Pod Save the World - A Biden foreign policy

Episode Date: October 28, 2020

On the final Pod Save the World before the election, Tommy and Ben talk to Biden foreign policy advisor Tony Blinken about what Joe Biden’s foreign policy will look like, and how he will approach everything from getting America back in the Iran nuclear deal to how Biden will build momentum in the global fight against climate change. Then, they dig into the latest failed ceasefire between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the latest wave of coronavirus in Europe, protests over police brutality in Nigeria, Chile’s vote to write a new constitution, Trump’s failed Venezuela policy, the normalization of relations between Sudan and Israel, and how Trump is making tensions between Ethiopia and Egypt worse.

Welcome back to Pots Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, I'm just a ball of anxiety hanging on by a thread. My enemies today are as follows. Bad polls, followed by out-of-context early vote returns. And then soon my enemy will be exit polls. How you doing? Yeah, I'm pretty bad because I'd add to your list, which is a good comprehensive list, bad memories. I think everybody's got like PTSD from 2016,

so the closer we get to the election, the more certain everybody is that somehow we're going to lose the election, even if the polls suggest otherwise. That's a healthy thing if it's channeled into working harder and convincing more people and donating more money and, you know, if you've already voted trying to get somebody else to vote the right way. But, you know, I mean, I remember what it was like to wake up the day after that election and how that felt.

and men, we just don't want to have that feeling again. No, no, we don't. That's what it's all about. One way you can prevent that feeling, by the way, is go to vote saveof America.com slash volunteer from now until polls close. There's tons of ways you can still help out. You can make calls. You can send texts.

There's a million things. So vote saveamerica.com slash volunteer. Ben, we got a great show today. We talked to one of Joe Biden's top foreign policy advisors and our former colleague, our friend, Tony Blink. And so I think people will really like hearing what Joe Biden would do differently if you were president when it comes to foreign policy. And then for news, we got some updates on fighting between our media and Azerbaijan, the latest on Europe's COVID outbreak. There's an inspiring movement against police brutality in Nigeria, an amazing new constitution in Chile, and then some big news out of Venezuela and Sudan.

So lots of good stuff. I think we will start this week with the conversation with Tony Blinken because it is so focused on the election. Just before we get to that, though, we want to give a quick shout out to our what a day team who's celebrating one year of this fantastic daily news pod. If you have not subscribed to What a Day, you're missing out. Akela and Gideon are hilarious. They're smart. They'll walk you through everything you need to know in like 15 minutes or less. So check it out on Apple Pods or wherever you get your podcasts.

Okay, here is our conversation with Tony Blinken. We are honored to be joined by Tony Blinken. He's the former Deputy Secretary of State during the Obama administration. He's a senior foreign policy advisor to Vice President Joe Biden's campaign and a just great human being. Tony, it's good to see it. Hey, Tommy, great to be with you, Ben. Great to be with you, too. Thank you again for doing this.

We figured it would be great to get your take on, you know, what a Joe Biden foreign policy would look like if he's elected president. and sort of a last chance to talk to some of our friends in the foreign policy worlds who are, you know, have some questions about what the agenda would look like. So I guess first question is, you know, there are some on the left. You see this on Twitter, which you know, take it for what it is. But you see some people complaining what, look, the Biden campaign is rolling out a lot of endorsements from the Bush administration, other Republicans, former Republicans. And they sometimes worry, does this mean the vice president might get drawn to the right on foreign policy, right? these are some people who might be frustrated that Obama didn't prosecute CIA officials for Bush era torture policies or are pissed that Obama was, you know, anti-war and Iraq candidate,

but he got drawn into conflicts in Libya and Syria. And they want a firm break from, you know, Republican policies and, you know, stagnant sort of blob thinking as Ben Michael. What do you say to them about, you know, the Biden agenda and officials who might serve in his cabinet? Well, Tommy, I guess I'd say two things. First of all, the support your seeing sort of across the board for Joe Biden, including from Republicans or in some cases former Republicans, I think is evidence of just a profound indictment of President Trump. And what he has done to our standing in the world resonates with Democrats, with independence, with Republicans in an incredibly negative way. So I think it's evidence of that. I mean,

we're now in a position. If you look at survey after survey, including work, for example, that Pew has done, where they go and look at, you know, public opinion in dozens of countries. We're now in a place where, according to the most recent Pew survey, people in country after country have more confidence in Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping to do the right thing regarding world affairs than they do in the president of the United States. Respect for the United States, influence of the United States are basically in free fall. And that's something, I think, that bothers also. sorts of folks from the left to the right. So you've known the vice president for a very long time.

You've worked with them since his days in the Senate. I imagine you talked with him about his vote against the 91 Gulf War. You've been with him when he voted for the war in Iraq. You were in the room during the Obama administration when he argued against sending more troops to Afghanistan. How have his views on using military force evolved over time? Can you explain to people how he thinks about these things? Yeah, you know, I think the vice president starts out with a profound core of idealism that I think animates most Americans. And what really got him into public life, what's motivated him, whether it's domestic or farm policy, is a profound aversion to people or countries abusing their power. And particularly, for example, in the 1990s, when he saw

ethnic cleansing and acts of genocide in the Balkans, he felt that we should say, stand up and try to do something about it. But his experience is also, I think, tempered by realism about what we can do, what we can't do, problems that are initially not about us, but may affect us. We have to bring a certain dose of humility to this. We can't just flip a light switch and solve all the world's problems or all the world's ills. On the other hand, I've got to tell you, he believes strongly that we also have to bring some confidence to our engagement in the world because when we're acting at our best, through the power of our example, less than the example of our power, we still have a greater ability than any other country on earth to mobilize others in positive collective action. That's how he sees our role in the world. And if we're not doing it, here's the problem. If we're not engaged, if we're not leading, and we sure have made our share of mistakes over the years. But, on balance, when we're not leading, we're not engaged, then the problem is this. One or two things happens. Either someone else does and probably not in a way that advances our interests or our

values, or maybe just as bad, no one does, and then you tend to have a vacuum that's filled by bad things before it's filled by good things. So, Tony, that's going to be my jumping off point, which is, and I just want to add, you know, Tony and I, colleagues, friends for, well, they use the Obama administration before. And like Joe Biden, someone who represents, represents the profound decency, I think, of the American people. So, Tony, we're glad you're in this spot. You are. I want to ask about, you mentioned the precarious state of the world and the standing of the United States. Even at the end of the Obama administration, the trend lines were not good for democracy globally. You saw Russia pushing back. You saw Russian efforts to kind of

disrupt the West, disinformation campaigns to disrupt democracy, China being much more sort of with its model. That's all been kind of turbocharged under Trump, as the U.S. has kind of ceased to be a democratic example to the world. If you come into office, how do you begin to go about, number one, kind of just restoring a sense of credibility and standing for the United States? You know, and I remember in the first year the Obama administration, Obama had to do a world tour to do that. But more importantly, how do you begin to try to reversed this trend of authoritarianism, this democratic backsliding. What are the tools in your toolkit to do that? So, Ben, this really goes to the heart of the challenge we would face.

