Trump Dances Across Asia

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Speaker 1 Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor.
I'm Ben Rose. Ben's calling in all the way live from the UK, where I believe he's there for a Tommy Robinson rally.
Did I get that right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, I

Speaker 2 did not overlap to try to disrupt the Tommy Robinson rally. That's what I'd be doing.
But coming to you from London, yes, it's lovely here.

Speaker 1 How is it?

Speaker 1 What's the vibe? What's the weather like? Are they

Speaker 1 do they have the same look on their faces about us in the Trump era that we did to them during the Boris Johnson era? Is that the vibe these days?

Speaker 2 It is a little worse.

Speaker 2 Like, as someone said to me yesterday, don't the Americans know what you dragged all of us into when you chose to re-elect Trump?

Speaker 2 And, you know, I always feel a little deflated when people say that. But yeah, it's basically a lot of questions about.

Speaker 1 You should terrify that guy. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's a lot of questions about like,

Speaker 2 why are you so insane? Why are you doing this to us?

Speaker 2 Are you going to be okay?

Speaker 2 You know, so par for the course. And, you you know, not exactly a little concerned here about Nigel Farage, too.
You know,

Speaker 2 I guess they're not doing the cameos.

Speaker 2 Some of the people, the people I'm talking to are not getting the cameos.

Speaker 1 They're not seeing the joy in Nigel Farage. Yeah, those are all, I think, understandable reactions.
Well, it's great to see you. Thank you for zooming so late.

Speaker 1 And we got a great show for everybody today. We're going to talk about Donald Trump's foreign trip.
He's in Asia right now.

Speaker 1 In honor and in the spirit of that foreign trip, we're going to talk about some staggering corruption because we know that corruption is such a big part of foreign trips these days for the U.S.

Speaker 1 president, including an incident that involves Donald Trump Jr. There's an update on the new and improved Pentagon Press Corps for you all.
There's an awful update on the civil war in Sudan.

Speaker 1 We have some breaking news on the budding U.S. war with Venezuela and then the latest breach of the ceasefire in Gaza.

Speaker 1 We'll also talk about some positive election results for the president of Argentina, why a TV ad featuring Ronald Reagan has created an international incident.

Speaker 1 It's a real story that we're going to talk about. And then we're going to give you some actual reasons to be mad at Canada.
Stay tuned for that.

Speaker 1 Ben, then you're going to hear my conversation with our old friend and colleague, Mike McFaul. Mike's got a big book out.

Speaker 1 It's called Autocrats versus Democrats, China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder. We talk about the book, who's winning? The Autocrats or the Democrats.

Speaker 1 We talk about Trump's relationship with Putin. I asked him Ben what he made of the new and not so improved Dmitry Medvedev, who's gone from

Speaker 1 president to insane person on Twitter. Although, I guess we have a president who could do both.
So,

Speaker 1 great conversation with Mike. Also, for our subscribers at the end of the show, we are going to take some questions from the Discord.
So, stick around for that. All right, Ben.

Speaker 1 So, President Trump is in Asia as we speak for a long week of summitry, bilateral meetings, and then whatever the hell this is, those of you watching on the Pod Say of the World YouTube will enjoy.

Speaker 1 So just to quickly describe what we watched,

Speaker 1 first was a clip of sort of like a fisting, maybe sideways hand job dance, followed by like a doddering old man getting led around a room by a Japanese woman. Is that fair representation?

Speaker 2 Well, he tried to walk into the band and then had to be led in the other direction and then he saluted the Japanese flag.

Speaker 1 Like, I don't know what the hell is going on there.

Speaker 2 It made Joe Biden look like a brisk young teenager by comparison.

Speaker 1 I feel like you and I don't always get baited by kind of like resistance clips that make him look stupid or silly.

Speaker 1 Because if you usually, if you watch the whole thing, like he's pretty funny and coherent, but that was just hilarious.

Speaker 1 It really is like, if Joe Biden did this,

Speaker 2 it would have been a real problem.

Speaker 1 We need a left-wing media ecosystem like Crooked Media, subscribe, because if Joe Biden had done had done that it would have been wall-to-wall coverage for three weeks but wall to wall and rightly so yeah subscribe to pod save the world on youtube please for the love of god we're trying to build a left-wing counterweight to all this crap okay so trump's first stop was in malaysia for the asean summit in kuala lumpur uh there he signed a trade agreement with malaysia and cambodia and then this framework agreement with thailand and vietnam another sort of beginning of a trade deal um but uh he also you know the main event was kind of this victory lap trump wanted to take over what the administration insists is a peace deal between thailand and Cambodia, but in reality, it's more of just the latest ceasefire in a long-standing border dispute that is not resolved.

Speaker 1 Details, details. Trump also went to Japan, where he met with the emperor and the new prime minister, Sani Takaichi.
We talked about her on the last week's show.

Speaker 1 She's the first female prime minister of Japan. She's very conservative.
She's a protege of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, who is a close buddy of Trump's.

Speaker 1 It seems like Trump's warm feelings for Abe have passed down to Takeichi. She also did lots of buttering him up.

Speaker 1 She nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize, served him American beef and rice, because when you're in Japan, you want some good old-fashioned American beef.

Speaker 1 And then they watched part of the epic World Series game last night together, which honestly, that's pretty cool. That's pretty cool.
So Trump later declared that the U.S.

Speaker 1 and Japan were, quote, allies at the strongest level, and that the two have become very close friends in this meeting. And he said, this woman is a winner.
So there you go.

Speaker 1 They don't seem to have resolved the major questions that are still outstanding about how to manage this proposed $550 billion fund that Japan promised to invest in the U.S., but again, details, details.

Speaker 1 So, the biggest meeting of Trump's trip is going to happen on Thursday when he meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea. Ahead of that visit, negotiators said the U.S.

Speaker 1 and China had worked out a deal to stop the massive tariffs Trump had threatened to slap on China, to get rid of restrictions on Chinese exports of rare earth minerals, and then to get China to start buying U.S.

Speaker 1 soybeans again, which in short means Trump may have solved all the problems he created by launching this trade war in the first place.

Speaker 1 Trump also said he wants to visit China next year, and then he wants to have Xi Jinping either come to Washington or Palm Beach.

Speaker 1 So listeners might be wondering, like, what kind of negotiating magic got all this done in time for the summit?

Speaker 1 Ben, this clip from Treasury Secretary Scott Besant from ABC News this past weekend probably tells you everything you need to know.

Speaker 3 You did mention that China has been boycotting American soybeans and American farmers have really suffered. Do you see see a real light at the end of the tunnel there that may allow soybeans again?

Speaker 1 Well, Martha, in case you don't know it, I'm actually a soybean farmer, so

Speaker 1 I have felt this pain too.

Speaker 1 Just one farmer to another, Ben. What do you make of the trip so far and this apparent detente that has been negotiated between the U.S.
and China?

Speaker 2 So just in the pageantry of authoritarianism watch here, I think it's really important to just kind of go through some of these things because what you'll find is what utter bullshit all this is, that he puts us through things to then arrive at these fake victories.

Speaker 2 So, first of all, the Thailand-Cambodia war that he's now ended, in his words, right? First of all, as you said, it didn't resolve the underlying dispute of the border question.

Speaker 2 Second of all, it's not like this was like a raging multi-year land war or something. As someone who's at a lot of ASEAN summits,

Speaker 2 proud of being at, I think, seven of them myself, this is the kind of thing.

Speaker 1 A lot of SIGs went down.

Speaker 2 Well, this is the kind of thing.

Speaker 1 A lot of heaters got burned.

Speaker 2 Oh, trust me, a lot of heaters got burned. A lot of weird clothes got worn.
Maybe I actually might have danced a little bit like Trump did there, I have to say.

Speaker 2 But this is the kind of issue that would have been like, you know, a paragraph in the communique addressed not in front of cameras, like in some meeting.

Speaker 2 They're just blowing out these things, like as if they're these massive achievements to stroke his ego. When, when, again, normally this would just be handled like routine business.

Speaker 2 Then these trade deals are Trump creating massive disruptions in the economies of these countries, you know, urging them essentially to begin to hedge against the United States and draw closer to China, but then announcing deals when he gets there, the biggest one being China, where if you look at the deal, it's a kind of return to like the status quo ante before Trump created all these disruptions.

Speaker 2 And so,

Speaker 2 and I have to say, Tommy, like, as was the case with like some of the peace deals we've talked about, I'm a little triggered by like the media coverage of these like wins and the Trump transactional style and era of diplomacy when all it is is like Trump starting a fire and then he and a bunch of countries have to like put out the fire just to return to how things were before.

Speaker 2 And then we're hearing about like the peace president and the Nobel Peace Prize and Trump the deal maker when nothing is like materially better than when this started.

Speaker 2 And in fact, a lot of people got hurt along the way. And I have a lot of empathy for Scott Besson.

Speaker 1 Like Scott Besson.

Speaker 2 Yeah, work in the fields, you know, the billionaire soybean farmer here.

Speaker 1 Calloused hands. Yeah, but it's just all the yield farming.

Speaker 2 And on China, because what happened is the Chinese exerted their leverage, right? Trump did these tariffs thinking I'm going to bully them and get them to do a bunch of stuff.

Speaker 2 They slapped on these restrictions on the export of rare earth materials. They stopped buying soybeans.

Speaker 2 And so then Trump furiously has to negotiate down his tariffs just to get back that they're going to buy some soybeans and let us buy rare earth materials.

Speaker 2 It's complete and utter bullshit that everybody has to kind of dress up as these winds to satiate his bottomless ego.

Speaker 1 And it's not at all clear that Trump can ameliorate the harm that's already been done to U.S.

Speaker 1 farmers because a lot of there's some belief that the Chinese have already bought like all that they need from other soybean farmers in places like Brazil and Argentina.

Speaker 1 And maybe they'll buy some like, you know, ceremonial amount from U.S. farmers to kind of make it seem like things are all patched up.
But I don't know. I guess we'll see.

Speaker 1 The other big question, Ben, about the Xi Jinping meeting is whether Trump will soften on Taiwan. There's been lots of reporting that she is preparing to make a big ask for the U.S.

Speaker 1 to change its position on Taiwan in exchange for some sort of economic carrot. We'll see if that happens.

Speaker 1 It's also worth just pointing out that Trump keeps saying over and over and over again that he wants to meet with Kim Jong-un on this trip.

Speaker 1 Nowhere in his comments is there an explanation of why he wants to meet with him, like what he wants to talk about.

