Pod Save the World - A criminally negligent coronavirus response

Episode Date: March 25, 2020

Tommy and Ben go through the latest news on the international response to the coronavirus, including nationwide lockdowns in the UK and India and signs of hope in Italy. Then they look at how the virus is impacting US relations with North Korea, how US sanctions are impeding health care workers in Iran and Venezuela, and how authoritarian leaders are using the pandemic to grab more power. They also cover Mike Pompeo’s trip to Afghanistan and how China is trying to turn the coronavirus into a propaganda win. Then Ambassador Susan Rice joins and does not mince words about her assessment of Trump’s performance.

Welcome back to Pots Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, I like the looks of your, what is that, a study office. Yeah, I've got a new bookshelf just in time for the coronavirus. Fantastic. So a little cozy in here. Well, I wish we were in the studio together, but I'm glad we can still do this. Today we're going to go through all the latest that's happening internationally in terms of the response to the coronavirus. We'll start with a major lockdown in the United Kingdom, in India, and potentially some signs of hope. in Italy. We'll also talk about how the virus is impacting U.S. relations with North Korea and Iran and how authoritarian leaders are using the coronavirus to grab more power. We'll also get into why Mike Pompeo went to Afghanistan and some non-coronavirus news and how China is trying to spin their response into a PR coup. And then we're going to be joined by Ambassador Susan Rice, former national security advisor to President Obama. She had firsthand experience managing the Ebola crisis in 2014 and all sorts of other international problems. She has some tough words for the Trump administration response.

Is that fair been? Yeah, it's not tough love either, Tommy. It's not tough luck. It's just tough, it's just tough. By the way, her book is great, tough love. She talks all about how she managed Ebola crisis. Real quick before we get into the news. So I think all of us are like heartbroken about all the people who are being impacted

by the coronavirus, all the small businesses, waiters, healthcare workers. So Crooked Media put together a coronavirus relief fund where you can donate and we'll spread that money equally to a bunch of groups who are providing support, healthcare, food banks, restaurant workers, seniors, kids who need school lunches and others. You can see the full list. If you go to crooked.com slash coronavirus, that's crooked.com slash coronavirus because you're the best people in the world, we've already raised like a half a million dollars. So anyway, check it out if you want to chip in any little bit goes far. So, Ben, I think we'd start with the UK because yesterday British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced strict new rules designed to stop the spread of the coronavirus. So for three weeks at least, British citizens can only leave home to exercise once a day. They can only travel to and from work or to get medical care shop for essential items.

Public gatherings are banned. Shop selling non-essential items are closed. Inviolators can be fined. There's also emergency legislation moving through Parliament that would allow the government to shut airports and force sick people to self-isolate. Ben, last week we talked about how the UK was slow to wake up to the threat of the coronavirus. That was in part due to a model, a statistical model of the impact of the coronavirus on UK citizens and its health care system that drastically underestimated the number of people that would be killed. Initially, they sort of bought time with a strategy that would slow but not stop the spread. now they are fully clamping down. It sounds like some of that mixed messaging initially led to a situation where

Boris Johnson's suggestion that you not leave your home or socially isolate was not being followed by enough people and they weren't complying. So now he needed to just crack down really hard. So hopefully this works. Yeah, I mean, you know, I was troubled, you know, about a week ago. there were a lot of pictures out of London of people still riding the tube, the subway there, people going to pubs. London is a city that is kind of hyper-connected to the rest of the world.

So people from China and Italy and other affected countries, no doubt, you know, had been coming through London as well. And so, you know, their response is a bit like ours. They got behind in the social distancing and kind of fell behind this. this virus and now they're going to be, you know, trying to catch up by more extreme social distancing measures. I think you're also seeing some complaints that the National Health Service there, even though they have, you know, single, they have Medicare for all, or their version of universal health care has been squeezed a bit by austerity measures that have been in place for like a

decade. So they also might have some shortfalls like the kinds we're seeing here around certain healthcare equipment. So we'll be thinking about all the world those out there in the UK. And it'll be interesting on the back end of this, you know, they'll be navigating this, you know, in a Brexit context, which on the one hand, you know, I guess presumably there's less easy freedom of movement of people. But like I said, it doesn't mean that the UK's walled off in the world. On the other hand, the economic shock, you know, be interesting to see if it's more difficult for the UK to recover outside of the EU trade block too. So, you know, lots to watch in all these countries about how the major kind of geopolitical moves that they've been doing affect in some way or another

the way they bounce back not just from the health crisis, but ultimately from the economic crisis too. Yeah. So after a really truly disastrous initial approach to mitigating the coronavirus. Italy has some signs of good news. Italian officials announced this week that new cases and deaths had gone down for the third day in a row. This came after a nationwide lockdown that went into effect on March 10th. But in the interim, it's been horrific. Well, over 60,000 confirmed cases, more than 6,000 deaths in Italy alone. Hopefully, hopefully this trend is part of a broader downward trajectory that will continue because Italy's healthcare system has just been totally overwhelmed. And I wanted to mention both the UK and Italy because Trump, our president,

and I don't want to wallow in Trump news today, but the UK and Italian experiences are instructive. Trump's new talking point is that the coronavirus cannot be worse than the problem itself. The cure can't be worse than the problem itself. And you're seeing that repeated all over Fox and right-wing Twitter. It sounds reasonable, maybe, but I think the UK and Italy show what will happen if you take half measures. I mean, self-quarantining for a month, as you and I are doing right now, that doesn't mean you're immune in six months. Like, we don't even know if getting the virus makes you immune. We hope so, but we don't know for sure.

