kind of out there for a long time, been on the table for a while.

Nor do I think Jared like swept in and leveraged his relationships with the Cutteries to work some meta.

No, it's like Trump forced Netanyahu to take the deal.

Like, yes, Wickoff and Kushner, like, I guess them going to the final days of the talks in Egypt signaled that Trump cared a lot, but that could have been Rubio or any government employee.

And the upside of using Rubio in that case is you're not worried about whether Jared has a conflict of interest because he's sitting on billions of dollars from the people that he is then negotiating with.

Yeah, I mean,

we've said many times that it seems like Trump squeezed Bibi.

That's great.

It also is the case that Israel was becoming an almost unsustainable pariah state, and the Europeans were starting to really break hard away from them.

There were reasons why Bibi might have felt like he had to bend at this point in a way that he didn't feel six months ago or a year ago.

And so, to credit the kind of negotiating genius of Witkoff or Jared Kushner, when the terms of this thing

have always been pretty clear,

like we've said a million times, this is the same kind of fucking ceasefire that we were hoping would be reached, you know, less than a year into this war, after October 7th.

And

so, I just, if people are listening to us and thinking, oh man, look, these guys don't give Trump credit, or these guys are pissed about the media coverage.

No, the reason we're doing this is because I honestly think it's an important function of this podcast as we continue to descend further and further into a kind of an authoritarian reality in which what we're learning is that everybody from media outlets to whomever seems to be more inclined to capitulate.

I don't know.

I think some of those journalists, as I mentioned, not only is it like, let's give Trump this win, it's like, Jared's probably a pretty good source, you know?

So let's just throw this Trump.

The reason we do this is because we want you to know, listener, that you're not crazy.

Because

I don't know, it was easy to think for more than a couple of minutes the other day, like, am I crazy?

Like, this seems like way over the top for a ceasefire that is belated, that could have been in place in March, that was in place in March.

So, yeah,

I think we have to look look under the hood of this stuff.

I guess if I give Witkoff credit for anything, that guy will show up anywhere at any time.

Which again, this is the thing I like about

if there's one thing, Trump, he will show up the next day in another country.

He'll send somebody anywhere to talk to anybody.

I like that.

So let's be very clear.

I do like that.

But I just don't think that this was like some ingenious formulation that was arrived at.

Anybody who's looked at this problem since October 7th had pretty much the outlines of the exact same deal.

And if anything, by the way,

from everything I hear, feels like the Qataris were the ones that built that formulation.

So if anything, Witkoff and Kushner were literally just coming in behind what was a, you know, probably a Doha-produced ceasefire.

And the Qataris helped pressure Hamas to get it over the finish line just a month after they had been bombed.

So you should shout out to them for sticking with it.

Now, what Trump is revealing, though, by the way, is that the United States, if it throws its weight around, none of these leaders are willing to, you you know, they all fall in line.

I mean, Kier Starmer looked like a bus boy, like waiting to be complimented by Trump

in that photo line.

He got like sort of summoned up and then dismissed.

And instead of that, he's like, Victor, Victor, Victor.

Loves his autocrats.

Okay, so a few things we haven't talked about yet, Ben.

So a two-state solution, Palestinian state.

Where was that?

And the settlement construction in the West Bank or threats of annexation.

We haven't talked about any sort of governance structure that could be an alternative to Hamas or a process to lead to Palestinian self-determination.

And so, those are the big picture long-term challenges.

And unfortunately, like inextricably linked to those questions is Bibi Netanyahu and his future.

Trump all but endorsed Netanyahu during his speech in the Knesset.

He also had this to say about Netanyahu's corruption trials.

Let's listen.

Mr.

President, why don't you give him a pardon?

Give him a pardon.

I happen to like this gentleman right over here, and it just seems to make so much sense.

Cigars and champagne, who the hell cares about?

Cool.

So it's also clear that Trump is a lot more popular than Netanyahu in Israel itself.

Check out this clip of Steve Witkoff addressing a big group of people assembled in hostages square in Tel Aviv over the weekend.

To Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Okay.

And

to President Donald J.

Trump.

Thank you, Trump.

Thank you, Trump.

Thank you, Trump.

The O and the long pot, like Wickoff really like hung a lantern on those booze and just to let them bring out over the crowd.

That guy's been on quite a psychedelic journey.

Like a year ago, he was a real estate developer in Florida.

Now he's stuck in 100,000 Israelis.

He's like, what the fuck?

He was shagging balls with Trump at the range.

Now he's doing this.

So the next Israeli election is supposed to be in about a year.

They will likely call elections sooner.

It's a little surprising to me, Ben, that the right-wing ministers in Netanyahu's coalition haven't gone further and toppled the government yet.

Like we were told for years that Netanyahu could not take a deal because he'd get thrown out of power and then he'd get prosecuted.