And also, I think, to the priorities that the vice president would bring to the job, because he continues to believe that at its core, the best answer to most of the challenges we face actually is democracy. He sees it as the foundation of our strength at home and also abroad. It reflects, after all, who we are, certainly how we see ourselves and arguably how the world has seen us, at least until recently. But the problem is, as you've said, that democracy is being challenged as never before. And I think that matters as never before. First, because I think as the vice president has said, you know, the strength of our own democracy

at home is directly tied to our ability to be a force for progress in the world and to mobilize the collective action I was talking about. The problem we face, of course, is that we have a president of the United States right now who's engaged in a daily assault on our own democracy, on its institutions, on its values, on its people, and that has deeply tarnished our ability to lead. But the flip side that you alluded to is also vitally important. Other democracies are a source of strength for us, especially when we find ways to work together. But, Ben, as you said, we see democracy and retreat. Freedom House tracks this, as you know, and over decades. they've looked at the strength and health of democracy in country after country.

There were about 40 countries that had been consistently ranked fully free in the 1980s, the 1990s, the 2000s. Of those 40 or so countries, fully half have fallen backwards on these metrics of democracy. So there is this democratic recession. And of course, autocracies, whether it's Russia or China, try to exploit that and they have feudal war troubles. So here's the problem. At the very moment, the world's democracies are looking to the United States. to be a leader for the values that we share, we have a president who, by embracing autocrats and dissing Democrats every day, and as the leading consumer and proliferator of conspiracy

theories, he basically seems to have suited up for the other side. So where does that lead us? I think here's an interesting thing. Joe Biden did an essay in foreign affairs, you know, the leading journal for foreign policy back in January or February. So ostensibly, it's his view of our foreign policy. If you go back and look at it, the first 25% is all about things we need to do to renew our democracy at home. That's where it starts. And he has a long and strong agenda for that kind of democratic renewal when it comes to transparency and governance, when it comes to getting dark money out of our politics, when it comes to having a truly representative democracy with functioning institutions. Once you've gotten that renewal in place, then you try

and work to revitalize our alliances with democracies around the world. But I can tell you this. Just starting with the fact that Joe Biden would actually be able to tell the difference between our friends and our foes, and they would know that he knows, that'll help a lot. So in one follow up on this, Tony, is like, you know, we look a lot on the podcast at these places where people, it does seem like there's also a growing trend of people standing up to this kind of authoritarianism.

When you look at Hong Kong, when you look at Belarus, close election recently in Poland, Nigeria, we'll talk about on the podcast today. But I totally agree with you. Get our own house in order is the number one thing. What can be done to more effectively find ways to support these democratic movements? Specifically, I'll just throw a couple things at you. I notice you guys have called for a summit of democracies in the first year. What's the kind of, you know, are there concrete outcomes from that that could be helpful to people in like a Belarus or Hungary?

and how much does corruption enter into it? I mean, is there a space where we can kind of start to go after the money, the dark money that kind of finances authoritarianism? And how do you think about, you know, taking that democratic renewal and making it, you know, put wind in the sales of these democratic movements that have inspired us, but that often kind of reach a brick wall at some point? Well, Ben, look, the first thing is, in the category of first do no harm, it'll be in and of itself a good thing to have a president who not only stands

against repression and abuses of human rights, but it starts with a proposition that you don't stand with those who are perpetrating them. So I think it'll be a big change in and of itself, not to have a president who tells Xi Jinping it's okay to have concentration camps for Uyghurs or it's okay to trample on democracy in Hong Kong. Having said that, That's obviously not enough. I think you're 100% right that, you know, corruption is certainly at the heart of the problem, but also maybe at the heart of the opportunity. If you look at virtually every popular movement over the last decades,

including a bunch that we saw on our watch in President Obama's administration, whether it was the Maidan in Ukraine, whether it was the fruit vendor in Tunisia, you know, and so on down the line in virtually every continent, a revulsion at public and official corruption was one of, if not the, motivating factors. But that gives us a huge opportunity in pushing back against repression and pushing back against abuses of human rights to try to expose the corruption that exists as a way of turning the tide on leaders who perpetuate their power by corrupt means. So I think there's a lot more that can be done. But the summit of democracies, I think two things on this.

One is there's a, I think, a moment that's necessary for democracies to come together and reason together about the challenges in the first instance that they share internally. Because even though they manifest themselves in somewhat different ways, there are a bunch of core challenges that we're all trying to grapple with, including a profound, you know, sort of atrophying of trust in governance, our own forms of corruption. and in the United States, it tends to be money in politics, and a whole series of challenges that democratic governance has to somehow overcome if it's going to get the trust and confidence of his people. And then from there, build out an outward-facing agenda of things that we can do together

to stand more effectively for democracy and progress in other countries around the world and to stand against abuses. None of this is easy stuff. One of the big challenges now, when you have autocratic governments, that are squeezing out any space in their countries, for example, for NGOs and for any kind of opposition, is finding ways to be supportive of them, very, very challenging. But look, it all starts with the United States actually regaining its voice

and showing by example that there's a better way. Tony, in their final, or maybe only, Oval Office meeting, President Obama reportedly told President Trump that the biggest challenge he would face is North Korea. fast forward four years, things are way worse. Kim has more nuclear weapons. He just trotted out a new intercontinental ballistic missile. All the love letters from Trump to Kim failed to convince him to get rid of his nuclear weapons.

But in fairness to Trump, all these past attempts by Obama and Clinton and Bush to denuclearize the peninsula have failed. Has watching the last four years change your thinking or the vice president's thinking at all about how to approach this problem? right? We had sort of maximalist pressure. Now we had maximalist diplomacy. Is there a middle ground that might be more fruitful? Or is North Korea just a de facto nuclear state? And we have to learn to live with it. Yeah. So, Tommy, I think you posed that in a very fair and balanced way, as someone might say, because this was a hard problem. And it was a problem that we didn't solve. But it has gotten worse under President Trump. And as you said, North Korea now has more fissile material for more nuclear weapons. It has more advanced missiles, including apparently the one that it displayed

just a couple of weeks ago. So I think two things here. One is we ought to take some inspiration from where we did succeed, and that was with the Iran nuclear agreement. And there, we built a very strong international coalition that made the case to Iran that it really had to choose coming to the table, negotiating in good faith in negotiating a strong agreement that allowed us to deal with the problem posed by its ability potentially to produce façade material for weapons on very short notice, or face unrelenting pressure from countries around the world, including countries that are not always lined up with us. And that's really a huge tribute to the diplomacy that President Obama and Vice President Biden

led in lining this up. But the reason it worked, the reason we were able to bring other countries along is they saw the endgame that we had in mind, not as regime change in Iran, no matter what you think about the regime, but as resolving the nuclear problem, the nuclear challenge posed by Iran. They were willing to sign up when they knew the diplomacy was really part of what we were trying to do. And we succeeded. Now, with Iran, we had an interim agreement, and that gave us some time and space to produce a long-term agreement, which tragically President Trump has torn up. So I think there's something to that model for dealing with North Korea. I think it's highly unlikely,

if not to say impossible, that in one fell swoop, we're going to get North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons, its infrastructure, its missiles, but there may be a step-by-step process that moves us in that direction. So I'd be inspired to some extent by what we did with Iran. One other thing, though, at the last year and a half of our administration, when North Korea was clearly developing the capacity to actually reach the United States with an ICBM that it might marry a nuclear weapon to, we exerted a comprehensive pressure campaign that involved basically two things. First, it involved China, given the unique relationship to China and North Korea had. Ninety percent of North Korea's trade. Its lifeline is through China.