Speaker 1 There's no reckoning with the reality that North Korea's nuclear and ballistic missile arsenal has increased substantially since the last couple of times they met.

Speaker 1 But clearly he just loves like the big splashy headlines and media coverage that comes from meeting with a despot, even if it accomplishes nothing and in fact could have been harmful.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And what is frustrating to me is that it kind of works for him politically, right?

Speaker 2 Because you recall, like, when he did that Singapore summit, it was like this kind of euphoric press coverage of this breakthrough when, in fact, like, as with the Ukraine war escalating since he got involved there, as with like the Gaza ceasefire, not really being ceasefire, which we'll talk about, you know, he does that meeting with Kim Jong-un.

Speaker 2 And since then, North Korea has like significantly expanded its nuclear and missile arsenals, has begun fighting with soldiers on the ground ground in the Russia-Ukraine war.

Speaker 2 He's so focused on the pageantry and the political benefit to him in the United States because you have a right-wing media that treats anything he does, you know, right-wing media that had never heard of a Thailand-Cambodia conflict, acts like he just ended World War III with his diplomacy.

Speaker 2 And the other thing that you know, the China piece highlights is that he's so episodic that he'll get the announcement of the soybean deal. Are they really going to follow through?

Speaker 2 Like, do we have confidence that they're going to be checking three months, six months, nine months to make sure that the Chinese are kind of back to the, you know, you get the sense that these countries have figured out that as long as Trump gets like the announcement, they kind of don't have to do anything beyond that.

Speaker 2 And this is a really important thing to watch across the board in his foreign policy, that these countries make these big announcements of investments in the United States.

Speaker 2 They're going to start buying things again or like some peace deals reached. And then nothing really changes changes on the back end.

Speaker 2 But Trump then spends the rest of his presidency just telling us about he's ended eight wars, nine wars, ten wars.

Speaker 2 He's got historic trade deals because all he cares about is the fact that there was some announcement, even if it didn't lead to something.

Speaker 2 And I think what worries me on the China piece is the Chinese have like a very clear agenda of what they want from Trump.

Speaker 2 You know, they want this historic shift on Taiwan, essentially opposition to Taiwan having any hope of independence, de facto recognition of the Chinese position that could lead someday to like the Chinese militarily forcing reunification with Taiwan.

Speaker 2 You know, the Chinese want access to American technology. They've already gotten it in this kind of weird deal, member, where they're allowed to get NVIDIA chips.

Speaker 2 And as long as the United States gets like a cut, they can just have all the computing power that they can buy in that regard.

Speaker 2 They have a strategy for what they're doing here. And if they need to squeeze Trump, they'll do it, right, with rare earth materials or whatever the thing is.

Speaker 2 And so, again, like this absence of follow-through and just settling for announcements,

Speaker 2 you know, credulous media coverage in the U.S. notwithstanding, underneath the surface of that, what I see happening in Asia is countries no longer thinking the United States is a reliable bet.

Speaker 2 And what you're going to see underneath the radar, because they're not going to have big announcements about it, because the Chinese don't need the kind of bottomless ego feeding that Trump does, is these countries like Vietnam, like moving closer to China, trading more with China, like trying to disentangle themselves from the United States.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Suddenly the conservative media cares deeply about like a random temple in the forest that was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site by one side.
It's like, how is this the thing?

Speaker 1 All of a sudden Fox is covering. But yeah.

Speaker 2 Barack Obama announced that they make fun of him, you know.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 pretty much, yes. Well, look, Ben, as we know, corruption,

Speaker 1 again, it's sort of a fellow traveler on every Trump foreign trip.

Speaker 1 It was on display in Charmil Sheikh for the ceasefire victory lap when a hot mic caught the president of Indonesia talking to Trump about whether he should call Don or Eric, presumably for some real estate deal.

Speaker 1 So in that spirit, today we're going to highlight some other recent instances of corruption. So the first one has to do with cryptocurrency, of course.

Speaker 1 Last week, Trump pardoned a billionaire crypto magnate who is known as CZ. CZ is the founder of a cryptocurrency exchange called Binance.

Speaker 1 CZ pleaded guilty to money laundering violations in 2023 and served four months in jail. And his company, Binance, paid about $4.3 billion in fines, which is the largest settlement in U.S.
history.

Speaker 1 Here's a clip of CNN's Caitlin Collins asking Trump about the pardon last week, and then we'll explain.

Speaker 4 Today you pardoned the founder of Binance. Can you explain why you chose to pardon him? And did it have anything to do with his involvement in your family's corruption?

Speaker 4 The founder of Binance.

Speaker 5 He has an involvement in your own family's crypto.

Speaker 5 I believe we're talking about the same part because I do pardon a lot of people. I don't know.
He was recommended by a lot of of people.

Speaker 5 A lot of people say that, are you talking about the crypto person?

Speaker 5 A lot of people say that he wasn't guilty of anything. He served four months in jail, and they say that he was not guilty of anything.
That what he did, well, you don't know much about crypto.

Speaker 5 You know nothing about, you know nothing about nothing, you fake news. But let me just tell you that he was somebody that, as I was told, I don't know him.
I don't believe I've ever met him.

Speaker 5 But I've been told by a lot of support. He had a lot of support.
And they said that what he did is not even a crime. It wasn't a crime, that he was persecuted by the Biden administration.

Speaker 5 And so I gave him a pardon at the request of a lot of very good people.

Speaker 1 So Trump is getting a little testy there and playing dumb, but like the underlying facts in the story is not complicated. Like CZ pleaded guilty.

Speaker 1 The Treasury Department said Binance willfully failed to report financial transactions associated with al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas. I think Palestinian Islamic Jihad was on that list too.

Speaker 1 They also allowed money to go to sanctioned countries like Iran and to websites selling child sexual abuse material. So truly vile stuff.
And the Binance team knew what they were doing.

Speaker 1 The New Yorker quotes an exchange where Binance's chief compliance officer said of its customers, quote, like, come on, they are here for crime, end quote.

Speaker 1 So true to form, CZ gets out of jail, Trump gets into office, and then CZ immediately starts scheming ways to buy himself a pardon. The Times had a great piece on sort of his process.

Speaker 1 He read books about business leaders who got pardons.

Speaker 1 He hired a former SEC lawyer who also represents the Trump family's crypto business, World Liberty Financial, and Zach Witkoff, the co-founder of World Liberty Financial and son of Steve Witkoff, the golf buddy turned diplomat.

Speaker 1 And then, and the biggest move that Binance made was working with this Emirati-backed investment fund called MGX to facilitate a $2 billion investment into Binance using World Liberty Financial's new stable coin, USD1.

Speaker 1 The code for that, that the USD1, the stablecoin, was basically written written by Binance as well, according to Bloomberg.

Speaker 1 And so this sounds a little wonky and complicated, but it's hard to overstate how consequential this was for the Trump family. USD1 was created in March of this year.

Speaker 1 It is now the sixth largest stablecoin in the world.

Speaker 1 A stablecoin is a type of cryptocurrency that is supposed to be pegged to the dollar or some other unit of measure so that you can use it to exchange money in and out of

Speaker 1 like Bitcoin or something without realizing gains on the underlying asset. It is almost entirely because of this $2 billion Emirati-backed investment into USD-1

Speaker 1 that the currency jumped in circulation like that. And it's also estimated to earn the family about $80 billion a year this year in interest alone.

Speaker 1 So that then is the process through which you buy yourself a pardon. Hopefully that's useful for listeners who might do money laundering in the near future.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And here's the thing.
There's the immediate grossness of the fact that clearly this was a pay-to-play or pay-to-part in thing, right?

Speaker 2 You get a $2 billion investment in World Liberty and you hire the right lawyers and the right connections and you can get out of jail-free card.

Speaker 2 But I think one of the things that people are missing about this is the message it sends, not just to this guy, not even just to Binance, but to the entire crypto sector.

Speaker 2 Because what the Trump people have done since they came in is they canceled all the enforcement cases at the SEC, right? So any investigations into crypto just kind of went away.

Speaker 2 They kind of, here's your wish list of lack of regulation. And oh, by the way, you get a pardon even if you do these things.

Speaker 2 And the concern that a lot of people have, we can talk separately about the risk of crypto bubbles like taking down the economy. That's a whole other conversation.

Speaker 2 But if you just take the money laundering question, one of the concerns regulators have always had is if you create some different currency that is not subject to any national government oversight, you are creating essentially a dark currency that can be used for everything from terrorist financing to money laundering to like, if criminals scam your grandma and take her life savings, the money just immediately disappears into some crypto asset that is untraceable, right?

Speaker 2 And what Trump is doing is sending a message to that entire sector that you are beyond the reach of the law.

Speaker 2 Or, you know, frankly, you can buy your way out of trouble by the right investments if you get in trouble.

Speaker 2 So the ripple effects of this thing are, yes, just the immediate disgust of Trump like selling pardons for the benefit of his family business interests, but also

Speaker 2 nobody's going to be mining the store here.

Speaker 2 Do we really think there are going to be vigorous investigations into other crypto money laundering and other terrorist financing and other crypto cyber crimes?

Speaker 2 This opens up a Pandora's box here that is really scary to think about. And it's what we've always said, Tommy, is it's not just like what the U.S.

Speaker 2 enforcement agencies like the FBI are doing and going after Trump's enemies, it's who they're not going after. And this is a glaring example of who they're not going to be going after going forward.

Speaker 2 And that opens up a ton of risk in the crypto space.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And it's also, this isn't the first pardon or

Speaker 1 pardon adjacent thing that's been purchased by a crypto billionaire. There's another crypto billionaire named Justin Sun, who is being investigated by the SEC for fraud.

Speaker 1 Justin Sun bought $75 million in World World Liberty tokens, and this case was put on ice.

Speaker 1 Sun also bought access to a dinner with Trump after spending $18.6 million on a Trump meme coin. So this money is just sloshing around at levels that are kind of like hard to wrap your head around.

Speaker 1 And the corruption stories are coming so quickly and frequently that the media can't really focus on any one thing. And it's just like the Republicans don't care.

Speaker 1 The conservative media doesn't cover it. So it's just like, it's just washing away.

Speaker 2 And And by the way, what you've gone through and what we've talked about in this podcast is what we know about.

Speaker 2 You know, the thing about crypto is there's a lot that happens there that we don't know about.

Speaker 2 You know, you can kind of watch these transactions in quite the same way that you can, you know, stock purchases, right?