But Trump is basically suggesting that we could reopen the economy because old people and those with preexisting conditions would, I guess, quarantine themselves in perpetuity or until there's a vaccine in 18 months while the rest of us go back to normal. And like, I get the instinct to want to do that. But how do you really help an at-risk population fully avoid the rest of the country? I mean, they need food. they need medical care, they need services, they need human contact, right? And so I'm not an epidemiologist, nor are you, but like, you know, the ones we listen to say that what Trump is proposing is a

recipe for disaster. It's a recipe for what was happening in Italy when it comes to stopping the virus. And frankly, it's highly unlikely to fix the economy since like, I don't know about you, Ben, but a Trump half opens up the country. And again, logistically, I don't know how he would do that. I'm going to continue to socially isolate, right? Like, people aren't going to go to the movies or restaurants. Like Washington, D.C. is addicted to deciding that the right answer is some middle ground between like two partisan positions, but I don't think the viruses share that take. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that what's so useful about this is that if you really want to understand the nature of the challenge, it's very instructive to look at other country's

experiences. And we talked a bit last time about how if you look at South Korea and Germany, can see how mass testing can help you contain the outbreak, we most closely resemble Italy's curve, right? So if you look at the respective curves of different countries that have had a presence of COVID-19, you know, we have followed the Italian pattern because Italy and the United States did not get in front of this. Our governments are the ones that fell the farthest behind. And in Italy, that's not entirely surprising. Italy's got a notoriously kind of unstable government, not just now, but over the last several decades, they average like a government almost every year. And so they're not used to having strong centralized messaging from

their governments. And it took kind of the scare of the healthcare system getting overwhelmed to put this extreme social distancing really into effect. And now you're seeing a slowing of this disease. And again, what that suggests is you can't, you know, you can't dramatically bend the curve through social distancing alone. You need the kind of testing the South Grays had, but you can bend the curve and you can save a lot of lives. And the idea that once you do that for a few days, because we've been at this for two, three weeks, like, we can all just go back to normal again is literally insane. Again, you don't need to be an epidemiologist to know that, like, the disease didn't disappear because fewer of us got it because we were

social distancing. And if we don't sustain some form of social distancing, you know, and extra precaution, there's nothing to stop this from kind of roaring back. And so I do think people should look at the Italian example and kind of consistently, if you want to measure the effectiveness of our government, just look at our experience in this country of coronavirus and measure it against China and South Korea and Germany and Italy and Spain and the other countries that are dealing with this. If you do that, you'll see what works and what doesn't. And you also see why a lot of this stuff Trump says is totally not borne out by the facts of what's happened in other places. Yeah, we have data. We should use it. The other major news I saw today was Indian Prime Minister

and Renri Modi announced a total lockdown of India, the whole country for 21 days. So far, India does not have a lot of reported coronavirus cases, but they've only tested 15,000 people, which is a drop in the bucket. Then, you know, I worry about how this will work in practice, given how many people live at or below the poverty line in India. But in terms of stopping the transmission of the virus, I pray that it'll save a lot of people. But it just, it was one of those headlines I read that just my jaw dropped. And to step back for a second, I mean, one leader just ordered 1.3 billion people, one sixth of the world's population to not leave their homes for three weeks.

Like that is how much the world has changed because of this virus. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to get your mind around one-sixth of humanity being told to stay indoors. On the one hand, it makes sense because, you know, India's public health infrastructure is, you know, outside of certain neighbors in certain cities, very, very problematic. And so if this started to spread, it really would overwhelm some of the more impoverished corners of India. And there's just not a public health infrastructure sufficient to deal with it. on the other hand, as you say, there are a lot of people in India living in extreme poverty,

you know, not just kind of the poverty that we would associate with the poverty line in the U.S., but people living on, you know, two or three dollars a day. Yeah. And so I do worry and wonder about what the precautions that are in place for just meeting basic needs of people who are self-isolated like this, who don't have ready access to food and, you know, basic staples, water, sanitation. So, you know, I hope that the Indian government can somehow, working with their own local governments, presumably,

not see like a scale of suffering and potential death because of the measures they're taking at this time. I think it also, you know, frankly just shows, you know, Modi's, you know, we talked about his kind of nationalist, kind of authoritarian tendencies. In this case, again, it may be very warranted to be doing this. But, you know, I think in a lot of countries, what we, including our own, will want to watch how emergency powers that are used by leaders, you know, whether they

go away, what kind of leaders emerge on the other end of this, how comfortable leaders get, telling all of their people to do things. there's so much fallout to this that we'll be talking about for so long in terms of the politics of other countries, geopolitics, potential instability. And again, one thing to watch is a leader like Modi who's shown these troubling tendencies, you know, what emergency powers might stay in place and how he might be, you know, an even more autocratic hand on the ship of state on the back end of this. Yeah, that emergency powers point is really important. And we're going to get into some troubling examples a little later in the show that we've already seen. But you're right. I mean, when it

comes to India and Modi, I particularly worry about the ability for Muslims to get food, water, basic necessities given the, you know, incredible horrific, you know, nationalism and the riots against Muslim citizens that we've seen recently. Yeah, will there be bias against Muslims? Like, let's say they are providing stuff, you know, is it going to go to Hindu neighborhoods, not Muslims? That's the kind of thing, yeah, I'd look for. Yeah. Let's talk about North Korea for a minute. I was happy to read that President Trump sent a letter to Kim Jong-un offering North Korea help fighting the coronavirus. Interestingly, Kim Jong-un's sister replied to Trump's request in a public statement. I don't know that I've seen that happen before.