But here we are.

And maybe it's just a matter of time, right?

Like, maybe like It's Mar Ben-Gavir will pull out tomorrow.

But it could also be that, like, the extremist fringe didn't, even they didn't want to be seen as opposed to a hostage release.

All that said, like, there was a recent poll that showed the Like Hud Party has gotten a little bump from all of this, but not really that much.

There are some rumors that Netanyahu could get presented a deal that's basically immunity from prosecution for all his corruption cases in exchange for leaving politics.

We'll see.

Do you want to bet on Netanyahu's future here?

I never bet against that guy's capacity to just survive some fashion.

I mean, I think the one interesting thing here, and first of all, we should say there were a lot of booze, which are always good to hear after Netanyahu's name.

But Tel Aviv is kind of like, you know, it's like someone praising Trump in New York or something, right?

If there's anywhere and he's going to get booze, but yeah, he's objectively has a really low approval rating.

The only thing I want to say is that what's interesting about the pardon idea is it might actually be one way to get Netanyahu out, you know, because the reason Netanyahu is clinging to power, one of them at at least, is that he does want to go to prison.

And there may actually be some weird deal that you could do behind the scenes in Israel where essentially Netyao gets pardoned and then can leave and they can have somebody else in there.

And actually, that may be something that a bunch of Israeli politicians want too, you know?

Yeah, it does raise a lot of questions about accountability.

Like there's accountability for October 7th.

Remember, like we don't need to relitigate all the ways the IDF and the military and intelligence infrastructure.

And the government failed to bring it up.

And they've never done a real inquiry.

No, Netanyahu has pushed out the generals, he's pushed out his intelligence chiefs.

And then, when it comes to his role, he says, oh, we'll get to that after the war.

First, we have to win the war.

He's never taken any accountability.

And then, second, like, Netanyahu has been indicted by the International Criminal Court.

He's been accused of genocide.

He has bombed, starved, and massacred an entire population of people for two years.

And if this ends with him kind of dancing off into the sunset or getting re-elected, like, I think that's bad.

Like, it's bad for people seeking accountability who are wronged.

I also think it's bad for the world and what's left of the systems and infrastructure we have in place to seek justice.

I also think it could lead Israel to be even more isolated if people just feel like Netanyahu kind of like acted in the worst way humanly possible and was rewarded for it.

No, this is an incredibly important point because

essentially they were committing war crimes again and again.

And

if there's no accountability for that whatsoever, and not just no accountability, but there's kind of like a celebration here of, you know, like

the meta lesson beyond even the Middle East is that we're in a new age where laws of war kind of just don't matter.

I mean, if you can essentially kind of be rewarded for doing what they just did in Gaza

and face no accountability and not only that, kind of get a blue ribbon, boy, we may look back on this as the moment when the post-World War II consensus against certain acts of war against civilians just collapsed, essentially.

That's not a small consideration.

No, sorry.

And again, I think the point when this is, the rubber is going to hit the road on this is if international journalists get into Gaza, and I don't want to diminish the fact that they're Palestinians who've been reporting, if you have international validation of what's under that rubble, of what the actual death count is,

I actually think this is not going to go away.

It's not just going to be memory holds.

And there's going to be a lot of pressure to like, you know,

here's a prediction.

Trump will be calling for the ICC to pardon Netanyahu too.

You know, there's going to be an effort to kind of whitewash this whole thing.

Or to pressure them or to sanction them or to attack them.

Well, they're already doing that, right?

And so I don't know.

This is not over yet.

And again, like what people see when they go into Gaza and whether they're allowed to is going to be very revealing.

It is insane that Israel is not allowed in journalists yet.

I mean, that has to happen.

They're technically in a ceasefire, and they're still not allowing journalists.

Yeah.

One final thing, Ben, we wanted to talk about on this sort of...

topic before we move on is listeners probably remember the super viral report from the free press was a few weeks back where they claimed to have exposed like media bias i guess because images of starving children featured in various news reports did not mention that some of those kids had preexisting conditions.

The big gotcha, I guess, was that people with preexisting health conditions tend to die first or get sick first in a famine, and thus the libs were owned.

So, we kind of poked holes in that story from the first second it was released.

One of the pre-existing conditions was a kid who had a traumatic brain injury from an Israeli airstrike,

but that was not seen as relevant or connected to the war.

But Dropsight News actually went even further.

They had a journalist on the ground in Gaza look into these cases and try to report out and find these families.

So she was able to report on three of them in depth before getting displaced from Gaza City because of the fighting and found that, quote, their underlying health conditions did not drive the deterioration of their health.

Instead, it was the lack of access to food and medicine that drove their acute medical crisis.

The piece then concludes, in all these cases, it could be said that the children and adults suffering from malnutrition and starvation had a universal complicating factor, Israel's attacks on their very way of life.