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 there's a tip of the iceberg that we're seeing in terms of the scale of corruption that's happening here. But you don't know what kind of...

Speaker 2 foreign government interests or other kind of corrupt or dark business type people might be trying to buy something from the United States government under the table through some crypto transaction that we're not even seeing here.

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Speaker 1 Speaking of our new government by meritocracy, Ben, so the Army announced that it intends to buy 3,500 drone engines from a company called Unusual Machines.

Speaker 1 Unusual Machines recently announced that it is being advised by a highly regarded international expert on drone technology, Donald Trump Jr., the eldest of the Fail Sons.

Speaker 1 So according to the New York Times, Unusual Machines gave Don Jr. 200,000 shares of its stock late last year in return for his help as an advisor.
Don Jr.

Speaker 1 also made an investment in the company, and his total shares are now worth around $4 million.

Speaker 1 Don Jr. is also an executive venture firm called 1789 Capital, which invests in companies like SpaceX, Firehawk Aerospace, and Endural, all of which have gotten Pentagon contracts this year.

Speaker 1 Again, meritocracy is back then.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and just monetizing the U.S. government here, right?

Speaker 2 Because if you control massive contracts, federal contracts, and you're simultaneously investing in the companies that stand to benefit from those contracts, you're just creating a feedback loop where decisions that Donald Trump can make in office immediately generate a profit for the Trump family business interest.

Speaker 2 And we're talking about things like what kind of military equipment the U.S. purchases, right? Or what kind of AI systems, right, the U.S.
military or the U.S. government might invest in.

Speaker 2 These are not small matters. And

Speaker 2 it's corruption at such a large scale that people seem to not be able to get their minds around it.

Speaker 2 Like if there was a story about somebody giving, I don't know, Hunter Biden, you know, $100,000 worth of gold bars, it would seem like more tawdry and, you know, they were got caught in something.

Speaker 2 This is just out happening in plain sight. Billions and billions of dollars swashing around in crypto and contracts and investments and circular payments, right? Because

Speaker 2 you're making decisions that then have second order effects that benefit your family.

Speaker 2 And I think the intention here is the scale and the fact that it's happening in plain sight is just kind of meant to overwhelm and numb people to the reality of how it is.

Speaker 2 And we should also say, like, this is kind of how some other countries have done business, right?

Speaker 2 Like Turkey, like Eritrean has a son-in-law and a son, including one who's in the drone business, by the way.

Speaker 2 And the same thing happens there, right? Like, like, but the United States is just so much bigger and more powerful. So the scale is so much larger for this to happen.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And like, just in case anyone thinks we're kind of exaggerating this, like, Don Jr.
bragged about helping vet candidates for jobs at the Pentagon. He was like, talk about it on his podcast.

Speaker 1 And like, the stakes are actually quite big if you think about it. I mean, imagine if in the future there's a war and a U.S.

Speaker 1 service member is relying on support from a drone in some way, maybe ISR, you know, sort of visual support, and the system fails because we bought an inferior product because Don Jr.

Speaker 1 advises the the company. Like that's the kind of thing that could very easily happen here.

Speaker 1 And seemingly no one cares. Also, Ben, I don't know if you saw this story.
Like

Speaker 1 obviously everyone knows there's a government shutdown happening right now.

Speaker 1 The members of the U.S. military

Speaker 1 are going to miss paychecks.

Speaker 1 But we recently learned that a billionaire named Timothy Mellon has donated $130 million to pay military salaries during the government shutdown, or at least a small portion of those salaries.

Speaker 1 I think it sort of nets out to about 100 bucks per U.S. service member.
This is almost certainly illegal. It's also kind of baffling.
Like, what's the, to what end is he doing this? Why?

Speaker 1 What are the motives?

Speaker 1 Are people really comfortable with random billionaires personally funding the U.S. military? Like, what does that buy you?

Speaker 1 It's just like, it's just bizarre.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, putting aside the illegality of even moving around

Speaker 2 like, you know, funds to pay troops beyond what normally would be the authorization process from Congress.

Speaker 2 We've talked a lot about the most concerning space in the kind of authoritarian watch being Trump's efforts to turn the military into kind of a MAGA militia, right?

Speaker 2 Like an institution that will serve his interests, whether those interests are blowing up boats illegally in the Caribbean or the Pacific, or whether that's using the military in American cities or whatever the thing may be.

Speaker 2 You know, God forbid it's using the U.S. military to challenge an election result.
We've already seen them purge generals that they don't like.

Speaker 2 Presumably they're trying to replace those people with kind of more MAGA friendly generals. We've already seen Pete Hegseth kind of bring the culture wars into the military.

Speaker 2 They want to clearly attract a certain kind of person into the military and probably make it so uncomfortable that other people leave.

Speaker 2 But this is why this thing is, you know, threw up some red flags for me, Tommy.

Speaker 2 It's like, now you're literally literally saying we have like a MAGA donor, because this guy was a huge donor to the Trump campaign, who's literally paying this.

Speaker 1 25 million to a super PAC or something like that. Yeah.
Exactly.

Speaker 2 Now he's literally paying the salaries of the U.S. military.

Speaker 2 I mean, if your concern is that this is supposed to be an apolitical military that serves all the people, but it's being paid by a MAGA political donor billionaire. Like, I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 Like, that is not only legal, that's scary, you know, because it's also like,

Speaker 1 what is this? Like, the 1600s Italy is like a Medici? What do we do? Are we just paying rival warlords to fight for us? What the fuck is happening? It's absolutely baffling. Good reference.

Speaker 1 Also, thank you. Also, at the same time, I mean,

Speaker 1 we've talked about all these changes happening at the Pentagon Press Corps. Just to quickly, you know.

Speaker 1 rewind the tape over the past few weeks the pentagon has issued a series of new rules for reporters who want to have credentials to get into the pentagon and have access to report from there, walk around, record live shots, et cetera.

Speaker 1 The latest version was 21 pages long.

Speaker 1 We won't go through all of it, but the gist was it basically told reporters that they could have their badges stripped for doing the job of being a reporter, for calling people and trying to get information.

Speaker 1 So, in response, a bunch of reporters said, no, we're not going to sign this. All the real reporters are like, this is bullshit.

Speaker 1 And there was a mass walkout by real Pentagon reporters on October 15th, one that included conservative outlets like Fox News and Newsmax.

Speaker 1 But if you thought that might embarrass former Fox News employee Pete Hegzeth, think again.

Speaker 1 Instead, his flak, Sean Parnell, recently announced that, quote, over 60 journalists representing a broad spectrum of new media outlets and independent journalists have signed the Pentagon's media access policy and will be joining the new Pentagon Press Corps.

Speaker 1 So, Ben, we thought we'd give you a couple examples of who is a part of this intrepid new Pentagon Press Corps. One organization is called Frontlines.

Speaker 1 That is a wing of Turning Point USA, which I'm sure folks have heard of. It was founded by Charlie Kirk.
It's basically an outside arm of the Republican Party or the MAGA movement.

Speaker 1 I'm sure they'll do tough coverage. Then there's Timcast Media.

Speaker 1 That's a company run by a guy named Tim Poole, who is so afraid of male pattern baldness that he has made his little beanie hat part of his identity and not long ago was busted for taking money from the Russian government.

Speaker 1 So I'm sure he will be holding feet to the fire over there. Then there's Lindell TV.
That's Mike Lindell. He's my favorite.
That's the MyPillow Pillow Guy as a media organization.

Speaker 1 There's the National Pulse that's run by a former top advisor to far-right British cameo star Nigel Farage, who you mentioned earlier. And then, of course, the Epic Times.

Speaker 1 They're going to be on the case too, because most Americans look to entities affiliated with the Fallen Gong religious movement for Pentagon coverage. So, Ben,

Speaker 1 like

Speaker 1 when you spell it all out, like this makes Hagseth look weak and pathetic and like a little fucking whiny titty baby who can't do a briefing, right? He used to be an anchor on TV.

Speaker 1 Now he can't talk talk to the press. But I do think like in the near term, it's likely to limit coverage of the stuff the Pentagon wants.

Speaker 1 But also I do worry about long-term, this really impeding serious investigative reporting, because

Speaker 1 there are questions about access to the Pentagon, but there's also questions about whether this will restrict access to other military facilities around the country.

Speaker 1 There's questions about whether who's going to get to travel on the Secretary's plane or attend his appearances at summits like the ones happening this week.

Speaker 1 And like, you know, I reached out to one Pentagon reporter just to try to get a sense of like how these new policies are impacting stuff like travel.

Speaker 1 And this person told me that in the beginning, Hexeth brought some traditional reporters.

Speaker 1 Like he was icing out the New York Times and the Post and others who had done like really tough coverage, but he brought a few real outlets.

Speaker 1 But then more recently, like he went to Gitmo, he only brought Laura Ingraham from Fox News.

Speaker 1 On his current trip to Asia, he's got a Washington Times columnist, a turning point USA media personality, and a Heritage Foundation staffer credentialed from the Daily Signal.

Speaker 1 There is a pool, which like rotates among the networks and is only like the only straight-laced journalist he sees. But the secretary has a lot of discretion to decide who he brings on these trips.

Speaker 1 And I think we have seen the impact that can make on the White House because it sounds small, but when Trump does a pool spray in the Oval Office, and it's like two real reporters and then a bunch of suckups, it ends up being instead of tough questions about Ukraine policy, you got Marjorie Taylor Greene's boyfriend shouting questions at Zelensky about why he's wearing a suit that day or whatever bullshit, right?

Speaker 1 And it just, it adds up.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And people need to understand, like, these outlets are,

Speaker 2 they make Fox News look like, you know, Walter Cronkite.

Speaker 2 I mean, the Mike Lindell, My Pillow Media conglomerate, I remember like there was a question in the White House press briefing room that was kind of like, Mr.

Speaker 2 Trump looks healthier and better than he's ever been. Can you tell us the secrets? You know, yeah, can you tell us the secrets of how he's so wonderful looking?

Speaker 2 You know, just absurd North Korean level stuff.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Can't do fluffing without my pillow.

Speaker 2 And look, the thing is, first of all, depending on reporters, sure, they're going to keep reporting. They're going to keep meeting the sources, but this makes it harder.

Speaker 2 If you're not there, you're not picking up the building chatter. You're not catching the general in the hallway.
Like, you have to work. Hot mic.
Yeah, it's not a hot mic moment.

Speaker 2 You have to work twice as hard. But the thing that worries me the most about this is, let's say we go to war with Venezuela tomorrow, which, you know, non-zero chance that that happens.