She basically thanked him for the letter, but still wouldn't commit to resuming talks about North Korea's nuclear program or relations generally, which, by the way, is still a massive existential threat to the world, just kind of looming out there. But we've forgotten about all those because it's all coronavirus, so I digress. But, you know, offering assistance like this is humane, it's decent. I think it's smart policy because we want the North Korean people to survive. We want them to like America. It's their leadership that we have a big problem with. But it also highlighted for me again why it's so frustrating that the U.S.

has kept economic sanctions on other countries like Iran and Venezuela. And we've touched on this before, Ben, but I really think it bears repeating, you know, Iran is one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the world right now. The U.K., the Chinese, the Russians have called on the United States to ease our sanctions, give them some relief during this horrible time. But instead, the U.S. government actually announced more sanctions last week. And the White House likes to claim that medicine and humanitarian goods are exempted from these sanctions. But I just don't believe that because the truth is, it's nearly impossible to conduct transactions with Iran from other countries. I've seen people

online say they try to set up a go-fund me and it's delayed a week because of sanctions concerns. There's reports of companies that have basically just stopped shipping medical supplies to Iran because they can't fight a bank that can handle the transaction. It's like a lot of bureaucratic cruelty that is practical but absolutely necessary. And that's not to say that the U.S. is at fault or that Iran's leadership is handling this well. They are clearly not. But sanctions are making it worse. Again, in Venezuela, an estimated 30% of hospitals don't have power and water.

And 80% lack basic supplies or qualified staff. So I do think like there needs to be a political movement to get these sanctions off now and help these countries before the crisis explodes. Yeah, and, you know, I agree with you that it's the right thing to offer help to North Korea. I'm not sure what help we're going to give, given that we can't even provide enough ventilators for ourselves. But if it was there, I would love to provide it. And look, it's a crisis.

You should be able to see the common humanity in people. It is the morally correct thing. You know, Iranians live in a society where, you know, they clearly have huge shortages. some of those shortages are very clearly attributable to U.S. sanctions enforcement. There have been concerns for a long time about the humanitarian exemptions from sanctions being too cumbersome for things like medical supplies already. And look, there's another reason to do this. If the U.S. compounds the crisis in Iran, which we already are,

the Iranian people will never forget that. If essentially we're contributing to the scale of death and suffering in Iran, because we have kind of a sociopathic policy from Mike Pompeo and others to punish Iran in the hopes that it somehow leads them to be more responsible actors in the global stage. We're going to lose multiple generations of Iranians and be trapped in the cycle of conflict more likely than not if we continue to squeeze them throughout this outbreak. Well, so let's stay on that point because I'm really glad you raised that, the sociopathic tendency, because for Iran it gets worse because,

Because our listeners probably remember when the United States assassinated Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian general, we were told by the Trump administration that that would deter future attacks from these Iranian-backed militia groups that are in Iraq attacking U.S. forces. As predicted, that is not what happened. On March 11th, there was a rocket attack against coalition forces in Iraq that killed two U.S. service members and one British service members. So now, according to New York Times, the White House is reportedly debating more military strikes on Iran, despite the fact that we don't have clear.

evidence that the strikes were ordered by Iran. And they said that Mike Pompeo and the new Twitter troll acting head of intelligence, Rick Grinnell, were arguing for bigger strikes, striking Iranian naval vessels to take Iran by surprise in the middle of the pandemic. So to your point, it's like, what amount of suffering is enough for these guys when it comes to Iran? And there's so many things that are crazy about this. I mean, one is the director of national intelligence should not be providing any policy advice whatsoever anyway. I mean, I think people, don't understand this, but like the DNI, the director of national intelligence, is not supposed to make policy recommendations. He or she is just supposed to present the intelligence. So the fact that you've got a goon in there, in Rick Grinnell, who has no experience and a matter of weeks into the job is recommending new wars.

Just shows you how completely and utterly broken are national security apparatuses right now. the idea that you'd somehow start a war in the middle of a pandemic. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that that doesn't make sense. But the other thing I'd say, Tommy, is like, let's say you do want to affect positively things like the direction of the Iranian nuclear program or their actions in the region. What is more likely to achieve an outcome where Iran behaves more responsibly? If we were to lift sanctions and in this mass infusion of goodwill, help them deal with this, Is that more likely to get Iran back to the table to get back into something like the Iran nuclear deal?