China. And we went to Beijing and said, look, we want to work with you to deal with this problem. It's something you don't want any much more than we do. But if you can't or if you won't join us in trying to curb North Korea's nuclear program, then, you know, we're going to have to do some things to protect ourselves and protect our partners and allies, including more forward-deployed missile defense, more exercises, more forward-deployed forces that are not directed at you. China, but you're not going to like. And interestingly, we got China behind what, until that point, were the two toughest UN Security Council resolutions. And according to our intelligence folks, China was making good on implementing its part of those resolutions to put pressure on North Korea.

The other piece of this was going to country after country with our South Korean and Japanese partners and saying, you know, if you've got North Korean guest workers who are sending more than a billion dollars home in remittances, not to their families, but to the North Korean government to prop up its military, you need to send them home or not accept anymore. And we started to build real pressure on North Korea. Unfortunately, we ran out of time. But again, the purpose of the pressure has to be not to topple the regime, no matter, again, how heinous it may be, but to get it to engage in a meaningful way in diplomacy, in negotiations so that we can actually, and in a very practical way, curb its program and hopefully walk it back. Yeah, the pretense that the Trump-Iran

policy is not about regime change has really fallen to the wayside, but I'll leave that for Ben in the next set of questions. So my question for you is about election interference, or foreign election interference. In 2016, they tried to cover it up the Russians, right? I mean, they laundered things through WikiLeaks. There were a variety of steps taken to try to create some space for this, you know, disinformation dump, the hack and dump, the, you know, sort of troll farms. This year, they're just handing shit to Rudy Giuliani, who goes on the record saying, yeah, it's 50-50 chance that some guy in Ukraine I'm working with is a Russian spy. How do you approach deterring foreign election interference? when it's this brazen, when it's this in the open,

when all parties involve, both foreign and domestic, seem to give zero fucks about getting caught. What do you do about that? Well, the first thing you do is you actually try to establish meaningful deterrence, and that means having what, you know, the foreign policy types like to call the declaratory policy, basically telling another country what you're going to do if they do X, meaning it and then doing it if they act. That's exactly what Joe Biden did. He spoke to this a

couple of months ago. We put out a very strong and quite detailed statement making very clear that he would view any election interference by Russia or by anyone else as an attack on our democracy, as an attack on our sovereignty, and there would be meaningful, real sustained consequences, costs imposed. And then he went out and notionally listed some of the things that we'd be looking at if we had to do it. And then, you know, you actually have to follow through. Joe Biden and Ben and Tommy, you both heard him say it many times in the situation room. Big nations can't bluff. So if you're going to say you're going to do something, it triggered by an action of another country, then you've got to follow through. otherwise it becomes hollow and empty. So I think in the case of Russia, for example, and we were talking about this earlier,

there's a lot more we can do, for example, to expose the profound corruption that is at the heart of the system, starting with Vladimir Putin, that might make him just a little bit less popular with his own people if it's exposed in a meaningful way. There are certainly economic consequences that can target the folks who are perpetrating these actions, who are propping up the regime as opposed to the Russian people. And we can do that in, I think, even more effective and targeted ways. But it starts with being very clear about what you'll do and then doing it. Tony, I'm actually going to ask a follow-up on this, because I've been intrigued and alarmed

at what I see is the approach coming out of Ratcliffe and the Trump White House intelligence community, which basically seems to be an effort to create, in my mind, an entirely false equivalency between what Russia is doing, which, if it's anything like 2016, and I'm sure it is, is a multifaceted systematic approach to affect our election results, and maybe even to get into, you know, hack into election systems, versus these allusions to Chinese and Iranian actions, which, particularly with respect to China, feels just like China has anti-U.S. propaganda all the time,

And they're somehow framing that as favoring Joe Biden when, you know, even Donald Trump himself recently said on the campaign trail, Xi Jinping probably wants him to win. How worried are you, though, that let's say knock on wood, fingers crossed, my toes are crossed, you can't see that. Joe Biden wins. How worried are you that there's going to be this transition period and the, you know, this leadership of the DNI that has been basically turned into an extension of the Trump White House is seeking to kind of create some legitimacy question. rooted in what China did. How do you deal with what I think are totally false equivalencies around what foreign countries are doing in our election and how they might try to hang around you guys

a totally false narrative that seeks to draw some equivalence between what happened to them based on Russia's 2016 intervention and what's happening now? Yeah, so, Ben, you're 110% right. The only country that is taking meaningful, active measures to try to affect the outcome of our election is Russia. And what Russia is doing, and the DNI has actually acknowledged this, not his office as he personally hasn't,

but his office has, and so is the director of the FBI. They are working every single day to denigrate Joe Biden and to promote President Trump. And that's a clear finding of the intelligence community and of the FBI. And as you said very well, countries like China may be, doing things, but it's in the realm of propaganda. It's not active measures to affect the outcome of the election. It's to advance their view of the world and to make, you know, make some trouble for us if they can, but not at all the active measures that we've seen coming from Russia.

And, you know, we'll see where we wind up next week. Look, we've had one of the, it's hard to have a hierarchy of terrible things this administration has done because there's so many and it would take forever to list them. But I think very close to the top in my book is the gross politicization and even corruption of the institutions of government to advance the president's personal political interests. And the intelligence community is unfortunately right near the top of that list. And so I think it's going to be vitally important in a Biden administration to try to take some of that poison out. That starts with the president who makes very clear what his expectations are of the intelligence community,

which is to speak truth to power, to come up with the facts and not in any way to distort or spin or modify their views to meet what they believe are the interests or expectations of the president. And then it means appointing the right people to senior jobs who are going to carry out that worldview. their agencies to make sure that they are devoid of corruption, devoid of politicization. But this, of course, unfortunately, is true, Ben, as you know, an agency after agency. Here's a striking thing. The State Department, where I had the privilege of working the last couple of years of our administration, you know, they do a survey, a survey's done every year of the different government agencies

to sort of ask the federal workforce what it thinks of the agency, their jobs, et cetera. And last year, the folks who worked at the State Department were queried, and one of the findings was that political coercion was running rampant in certain bureaus of the department. And then one of my favorite, and I use that word as advisedly findings, was in the Office of the Legal Advisor of the State Department, when asked the question, is the leadership of the department honest and calling it like it is, 30. 35% said no, it wasn't, versus zero percent in 2016 when Barack Obama and John Perry and Joe Biden

were in charge. Well, it's, yeah, you guys have a steep challenge and, you know, the transition will be a very delicate period of time, but hopefully we have no capacity to deal with that or talk about it. I wanted to ask one follow to what you said earlier about Iran. You know, you were a key part of the process that produced the Iran nuclear agreement. You know, I think we all believe that the world would be better off that that agreement was still in place. But you guys are going to find the world as it is when you come in.