Speaker 2 And, you know, let's say we're like into the war and shit is going haywire. Like, the briefing matters, right?

Speaker 2 Like, briefing is the accountability moment where the SECDF walks out with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or something, and they got to answer questions.

Speaker 2 And the questions they get are not going to be like, what is the basis under which you're doing this? Or is this going wrong? Or like, what can you tell the American people about? You know,

Speaker 2 the questions are going to be like, Pete Hexeth, tell us your workout routine. Why was this the most brilliant military campaign in the history of military campaigns? And

Speaker 2 it's going to deny the public any kind of moment of accountability.

Speaker 2 Never mind, yeah, like if Hexeth has like some visiting Secretary of Defense, like you're going to get like questions that make Marjorie Taylor Greene's boyfriend look hard-hitting too.

Speaker 2 And it's just turning the Pentagon into this extension of MAGA in a very scary way.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and look, Dan Kane, the chairman of Joint Chiefs,

Speaker 1 I've not seen him do anything

Speaker 2 gross.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, he hasn't been like overt and a troll and just a partisan actor like Hegzette, but it's just worth noting that he has not traveled with any media since being confirmed in April.

Speaker 1 And that, that used to not be the norm. Service Chiefs often used to travel with media, but it seems to be like non-existent these days.
Now, part of that might be budgets.

Speaker 1 It can be really expensive for news outlets to travel on government trips.

Speaker 1 I remember, you know, the first Obama foreign trip we went on, like our NBC correspondents were Chuck Todd and Savannah Guthrie, and there was like a packed press plane.

Speaker 1 There was like a double-decker, and, you know, and by the end, you had much smaller contingents of reporters who could afford to pay to go on those foreign trips because they're very expensive.

Speaker 1 But, you know, that doesn't mean it's okay for these officials to just ice out reporters.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And again, like you would fly with those reporters, and not only would they be covering you and trying to pick up information like here and there, they would go to the place and then they'd go interview the other government about, hey, what's really going on here?

Speaker 2 You know, they

Speaker 2 think of like what the U.S. government is doing.
And this is just shutting that out or making that cost prohibitive or making that like twice as hard.

Speaker 2 There will be less, and this is not a knock on the Pentagon reporters are going to keep hustling, but there will be less coverage of waste, fraud, abuse, of lies, of, you know, I mean, look, and it's not as if the U.S.

Speaker 2 has some track record from the Vietnam War, you know, happy talk about, you know, progress to the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, you know, to look shit in the Obama Euros.

Speaker 1 To Afghanistan, happy talk.

Speaker 2 To Afghanistan, where the Obama era is exactly. Like, there's a track record of rosy assessments or sometimes outright lies, or certainly hiding kind of huge abuses and budgeting.

Speaker 2 That's just not going to be revealed or it's going to be much harder for that to be revealed. And you're going to be legitimizing everything they do with this kind of sheen of a fake press corps.

Speaker 2 I mean, this is what this is. These are not journalists.
This is like literally creating a fake press corps to just echo back to the Trump people what their spin is.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

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Speaker 1 All right, let's turn to some stories happening overseas. So unfortunately, Ben, there's some terrible terrible news this week out of Sudan.

Speaker 1 So as listeners probably know, a civil war has been raging in the Sudan since April of 2023.

Speaker 1 That fighting has been between the Sudanese military and a militia group called the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF.

Speaker 1 The RSF was once aligned with the Sudanese military, and then they had this bitter split, and it led to this civil war that's been raging ever since.

Speaker 1 Recently, that fighting has been especially bad in the southwest part of Sudan, especially the Darfur region.

Speaker 1 And this week, the RSF finally managed to take over a major city called El Fasher, which has been under siege in the Darfur region for 18 months.

Speaker 1 RSF forces had literally built like an earthen wall around the city to prevent anything from going in and out. You can see it in satellite photos.
And people there are starving to death.

Speaker 1 There's a famine. And before this attack, the UN estimated that nearly 260,000 people were still trapped inside El Fasher.
Half of them are kids.

Speaker 1 And now that entire population has been overrun by this militia group.

Speaker 1 Look, the RSF, it is a group that grew out of the Janjaweed militia, which was responsible for the genocide in Darfur two decades ago.

Speaker 1 They're the worst of the worst, and these human rights groups that are monitoring this are fearing the worst already. There's a report from Yale's humanitarian research lab.

Speaker 1 They found satellite imagery showing evidence of mass killings already happening since the city fell. There are images all over social media of civilians trying to flee the city.

Speaker 1 There's atrocities being gleefully filmed by RSF forces.

Speaker 1 There are people just being like carpet bombed in the desert as they tried to escape. It is awful.

Speaker 1 And this victory means the RSF now controls all of Darfur's five states, and there's growing concern that the country could basically be cut in half. It could be partitioned.

Speaker 1 So, Ben, like, much like the war in Gaza, not only has the international community failed to intervene to end the fighting in Sudan, they have been actively contributing to it.

Speaker 1 The Guardian had a report this week about British military equipment found in Sudan that has been used by RSF forces. That equipment was probably given to the RSF by the UAE, the United Arab Emirates.

Speaker 1 And along in terms of the UAE, I mean, the Wall Street Journal had another story this week that said, quote, U.S.

Speaker 1 intelligence agencies say the United Arab Emirates sent increasing supplies of weapons, including sophisticated Chinese drones, to a major Sudanese militia this year, bolstering a group that has been accused of genocide and pouring fuel on the conflict that has created one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.

Speaker 1 So this is just like the latest of many, many reports about the UAE funneling. arms to the RSF.

Speaker 1 And what this one in particular says is that not only was the UAE providing weapons to this genocidal militia force, they increased that support earlier this year after the Sudanese armed forces won back Khartoum, the capital of Sudan.

Speaker 1 So just the scale of the suffering in Sudan, especially in Darfur, is just unimaginable.

Speaker 1 Again, this is a country that experienced a genocide between 2003 and 2005. And then in the past two and a half years, 13 million people have been displaced in Sudan.
Half the country needs food aid.

Speaker 1 And so, Ben, I guess, like my ask to all the people in Washington who are listening, especially journalists and congressional aides and stuff, is like, when you write about the UAE being some peacemaker because of the Abraham Accords, please mention this.

Speaker 1 It is far more consequential than some agreement that allows like a direct flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv.

Speaker 1 And then, again, if you happen to be a big shot of the IP and Muckety Muck out to dinner at Cafe Milano and you see the Emirati ambassador to the U.S.,

Speaker 1 there for the thousandth time, maybe ask him why his country is like feeding weapons into the worst humanitarian disaster on earth.

Speaker 1 Maybe if you are a part of the cast of Morning Joe, you could ask him when he hosts a book event for you.

Speaker 1 Like, there's just like it's just so crazy to me that this entire issue gets buried of the UAE's support for the RSF.

Speaker 2 Yeah, because the thing here is that's so frustrating and tragic about this is like, yes, are there internal issues and disputes? Absolutely.

Speaker 2 But if the world came together and was like, this has to end, the RSF has to, like,

Speaker 2 you know, nobody armed the RSF. Like,

Speaker 2 they couldn't sustain themselves, right?

Speaker 1 It would end today.

Speaker 2 It would end. Like, people have to understand this.
And what you point out that was so important, Tommy, is actually in this civil war,

Speaker 2 the Sudanese military was winning, right?

Speaker 2 Part of what is so grotesque here is that the UAE seemed to re-escalate its support to the RSF at a time when it looked like this thing was basically being resolved or coming to some kind of calm in at least large parts of Sudan where you might have then been prioritizing getting humanitarian aid in and kind of trying to negotiate some process of an end to the conflict and demilitarization of different spaces.

Speaker 2 Instead, they basically went back in there. the embers that were burning, the UAE decided to pour more fire onto those.

Speaker 2 And part of what's particularly gross about this is if you kind of dig into it too, I don't even think at this point the UAE could credibly think that the RSF is somehow going to prevail and govern Sudan.

Speaker 2 It feels like either a combination of like sour grapes, like my side is losing the proxy war, or access to like gold or like raw, you know, materials that frankly some port deal.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Some port deal.
That's crazy.

Speaker 2 How rich is the UAE already? Like, do you really need the, like, you guys are sitting on top of like a trillion dollars, you know?

Speaker 2 Like, is it really that important that you get this port and some of these minerals or this gold or whatever the fuck the thing is that you think the RSF controlling some territory will get you?

Speaker 2 Is it worth all those lives in Darfur? Is it worth all this chaos? Is it worth like condemning Sudan to this kind of perpetual, endless state of civil war?

Speaker 2 And, you know, by the way, we've seen that happen in Yemen, right? We've seen that happen in Libya.

Speaker 2 The U.S., I more than acknowledge and, you know, has its own blood on its hands for its role in some of these conflicts.

Speaker 2 But in this one, it's very clear, if you just cut the RSF off tomorrow and said like this thing has to end, this wouldn't need to happen.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the journal report says they are providing Chinese-made drones, small arms, heavy machine guns, vehicles, artillery, mortars, and other ammunition.

Speaker 1 The story was corroborated by Libyan, Egyptian, and European officials who are familiar with the situation. So this just isn't just like U.S.
Intel saying this. And the story notes that the U.S.

Speaker 1 has never formally called out the UAE publicly for its role in arming the RSF, which means the U.S. is just not really bringing to bear any of the pressure it could

Speaker 1 to end this conflict. And that happened under Biden and it's happening again now.

Speaker 2 And by the way, except I want to give one shout out because the one time somebody did, it was Tom Perielo, who was the envoy for Biden on Sudan, including on this podcast. He called out the Emiratis.

Speaker 2 And guess what? The Emiratis kind of iced Perielo out. And like Biden didn't get his back as he should have too.
So this has happened under multiple U.S. administrations.
And

Speaker 2 given that if the U.S. said to the UAE, we're going to stop providing you with arms until you stop providing the RSF with arms, I think it would stop, right?

Speaker 2 So this is not a case of this is impossible. This is a case of people just needing to use leverage.

Speaker 1 It's just like Trump like forcing a ceasefire in BBNI, which is political will. And yes, Tom did really hard work on this.

Speaker 1 He was an envoy working it hard, like, you know, trying to call out the Emiratis, but he needed some top-level top cover from Joe Biden or somebody else in the administration.

Speaker 1 Switching gears to Venezuela, Ben. So on Monday, Pete Hegseth announced that the U.S.
has hit four more boats in the eastern Pacific, killing 14 people.