Or is it more likely if we squeeze them and punish them throughout a pandemic that they'll somehow do that? Obviously, if we squeeze and try to punish Iran through a pandemic, I think that they're going to be more hostile to the United States and more likely to develop a nuclear weapon and more likely to engage in attacks. So even if you put aside the moral concerns and humanitarian concerns, just as a matter of what you're trying to. achieve, of course it would follow that you have a better chance of drawing somebody back into diplomacy through a gesture of humanitarian relief than you would by essentially literally kicking somebody in the face where they're down. Yeah. Yeah, it's just, it's truly insane. And again, like Iran's leadership has lied about this. They've covered it up. Yeah. There are factions there that are trying to, you know, say that the WHO is a Jewish Zionist like Kabbal and not to blame

them, right? There's a lot of bad actors in Iran. No one's arguing. otherwise, but we shouldn't help innocent people get killed by making it harder for them to get medical supplies or blowing them up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's save the war. Yeah, let's save the war. So, Ben, you alluded to this earlier. Anne Applebaum at the Atlantic wrote a fascinating piece about how rulers around the world

are already using the coronavirus to grab more power. So two examples she used are Hungary and Israel. And, you know, I got to tell Bibi Nanjahu, that's probably not company you want to be in. But so let's start with Hungary. So Prime Minister, Victor Orban, he put forward a proposal to Parliament that does the following. It lets him basically ignore all existing laws and suspend elections. It criminalizes the spread of information that's deemed false or distorted that the authorities claim could interfere with a pandemic response.

So really a big catch-all there. And it says they can quarantine anyone indefinitely. So, you know, if this passes, which it probably will, it basically makes him an absolute dictator, gives Orban an easy mechanism to just crush what remains of the free press and the name of the, you know, a pandemic response, gives him a pretext to quarantine, in quotes, critics. And it will be almost impossible to unwind those changes once they're made. In Israel, it's pretty bad as well. I mean, Netanyahu issued an emergency decree that allowed him to postpone his own criminal trial. He also is preventing parliament from convening. And he gave himself new surveillance powers

that mean they can track, like things you normally use, authorities you would normally use to track terrorists can be used to monitor the phones of people diagnosed with the coronavirus or suspected of infection. They can track where you've been. I mean, it's a massive expansion of the surveillance state. Some BB Netanyahu's critics are calling it a coup. And then, you know, you alluded to this, but our own Department of Justice is reportedly seeking more emergency powers, including allowing judges to detain people indefinitely. So, man, I mean, I think like the playbook of every authoritarian forever has been creates. some emergency, grab a huge amount of power, never give it back.

And so, like, obviously we should know to expect these sort of cynical power plays. I guess the question is, how do you prevent them? Like, what is the antidote now? Unfortunately, the reason this is so dangerous is there's not a clear antidote because this is a crisis and there's not much of an enforcement mechanism, you know, from abroad that can prevent these steps being taken. And if you know anything about Victor Orban and Bibi Netanyahu, you would have no reason whatsoever to believe that they would relinquish whatever emergency powers they obtain. Or Bill Barr.

Yeah, or Bill. Yeah, or Bill Bar for years. And, you know, Orban for years has been steadily chipping away at Hungary's freedoms and its open society and its democracy through laws that he passes. And if you, you know, if you know anything about Hungary, the misinformation that he claims to. want to combat, like his propaganda outlets are usually the sources of disinformation in Hungary. He's already done a number on the independent media there. He clearly wants to control all the information in Hungary and is trying to give himself the authority to do just that.

There's not an election coming up in Hungary on the national level. So the idea that this would extend to elections makes no sense. And if you look at what Netanyahu and. One way to evaluate again what these leaders are doing is, were these types of authorities necessary in other places? I don't think South Korea, which managed this as well as anybody, certainly as well as any democracy, needed to give itself powers to surveil everybody's phones or to shut down media or to basically detain people forcibly at the whims of the government. So it's not necessary. And so if you're seeing leaders taking steps that are not necessary, that go beyond what other countries have done,

I think, you know, the red flag should go up. And, you know, one of the things you could do in a normal circumstance to prevent this is if the U.S. was trying to work cooperatively with other countries to develop, okay, here are the best protocols. Here's the best way to approach social distancing. Here's the best way to approach travel restrictions. And maybe even here's the way to combat misinformation. If you had kind of an international baseline, it would be more obvious when a leader was deviating from that baseline. But because there is no set of international guidelines here,

everybody's making up as they go along. And it's easier for these leaders, I think, to take extraordinary steps that go well beyond what's necessary because there's not like a baseline to measure it against. Yeah. I don't know about you, but I also find it very interesting and suspicious that you're seeing very little about the number of reported cases in Russia. And I wonder if that's not because Putin has already started his power grab process in motion. And he has a referendum on April 22nd that will basically let him be president for life.

And God forbid, any news gets out there that prevents people from going to the polls and, you know, given him another two terms. Yeah, I mean, this is another thing. And it comes up in the China context, too, is that people should look at the numbers coming out of some of these countries with some skepticism. Like, I'm not sure why we should, you know, while it's clear that China has gotten its arms around this thing, I'm not sure why we should trust completely the numbers that come to us from the Chinese Communist Party, particularly when they got it so wrong out of the gate. And the idea that Russia is somehow immune to this when other countries aren't, and where Russia, you know, it's cold and it's not the hot, humid weather exactly, that it makes us a little bit harder to travel.