If you, again, Nakam would come in. That would be a good title for a book, by the way. I know. Thanks for that. As soon as I said that, I realized I plugged my book, I guess it's hardwired. So here's the question I have, which is there's always a lot of pressure from the, the opponents of the Iran nuclear agreement, including some U.S. partner governments in the Gulf, the Emirates, the Saudis, and the Israelis, and Republican Party in Washington, that there's a better deal to be had, that, you know, the provisions should be stronger and longer.

And I'm sure there would be a chorus of people saying, we've got them on the ropes, we've added all these sanctions, and they're stacking sanction upon sanction on Iran right now as we speak. and the worst thing you could do is try to return to the status quo of the Iran nuclear agreement. Others like Emmanuel Macron, the French president, said, we'll come back into that agreement and then negotiate the follow-on provisions that deal with other things. How do you approach a situation where, I think, objectively speaking, it would be better if somehow you could get back into the JCPOA. We don't know whether Iran will do that, given all the sanctions.

And yet, you're not just trying to solve the equation of getting back into the JCPOA. Yet you're not just trying to solve the equation of getting back into JCPOA. You've got all these new sanctions that have been stacked on. You've got governments in the Gulf that have recently concluded agreements with Israel that are presented as part of an anti-Iran axis. What is the goal of a Biden team? Is it to get back to the JCPOA and then negotiate from that? Is it to immediately try to pursue some better deal that might draw support from some of these actors? how do you navigate the pursuit of what we had already accomplished with the Iran nuclear agreement

in the new context? So two things, Ben, and first, you have to start not in the abstract, but from where we are. And where we are is a really bad place. When President Trump walked away from the deal, he promised, as you said, a better deal that, of course, is not materialized. He also promised the so-called maximum pressure campaign he was exerting against Iran would make Iran act less. provocatively. And of course, the opposite has happened. So on the nuclear side of the equation,

we have an Iran that is building back the very capability that the JCPOA stopped in its tracks because the president effectively freed Iran from its commitments. And it now acknowledges enriching uranium at higher levels. It's got a much larger stockpile. It's using more advanced centrifuges. The bottom line is the infamous breakout time, the time it would take for Iran to produce enough fissile material for a weapon that we push back through the JCPOA to more than a year. year is, at least according to public reporting, down to about three months and heading south from there. So we're right back to where we were before the deal with this terrible binary choice between, at least in my judgment, allowing Iran to get to a very, very short breakout time,

or taking some kind of action that's likely to have huge unintended consequences, and at best, if it's military, maybe set back the program, but not end it. And in fact, we're already seeing Iran reports today suggests that Iran is now building back things deep underground that would be very hard to get at anyway when they eventually build them. And then on the other side of the equation, maximum pressure, you know, we've seen the Trump administration swing wildly from allowing Iran to act with some impunity to, you know, obviously taking actions, including taking out Qasem Soleimani. And there, no one's shedding a tear for his demise. But it's one thing to take him out.

It's another to game out. What would be the almost certain consequences from that, including a significant increase in Iranian provocative actions? So much so now that in Iraq, where the administration said it was trying to restore deterrence, exactly the opposite has happened. We're being chased out of our own embassy. Secretary Pompeo is working to shut down our embassy because of increased attacks from Iranian-supported militia in Iraq.

see Iran acting in other places as well. So that's the picture that we have to deal with if Joe Biden's elected. What he said is, look, if Iran comes back into compliance with its obligations, we would and we should do the same thing. And then we would use that as a basis for seeking to certainly lengthen the agreement because a lot of time has passed. And some of the various timelines that were established in the agreement are now by definition much shorter, so they should be lengthened, and we would look at ways to strengthen it too.

But we'd be in a much different and better position because instead of having alienated all of our partners who negotiated the agreement with us and who are now spending all of their time and energy trying to keep it alive, instead of working with us to engage Iran in an effective and meaningful way, we'd be back on side. And if Iran decides not to do it, well, then I think the world would be able to address that together. And if Iran does engage in this, then at least we'd be back with the folks who helped us achieve the deal in the first place. That would also put us in a better position, I think, to effectively deal with other actions that Iran takes that we don't like. So there is, there'd be a lot of work to do on that.

And it's one of the things that, you know, needs to be gained out in detail. But there's no question that the place we're in now is the worst of all worlds. And it's a place we need to move away from. Tony, thank you again for your time. This might have to be the last question. I know you have an event to get to. But just we're building on the JCPOA question, Ben and I always rip our hair out

when we hear Democrats talk about the Iran nuclear deal because before they get to the good stuff, there's 4,000 caveats about how it was imperfect and time limited and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? It's harder to be for diplomacy than for war. Yeah. Right? It is seen as politically dangerous to vote against the Iraq war or the war in Afghanistan or the various surges or various funding bills.

And it is seen as politically risky to be for big diplomatic efforts that might prevent wars. How do you think we fix that? Is that a problem with the Democratic Party being squishy? Is that a Washington blob thing? Is that a media thing? Is this something you've thought about it all? Yeah, look, I think it goes to the heart of what we need. to do. And it starts with having actual confidence in our approach to the world and our approach

to America's place in the world. And I would say in the first instance, you know, one thing it's useful to remind people of is when you're looking at anything, whether it's the Iran deal or anything else, it says, you know, don't compare me to the Almighty. Compare me the alternative. And no one in the case of the Iran deal or pretty much anything else that we did during our administration, I think could make a very convincing case that the alternatives that they were proposing were better, more effective, or realistic. So you've got to start from that. But beyond that, I think we ought to have a little bit of confidence in what we've been able to achieve with diplomacy. And I think about it this way, Tommy. I mean, it always reminds me of, you know, the movie that we all got to

watch every holiday season and maybe some people still watch. It's a wonderful life where, you know, the Jimmy Stewart character is about to take his life at the beginning of the movie, and Gabriel the Angel stops him from doing that, and does that by trying to show him what life would be like in his town, for his family, for his community, if he hadn't been there. And then, of course, we see the contrast, and between Pottersville and Bedford Falls. And, of course, Donald Trump is now fully in Pottersville.

But the point is this. If you take us an American diplomacy out of the equation over the last, 10 or 15 years, look at all the things that would not have happened and ask yourself where we would be, where all the world would be, even without us in the picture, whether it was the Iran deal, where would that actually be now in the absence? Well, we're starting to see with President Trump having pulled us out of it. You know, where would we be? Where would the world be without the United States engaged in getting the Paris Climate Accord done? Well, we may be witnessing that now, too. I can go down the list of every single thing that we did.