I highly recommend reading the full story from Dropsight.

They did a great job.

And it was such a rejoinder to the kind of like sneering tone in that initial free press story, which was like, we found the names and we googled them.

And it was so fucking easy, right?

And it's just awful.

And it's also relevant given that the free press was just purchased by Paramount for $150 million and Barry Weiss will now be running CBS News.

Matthew Glesius pointed out today also that when Biden was kind of in power and considering a ceasefire like the one Trump just brokered with like a Hamas remaining in power, but the hostages are released, the free press and the kind of conservative right in the U.S.

acted like that was like an unconscionable betrayal, but now they're celebrating the same basic deal from Trump.

So just worth pointing out the kind of fair and balance here.

Yeah, and that's such a like relevant point that essentially

What are these people really after here?

Because part of what they're after is that they know like Trump is on a certain side in the world.

It's a side in which you are aggrandized for being powerful and you don't have to feel bad about kids starving in Gaza.

You know, if that's happening, it's the fault of the people reporting it, right?

Not the government that's doing it.

And what was useful about the dropside thing is it's actual journalism.

You go out and actually try to talk to people.

And part of what was so frustrating about the free press report wasn't just the kind of horror of essentially diminishing the fact that these kids were starving because they had preexisting conditions.

It It was also what they said about journalism: like, oh, we Googled.

And so we, you know, our Google was more useful than your, you know, the cameraman who's literally standing there in front of desperate people technology.

And the reason this is relevant is because this is all, like, the free press and Barry Weiss now at CBS News.

Like, journalism is not using your sub stack to try out warmed over, like, pro-Israel takes that you can shop to Bill Maher on some appearance and then have Bill Ackman or David Sachs or Mark Andreessen, whoever, you know, give you a bunch of money.

Like that's not journalism.

You know, journalism is actually going out and talking to people, you know?

And God, I hope we don't lose that and everything else that we're losing.

Yeah, it would be a real shame if CBS News got away from that.

Yeah.

Just became sort of an activist, anti-woke organization.

Can you imagine?

Like 60 Minutes reports on...

DEI pronouns and emails.

Or like one professor at one university who has like a weird view of Middle East studies.

That's the real problem in the world.

Top issue.

Finally, Ben, so there's this narrative out there that's again getting pushed by like Steve Wickoff and others in the administration that success in Gaza could spread and that like peace in Ukraine could be next.

I would obviously love for that to be true.

The logic seems a touch flimsy, if not absurd,

especially given that we know that Putin has been ramping up airstrikes lately, not down.

But Vlodymir Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, will be in Washington on Friday.

So we will watch that one closely and also, I guess, get to see what kind of like, you know, humiliation event, ritual, whatever you want to call it, the JD Vance kind of has set up for him.

Yeah, I mean, I think the reason this doesn't correlate as much as it would be great if it did is that Putin is not Netanyahu.

You know, Putin, you know, the U.S.

doesn't have the leverage on Putin that it has on Netanyahu.

Like, you don't make...

peace in Ukraine because of vibes.

Putin doesn't want to be at a peace summit with that cast of characters.

Like he just had that meeting in China and he felt pretty comfortable there, right?

So I think what remains, and the question that remains for Ukraine is where is Trump going to find that leverage on Putin?

Because it's not just going to be like him picking up the phone and telling him to cut it out, which is kind of what he needed to be.

It's going to be, you know, are we going to

are we going to find ways to unlock Russia's.

frozen assets?

Are we going to provide more offensive military assistance to the US?

They're sort of tomahawk missiles.

That's the kind of new asks.

Well, and the Ukrainians are trying to show, I think, you know, they've been targeting Russian energy infrastructure, which is not nothing.

I think they're kind of trying to show Trump, like, hey, look, we could do a lot if you gave us some more, and then you'd get some leverage on Putin.

So I don't know, it'd be interesting to see where attention's, you know, I mean, all this stuff like comes down also to Trump's attention span.

Exactly.

Like, Gaza, if he, you know, is he going to stay on this thing for week after week, month after month?

Ukraine, is he going to stay on this thing and not just do the kind of episodic negation we saw in Alaska.

Zelensky, you know,

it'd be interesting to see what his asks are when he comes.

I think it's probably going to be that offensive military assistance.

It's going to be access to those Russian frozen assets.

We'll see.

Yeah, we will see.

We're going to take a break, but quickly, Ben, before we go, I wanted to show you the cover of Crooked Media Reads' new book.

It's coming out January 27th, 2026.

It's called Hated by All the Right People, Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind.

It's by Jason Zangerly, who I know you know.

Favorite reporter, yeah.

Truly one of the best reporters, longtime New York Times magazine, and just a great feature reporter.