Speaker 1 Again, the Trump administration is claiming that these boats are carrying drugs and are being operated by drug cartels. There's apparently one survivor.

Speaker 1 Mexico is handling the search and rescue for that individual. We'll see what happens there.
Remember the last time the U.S. picked up survivors, they just returned them.

Speaker 1 They didn't try to prosecute them because the legal case is so flimsy for what we're doing. So we've been obviously talking about this a lot.
Listeners know that, because it's part of not just

Speaker 1 a drug war, it is part of this effort by neocon hawks within the Trump administration to launch a regime change war with Venezuela and depose Nicolas Maduro, the president.

Speaker 1 Some of this is coming because Trump wants Venezuela's oil, but it's also being driven by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who comes from a hardline right-wing political world in Miami.

Speaker 1 And he thinks that toppling Maduro is the key to then toppling the Cuban government and him, Marco Rubio, that is running for president in 2028. So delusional.

Speaker 1 The Republican Party, though, is not united behind this policy. Let's listen to two examples, Ben.
So the first is Senator Lindsey Graham and then Senator Rand Paul.

Speaker 7 Our land strikes planned.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 19 Yeah, I think that's a real possibility.

Speaker 19 I think President Trump's made a decision that Maduro, the leader of Venezuela, is an indicted drug trafficker, that it's time for him to go, that Venezuela and Colombia have been safe havens for narco-terrorists for too long.

Speaker 19 So there will be a congressional briefing about a potential expanding from the sea to the land. I support that idea.

Speaker 20 So far, they have alleged that these people are drug dealers. No one said their name.
No one said what evidence. No one said whether they're armed.
And we've had no evidence presented.

Speaker 20 So at this point, I would call them extrajudicial killings. And this is is akin to what China does, to Iran does with drug dealers.

Speaker 20 They summarily execute people without presenting evidence to the public. So it's wrong.

Speaker 1 Just to add to, I think, Brandon Paul's excellent argument there.

Speaker 1 I mean, invading Venezuela to stop fentanyl trafficking makes as much sense as invading Iraq to destroy al-Qaeda, which is probably why Lindsey Graham wants to do it.

Speaker 1 Ben, there was also a Time story recently about how other big parts of the NAGA base are just think this is insane. Like it quotes people like Steve Bannon who are just not on board with this policy.

Speaker 1 So I don't know, man. Like the thing I keep thinking about is Trump keeps saying that like his success in getting this ceasefire deal in Gaza might lead to success in ending the war in Ukraine.

Speaker 1 I kind of worry that the opposite might be true, that if he gets too high on his own supply here, it might lead him to think that he's some sort of genius Monroe Doctrine master of the universe who could then have the like, I don't know, authority to go topple Venezuela.

Speaker 1 But I don't know. I guess we're just going to watch these boats blow up a couple times a week until something gives.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I I mean, I had a piece in the New York Times about this, if people want to check it out, but basically, you know, make this argument.

Speaker 1 It's a great piece, by the way. Everyone, check it out.

Speaker 2 Yeah, thanks. And,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 I was basically trying to kind of make the argument that. Trump is above all focused on power, right?

Speaker 2 And this gives him more power, right? He gets to, again, use the military like his kind of personal militia in this regard, that he has a view of the world that is like Putin's, right?

Speaker 2 And we've talked about this, but like the sphere of influence for Putin is the former Soviet Union. For Trump, it's in Latin America, right?

Speaker 2 And so it's not just you could go into Venezuela, it's that then he could go into Panama and he could kind of continue this.

Speaker 2 Um, and you know, like picking leaders of these countries, like you hear Lindsey Graham, he's got Colombia on the list, right? Like a U.S. partner, a U.S.

Speaker 2 ally, um, who Trump is also threatened with potential strikes, right? Or they don't like the leader there. Is Trump just going to declare him a narco-terrorist too, right?

Speaker 2 And so this should scare a lot of people. And, you know, we mentioned this before, but he's asking the U.S.
military to do things that are illegal. These are war crimes.
They're illegal.

Speaker 2 There's no domestic legal basis right now. There's no authorization for him to be doing this.
There's no international legal basis for a president to just determine.

Speaker 2 And look, if people want to say that there were drone strikes in the Obama years, you can absolutely say that. You can absolutely object to that.

Speaker 2 Congress had authorized the use of military force against al-Qaeda. We had, under international law, were pursuing that as a matter of direct self-defense because we'd been attacked.

Speaker 2 You can still say it was the wrong thing, but there was a legal basis put around what that policy was.

Speaker 2 There is nothing here other than Donald Trump and PDXF just declaring that these are drug traffickers, so we have the right to kill them in international waters.

Speaker 2 And that should worry the people that are pulling the trigger in this case here. Now, politically, I think the Democrats should be leaning into this because it's the right thing to do.

Speaker 2 But also, we've we've talked before about the fact that there's real divisions in MAGA on these foreign policy questions. And I think you need to lean into those divisions.

Speaker 2 And sorry, there's one more thing, Tommy, that's been bugging me, which is I kind of think, you know, one of the resistance things is to say everything's a distraction.

Speaker 2 And I don't think that's the case. I think it's just what Trump's doing.

Speaker 2 The thing that I think might be the distraction, I've been thinking about this recently, is Trump puffing up these peace deals on the small ball, right?

Speaker 2 Like, oh, look at me, I'm resolving, you you know, the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict, or I'm resolving the Thailand-Cambodia conflict to kind of create this Serbian economic deal from 2020.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 2 So, he's creating this illusion of, oh, look at Trump. He's such a peacemaker.
Well,

Speaker 2 not only is he not solving the big conflicts like Sudan, like Ukraine, like Gaza, which we'll get to, but he's launching

Speaker 2 potentially regime change wars in Latin America. And I kind of think that some of the peace deal stuff might be a bit of a smokescreen, right?

Speaker 2 Dare I say, from a resistance standpoint, a distraction from the fact that he's anything but a peace president.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, that's sort of the same vibes to what I was saying earlier.

Speaker 1 I mean, also, it's just, we should be clear that deposing Maduro is likely to end up in a messy kind of Libya-like scenario with competing warlords and factions and fighting that could ripple throughout South and Central America.

Speaker 1 So this is this, we could create this problem in Venezuela, but it's not likely to stay there. I mean, it's just, it really,

Speaker 1 it just, it's worth noting how bad this could actually be and how hemispheric of a challenge it could be. Also, Ben, I don't know if you saw, the AP had a story today that detailed the U.S.

Speaker 1 efforts to convince one of Maduro's pilots, airplane pilots, to basically divert the president's plane to a place where the U.S. could capture him.
Really fascinating piece.

Speaker 1 I'm not sure what it getting reported out means for this pilot who's presumably still in Venezuela flying around Maduro.

Speaker 1 But great story that's worth your time. Also worth your time, just to give another shout out to great reporters.
60 Minutes sent a crew down to Venezuela.

Speaker 1 They thought they were going to get an interview with Maduro. They ended up getting stiffed.

Speaker 1 But they did a bunch of really interesting reporting from the ground about people preparing for war that shows both the frustration with the Maduro regime, but also some real trepidation about what a U.S.

Speaker 1 military conflict could do to the country. So also worth watching.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And like this has all these echoes of 70s and 80s policies, even like the elaborate coup plot, like the diverted plane.
It kind of feels like something out of

Speaker 2 some book you read about the 70s.

Speaker 2 But remember how those things went is even when you depose somebody and you get a right-wing leader, like to your point, like then you get death squads and then you get reprisal violence and then you get guerrillas in the, you know, fighting back.

Speaker 2 And these places can be torn apart. Like these countries that have been the sources of migration into the United States, like El Salvador, are countries that the United States broke.
like decades ago.

Speaker 2 And we're still living with that now. That's how long the tail of these things can be.

Speaker 1 Yeah, generational. A couple more quick things as we're we're going a little long.
So we didn't plan a big Gaza section for the show today because we were just going to try to cover some new things.

Speaker 1 But of course, right before we started recording, Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Nyahu announced that he'd ordered, quote, forceful strikes, end quote, on Hamas after he says Hamas violated the ceasefire deal by shooting at Israeli troops and for the failure by Hamas to turn over the bodies of dead hostages in the agreed-upon timeframe.

Speaker 1 So the AP has reported that

Speaker 1 observers in Gaza have heard tank fire and explosions in several parts of the Gaza Strip since that announcement.

Speaker 1 Israeli officials said Hamas fired on IDF forces in Rafah and then handed over remains Monday. They were actually partial remains from the body of a different hostage.
It's very grim stuff.

Speaker 1 Axios reported that Hamas claims it has no connection with the Rafah incident and reiterated its commitment to the ceasefire.

Speaker 1 Remember, there are other jihadist groups in the Gaza Strip, like Palestinian Islamic Jihad and

Speaker 1 Binance,

Speaker 1 and gangs and stuff. So it's like hard to know.
But look, I don't trust Hamas' statements either.

Speaker 1 Hamas also accused Israel of violating the ceasefire by conducting airstrikes, which you know seems like a reasonable point.

Speaker 1 So, Ben, we remain in this odd place where we're a couple weeks after the ceasefire was inked, and you read articles that are like the ceasefire is still holding, but the next sentence of the story is like, also, Israel conducted a series of airstrikes that killed more than 40 people in the Gaza Strip, and it just sure doesn't feel like the ceasefire is holding.

Speaker 1 But I guess we'll see. We should also note that 13 hostage bodies are still being held in Gaza by Hamas.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, the one thing I would just say is that, like,

Speaker 2 if you were measuring what's been happening against normal times, it would feel like there was a war in Gaza.

Speaker 2 You know, like dozens of Palestinians have been killed, shots have been fired back at the Israeli military.

Speaker 2 It only feels like a quote-unquote ceasefire compared to like the apocalyptic violence that was taking place, particularly against Palestinians before this.

Speaker 2 And so this thing has always been not what it was sold to people as, as like a peace deal, right?

Speaker 2 It was putting a lid on a cauldron that is still boiling with probably both sides looking for a pretext to fire at each other.

Speaker 2 And look, the Israeli government has been saying in the far-right components that they want to do this, that they don't want to stay in the ceasefire too.

Speaker 2 So that's relevant here as well, that essentially we know that there are elements in the coalition that want this to resume.

Speaker 2 And like, let's hope this is not the beginning of a full-scale resumption, but it certainly doesn't feel like peace in our time, the resolution of a 3,000-year war is Trump sold at it.