And it's always imperfect negotiation by definition. You're never getting 100%. There are always things that arguably could be done better that you can complain about. But again, it's compare me to the alternative, not to the Almighty, and ask yourself, where is the world with the United States out of the picture? Well, we're finding out these last three and a half years. And I think we now have a much stronger case to make for American leadership, for American engagement, leading with our diplomacy, leading with our values, leading with the

power of our example, not just the example of our power. Tony, I'm going to ask one last question. I know you have to go, but I think this is a good note, dead on for our audience, for looking for one of the things to be most excited about in a Biden presidency, I think, is climate change. And the question I just wanted to ask you is such admiration for how much he's elevated climate, more than any presidential candidate ever, including Barack Obama. taking some bold stances. The debate is often about at home, right? And the question is,

if you guys are successful in doing what he's talking about doing at home, which is a big climate package, clean energy package, job-creating package through Congress, that helps move our economy in the direction it needs to go, what momentum will that give you coming back into Paris to go around the world in that first year and try to revitalize global climate efforts? Why should people listening to this who care about this, which is about everybody who listens this, make them excited about the vision of how a domestic Biden climate plan can connect with prioritization of this issue internationally that can be a game changer on the climate crisis. Ben, these things are inexorably linked, and it's pretty basic and it's pretty simple, but it's

vitally important. We are 15% of global emissions by definition. Even if we do everything right at home. That's not enough, by far not enough, because we've still got 85% of emissions coming from other countries around the world. And so you have to have a strong international agenda to deal with the problem. Conversely, if we're not getting our act right at home, our ability to drive that international agenda, to be a leader, to push other countries into doing the right thing is dramatically undermined, if not eliminated. And so if we're able to actually move the climate agenda in an effective way at home, and I believe we will be, then that strengthens our hand enormously in the international arena in terms of actually making meaningful, sustainable,

and dramatic progress on what is the existential issue of our times. So you've got to be able to do both. You've got to do them in effect more or less at the same time. But as the world sees that a Biden administration is deadly serious about actually taking concrete actions necessary to get our own house in order, we are so much stronger in eliciting that kind of cooperation and action from other countries. Tony, thank you so much for doing the show. Good luck on Tuesday. Thank you.

Tuesday plus seven, Tuesday plus 14. However long this thing is going to take, we're really. rooting for you. It is clear to me and hopefully everyone who just heard this conversation that Joe Biden would make the world a safer, better place to live that maybe wasn't melting. So that seems like a good endorsement. That's a good slogan. I like that. So vote. Thanks again. Thanks, Tony. Thanks, guys. Good to be with you. All right. We're back for for our news section, Ben. But, you know, it's just, it's just nice to see Tony's face. Yeah. I miss him. I miss him too. I think people should understand

to like this really is Joe Biden's closest advisor on these things. He was in the Senate when he was the staff director of the Farm Relations Committee when Joe Biden was chairman. He was in the White House when he was the National Security Advisor. He has been since he left. So this is the guy. There are a lot of people around Vice President Biden, and none of them are closer to him than Tony. So it was good here.

I also think in a cage match between National Security Advisor Robert O'Brien and Tony Blinken, my money is on Tony Blinken, too. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. So let's turn to, let's talk about the fighting in Armenia and Azerbaijan to start. So we've talked about this a couple times. The conflict itself started on September 27th over a disputed territory.

But not everyone can do a Nagorno-Karabakh transition like that. You know, that takes years. No, that takes time in the NSA. So we've talked about this fighting before. It's scary for a lot of reasons. You know, obviously, like any violence is awful if it's, especially when it's harming civilians. but it has the potential to draw in both Turkey and Russia into a broader proxy war. I think that's the bigger concern.

On Sunday, President Trump announced that his team had brokered a ceasefire between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which would obviously be a very good thing. But unfortunately, within minutes of that ceasefire coming into effect, both sides accused the other of violating it. So it seems unlikely to hold. This wouldn't be the first ceasefire that didn't hold. Putin brokered one that was immediately violated. The situation on the ground is not good. I've seen estimates of up to 5,000.

people who have been killed in the fighting. Armenia has accused Azerbaijan of executing prisoners and committing war crimes. Azerbaijan has reportedly used cluster munitions, which are bombs that basically release lots of little bombs that can pose threats to civilians for years if they don't go off. Ben, I've been impressed at how the Armenian community in the U.S. has organized to raise awareness about the conflict. There have been a bunch of rallies here in L.A. I think some in New York. I'm seeing planes dragging signs, there's banners everywhere. Apparently, President Trump spoke to a group of Armenian Americans in New Hampshire for the weekend and said ending the fighting would be, quote, an easy one. So that's good to know. So, Ben, you know, the Obama administration negotiated many

ceasefires in places like Syria that didn't always hold. What do you think of this latest effort? Does it tell us anything about whether the U.S. is sufficiently engaged in trying to solve the problem? Well, look, on the one hand, I'm sympathetic. This is an intractable problem. It's been around for decades. But we're a week out from the election, so I'm going to focus on what was wrong here, which is what was wrong was Trump going out and spiking the football. I mean, essentially declaring victory, tweeting, like as if the United States had just ended this conflict when this is very tenuous. I think the fact that it collapsed

is not a huge surprise. Two Russian brokered ceasefires had previously collapsed. I think what needs to happen differently is this needs the broadest possible international engagement. Just the U.S., just Russia, just Europeans is not enough. Like, you know, if we had a Biden

administration, I think a very broad multilateral process that brings in Russia, the European Union, the United States, these countries, by the way, that are selling arms to both parties to just say, like, you guys got to pull back from the brink here and deal with this. And frankly, Azerbaijan has been more of the aggressor in this case. And they basically said as much.

They said, you know, we're tired of waiting for diplomacy to deliver what we think is our land back to us. And so we're just going to start killing people, including civilians and releasing, you know, like rock video footage of drone attacks on Armenians. Really awful stuff. So I think it's just going to take a really muscular. sustained multilateral effort with the U.S. involved with other countries to just say, we got to cut out this fighting and then really start a process of negotiation around these disputed territories. So it's not just a ceasefire and everybody kind of goes home, but like drive the momentum from the ceasefire talks into actually addressing these underlying territorial questions, which are,

there's no, you know, there's no layup answer to that. There's no easy answer. Both sides claim it. You have to figure something out, though, that's a mix of territory and up. autonomy for the people who live there and for the two warring parties. Yeah, and look, one challenge to more European engagement is the fact that Europe's coronavirus outbreak is getting quite bad. Cases are exploding in a bunch of countries, including the Czech Republic, Italy, Belgium, the UK. Spain and France both now have over one million cumulative confirmed cases.

Even Germany, which had done a great job so far as seeing a big uptick. I saw that the president of Poland tested positive for COVID over the weekend. So you're also seeing that the European Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported that their infection rate in Europe has been going up for more than 90 days. So unlike here Ben, countries are starting to do something in response. Some have declared national states of emergency. There have been curfews or travel restrictions. Ireland and Wales have reimposed lockdowns.

Italy has put restrictions on gyms and restaurants. Those are leading to anti-lockdown protests. and lockdown fatigue. There's added concerns about some of these countries that may have avoided a bad outbreak the first time but failed to bolster their healthcare infrastructure while there was still time to do so. So, you know, Joe Biden said we're going into a dark winter.

I guess the question is whether that was actually an understatement when you look at, you know, Europe that's a couple weeks ahead of maybe where we are. Yeah, I mean, I think what's so troubling and terrifying about this time is that these are countries that by and large got things right or at least better than we did at the initial spike in the spring and managed to keep cases pretty low over the summer. And I think, you know, a couple of things really sunk in.