The title comes from, you'll like this, Tucker himself, because when he visited Hungary in 2021, he told Victor Orban, you are hated by all the right people.

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Remember that, like, remember that week of Tucker programming?

I fortunately remember it very well.

It's vividly documented in the book.

It was good content on the pod.

It was a good content on the pod, bad for the world.

So, look, why Tucker Carlson?

Because I think tracking his path from like one of the best magazine feature reporters in Washington, someone who was known by everybody, left, right, progressives,

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Crooked.com slash books.

Highly recommend reading this.

Also, you're a Californian, Ben.

I'm a Californian.

On November 4th, we get to vote on Prop 50.

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Congress and adding to it trifecta, right?

He started

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The best way to make sure that Prop 50 passes is obviously to vote yes.

If you live in California, vote yes on November 4th, but also to make sure everyone you know knows about the election.

So Vote Save America is hosting an event today, Wednesday, October 15th, at 8 p.m.

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If you don't live in California, that's okay.

You can still join.

Go to votesaveamerica.com/slash prop 50.

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Okay, we're going to switch gears a little bit at the end of the show.

So also on Tuesday, Trump met with the president of Argentina, Javier Malay.

So Malay, we've talked about him on the show a bunch.

He's this guy self-described anarcho-capitalist.

He ran on making dramatic cuts to government spending to tame inflation.

He would even campaign with a chainsaw, which he later gifted to Elon Musk at CPAC because power tools go well with ketamine.

So Malay is a big Trump fanboy.

He's a right-wing darling.

The CPAC crowd loves him.

So far, those cuts, those economic policies from Malay have made a lot of progress in cutting inflation.

I think it's down from like 200% to 30%,

but that happened because of these brutal austerity measures that have pushed a lot of people into poverty and are not popular.

So fast forward to last month, Malay's party got crushed in Buenos Aires regional elections.

That kind of panicked the stock market, started a run on their currency to the point where the U.S.

stepped in to offer Argentina what is in essence a bank bailout.

It is technically a currency swap.

We give them access to U.S.

dollars in exchange for Argentina's pesos.

But if this goes badly and investors start dumping the peso and it's or if they devalue it, the U.S.

taxpayer will be holding the bag and we will get royally screwed to the tune of $20 billion.

So Millet was in D.C.

on Tuesday.

During that meeting, Trump was asked about how this idea is America first.

He was asked if it comes with strings.

Here's what he had to say.

If the president doesn't win, I know the person that he'd be running against, I believe, probably.

We probably have the person.

A person is extremely far left and a philosophy that got Argentina into this problem in the first place.

So we would not be generous with Argentina if that happened.

If he loses, we are not going to be generous with Argentina.

So Argentina has midterm elections on October 26th.

No election interference there, Ben.

The New York Times did some great reporting about who will actually benefit from this bailout for Argentina.

Ben, you'll be shocked to learn that it's a bunch of hedge fund guys.

It's a bunch of banks.

It's a bunch of billionaires, most of whom are friends with Treasury Secretary Scott Besson.

It's names like BlackRock, Fidelity, Pimco.

There's billionaires like Stanley Druckenmiller and Robert Citrone.

Robert Citrone once bragged on a Goldman Sachs podcast that he was responsible for Besant getting a massive bonus when they both worked for George Soros.

The Times reported that Citrone and this lobbying company that lobbies on behalf of CPAC lobbied both the IMF and Besant to bail out Argentina.

And then, by the way, all of this is happening as farmers in Argentina are undercutting U.S.

farmers by selling selling discounted soybeans to China.

So, Ben, I'm mostly just bringing this up over and over again because I feel like it was designed in a lab to be like the most politically damaging thing Trump could possibly do, but it's not really getting that much coverage.

I don't understand, you know, Democrats out there, please, like, you don't have to agree with all our foreign policy takes, but this one is just like a giant softball that's being tossed at you.

The American taxpayer is bailing out Argentina to take care of one of Trump's weird autocratic buddies and meddle in Argentine politics.

I mean, we had a whole tea party in this country because they blamed Obama for George Bush bailing out the banks, but put that aside.

This seems like the kind of thing that you could get political traction on.

It seems absurd on its face.

It's obvious because Trump said the quiet part out loud there, that we're only doing this bailout because Millet is like a darling of the American right wing and all these kind of weird hedge fund libertarian type guys who like that he's an anarcho-capitalist.

I personally don't like the fact that we're leveraged to the tune of 20 billion bucks to a nutcase who sings like 80s rock anthems to a crowd of people so that he can feel

like

corrupt sister running the whole thing.

Please, like, just please do something with this.

Like, can someone else also take the baton on this one?

And

Elizabeth Warren's been good on this.

Yeah, she's been great.

Eight Democrats introduced a bill to prevent Treasury from doing this, but like, it's just, again, a bunch of hedge funds and banks.