Speaker 1 No, no, not quite. Okay, so going back to South America.
So this past Sunday, Argentina held legislative elections. So the stakes of these elections were huge for President Javier Millay.

Speaker 1 The elections not only impact his ability to govern the country, but were also watched closely by markets and outside investors and others who are trying to determine if Millay can continue his effort to cut government spending and slash inflation.

Speaker 1 If the elections went badly, you know, it could lead to people dumping Argentinian bonds or the currency or other sort of like really bad economic factors.

Speaker 1 So going into this election itself, the headwinds seem to be quite strong for Malay.

Speaker 1 His austerity measures, while reducing inflation, were hurting voters.

Speaker 1 He has created a bunch of scandals for himself, both by endorsing this bizarre crypto coin that collapsed and lost billions of dollars for investors, and also because there's corruption allegations that are swirling around his sister, who is also his top advisor in this very weird, secretive setup.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but then Trump decided to throw Malay a lifeline by announcing a basically $20 billion U.S.

Speaker 1 government bailout for Argentina and then a potentially an additional $20 billion in financing from the private sector. And then just to make things even...

Speaker 1 clearer about the stakes of the election, Malay visited the White House and Trump and he did a press spray where Trump said,

Speaker 1 We are not going to be generous with Argentina. If he wins, we are staying with him.
And if he doesn't win, we are gone.

Speaker 1 So, you know, pretty clear that Trump was siding with the leader, not the country. But, Ben, it turns out the U.S.
will not be gone. Millay's party won decisively, getting over 40% of the vote

Speaker 1 in both houses of the National Congress, which gives his agenda new life.

Speaker 1 Millay thanked Trump on Twitter, concluding his post with MAGA and then Argentinian flag, the little handshake thing, and then the U.S. flag.
So, I don't know, Ben, I think

Speaker 1 I was a little surprised that this kind of like a neo-colonial threatening political strategy work.

Speaker 1 I guess voters in Argentina are angry enough about decades of rampant inflation in the status quo that they're willing to give Millay more time. But what did you make of this?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I was surprised too, you know,

Speaker 2 but I have to say, like, I don't think that this is because of the performance of 80s rock anthems that we saw from Millay recently. I do think Trump's intervention had to play a part in this.

Speaker 2 You basically come in and you say, here's 20 billion, oh, here's 40 billion dollars that you don't have, and it will go away if you don't vote for this guy. That had to make an impact.

Speaker 2 And first of all, like that is just such an interference in the politics of another country.

Speaker 2 I've done this a couple times today, but I can't resist doing it again. Imagine if a Democratic president was like, hey, we like the socialist president in Colombia or Mexico.

Speaker 2 We're going to give them $40 billion and tell people that if you don't vote for them, this money is going away. I mean, it's an insane leveraging of taxpayer dollars.
This is your dollars, right?

Speaker 2 This is not world liberty financial, right? This is taxpayer dollars going to this guy to get him reelected.

Speaker 2 And I will say there's a bit of a triumphalism around this, but it presupposes that these economic policies are going to work.

Speaker 2 And, you know, frankly, like, you know, not to be a bit on the left here, like, I'm not sure that this plan is working, right? Like, it doesn't seem to be solving their debt crisis. Like,

Speaker 2 you know, it's not making life better. It's creating more poverty for people.
Like, it's somewhat cleaning up their balance sheet.

Speaker 2 So, like, for all the neolib dunking that's happening on this thing, like, let's just kind of wait and see because we might lose that money. The Argentine people might get screwed.

Speaker 2 So, I don't know. Like, yeah, it's kind of a win for this, you know, neo-colonial policy we have in the Americas and this kind of global MAGA coalition.

Speaker 2 I'll take the L on it, but like, shouldn't we be measuring this against like the outcome in people's lives? And that remains to be seen here.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that will play it over the long term. Another trade war news, Ben.
So, Trump got mad about a TV ad featuring Ronald Reagan.

Speaker 1 So, he called off trade negotiations with Canada and announced an additional 10% tariff on Canadian imports. That is a real thing that happened.

Speaker 1 So, the ad in question aired during game two of the World Series on Saturday night.

Speaker 1 It is basically the audio from an address Ronald Reagan gave in 1987 to make the case that trade wars do long-term economic damage. Here's a a quick excerpt from it.

Speaker 1 When someone says, let's impose tariffs on foreign imports, it looks like they're doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs.

Speaker 1 And sometimes for a short while it works, but only for a short time. But over the long run, such trade barriers hurt every American worker and consumer.

Speaker 1 So this ad was paid for by the Canadian province of Ontario. It was not by like Mark Carney or something.

Speaker 1 And it was already pulled from the air by the time Trump tweaked out about it.

Speaker 1 And so for context, it would be like the Canadian prime minister flipping out about an ad that like Gavin Newsom ran or something.

Speaker 1 Like I get maybe why it's annoying, but like it wasn't official government policy. Regardless, Trump like had this fit on Truth Social and wrote, they fraudulently took a big buy ad.

Speaker 1 Sick, saying that the verbatim here, they fraudulently took a big buy ad saying that Ronald Reagan did not like tariffs tariffs when he actually loved tariffs for our country and its national security, end quote.

Speaker 1 Trump was mad that Reagan's words were reordered, but like the thrust of what he said was totally accurate. Reagan was a big free trader.

Speaker 1 Trump also claimed this was some effort by Canada to influence this Supreme Court case that's coming up. I don't really get how that tracks.

Speaker 1 So, Ben, it's just the whole thing was idiotic, but it's also a reminder that Trump often justifies these tariffs by claiming there's a national security emergency.

Speaker 1 So I guess the emergency here was Ronald Reagan's words being being taken out of context or something that threatened our national security.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, a few quick things. Number one, what did we just talk about?

Speaker 2 We talked about the United States literally intervening in the election of Argentina with a $40 billion bailout and the threat that that's going to go away.

Speaker 2 What is influencing the politics of another country more? Like $40 billion and the threat, or like one ad with the gipper in it, right? I mean, the double standard is just cavernous.

Speaker 2 This also shows that this is not about like some coherent strategy to redress the inequities of globalization and kind of the sainwashing of what Trump does.

Speaker 2 It is so much driven by kind of personal peak and how he feels on a given day and what affects his mood.

Speaker 2 And the last thing that drove me crazy about this is like, are we really debating whether like Ronald Reagan was for tariffs? Like the guy's the fucking godfather of Neolibs, right?

Speaker 2 Like he's the ultimate free trader. Like he hated tariffs.

Speaker 2 Like sure, like maybe they were like some very small tariffs for a finite period of time during the Reagan presidency, but that that guy was a free trader.

Speaker 2 So don't like gaslight us because you guys in the Republican Party cannot swear the fact that you spent decades lionizing Ronald Reagan as your hero and now have elected a guy who completely disagrees with Ronald Reagan on foundational issues like trade and immigration.

Speaker 2 Like just accept the fact that... Trump is different.
But they can't do that.

Speaker 2 This is really authoritarian stuff. They have to rewrite history.
Oh, no, no, no, no. Ronald Reagan was actually, he agrees with Trump.

Speaker 2 And I was kind of disgusted that the Ronald Reagan library kind of went along with this.

Speaker 1 I know, I saw that too.

Speaker 2 It's like, come on. Like, it's just, like, just accept the fact that there's something, you know, like that you don't agree with Ronald Reagan on.

Speaker 1 Isn't Hugh Hewitt part of the Reagan Library? I may be a former official or current official. Yeah.
There. Well, that kind of explains it.
All right.

Speaker 1 Finally, last thing for the interview with Mike McFaul. Here's one reason we might actually want to tariff Canada.

Speaker 1 So former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and American pop star Katie Perry are officially dating. Last weekend, they made a public appearance together.

Speaker 1 They are walking out of a cabaret show at the crazy horse in Paris, holding hands for all the paparazzi to see. In recent months, though, they've been spotted dining together.

Speaker 1 Trudeau attended Katy Perry's concert in Montreal. And then recently, a passenger on a whale-watching boat snapped a picture of the two of them making out on a yacht off the coast of Santa Barbara.

Speaker 1 Okay. Perry announced her breakup with Orlando Bloom this June.
Trudeau and his wife split up in 2023.

Speaker 1 I hope they're happy, I guess.

Speaker 2 I mean, these are two much maligned people who are kind of the apotheosis of like Hamilton-era libs, you know?

Speaker 2 So, I mean, they found each other, right? Like, and I guess I can get behind it.

Speaker 2 Although, like, the choices are kind of cringe, you know, like the yacht and the cabaret and like all these other things.

Speaker 2 I did think, Tommy, like, one of the funnier things I saw online was like that the counter was like this AI picture.

Speaker 2 I think it was an onion image of Orlando Bloom at a romantic dinner with Angela Merkel, which would ultimately be the best revenge.

Speaker 1 Let's face it.

Speaker 1 That's fucking hilarious. Okay, that's enough about Katy Perry and Trudeau.

Speaker 1 We're going to take a quick break, but after that, please stick around for my conversation with Mike McFaul about authoritarians and dictators and all things Trump and Russia.

Speaker 1 You won't want to miss it.

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Speaker 1 My guest today is the former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, an NSC Senior Director for Russian Affairs on the National Security Council.

Speaker 1 He is now the director of the Freeman Spokely Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and my friend, Mike McFaul. Great to see you.
Thanks for having me, Tommy.

Speaker 1 Mike, you're also one of the earliest guests on the show. I want to point out that.
I didn't know that.

Speaker 1 I think I drove up to Stanford in 2017 or 2018 and interviewed you in this very nice studio up there. It was a good time.
You're also the author of the new book. I'm really glad you told me that.

Speaker 1 That's a cool little tidbit. Thanks for sharing that.

Speaker 1 You're OG, OG, Pate of the World. Also, the author of the new book, Autocrats versus Democrats, China, Russia, America, and the New Global disorder.
Available now.

Speaker 1 Run, don't walk to buy one, or just go on Amazon, whatever you do these days, or a small bookstore.

Speaker 1 Whatever I'm supposed to say, that's how you should buy it. Mike, let's start with the book.
So big picture, Autocrats versus Democrats.

Speaker 1 Who is winning at the moment, and where does the United States under Donald Trump fall on the autocracy versus democracy continuum?

Speaker 1 Well, Tommy, that's a huge question, and it took me 500 pages to answer it in the book.

Speaker 1 let me give you a short version of my answer. So, in the battle between autocrats and Democrats, the autocrats are rising compared to 30 years ago.
They're more organized.