One, complacency and frustration with limitations on daily life combined with then cold weather. And, you know, Europe is more north than most of the United States, drives people inside. And so you worry that we're, you know, a couple weeks behind in the weather category and we're probably worse than the Europeans in terms of people. in this country being fed up with lockdowns. So I read it as a difficult indicator of how Europe's going to get through the winter,

given the weather and much of Europe. But also, you know, it's likely to be worse here than it is in Europe. And so if one of the things we do with the coronavirus is look abroad for warning tents for here, I think we have them now. And if you live in a cold weather climate, and particularly the states in the upper Midwest and Mount West, like, this is not a good signal. And I think it's a sign that if Biden does win. like COVID is going to be front and center in January.

You know, this is still going to be very real. We're going to be in the thick of it. We're going to be dealing with a lot of cases and a lot of places. And the capacity to align the global response and hopefully work towards the global dissemination of treatments and vaccines is going to be priority one for Biden foreign policy. Yeah, absolutely. Let's turn to Nigeria and talk about police brutality because, you know, corruption and and police brutality have been a big issue in Nigeria for many years.

And one police branch in particular, the special anti-robbery squad or SARS, not to be confused with the disease SARS, I know we're coming off of the coronavirus, but this is just a shortening of special anti-robbery squad, is notorious for corruption, indiscriminate violence, including torture and summary executions. Think of SARS as basically a pyramid scheme masquerading as a police unit. You have these underpaid, low-level cops. They demand bribes or they just steal from other citizens. And they have to kick some portion of that money up to their superiors.

And over time, these units have gotten more violent, more brazen, and they've really enraged a lot of the country. In 2017, the government made a sort of nominal effort to rein in police brutality. But in reality, they just sort of been pushing the problem around. They've reassigned corrupt officers to other parts of the police force. And according to an Amnesty International report released this summer, SARS conducted at least 82 cases of torture, ill-treatment, and extrajudicial execution between January 17 in May 2020, and not a single officer was prosecuted. So it's a huge problem.

But the issue really exploded again in early October when a video of a SARS officer killing a man surfaced on social media and led to mass protests across the country with huge numbers of young people participating and the hashtag N SARS trending really across the world. protesters want the unit abolished and they want an end to police brutality basically. The president in Nigeria, Mohamedu Buhari, tried to calm things by announcing that he would disband SARS, but then the head of police later clarified that actually, you know, a different special police force unit would just sort of take on their duties. So again, not exactly reform. Last week, there was another awful video of security forces in Nigeria firing on demonstrators in Lagos and killing 12 people. Ben, every week I feel like we talk about another protest movement, many of them very brave and inspiring, you know, in different places in the world.

What do you make of this latest effort to stop police brutality in Nigeria and the government's response and the seeming echoes of, you know, the protests we saw back in June over the murder of George Floyd? Well, I think that, you know, what's at play here is this sense of complete impunity. And, you know, corruption is embedded into daily life in parts of Nigeria. Like, you cannot do certain things without paying a bribe, you know. Whether the thing you're talking about is avoiding police shakedowns or whether it's, you know, being able to start a business. And this is basically industrialized corruption mixed with police brutality because if you don't pay up and if you don't go along with the scheme, you know, you could end up getting tortured. Or if you stand up to this kind of behavior, you could end up getting tortured.

So it's all about whether or not authorities have impunity to do whatever they want, whether it's brutalizing people or shaking people down. and that has shaped aspects of life in Nigeria. I think it's also important to note, you know, Nigeria's the biggest African country. It's kind of the bellwether. There are similar problems in other African countries, too. So I think that, you know, across the continent and SARS is speaking to a degree of frustration people have with this nexus of corruption police brutality. And, you know, there's really no solution to it than ending SARS, like ending these

kinds of units that have become so thoroughly corrupted that literally the model, for how this unit acts is indistinguishable from corruption brutality. This is what they do, right? And so being max, it's a mob, yeah. So being maximalist in your demands and calling out the government officials who might pay lip service, but then get into bed with these people is exactly right. But I think you put your finger on it, Tommy, like, we keep beating this drama on this podcast because it's true that whether you're talking about Belarus or Nigeria or Chile,

which we're going to get to, or Hong Kong, like, these are. just people everywhere who are pissed off at this kind of nexus of corruption and brutality and authoritarianism. And frankly, the movement for black lives in this country is in that same category. And there's a reason why those protests went global, because there are frustrations about that too. And racism is a part of this mix. So I think it just goes to show that this is global. This isn't about any one region or ethnicity or flavor. There are different flavors of the same problem everywhere. And the Ansar's people

are speaking to just how pronounced this problem is in the biggest African country. And this is something that merits our attention and support. Because again, Nigeria also has tremendous potential. I think this is what frustrates people. The economy is growing there. It's a young, dynamic

population. And corruption is a big part of what is holding that back from being even more promising. And so if they could just get out of their own way here and reform their institutions and have more accountable governance, then you could also really see not only abuses avoided, but you could really see a place like Nigeria take off and become a real player in the world. Yeah. And look, you know, this sort of corruption was also something you saw people furious about in Ferguson where, you know, it was done under sort of a legal rubric in the form of, you know, punishing fines on the

population here, but it was basically just piracy from the Ferguson police force stealing from the citizens of that city. So, yeah, it's very similar problems across the process of growth. Yeah, it's the same. And we saw this in Africa. Like one of the things we did in some African countries in the Obama administration is mobile justice units that some of these police forces were so corrupted that you kind of had to stand up

new methods of, you know, literally mobile courts and judges out in rural areas to set up from scratch. And we provide support, technical support to those kinds of efforts because there was a sense that the judicial institutions were so corrupted that you kind of had to start

over. And Ansar seems to reflect that mentality of like, this is not fixable. It needs to be gotten rid of and built back differently and better, you know. Yeah, build back better. Let's talk about Chile, as you sort of mentioned, because this could be the future, hopefully, for some of these protest movements. So, 78% of Chilean citizens voted to rewrite Chile as constitution in a referendum that came after months of protests. The protest started narrowly at first. I remember talking about these with you like a year ago, people were pissed about a fair hike increase at the metro. But over time, they broadened into a critique of economic inequality in Chile. And now the country will have the

chance to basically toss out their old constitution that was written during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and just write a new one. So the next step in this process is an election in April of 2021, where voters will choose 155 people who will attend basically a constitutional convention. They'll have nine months. and they can extend it if they need more time to write a new constitution. I believe that constitution will then be voted on. But what voters are looking for in Chile is basically address economic inequality, specifically when it comes to education, healthcare, and housing.

So, Ben, you know, I thought this is a pretty incredible story. It is inspiring to see a protest movement lead to an outcome like this and not to just a brutal crackdown. Do you think, like, is Chile the blueprint for some other places? Like, what do you make of this? I think so, because, you know, we talked about Chile. they were part of a series of movements against inequality. These kind of took off right around the time we were talking about like the yellow vests in France, right?

I mean, and they stuck to it. The protest movement continued and was a central feature of life in Santiago, the capital of Chile. They had very clear demands and a very clear focus on constitutional reform as the only means of addressing structural inequality. And lo and behold, they look like they're getting it done. And keep in mind, Chile has a right of center. billionaire president, Sebastian Penaera. So it's not like they have like a leader in office who's doing this for them. This is proof that it's hard and it takes time.