They bought, they didn't, like, they're not the original bondholders.

They bought them at a discount from other people who have already lost money and they're hoping that they get paid out because the U.S.

steps in to rescue this fucking freak or Malay guy.

And by the way, part of what's so dark about this, and we don't have the time to get into it, but if you want to go down a rabbit hole,

basically one of the reasons that Argentina got into a financial crisis in the first place a bunch of years ago is that a bunch of like vulture funds and hedge funders in the United States like shorted the peso and like fucked them over.

Right.

And

so this also hits like deep cords in Argentina, and we don't have the time to get into this, but like earlier in the 21st century, one of the reasons that Argentina got into a gigantic debt crisis was that a bunch of U.S.

hedge funds, they were called like vulture funds ultimately, they bought up a lot of Argentina's debt at like a basement rate, and then they came in to collect and that put them in this giant hole.

So this is something that is also like, you know, a bunch of hedge funds lurking around.

The Argentine pesos pesos, like something that is probably not hitting the right chords down in that country either.

Two more quick things before we get to Ben's interview.

So, we've talked a bunch of times about French President Emmanuel Macron's unpopularity and the ways the snap election he called in 2024 has kind of rendered the country both hopelessly divided and basically ungovernable.

That political disaster kind of manifests over and over again in Macron's total inability to keep a prime minister on the job.

So, in September, Macron appointed a centrist named Sebastian Le Cornu as prime minister.

And then last week, less than a month into the job, Le Corneu resigned, meaning Macron had to pick a new candidate.

So there's a bunch of speculation, like, is Macron going to pick someone from the left?

Is he going to go for a centrist?

Like, how's he going to play this?

But amazingly, Macron, once again, he shocked the political world by selecting the same guy.

He reappointed Le Corneux.

So we will not bother you with all the details or bore you with all the details.

They're going to try to survive this time by kind of delaying some pension reforms.

But just big picture, it's like, it's hard to just watch this political dysfunction and imagine a better setup for Maureen Le Pen and the far-right National Rally Party as we barrel towards the French 2027 elections.

Yeah, it doesn't, and it just doesn't feel like Macron has any plan to get out of this thing and is unwilling to tack off of his kind of radical centrism, to use another Barry Weissism, I think,

which is clearly not appealing to the French public.

So, yeah,

not an ideal situation.

Bad news.

And then finally, as I'm sure everyone has heard by now, Trump did not get the Nobel Peace Prize.

He would like you to know that he's not mad about it.

And if you suggest otherwise, he will drone you.

The prize was awarded to Maria Machado.

She is a conservative Venezuelan opposition leader.

She was barred from running for the presidency last year.

So she handed the baton to an ally named Edmundo Gonzalez, who, by all accounts, won that election and won it overwhelmingly.

But Nicolas Maduro stole it, which leads us to this moment of tension between the U.S.

and Venezuela.

On Tuesday, the U.S.

military blew up the fifth boat off the coast of Venezuela.

We know this because Trump once again tweeted a snuff video.

The White House is openly lusting for regime change.

And here's what Machado told NPR about the peace prize.

I dedicate it to the people of Venezuela and President Trump because I think it's the correct thing to do, not only for what he has been doing in the last months to solve long and painful conflicts around the world, but precisely for what he's doing right now for the Americas, because this is not only about Venezuela.

Once Maduro goes, the Cuban regime will follow, the Nicaraguan regime will follow, and for the first time in history, we will have the Americas free of communism and narco dictatorships.

So, Ben, we're bringing back all the best U.S.

foreign policy ideas.

We got a kind of reverse domino theory to combat communism, like the Cold War.

We got the war on terror, meeting the war on drugs.

We've got covert action and not so covert action in Latin America and fucking with their elections.

What could go wrong?

Yeah, when I saw this news, it was interesting.

I feel like what the Nobel Committee did is they didn't want to give Trump the peace prize because that would make a farce out of the Nobel Peace Prize.

But they wanted to pick someone that he couldn't be pissed that they gave to.

It seemed literally like they had a meeting and were like, who out there can we give this award to that won't piss Trump off, but is not Trump?

Because, Mitchell, look, I will say, this person is braver than I am.

This person has, she's undeniably courageous, right?

She's put herself at personal risk.

There's no question that Maduro has been repressive.

There's no question that she has taken extraordinary risks.

She's also extraordinarily right-wing, you know?

And she wants a U.S.

military intervention in Venezuela.

Like she's said as much, like repeatedly.

And she's, you know, expressed some admiration for people like Bukele, you know, who have obviously a kind of a different view of governance,

not just from Maduro, but from a lot of people.

And I saw it even recently, like she gave another interview where she said, you know, kind of promised that, you know, come and have a regime change operation here and you can, all the American corporations can have the oil.