Speaker 1 They're helping each other, right? Think of Putin getting drones from Iran, soldiers from North Korea, money from the Chinese to fight his barbaric war in Ukraine. We're more disorganized.

Speaker 1 But the biggest problem and the biggest challenge is one that I had to

Speaker 1 do a bunch of writing right at the end of the book. I wrote most of this book before our last election.

Speaker 1 And after Donald Trump, President Trump won re-election, he has begun to A,

Speaker 1 erode our democratic institutions at home. And you all talk about this all the time.

Speaker 1 And so we're becoming less democratic. I'm cautiously optimistic in the long run, but this is a fight.
We've got to fight for these institutions.

Speaker 1 But on the foreign policy area and the international arena, Donald Trump doesn't think in terms of autocrats versus Democrats.

Speaker 1 He thinks in terms of strong leaders versus weak leaders in his mind, and leaders that say nice things about him versus leaders that don't.

Speaker 1 And so in that respect, we are in a much weaker position, small D Democrats, both in America and around the world.

Speaker 1 And there are some days where I'm not sure which side we're on.

Speaker 1 Yeah, us big D Democrats are a little weakened as well. That's true.

Speaker 1 In the book, you argue that describing the U.S.-Russia relationship as a new Cold War is a little too simplistic. It doesn't really fully capture the scope of the relationship.

Speaker 1 What's a more accurate way to characterize it, in your view?

Speaker 1 Well, yeah, it's hard because there's some things that are similar and there's some things that are different. And same with the U.S.-China relationship, right? And we need to embrace complexity.

Speaker 1 I think oversimplifying sometimes can get us into trouble. And I think new Cold War can get us into trouble.

Speaker 1 I think think the more accurate description would be great power competition between two autocratic powers, China being the most powerful one, Russia's its sidekick.

Speaker 1 And what I hope would be the democratic powers. By the way, when I first drafted this book, the book proposal, I had America and Europe as two separate actors.
I wanted two plus two.

Speaker 1 My editor said, you know, Americans don't really care about Europe, so take it out.

Speaker 1 But today, you know, that was years ago, but today, in some ways, the Europeans are acting as an autonomous actor, and they're acting in more democratic ways in support of more liberal democratic values than sometimes the United States is.

Speaker 1 So, but I would say it's a new era of great power competition between autocrats and democrats.

Speaker 1 I want to dig into some of Trump's recent actions when it comes to Russia and Ukraine.

Speaker 1 So, the Trump administration just announced new sanctions on Russia's two largest oil companies, Luke Oil and Rosneft.

Speaker 1 After years of, you know, many various new sanctions announcements and kind of lofty but failed promises about how they're going to crush the Russian economy, I've grown a little cynical and skeptical about the impact of sanctions, but you are the expert.

Speaker 1 How big a deal are these new oil sector sanctions, in your view?

Speaker 1 Well, they would have been a much bigger deal had we done it in a big bang approach several years ago.

Speaker 1 I think the incrementalism of sanctions, and I would say the same things about weapons to Ukraine, has undermined their effectiveness.

Speaker 1 If we did it all in a big bang, we would have put a lot of pressure on that economy. Instead, we've done it in this drip-drip way, and that means it's less effective.

Speaker 1 Second, are sanctions effective or not? The goal of sanctions in my mind, I do run this international coalition of people to write about sanctions. We've written 23 papers.

Speaker 1 That's how tragic and long this war has been. But

Speaker 1 every preamble of every paper says the goal goal of sanctions is to stop this horrific, barbaric war, and sanctions have not stopped the war.

Speaker 1 So in that sense, sanctions haven't achieved their objective. But you have to think of the counterfactual.
What if there had been no sanctions?

Speaker 1 Putin would have had more money and more technology and would be stronger today to conduct this war.

Speaker 1 So the sanctions are constraining his money, are constraining his technology, but not enough in and of itself to stop his war efforts in Ukraine. And both those things can be true at the same time.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and look, Trump's policy also has just been all over the map. I mean, one day they are friends.
Trump is going to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours.

Speaker 1 The next day, Trump is ranting and raving about getting tapped along, and he's threatening to punish Trump. That was his phrase, right? Tapped along? Yeah.
Yeah, tapped along.

Speaker 1 I'd never heard that before, but it's always like two weeks until something tough will happen, right?

Speaker 1 What was your takeaway from watching the Alaska summit back in August and then your analysis of this quickly aborted proposed meeting in Budapest between Trump and Putin.

Speaker 1 Yes, so Alaska, I thought, was a big mistake, and not because he's talking to Putin, and I even applaud Trump for trying to end this war. You know, he's engaged in it, and I'm glad he is.

Speaker 1 But his strategy has been flawed, at least up until recently. So his strategy has been listen to what Putin wants, write it all down.

Speaker 1 And his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, flies to Moscow, and they write down all of his demands and then they acquiesce to them and then they put pressure on the Ukrainians to try to get all those things.

Speaker 1 And what Putin took away from that is he just kept upping the ante, kept asking for more things.

Speaker 1 The most absurd thing he asked for, which according to reporting, was that he asked in Alaska for Trump to ask Zelensky to pull his soldiers out of Donbass so that he could have all of Donbass.

Speaker 1 He hasn't been able to conquer Donbass. That's a region in the eastern part of Ukraine since he invaded in 2014.
So now he's asking Trump to do that.

Speaker 1 And, you know, I think he's overreached. And so now you're beginning to see that the president may be understanding that appeasement doesn't work with Putin.

Speaker 1 But now he's got to back it up with a different strategy. And to me, that is providing more weapons to the Ukrainians and better weapons.

Speaker 1 And, you know, I'm glad that the Europeans are buying our weapons and giving them to the Ukrainians. But as an American, I'm also embarrassed by that.
Like, think about it.

Speaker 1 We're making money off of the Ukrainian war and we're not sharing the burden of helping our allies in Ukraine. President Topps, Trump talks all the time about burden sharing, burden sharing.

Speaker 1 Well, we're not doing that in this case right now. And, you know, wars tend to end in two ways.
One, one side wins and dictates the terms, or two, there's a stalemate on the battlefield.

Speaker 1 And right now, we don't have either of those conditions. And I think the only way we'll get to a ceasefire is stalemate on the battlefield.

Speaker 1 And to have stalemate on the battlefield, we need to arm the Ukrainians with better weapons. And so I hope the president finally understands that appeasing Putin is not going to work.

Speaker 1 You actually have to give the Ukrainians what they need to stop Putin's army on the battlefield. Yeah, I mean, the Russian side feels familiar.

Speaker 1 It's a lot of sort of maximalist demands. There's a lot of reports that Putin comes into a meeting and does like a three-hour lecture on Russian history and the ways the U.S.

Speaker 1 has wronged him or the ways Ukraine is not a real country. What has been equally inconsistent, though, as you noted, is U.S.
support for Ukraine.

Speaker 1 Now, over the past, what, two, three years, there have been lots of news cycles about how this next weapon system could be a game changer, whether it was F-16s or M1 Abrams tanks or high Mars missiles, right?

Speaker 1 The latest version of this conversation is about the Tomahawk missile, which admittedly does have a considerable range. I think it could hit Moscow and come back to Kyiv.

Speaker 1 It's got like a thousand-mile range.

Speaker 1 Do you mean, do you think the Tomahawk would be a game changer in terms of Ukrainian capabilities? Or how do you see, you know, sort of the landscape in terms of what the U.S.

Speaker 1 needs to supply Ukraine that would actually make a difference?

Speaker 1 I

Speaker 1 don't believe so. Now, I'm not a general.
I'm not going to pretend to be one on your podcast. But I talked to a lot of generals.
I talked to a lot of soldiers in Ukraine.

Speaker 1 I just saw a bunch of them just a few days ago. No.
And to your point, because I was through all those debates about those different weapon systems. None of them has proven to be a game changer.

Speaker 1 And that's tragic, but true.

Speaker 1 But it would send a signal that Trump is not going to leave the fight. And I think that's the important point.

Speaker 1 You know, right as I was leaving Moscow in 2014, right before Putin went into Crimea, I was meeting with one of his top government officials, you know, kind of a courtesy call on my way out.

Speaker 1 Putin never gave me a courtesy call, by the way.

Speaker 1 He wasn't a big fan of mine. I wasn't a fan of his.
So I left and now I'm on the sanctions list. Now he wants to arrest me, right? But your job.

Speaker 1 Job as an ambassador, you got to engage with whoever is in the government. So I had this long dinner with the first deputy prime minister, Igor Shuvalov is his name.

Speaker 1 And he said two things that that still ring true to me. He said, one, Mike, we care about Ukraine more than you Americans do.
And two, we have longer attention spans than you Americans.

Speaker 1 And I hope he's wrong, but I fear he's right. And

Speaker 1 in order for him to be wrong, Trump has to prove him wrong. And Trump has to signal, we're going to be there.

Speaker 1 And providing tomahawks would send that kind of signal that you're not going to wait us out. And so you might want to think about negotiating instead.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't think he's wrong about that attention span issue. We're not great on that.
Let me ask you a question about sort of the Obama days.

Speaker 1 So back in the Obama era, you were an instrumental part of the team that helped negotiate a treaty with Russia called New Start that reduced the threat of nuclear annihilation, to put it simply.

Speaker 1 The world has changed a lot since then. This week, Putin said that Russia has tested a nuclear-capable, nuclear-powered cruise missile that flew 8,700 miles.

Speaker 1 First of all, do you believe these kinds of announcements from Putin? And if it's true, what do you think the impact is on existing missile defense systems and treaties that you helped work on?

Speaker 1 Well, first,

Speaker 1 I'm really proud of that Newstart treaty. I remember it,

Speaker 1 negotiating it, flying all over the world with the president. We then flew to Prague to sign it.

Speaker 1 And then I remember the day we were there together, if I'm not mistaken, when the Senate passed it and we drank champagne in the Oval Office before the President went to Hawaii for his vacation, right?

Speaker 1 Those are some of the greatest achievements of my time in the government. In fact, I can't remember what I did three years ago.

Speaker 1 I can't remember at all, but I do remember 2010, reducing by 30% the number of nuclear weapons in the world. That's a good thing.

Speaker 1 And I think, by the way, some people get, I'm always arguing about the reset and U.S.-Russia relations. It was never about a good relationship with Russia or Putin or Medvedev.

Speaker 1 I think that's what Trump gets mixed up. He thinks good relations and a good good meeting is the goal.
The goal is to make Americans safer and more prosperous and to defend our values.