I look at those Russian numbers with a lot of skepticism, and I frankly think that we have no capacity to know what's really gone on there until, you know, it starts to trickle out anecdotally. Okay, some non-corona news. I was surprised to see Secretary of State Mike Pompeo make a surprise trip over to Afghanistan in the middle of all this. He was reportedly trying to resolve this ongoing political crisis between President Ashrafgani and his chief political rival, Abdullah, Abdullah. We've talked about this before on the show. There's been a political deadlock since the election in September.

It is destabilizing the whole country. Pompeo was unable to resolve it. And he released a statement when he got back that said, quote, the impasse harmed U.S. Afghan relations and sadly dishonors those Afghan American and coalition partners who have sacrificed their lives and treasure in the struggle to build a new future for this country, end quote. It's a pretty tough quote there. He also announced or threatened really to slash a billion dollars in USA to Afghanistan. So I mean, that kind of jerk my head back. So I get how big this political crisis is, right? I mean, if we don't resolve this political crisis,

there's no way there will ever be stability in Afghanistan. And it seems unlikely that Afghan Taliban talks will ever resume. Meanwhile, U.S. troops are preparing to leave and the government is just paralyzed. But I don't know, man, slashing aid in the middle of a pandemic and, like, threatening these guys on the way out, doesn't seem like the best way to resolve it. Yeah, so we had the exact same issue in 2014. Again, with Ashrafgani and Abdullah Dala, and there was contested election results. and it took us a few weeks of, you know, shuttle diplomacy and President Obama, I remember I staffed a couple of phone calls he made from Martha's Vineyard, his vacation to each of those leaders.

And we ultimately ended up with a kind of power sharing formula where Gandhi was the president, Abdullah was like a CEO. It's also important to note that this plays into some of the ethnic divides inside of Afghanistan too, you know, because Ashraf Ghani is from the majority Pashtun ethnicity. and Abdullah Abdullah is part Tajik. And so some of the minority ethnic groups have kind of supported him. And so when you have this kind of division, it's not just about politics. It also plays into some of the sectarian divisions. You know, it can be particularly dangerous. All that said, number one, what is Mike Pompeo doing on coronavirus?

You know, I mean, I just don't understand why he's not working day and night to formulate an international response. The one thing I saw him do was put out an attack video, threatening the Chinese and the Russians and the Iranians for putting out disinformation. Like, okay. Yeah. And the fact is that he put out a picture of himself like doing a puzzle at home. Well, meanwhile, we've got thousands of Americans who are stranded abroad trying to figure out to get back home. But the other thing that bothers me so much about this, Tommy, is that we talked about this. We just gave a giant foot rub to the Taliban, you know?

Trump called him. Mike Pompei was just, yeah, Mike Pompei was just in Qatar, meeting with these guys. And if you're Afghan and you're watching this, and he's got nothing but, you know, kind of praise that he's heaping on the Taliban around this deal. And then he's threatening to cut a billion dollars

to the Afghan government right after we gave this big embrace to the Taliban. What kind of message does that sound? You know, that essentially the Taliban we're now referring to as a counterterrorism partner. And meanwhile, the government that actually is our counterterrorism partner, that's lost tens of thousands of Afghan National Security forces fighting with us against the Taliban.

You know, so I look, I want them to succeed in resolving this dispute. I get that you sometimes need to exert leverage. But this feels overtorched to me. Yeah, that's a really good point. I hadn't thought of it. Two more things before we get to Susan Rice. And we talk a little bit about this topic with her. So China's role in the coronavirus is massive.

I mean, despite the fact that the, virus originated in China and Wuhan and they completely botched the containment effort and they lied about it and they used it to clamp down a descent. China is now actually trying to use their relative success in eradicating the coronavirus or at least drastically reducing it as a propaganda tool. And so you see that in a few ways. I mean, Alibaba, a big internet company, they sent millions of testing kits, masks, protective suits to Africa for distribution. The Chinese telecom giant Huawei donated 800,000 masks to the Dutch, I believe. And Chinese state-run media is just working overtime. They're putting Fox News to shame. They're spinning the containment

effort. They're highlighting the work the Chinese are doing abroad. They're making Xi Jinping look at this conquering hero who's on top of the problem globally. And, you know, even darker, and you're hearing this from the Trump administration, the Chinese state-run media is suggesting the virus originated in the U.S. or that the U.S. Army brought it to China. Ben, do you think, is there any way to actually know if this kind of PR spin campaign is working in China itself? And more broadly, like, how effective do you think this sort of overt effort to curry favor with countries in a time of crisis is in terms of like soft diplomacy? Well, I think that the propaganda campaign, which is gross, is probably chiefly intended for like a Chinese audience.

You know, it's not like Dutch people are going to think that the U.S. military created it, right? But like, you know, I think some Chinese people, like, that's all they're consuming. Some Americans might. I mean, look, we love conspiracy these days. Well, yeah, exactly. It might, you know, Q&N people might pick that up, you know. So that's what I think that's about. But I think that the, I think it's incredibly effective. And it's clearly strategic. I mean, the examples you cited, you know, the Netherlands, a very kind of critical, like, almost swing country in Europe, you know. notably the assistance didn't come just from the Chinese government. It came from Huawei.