You know, she's speaking directly to Trump with this new platform she has.

So

I don't know.

This feels kind of weird, too.

This kind of feels like,

you know, one more piece of lining.

Because you hear her, like, that could have been Marco Rubio.

You know,

Venezuela to Cuba to Nicaragua.

And I'm not here, like, carrying any water for any of those governments.

I'm just here to say I don't think a U.S.

regime change operation in Venezuela will end well.

Well, if you take out Saddam and Iraq, then that was going to be Iran.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Syria.

It'll all go perfectly.

We've heard this.

Domino theories don't work in whatever direction the dominoes are falling.

Positive dominoes or negative dominoes.

Turns out really simplistic metaphors don't always apply to foreign affairs.

That's why dominoes, yeah, it's like, you know,

kids' game.

It's a kid's game.

Yeah.

Okay, that's it for us for today on the news section, but stick around for Ben's interview about Russia's shadow fleet because you won't want to miss that.

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Okay, so last week we touched on a story about French authorities who intercepted an oil tinker named the Borisay that was en route to Russia, or from Russia to India.

The ship is suspected of being the launch point for the drones that were flying over Denmark a few weeks ago, but the official reason France gave for stopping it was inconsistencies over its registration.

Its captain and first mate were detained, but are now back on the ship, and it has resumed its voyage.

The Borsay is part of what's known as the Shadow Fleet, or a dark fleet of ships that evade sanctions by obscuring their identities and registrations.

This story has been hanging around for a while, and so we wanted to kind of just go deeper for people to understand what we're talking about.

And we have the right person to help us do that.

We're very pleased to be joined by Michelle V.

C.

Bachman.

She's a senior maritime intelligence analyst at Wynward, which is a maritime intelligence firm.

She is an expert on this subject.

Michelle, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you very much for having me.

Okay, I mean, let's just start with like very basic question for people.

I talked a little bit about sanctions invasion, but what are we talking about when we talk about a shadow fleet, especially a Russian shadow fleet?

Okay, so there's lots of different ways.

There's the Dark Fleet, the Shadow Fleet, the Ghost fleet, the parallel fleet.

There's lots of different names, but there's no defined methodology

or marker for what a shadow fleet or dark fleet vessel is.

However, there are some characteristics that are endemic, no matter what you call it.

So a shadow fleet is typically solely deployed in sanctioned oil trades.

So it doesn't go from Saudi Arabia to China, then go to Iran and pick up a cargo.

It's solely employed in, say, Russia trading, for example.

It's normally the identity or the beneficial owner is obscured behind layers of Byzantine corporate structures that range from the United Arab Emirates to India to Mauritius, Seychelles, Marshall Islands.

And then also they're usually elderly.

and poorly maintained because they exploit weaknesses in global shipping regulation to evade sanctions and they also deploy a range of deceptive shipping,

just deceptive practices.

And that can range from switching off their vessel transponder, their automatic identification system, their AIS, to manipulating their position, saying they're in one place when they're really somewhere else to obfuscate the destination and the origin of their cargo.

Those very dense layers of ownership, management, control.

And typically, they are also, as I said, elderly, very difficult to track, and their sole purpose is to evade sanctions.

So, that

is a very long way of explaining what encompasses that term.

No, that's great.

And so, to give people a sense of the scale, do we have any idea of the kind of number of ships that are out there being used in this kind of shadow fleet purpose?

And how has that,

as someone who tracks us, have you seen that dramatically increase since the sanctions were imposed on Russia after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022?

Oh, absolutely.

So at Wynward, we've got our own dark fleet list, and that starts at about 1,900 vessels.

However, when you sort of narrow that down for vessels over 20,000 deadweight, which is a measurement that typically implies that it's trading internationally, that number gets to about a thousand.

That is probably where

it's now.

It's about 17% of the total internationally trading fleet.

But before Russia invaded Ukraine, when there was still a DARP fleet and it was mostly used for shipping sanctioned Venezuelan and Iranian oil, it was more or less about 300, 350 vessels.

That has more than tripled since Russia invaded Ukraine because obviously the imposition of sanctions meant that Russia had to spend, and I think the UK government estimates about $14 billion in putting together a fleet, Russia trading fleet, of maybe about 450, 500 tankers that are used to circumvent, first of all, the oil price cap, the G7 oil price cap that was imposed on Russia, and to keep oil flowing with minimal Western involvement.

So they kind of created a parallel fleet that's completely outside normal Western jurisdiction.

And when you, so hearing that scale, right, 17%

of this kind of maritime trade um that doesn't feel like a bug it feels like it's becoming kind of a feature of global commerce i mean have have we reached a point where sanctions are so

i would say overused but so you utilized that not just russia but a whole bunch of other countries including purchasers of this uh oil are just kind of normalizing this kind of parallel trading system

well that that's that's for sure been a an evolution of the the imposition or the re-imposition of sanctions on Iran that started back in 2018, implemented in 2019.