But a lot of these movements we talk about, you know, meet with a lot of frustration. This is a breakthrough. And, you know, what you see in Chile is kind of an emblem of what you see in Latin America broadly, which is structural, economic and equality that is, you know, puts, you know, I mean, we're worried about in the U.S. This is well beyond that. And people realizing that you kind of have to rewire the system. to get different outcomes, particularly on things like education, housing and healthcare and basic

services like that. So yeah, I think this is a success story and one that could be replicated in channeling that popular anger to constitutional and legal reform that's beyond just electing a different person. It's about changing structures. Yeah. Let's stay in the Western Hemisphere and talk about Venezuela because after six years in, you know, various kinds of detention, Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez has escaped Venezuela to Spain. Lopez had been living at the Spanish ambassador's residence since April of 2019 after he, you know, opposition leader Juan Guaido, basically failed in an attempt to overthrow the government. Before that, Lopez was held in a just horrific prison.

At one point he was released under house arrest, but they were going to bring him back. So one quick note, like full disclosure for listeners, Leopoldo Lopez went to the same college that I did. He's like a decade older than me, but I know some of his friends and I followed this case very closely since he went to prison. That doesn't mean I'm down with the Trump administration sort of like coup light policy, far from it. But I am obviously sympathetic to calls for free and fair elections and humanitarian relief for the people of Venezuela who are suffering horrifically. That said, it's hard to argue, Ben, that the White House Guido Lopez have played this particularly well, right? I mean, John Bolton basically threatened to invade the country.

Maduro called his bluff and it never happened. I'm glad they didn't invade, but, you know, things are not good. So the result is a humanitarian situation that is seemingly getting worse. The opposition is seemingly weaker. Ben, what do you think this says about the state of the opposition in Venezuela, how Biden should approach this? I mean, I'm not sure what the next step is. I think this says everything about the failure of the Trump policy. And I'm not just saying this because it's a week before the election. But this guy's whole political brand, and it's, you're right. He was a courageous individual. But Leopoldo Lopez, his whole brand was, I'm not going to leave Venezuela.

That was his pronouncement. And he was willing to suffer house arrest and the threat of arrest. And the fact that he sees such a dead end in Venezuela that having stayed there through so many dark times, he's moving to Spain, tells you everything about the failure of this approach that Trump has pursued of embracing and recognizing Guido and just kind of pretending like that's the government. when Maduro is still there in power. And again, I just want to, there was literally a day when Guaido appeared with Leopoldo

Lopez, he kind of emerged from, you know, his house arrest and his hiding to essentially declare that they were taking over the government. And John Bolton was taping videos in like the Roosevelt room announcing like the change of power. And Marco Rubio was like tweeting furiously from, you know, about like how this is all. What if we had done that? Where's the accountability? Why are people not calling them out on this kind of catastrophic failure of a policy? You know? And oddly, they seem to get credit for trying They get credit down in South Florida from the hardliners down there But this is failing.

If your objective, if your objective was to see a guy like Liverpool Lopez as the president of Venezuela, how can you be satisfied with the policy that has him in Spain? You know, I mean, so what they should have done from the beginning is try to negotiate in the country between the different factions, Maduro, Lopez, Guido, the Assembly, the Chavistas, the military, with support from all the different countries in the region, those that we agree with like Colombia and Chile,

those that we don't like Cuba, and to have a real negotiation about what an interim government might look like, what power sharing might look like for a time, and then what a real credible free and fair election might look like. And instead, there was this effort to kind of use this maneuver to recognize Guaido and kind of ram it down and make it reality. So to me, it shows that that failed. And what I think Biden's going to have to do is kind of start from scratch.

and do a listening tour of Latin America, check in with the Venezuelan opposition, but open lines of dialogue with the Maduro people as well, and try to have that broad-based diplomatic negotiation that focuses at first on leaving humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, and then trying to find some way out of this political stalemate that is negotiated and is not just the U.S. thinking that we can dictate this policy from Washington or Miami.

Yeah, maybe Private Rubio shouldn't be. running this account more. It doesn't seem like it's going to work. No. Let's talk about Sudan and Israel for a bit because last week, President Trump held an Ovalovas event and I think a conference call or maybe a three-way call with the Israeli prime minister and the prime minister of Sudan to celebrate this announcement where Sudan says they plan to normalize relations with Israel. Talked a bit about this last week. The normalization announcement came after heavy pressure and financial incentives from the U.S. that led to the U.S. that led to the U.S. US removing Sudan from the state sponsor of terror list and getting Trump, another headline

that he can shop around to Jewish voters primarily in Florida that makes it seem like pieces breaking out in the Middle East when really it's just these sort of like soft normalization agreements among, you know, autocratic countries. This was the part of the event that made me laugh, though, Ben. We are going to play a little audio here. Do you think Sleepy Joe could have made this deal, baby, sleepy Joe. Do you think you would have made this deal somehow? I don't think so. Yeah. Ben, that is for the listeners, that is Trump trying to get Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu to take a shot at Joe Biden. And you can hear Bibi's political wheels turning in real time. You can hear him hedging his bets and refusing to take a shot at Biden. I loved it.

Trump has done him every single political favor possible. He teed that up for him and BB just wouldn't hit it, wouldn't swing. I mean like BB is the most coldly calculating political animal that there is. I have nothing but you know, let's just say I have lots of you know

negative feelings about his agenda but a lot of you know respect for his political acumen and you could sense Tommy in that little pause like him considering it and then not only did he not go along with the, and first of all, it bears saying, how absurd is it that the President of America, you know, is sitting here a couple weeks for an election, you know, having poured

money into this deal and basically talking about Sleepy Joe and soliciting an endorsement. That phone call is worse than the phone call that he got impeached for. Like, the phone call that he got impeached for in Ukraine was about trying to leverage a foreign government for political van. She's literally asking for an endorsement after spending taxpayer dollars on this thing. But what's so telling me, Tommy, he's like, it was actually worse than not endorsing him because BB paused. He calculated what he was going to say. And then he didn't even start by saying, well, President Trump, we really appreciate what you did for us.

And we welcome support from anybody. He reversed it. He said, well, we welcome support from anyone in America. And it's almost like, we anticipate Joe Biden winning and hope he will give us support too. And then kind of throws in and we appreciate all you did. I mean, it couldn't have been a more embarrassing. And guess who is savvy enough to notice that kind of thing? The Jewish voters that Trump is trying to reach with this thing.

They know when they see that and they've been thinking, well, I want to vote against Trump because he's against everything I stand for and he's probably in any semi. But he's done all this good stuff for Israel, so maybe I'll vote for him. And then they hear Beebe saying, well, we appreciate what everybody in America does. That's Beebe essentially saying, like, no, I actually don't see you as any different. in terms of your support for Israel, than what we might get from other people in America. Yeah, it was sweet.