And we've been talking about how there's this whole competition taking place where the United States is going around to European countries and saying don't use Huawei because they're a potential cyber threat to your economy. And then in a crisis, the picture I saw literally had the Dutch deputy prime minister uploading this gear that was stamped Huawei on it. Of course that's going to have an effect. And at a time when the United States can't get its act together, we're clearly falling down on the job. As we talk about in this show, other countries don't have to play the both sides game.

So it's not like other countries have to be like, on the one hand, Democrats criticize Trump's response. On the other hand, you know, he said it's perfect. They can just see plainly that this is a fiasco. And not only is the U.S. not making donations to other countries, but as we get into it in a moment with Susan, we're literally now going around asking for equipment from countries like South. Korea. And by contrast, you've got China is a donor country. And I think we might not be able to fully get our minds around what a paradigm shift that is. Like it has been the steady state of the world for over 70 years that the U.S. leads the global responsive crisis. The U.S. is usually the

biggest donor in humanitarian crises. And now the U.S. is completely absent and China is emerging as a donor, I think it really is going to accelerate, if not turbocharge, this sense of countries looking to China for leadership and looking away from us. And if Donald Trump thinks just calling it the China virus is his strategy, no other country on earth is calling this a China virus. Like there's not like some other prime minister who's like, yeah, it's a China virus. So what do you have? You have, this is a great power of competition and let's face it, even in a crisis that's happening. The Chinese strategy is to perform. provide assistance to critical countries.

And the U.S. strategy is to call it the China virus. Yeah. Like which of those do you think is going to be more effective? Or to try to purchase a German company to try to get products that might help deal with the coronavirus and lock out the Germans, one of our closest allies. As Angela Merkel is in self-quarantine getting tested for the coronavirus. But thank God, she is okay because we cannot leave her. She's like the international RBG.

We can't lose her. I saw one of the reports that she went shopping herself and had four bottles of wine and a bunch of toilet paper in her cart. And it's like, you know, German chancers are just like us, you know. I mean, Angola makes me, I don't know what I would do without her, frankly, because like you look around this collection of creeps and goons who run all these countries. I mean, this worries me in the financial crisis. Like, if you tick through it, 2009, we needed a coordinated response to the financial crisis. we're going to need one now. And it's gone from Obama to Trump, Medvedev to Putin, Gordon Brown to Boris Johnson,

no Singh to Modi, Lula to Bolsonaro. Like, unfortunately, I could keep going. Like, thank God, Angela Merkel is still there because there's not a lot of leadership. No, no, there is not. Let's end on some sports news, which is unfortunately a bummer. The Olympics have been postponed until 2021. The Japanese Prime Minister, Shenzhou Abe. and the International Olympic Committee or IOC announced it today.

This was inevitable. Of course, you can't have a bunch of Olympic games while people are suffering from a global pandemic. The only silver lining was it got the name Dick Pound trending on Twitter, which is, of course, the name of one of the International Olympic Committee members and nothing else. I don't know why you're laughing. Well, I'm laughing because I, and again, I don't want to go down this rabbit all too far,

but I did, like, legitimately text our group threat, you know, that goes on endlessly with you and me and John and Cody and Dan yesterday. I was like, why is Dick Pound trending? And Dan very, with absolutely no humor associated whatsoever, like communicate what happened. I will say Japan has already taken a big hit economically. And I can't imagine how much they kind of modeled and projected, you know, their, their tourism industry and all this infrastructure they built around the revenue from these Olympics. So they'll take another big hit.

I guess the hopeful note I'd say, Tommy, is that like, there's a world, because I love the Olympics, right? Me too. I fucking live for the Olympics. And there's a world. And by the way, if I don't get to see Simone Biles in the Olympics at some point, I'd be very upset. But there's a world in December of 2021 where Donald Trump is no longer president and we're through this disease. And we all get to watch the Olympics together. You know, like, maybe that's the target.

I'm going to have in mind here is that we, if we handle this right, because that's about, you know, it's about a year and a half that's when the vaccine should be disseminated. So let's maybe just kind of fantasize about the world we could inhabit for the Summer Olympics 2021 in Tokyo. That's a good light at the end of the tunnel. I like that a lot. Yeah, there it is. Before we get to Susan, I wanted to ask you.

So I finished in the Garden of the Beast. Again, great book. Probably not what my brain needed right now, which is, you know, Lots of Nazi talk. I think my next book, so I'm still reading a book about the transition from like Nixon through Ford and Reagan. That's great, but it's like 900 pages, so I'm like kind of swapping in and out of books. I think I'm going to read one called Rise and Kill First, which is the secret history of Israel's story of assassination. Yeah, I read that one. It looks amazing. Have you read it? I did. And it's really amazing and incredibly reported. And, you know, he had all kinds of

problems with the Israeli government trying to block production of that book. But one of the of the reasons why it's frankly interesting to read is as former Obama people, you know, they have gone through all these ethical questions around targeted killing and, you know, not always handle them the best way. And, you know, they've kind of ingrained targeted killing in their security culture. And that's what the book is very much about. And it makes you think about what we've done in our system. And, you know, it definitely makes you question whether we want to kind of keep going down the rabbit hole of relying on things like drones. So it's about them, but it's also about us. I mean, that's like it's an important

debate. And, you know, I think that if people in the Obama White House or in previous iterations of the Israeli government knew that Donald Trump was an option or BB Netanyahu in perpetuity was an option, maybe you think a little harder about restrictions. I also hate that our politics is so ready and willing to fund the military and fund the intelligence community and take out targets in the name of safety. And then you have like the lieutenant governor of Texas saying that like grandma can die if it will prevent the the GDP of the country from going down a percentage point. I mean like we've lost our fucking minds. Yeah. Yeah. We got to this is kind of like We talked a bit last time how crises exposed kind of some of the cultural and social problems.