And then, of course, the tactics were borrowed by Venezuela and embraced with gusto by Russia.

So now, when you look at the number of vessels that have been sanctioned by the EU, the UK and the US since the beginning of 2023, so that includes Iranian sanctions as vessels as well, this past quarter, the number of sanctioned vessels exceeded a thousand for the first time.

So when you sit sort of sit back and look at that, you have got about 20%

of crude tankers are now sanctioned.

So trade is now divided into compliant and to non-compliant.

And these vessels are

really destroying the regulatory integrity of global trade

and

they are also threatening international rules-based order, which is essential to have international shipping go safely, securely, and you know, without consequences for the environment.

Because these tankers are carrying oil.

So, one Afromax tanker that's commonly used in Russia, that's 750,000 barrels of oil.

These tankers are poorly maintained, and they're using permissive flag states in order to avoid scrutiny.

If there is an accident, as it says, let's say an Afromax tanker sails from a Russian Baltic port to India, through the Danish Straits, down through the English Channel, which is the route the Borakai took, marine insurers have said that is a billion-dollar marine oil spill.

That's what it's going to cost to clean up.

So the stakes are really big when it comes to the shadow fleet.

So it's not just, you know, the cost of sanctions of Asian, right, making sanctions worth less.

It's also potentially massive environmental risks.

And then I want to ask about this emerging question of whether Russia is also shifting to use these ships for military purposes.

We mentioned the Borsai potentially being used as a base for drone launches.

There are other scenarios.

We saw a shadow fleet tanker named Eagle S caught last year dragging its anchor to potentially destroy undersea cables, which are obviously also critical to the global economy.

What are the risks that you're seeing?

You've got sanctions evasion, you've got environmental damage.

What are the risks of potential military purposes to this kind of growing shadow fleet out there?

So when we come to the Boracai, the vessel was one of three that were listed as a possible staging point for drones.

And none of the countries that have alleged the have actually alleged the Borakai was involved.

They've said that it was a vessel of interest and France didn't detain the vessel on that basis.

However, over the weekend,

Polish intelligence and also Ukraine's president have suggested that they have evidence and knowledge that these vessels are being used for drone attacks.

I've personally seen no evidence or read any evidence, but do note that those reports have been said.

There have also been reports that unauthorised personnel have been on this vessel, these vessels, and that's from Danish pilots that have watched them go through the Danish Straits.

Again,

if anybody would know

who's on those vessels, the Danish pilots would know.

I've personally received reports from people in a position to know that they have seen unauthorised people on these vessels going back as long as 18 months ago.

And of course, the Eagle S, the alleged sabotage of that vessel, which cut the S-Link cable linking Finland in Estonia on Christmas Day.

There has been no evidence offered, even during a recent court case, that this was done, this was sabotage.

But definitely

the evidence that came out in the court case suggested that crew incompetency, and the vessel's very poor condition led to that anchor being dragged for, for, I think it was 100 kilometers without anybody knowing.

So that's interesting.

So, as with the environmental risks,

in addition to there being potentially military uses, there's also just the risk that these are old ships that are not up to standard, that are not abiding by rules, and so they could cause damage wittingly or unwittingly.

So, what are the tools available to deal with this challenge,

this threat?

and if they're not sufficient, what kind of new capabilities, policies, regulatory changes

do you think are necessary to tackle what is clearly kind of a growing phenomenon out there?

Well, I think shipping is at the front line of an unprecedented sanctions experiment and a foreign policy experiment because we have never seen so many

vessels sanctioned so rapidly at such scale ever before.

So there is no way of looking at precedent to say, well, this is what's happened before.

What we do see now is that regulators are, because they have sanctioned so many vessels, they have fewer levers to pull.

They are now targeting the enablers of sanctions evasion.

So they're extending beyond vessels to flag registries, to marine insurers, to oil traders, directors of those companies that are oil traders, company formation agents, ship managers across many jurisdictions in order to frustrate and make shipping Russian oil more complicated, more expensive, more difficult for the Russians.

And it certainly had that aim.

Because obviously we have to remember that the primary aim when sanctions on Russia were established wasn't to block the flow of oil, it was to diminish the flow of revenue to

the Kremlin.

And certainly the oil price cap, even though the UK and the EU have diverged from US policy,

the price cap has definitely reduced income to the Kremlin because they have to accept a discount in order to sell their oil, whether or not they're price cap compliant.

And they've also had to spend money in establishing this parallel fleet in order to avoid being compliant with the price cap.

So, are there policy solutions?

You know, I've got a few ideas, but

at the moment, I think it's all about making things as difficult as possible.