I loved every second of it. Okay, so this event goes on, and there's a second part of it that was a lot less funny and a lot worse. So we've talked before about the Grand Renaissance Dam. It's a $5 billion hydroelectric power project that Ethiopia is building on the Blue Nile River that is incredibly controversial, both in Sudan and Egypt,

because that river flows into their country, and is their main source of water. So at this same event, Trump is doing a three-way call with Sudanese Prime Minister, Abdallah Hamdok, and Netanyahu. He just casually mentions that Egypt will end up

blowing up the dam. And he sounded like he was endorsing that action by adding, and they have to do something. So within hours, Ethiopia was denouncing, quote, belligerent threats to the project. They summoned in the U.S. ambassador. So, Ben, I just thought this was such a perfect

moment that encapsulates the Trump foreign policy, right? So he is forcing Sudan to cut this deal with Israel, even if it's disruptive to their internal politics, their sort of fragile new government. In the process, he is kicking a beehive that is the source of unbelievable amounts of tension between three heavily armed countries and just doesn't even seem to know that he's doing it in real time. It was just, it was staggering. Yeah. I mean, first of all, why is that phone call on like television Tommy. Like, I mean, you should have done the threat to begin with,

but like, these people are so transparently self-interested, they could have, you know, put out of press release and taken a photo, but Trump just needs to to have this attention on what he thinks are these

transformative achievements, you know, that really aren't, as we've discussed. So he, the Sudanese prime minister is suddenly like on international media, like talking about this stuff. But then with the dam,

like, What is, that statement is insane. You're basically encouraging like a U.S., the second largest recipient of U.S. military assistance after Israel is Egypt. And, you know, essentially saying that they're going to blow up this dam and start a war. I mean, is an insane thing to say. It also demonstrates, like, what the hell does Trump know about Ethiopia? Ethiopia is a really important country.

It's got a population of over 100 million people. It's got a growing economy. It hosts the African Union. Like, none of these are things that Trump knows. But he's talking, I mean, it would be grotesque if it's any country. But, I mean, this guy is just kind of wading into this massive geopolitical dispute urging a military action that could, you know, destabilize that entire region and upend people's lives. And also just meanwhile, taking a massive shot at one of the most important countries in Africa. Yeah, I mean, it's just about everything on display there about why this person is not fit to be president of the United States.

Yeah, unless anyone think we're exaggerating. Like, I think the Ethiopians have already closed the airspace over this dam because they're worried about exactly this outcome. So this is a very real, very live threat. Egypt views the lack of water from the Blue Nile is literally an existential problem. Like, they will have no way to exist without that water. So huge deal. Just drop kicking it in the Oval Office on a Friday, you know.

Yeah, I mean, we'll just have like diplomatic process to resolve this. This says nothing. As you point out, he's already concretely. set things back in terms of diplomacy. Hopefully, there's a chance to start from scratch of the Biden administration. But the answer is not for the President of the United States and a photo op for some election eve deal that has nothing to do with this issue, by the way. I mean, veers out of his way. And suddenly we're talking about like bombing a dam. It's insane. Yeah, as an afterthought to some political gift to himself in the Israelis. Last thing we're

going to leave you guys with. So President Obama has been out on the trail this week. It has been really fun to watch him. He's clearly having a good time campaigning against Donald Trump. But he went hardcore Worldo today, and we just want to play a quick clip of that. Our current president, he whines that 60 minutes is too tough. You think he's going to stand up to dictators? He thinks Leslie Stalls a bully. Just yesterday.

Just yesterday. He said that Putin of Russia, she of China, and Kim Jong-un, of North Korea want him to win. We know. We know because you've been giving them whatever they want for the last four years. Of course they want you to win. That's not a good thing.

You shouldn't brag about the fact that some of our greatest adversaries think they'd be better off with you in office. Of course they did. What does that say about you? Oh, good. It's so good to hear him out there. I think, like, the thing Obama's able to do better than most politicians is land a devastating hit in a way that makes you laugh.

And it is such an underrated skill in a politician. Just be a little bit funny and everything lands a little softer. Yeah. I mean, whenever Obama is saying something that could end with, come on, you know, you know. Come on, man. But he used humor to, like, just, I mean, it's a hugely effective. way to take somebody down, especially somebody like Trump, because Trump seems, you know, he wants to be this tough guy and mockery that everybody knows is true is really effective. Tommy makes you

remember, though, when he did this really well, I remember there's a debate in 2008 when they got the question, what is your biggest flaw, you know? Oh, yeah. And it was Edwards, Clinton, and Obama, and they were all kind of tied at the time. And I think Obama's this thing about it. He's disorganized and, you know, messy desk. Messy desk kind of thing. And, you know, and, But then, like, John Edwards' answer was he just cares so much about fighting poverty that sometimes he's too passionate, you know. And I can't remember Hillary's answers, but basically the same thing. And the next day he goes out and everybody thought that their answers were much better and that Obama's was a problem because he said he's disorganized. So maybe he came around the country.

And I remember when I was like, I mean, I didn't know I could say that, I mean, I just care so much about helping folks that I just can't. And he went on this whole riff and it was really funny how he did it. But in a way, he was also tweaking Clinton and Edwards because people thought they were kind of phonies. You know, and he was doing a comedy routine and kind of making fun of himself. But he was speaking to something that people were concerned about with his opponents. And with Trump, it's the same thing. And this, how many times have you and I yelled each other about, you know, Trump's affinity for dictators? Well, it's so much more effective to just get up and be like, yeah, of course they win because you've been doing everything they want, you know?

And he has standing to do that the week. can't really. But it's been great to see him do that because it's striking. Think about it. How many politicians can use humor to go on offense like that? There are not many, you know. Yeah. And it wasn't overcranked. It's not like you're Putin's puppet or like hashtag resistancey stupid thing. He's like Putin of Russia, Xi of China, Kim Jong-un, North Carolina. Context, they want you to win. That's bad because they're bad. It's just like it's very simple. It's a great hit. You don't hear a lot of foreign policy out on the trail. So it's a nice way. Very world though. Very good, good world to hit. very world out. Well, that's it for this week. So we're going to do something a little different next week schedule-wise because the thought of preparing a bunch of foreign policy topics on Tuesday of Election Day and then talking about them and releasing it on Wednesday seems completely idiotic. I don't, my brain is going to be a fried egg. So I don't know what we're thinking. So we're thinking maybe we'll record Thursday for release Friday. So slightly later, but we'll we'll dig into the election. We'll dig into all the things happen in the world. And, uh,

excited. Talk to you guys next week. Votesaveamerica.com slash volunteer. Ben, good to see you. Thanks again to Tony Blinken. Yeah. No. And I'll just say, like, and hopefully we can get some international flavor of the reaction in the election. But I just want to say, like, we and I have talked on the show and offline about how sometimes we feel bad that we talk a lot about Trump. God, I hope that this election, you know, I would like nothing more than to spend the next four years talking about, you know, what Joe Biden. Biden's doing right and wrong. What's happening in the world?

What's happening with these democratic movements? Thank you for sticking with us. The reason we talk about Trump a lot is because he really is a threat to our democracy here and to the rest of the world. So you have to. We have to. It would be the wrong thing to not talk about it. But we've got now one more week to make sure that we don't have to talk about Trump for another four years. So let's get it done.

I cannot wait to argue about climate change plans not being aggressive enough. That will be a good day. Yeah. All right, everybody. Talk to you next week. See you. POTSE of the World is a crooked media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our associate producer is Jordan Waller.

It's mixed and edited by Chris Basil. Kyle Segglin is our sound engineer. Special thanks to Quinn Lewis for production support. And thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Malkonian, and Milo Kim, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.