And if we're the kind of country where the second, you know, highest elected official in one of the biggest states can say that on television, something is clearly broken and gone wrong. And you're right. I mean, I think that book when I read it, you know, made me think like, because it was in the Trump years, exactly the question you said, which is, you know, if you wouldn't want a certain capability to be in the hands of it. of Donald Trump, then, you know, you should think twice about doing in the first place and, or certainly doing it a certain scale. I would tell you, I'm reading, I turn, you know, I finally turn to escapeism here. And I'm reading John LaCarray, Tinker Taylor Soldier Sui. Oh, nice.

I've never read it. Yeah, there's a trilogy of books of his, that, that I'm setting out to read here, that speaks to my desire for things that are easy and digestible. I'm also looking here. I'm reading a really good book called Draw Your Weapons by Saras and Teales. And it's a hard book to describe, but basically it's about, it's very much about kind of war. And it tells the story of this guy who was a conscientious objector during World War II.

And it juxtaposes that against the Iraq war and Abu Ghraib and some Iraq veterans that she's speaking to. It's just a very beautifully written thematic look at, you know, why wars happen and what they do to people and, frankly, why we should avoid them. So draw your weapons is another cool book. Cool. Well, check it out. I watched an episode of Tiger King on Netflix. Super weird. People in Ohio and Oklahoma own, like, hundreds of tigers and lions and big cats.

and there's some murder in there. Oh. So far, one episode in, it's pretty intense. What other shows you got? Because we're desperate. We're casting around. We watched, I can't remember. You know what?

I'll double back next episode. We'll do TV. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll do shows next time. All right, buddy. Well, I don't want to end this because it's so nice to talk to a human being. But when we go back from the break, we'll have Ambassador Susan Rice.

You don't want to miss this. Yeah, this is amazing. She's managed a global pandemic response. She has, doesn't mince words when it comes to. talking about her belief for how this one's going. And so check it out. We are thrilled to be joined now by the former national security advisor, former U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations,

and the author of the fantastic book, Tough Love, My Story of the Things Worth Fighting for. Ambassador Susan Rice, thank you for zooming into the show. It's so great to be with you guys. Thanks for having me. It's so fun to see you. So there's been a lot of reporting about this pandemic preparedness exercise that you and President Obama's national security team put together and hosted for President Trump's

transition team back in 2017. Were you in that briefing? And can you tell us what it was like and why you thought that that was such an important topic to walk them through for like three hours? Yes, I was in that meeting, Tommy. And interestingly, there was legislation that required the incoming administration and the outgoing administration to sit through a homeland security and national security exercise. It was meant to be in addition to what should have been a proper handoff from each cabinet official to his or her successor. And as it turned out, because the Trump administration was so unprepared and even less interested in anything we in the Obama administration could impart to them that might help them to govern. It turned out that this

exercise was for many of my colleagues and counterparts, their only experience with their Trump administration successors. In my case, it was surreal. In my case, I actually was really the only national security principle who had any extended opportunity for a handoff with my successor, who is short-lived, as people recall, that was General Michael Flynn, retired General Michael Flynn. And we actually had over four sessions about 12 hours together in which I used that time, obviously, to brief him, among other things about our grave concern about a potential pandemic and to explain to him that we had, under my leadership and with Lisa Monaco, set up an office in the National Security Council on pandemic preparedness called the Global Health.

security and biodefense office. And so we went through some of that stuff in depth. But then this exercise, which came really a week before the end of the administration, was in a big room in the old executive office building and a huge square table where everybody was literally supposed to sit in the chair next to their successor. So we called it a side-by-side exercise. A Lisa Monaco led it with who was President Obama's Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Top Advisor she led it with her incoming counterpart a guy named Tom Bossard who's no longer there who was fired at the same time roughly that they moved on to kill the office that I described on global health security but you know it was Wilbur Ross

and Betsy DeVos and Ben Carson and all these bizarre figures Jeff Sessions. I mean, you can imagine it was kind of surreal. Bar scene from Star Wars. We had three hours and we had, as I recall, three primary issues that were covered. One was a counterterrorism scenario or a terrorism attack scenario where we had to counter it, a cyber attack scenario and then a pandemic scenario. And the reason why Lisa and I and President Obama very much wanted that to be among the things we put very much front and center before the new team was because we understood from our own

experience and from history that this was in all likelihood that kind of threat that they should be prepared to face. So Susan, I also want to get at, you know, obviously they eliminated that office. Frankly, most of the people who were in that scenario left because of the chaos of the administration. But then I also want to put the listeners into the position of a presidential daily briefing consumer because, you know, one of the things I remember from the summer of 2014 is you and I get the PDB every morning before we sit down and go through it with President Obama. And I remember beginning to see Ebola cases in West Africa, you know, in that briefing. And they were beginning to rise and you becoming focused on that,