Speaker 1 And sometimes that means engaging, like we did to sign that treaty. I think that made us better off.
Sometimes it means confronting. And I just think Trump gets that mixed up.

Speaker 1 But I worry about that that's all falling apart. I worry that Trump fundamentally does not engage in treaties.
He hasn't signed any treaties. He's kind of,

Speaker 1 he's an isolationist, first and foremost. I call it in the book the Trump withdrawal doctrine.
He's just pulling out of everything.

Speaker 1 And when he does act, it's always in a unilateral way, not a multilateral way. I just think that's bad for our long-term interests when speaking about Iran or Russia.

Speaker 1 And on the treaty that we're, the New START treaty, it's in our interest to have that treaty.

Speaker 1 And we should be negotiating right now, despite our differences over Ukraine,

Speaker 1 to extend that treaty. And I find it disappointing that we're not doing that.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, sort of speaking of this question around like good relations and good meetings, I mean, in the first few years of the Obama presidency, his main interlocutor was a guy named Dmitry Medvedev.

Speaker 1 Medvedev was an extremely close ally of Putin, but was also, you know, seen as more rational and more liberal in a lot of ways. He was president from 2008 to 2012.

Speaker 1 So he and Obama did a lot of direct work together. And, you know, you used to be on those phone calls.
I used to read the transcripts. Medvedev was lawyerly.
lawyerly. He had a sense of humor.

Speaker 1 He seemed rational. He seemed reasonable.
Fast forward to today or last few years, Medvedev is now the deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia.

Speaker 1 Maybe you could explain quickly what that is, but also has a side hustle of putting out the most unhinged, bloodthirsty, dare I say, genocidal tweets and statements about Ukraine.

Speaker 1 And I'm just wondering what you think happened there. Like, is this the guy he always was? Is he playing a part? Did something change? What's your read on this?

Speaker 1 Well, the change has been dramatic, just like you described it. And just, I think he's just one of the most pathetic people in Russia today, because I know he's smarter than that.

Speaker 1 I interacted with him.

Speaker 1 And I do think in that early period, we got the START treaty done. We got sanctions on Iran in a multilateral way done.

Speaker 1 We opened up supply routes through Russia to Afghanistan so that we could expand the war in Pakistan to kill Osam bin Laden. These are all really concrete things that made America better off.

Speaker 1 And we did that by interacting with Medvedev. It wasn't about, you know, holding hands and singing kumbaya, in my opinion.
It was all about doing things that we think were good for us.

Speaker 1 And even, Tommy, we flew. I flew this time with the vice president, but I remember it very vividly, 2011.
Remember, you know, that was the Arab Spring.

Speaker 1 There was a lot of violence in Libya. We thought there was going to be this genocidal slaughter in Benghazi.
And we made the determination that we needed to stop it.

Speaker 1 But because President Obama was a multilateralist and I applaud him for that he said we're only going to do it if we get a Security Council resolution and so Biden flew to Moscow to meet with Medvedev and he agreed to that.

Speaker 1 Shocking. I was in the room.
I was the only other American in the room, by the way. He wouldn't even let

Speaker 1 his then national security advisor Tony Blinken into the room because he didn't want anybody else to hear what he was about to say. We had to fight like to get in.
I had to fight to get in the room.

Speaker 1 They just wanted a one-on-one And we wanted at least a note taker in the room. But I tell you that because he was leaning into cooperating with us.

Speaker 1 And then Putin came back. You know, there was a lot of protests against them all, right? I got blamed for that when I was the ambassador.

Speaker 1 And in that period, when Putin got pushed aside, I think he thought of himself when we were interacting with him as a kind of a second Gorbachev, liberalizing slowly.

Speaker 1 This is the era when independent media, TV Reign comes online. This is when Alexei Navalny is allowed to start his NGO, anti-corruption NGO.
People need to remember that.

Speaker 1 Later, of course, was shut down and later, tragically, was killed last year. But that, so I think, was his play.

Speaker 1 And when Putin took that away from him and then invaded Ukraine the first time, I think Medvedev just decided he had to be more hawkish and more crazy than the rest of them because he's not from the KGB, like Putin and his cronies.

Speaker 1 So he's got to be, you know, more radical and extremist than all those guys to keep his place in the world. But man, what a hypocrite.

Speaker 1 And deeply disappointing, not just to me, but to a lot of people in Russia who I know know him and just think it's just

Speaker 1 tragic what he's done.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 You mentioned Alexey Navalny just now. So for those who don't know, you know, Navalny, his primary message against Putin, is that fair to say, was about corruption.

Speaker 1 I mean, his organization would make these amazing YouTube videos where they would fly a drone over Putin's billion-dollar new house on the Black Sea, right?

Speaker 1 Or over, you know, Medvedev's properties or whatever, just expose the fact that these senior officials were looting the government.

Speaker 1 And it seemed to pose a threat to Putin unlike maybe anyone else.

Speaker 1 And I'm wondering if you think that kind of anti-corruption message is kind of the linchpin to going after autocrats and dictators like a Putin that could be replicated elsewhere.

Speaker 1 Well, you described his activities absolutely correctly. And he was super savvy on social media.

Speaker 1 And he had a podcast and he was super modern in his technology, you know, the use of technology in a way that no other leader was. And I used to know Alexei Navalny.
He was very charismatic.

Speaker 1 You know, in free and fair elections,

Speaker 1 he would have been a president of the United of Russia.

Speaker 1 I I have no doubt about that.

Speaker 1 He said some stupid things, by the way, along the way when he was younger,

Speaker 1 things that I think he regretted. I talked to him about it, about Ukraine, about Chechens.
But as he got more mature, I saw him as a future leader of Russia.

Speaker 1 And I do think that's the way to fight autocrats, most certainly, including autocratic tendencies here in the United States.

Speaker 1 I mean, the kind of corruption that's going on in America, I mean, I study in a comparative way these things.

Speaker 1 You know, 10 years ago, like the things that Trump is doing now, we would have said, oh my gosh, the Russians are doing that. And now it happens.
And it's just, we don't react that much to it.

Speaker 1 I mean, some bunch of private people are paying to build the White House

Speaker 1 ballroom. Like, like.

Speaker 1 How did that happen? Like, don't we have laws about how that's supposed to happen? Just, I just take one example that it's in the news.

Speaker 1 And what autocrats do is they create facts on the ground and then they dare you to push back on them. And when the facts on the ground, like tearing down the East Wing, are really hard to roll back,

Speaker 1 that creates momentum for those kinds of things.

Speaker 1 But to your point, back to Navalny, I just think just knowing the facts about how autocrats or leaders with autocratic tendencies are performing in the world is one of our best checks.

Speaker 1 That's why independent media is so important.

Speaker 1 And that's why Putin, when he first came into power, the first people he went after was the independent media because he knew that that ultimately was his greatest enemy. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Final question for you, Mike. So in the book, you map the ebb and flow of the U.S.-China relationship and the U.S.-Russia relationship.

Speaker 1 It's clear from your analysis that you don't think the conflict is inevitable and that cooperation is, in fact, possible. And you just talked about some of the eras of cooperation.

Speaker 1 What do you think were unique about the periods of cooperation? And how can we get back on track again so it's not this kind of new Cold War feeling, scary

Speaker 1 conflict? People are constantly talking about conflict being inevitable, war with China being inevitable. We want to get out of that cycle.

Speaker 1 Well, I wrote the book in part because I do not think war with China is inevitable.

Speaker 1 And we need to study the Cold War and remind ourselves that we didn't go to the war with the Soviets in part because of deterrence.

Speaker 1 So I talk about strengthening strengthening deterrence in Europe and in Asia and on the island of Taiwan and we got to do deterrence.

Speaker 1 But we also got to cooperate and interact like we did during the Cold War. I think people forget that during the Cold War, we cooperated with the Soviets when it was in our interests on arms control.

Speaker 1 We got rid of smallpox together.

Speaker 1 And I see parallels there with the Chinese. Like we need to be working with the Chinese on climate change.
And okay, I get it.

Speaker 1 This president's not interested, but I hope future presidents are because we're not going to be able to manage that global threat if we don't cooperate.

Speaker 1 But the bigger, another thing I would say, and I would say it's the kind of central theme of my prescriptive chapters, is we're in this new era of isolationism now

Speaker 1 and pulling back. And if we do act, then we do it in this unilateral way.

Speaker 1 And then we don't care about ideas of democracy. And on all three of those big debates, isolationism versus engagement, I make the case for engagement in this book.
I think Trump is wrong.

Speaker 1 Unilateralism versus multilateralism, I make the case that we're better off with allies. We're better off being within the system, not violating the rules of the game.

Speaker 1 And the most controversial are we,

Speaker 1 you know, Trump doesn't care about promoting democracy around the world. I think he's wrong about that.
Not only do I think it's the right thing to do, the right moral thing to do, I want to be

Speaker 1 on the side of the democratic government of Ukraine and against the autocratic government of Putin.

Speaker 1 I do think there's good and evil in the world, and that war in particular, I think it could not be clearer. But it's also international interests.

Speaker 1 If you look at the course of history, and I go back to the 18th century in this book and summarize it all so you don't have to read it all,

Speaker 1 I summarize it all in 60 pages, just so you know, one chapter on China, one chapter on Russia. That was really hard to do.
It was originally 200 pages each.

Speaker 1 But if you go through that whole history, what's really clear is our most enduring allies have always been democracies. And the countries threatening us have always been autocracies.

Speaker 1 So it's not only the right thing to do, but it's also the smart thing to do. And right now we have a president that's doing exactly the opposite of my recommendations.

Speaker 1 So my message of my book is, you know, I'm not sure

Speaker 1 the Trump administration is going to read my book, but I hope future leaders will. I hope future students will, because this is going to be a long struggle.

Speaker 1 And if we don't get this American grand strategy right, we're not going to prevail in the 21st century like we did during the Cold War. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, you know, smallpox could be making a comeback under RFK Jr., so maybe that's another avenue for cooperation. Isn't that tragic? Finding some hope here, isn't that tragic?

Speaker 1 Gallows humor not accepted. The book is Autocrabs versus Democrats, China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder.
Go out, buy a copy today. Mike McFaul, great to see you.

Speaker 1 Thanks for having me, Tommy. Really great to be back.

Speaker 1 Thanks again to Mike McFaul for joining the show. Ben, thanks to you for clocking in late from the UK this evening.
And we'll talk to you guys next week.

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