And if you don't sanction these vessels, if you don't place impediments in the way of Russia in order to prevent them

getting as much money and income for their energy sales, which of course are, I think, about

14% of Russia's GDP, then

what other consequences will they face for their actions with Ukraine?

So it feels like if sanctions are a tool here that can be expanded,

it also feels like we're in kind of a cat and mouse game, right?

Where, as you've described, it's relatively easy in global shipping to be kind of changing a ship's name, its owner, its flag,

you know, pretty regularly to try to probably stay like half a step ahead of regulators or, you know, people people enforcing sanctions.

At the same time, we know that,

and I know your firm is probably beginning to use AI to monitor the shipping data.

So on the one hand, I can see how AI could be put to use in kind of monitoring a challenge like this where you're trying to analyze behaviors and changes and registration and things like that.

I also would expect that then they'll be using AI to try to stay ahead of that.

How is technology going to begin to interact with this?

How is artificial intelligence?

I mean, it's a good test case of how a new tool could be brought to bear on a kind of complex challenge like this.

Well, I've actually got an excellent example from the weekend because we have at Wynward, it's called early anomaly detection, and we use AI to sort of use all these data points to find anomalies that can be significant.

And I won't go into the where's and exactly how it works.

But what it did find over the weekend is it pointed out that the Iranian Iranian flag tankers suddenly began putting on their AIS.

So that's the vessel transponder.

Iranian flag tankers are owned by

Iran's national Iranian tanker company, the state-owned ship owner.

And they are the darkest of the dark fleet.

Their deceptive shipping practices are among the most difficult to track.

So they very rarely have their vessel transponder on.

They only have it on when they go through the Singapore Strait because they have to.

You never track them loading at Iran because they spoof their location in order to hide the fact that they're loading.

And they do lots of ship-to-ship transfers and a very complex logistics chain.

And so AI, for example, picked up that behavior in the waters of Malaysia, in the Malaysia's economic exclusive zone, where a lot of them will an area used for floating storage and ship-to-ship transfers, that a lot of them simultaneously, I think there was about

nine, maybe ten, simultaneously began broadcasting their AIS.

The reasons why, you know, I'm looking at that to find out why, but I think it's related to the snapback sanctions that were re-imposed by the UN,

but that

picked up a behavior that is very, very interesting for oil traders and for maritime intelligence and regulators regulators all around the world.

So

one last question I just wanted to ask you, and back on the Boer side where we began this, which is that I noticed that the captain and the ship's first mate, and the captain is a dude back in Francis Dan Trial,

they're both Chinese.

Is there anything to be read into that geopolitically, right?

You know, kind of a Chinese collaboration?

Or is there just like a common profile for these crews?

Like

who is piloting these ships?

Who's working on these ships?

Who are the human beings that are running the Shadow Fleet?

Well,

in terms of generally, you will find Filipino, Indian, Chinese crew.

That's certainly not unusual.

And especially if there's some element of Chinese ownership or management of a ship, you will typically find Chinese crews.

So I don't feel that that had any significance

except it perhaps gives us a few more clues about the beneficial owner or the the

management structure of the tanker, which, as I said, I can't recall exactly the details of the Boracai, but I believe it had Seychelles management structure, which is something that's typically favoured by Chinese-linked dark fleet vessels.

So that's probably my takeaway.

I think with the Eagle S, for example, there was Georgian and Indian crew.

The crew are probably the least guilty, you know, in terms of the

dark fleet management.

You know, they're poorly paid.

They usually don't have a choice of vessel.

You know,

they need to feed their families.

They'll take what they can get.

So that's perhaps the most that you can gather from the Borake and the crew situation.

Well, Michelle, potentially Chinese-owned ship through hidden ownership through the Seychelles, selling Russian oil with crew from all around the world.

Sounds like a, and you could also write a Netflix show if you have the time.

Yeah.

And you have to forget.

Yeah.

But can I just add that that vessel was also falsely flagged?

So it belonged to a fraudulent registry.

So it was effectively lawless, flagless, and stateless, which was the basis upon which the French interdicted it, not because it was a shadow vessel, not because it was shipping Russian oil, but because it was potentially violating international maritime rules.

Yeah,

it's fascinating, actually.

And I think a challenge that's going to just continue to grow, right, as sanctions are used and as geopolitical tensions increase.

So thanks to you and the work that Wynward, your firm does.

Thanks so much for coming on here to make us a little bit smarter about this.

Thanks very much, Ben.

Thanks again, Michelle V.C.

Bachman, for joining the show.

And

I don't know.

Talk to you next week, I guess.

Maybe we might have to do a little bonus, talk about all the other issues.

It's not impossible that there's a bonus coming.

Yeah, we'll watch.

And

if we regime change Venezuela,

we'll be on that too.

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