given your interest in this topic and your knowledge of the lack of health care infrastructure in West Africa. We've had this Washington Post report that essentially Trump was getting intelligence steadily through January and February saying that the risk, the threat from this is growing, that the Chinese are not telling the truth about it. At the same time that Trump was saying publicly that this isn't a threat and was congratulating Xi Jinping for how he was managing it. I assume you saw that story. I mean, what is your sense of the disconnect between, the information Trump was probably getting from his intelligence community and what he chose to say and do with that information, you know, from the perspective of someone who used to get

that type of briefing every day? Ben, it's mind-boggling. It's more infuriating than I can articulate. It's literally criminal negligence on the part of the president of the United States. It does not take a rocket scientist to read the intelligence briefing that you get every morning. And it doesn't take a genius to realize that when you have a new virus that is spreading rapidly in any part of the globe, in this case beginning in China, that it will inevitably in an era of globalization and interconnected supply chains, travel, commerce, technology, eventually, if not, rapidly spread from one corner of the globe to every other part of the globe, which is why we care

about pandemics. We in the Obama administration experienced Zika, we experienced Ebola, we experienced in 2009 the H1N1 swine flu, which was a major global pandemic. And then in the Bush administration, in the early 2000s, they experienced the H5N1 avian flu pandemic, which was extremely deadly and thankfully didn't spread to the extent that it could have. But there was no secret that this was a proximate and actually overdue threat. If you know anything about pandemics, you know that they come in waves and that we have been globally overdue, for one, on a very significant scale. I've spoken about this publicly on many occasions, going back well into my time as UN ambassador. I wrote about it in my book.

There's no secret here. So Trump decided to ignore all of the flashing red lights. He decided to ignore his Secretary of Health and Human Services, who was concerned early in January. And to play down this threat, I presume because he viewed it as a risk to his reelection, as a risk to the economy, as a risk to his narrative,

that everything is hunky-dory, and just stick with me. The fact of the matter is, from a public health point of view, from an economic point of view, and Trump personally from a political point of view, would have been in much better shape had he acted early and recognized the importance of this and used the time from early January when we were first warned about it to put in place the kinds of mechanisms that would enable us to get ahead of the curve, the testing early as soon as the WHO got the sequence of the virus in late December, early January from China.

We were in a position to replicate it, just as the Germans and many others did around the world that have no problem with the volume of testing. We could have used the time from early January to ramp up and prepare for the absolutely predictable reality that we wouldn't have the hospital beds, we wouldn't have the ventilators, we wouldn't have the masks, we wouldn't have the other protective gear that is necessary for a crisis on this scale. Everybody who knows anything knows that our healthcare infrastructure is unprepared for a crisis of this magnitude and that it would require a massive surge and a front-loaded surge to be able to cope with this before it really washed over our shores. And so, you know,

If we'd been doing this, frankly, in the Obama administration, Ben and Tommy, I have no doubt that from early January, we would have invoked the Defense Production Act. We would have called upon producers to ensure that we had the quantities of equipment and protective gear that we were inevitably going to need. We can argue about the merits of closing off flights from China. you know, the reality is at best that all that could do was slow the spread of the disease. It was never going to prevent it. And, you know, Trump touts it as the greatest, smartest thing he's ever done. But then how does he explain why we're in the shit show that we're in right now? You know, I'm not arguing that it was a mistake.

I'm arguing that to the extent it brought us some time, we squandered that time. And the notion that this is a foreign virus and something from abroad that we can, you know, demonize and, you know, return to the yellow peril over. I mean, it's just absolutely ridiculous and offensive. And it's cost us time because it has caused our systems not to kick into gear early. It's given people a degree of complacency and sense of security that is not warranted in this case. It's left it to governors and mayors to determine, you know, what they ought to do rather than leading with clarity and truthfulness and, you know, calming reassurance born of preparedness that, you know, we could have done. And so forgive me for getting upset about

this, but this really, really, really, really makes me angry. No, no. We're there. Well, so you mentioned the Defense Production Act. And, you know, President Trump keeps getting pressed on why he has invoked it, but not used it. And he says, we don't need to because all these companies are coming to us and they're offering their services. Can you unpack a little bit what he could or should be doing with that authority? And do you buy this suggestion that, oh, private industry is doing it on its own? No, I don't buy it. Obviously, we all ought to be appreciative of those companies that are stepping up and offering to do things that they wouldn't normally do. But this is a major national and global crisis. We know. need predictably the kinds of equipment and PPE and ventilators and masks that anyone with

any knowledge could have foreseen. And we need it everywhere, and we need it everywhere simultaneously. And so the reason for the urgency of invoking the Defense Production Act, which frankly should have been invoked two months ago, is that it enables the government to guarantee the purchase of goods that it essentially... mandates companies to manufacture in the near term. And it regulates the price and it enables the government to distribute it in a fashion that is rational and equitable and doesn't pit states against each other competing for the same equipment and bidding up the price. So, you know, this is not a time for ad hocery or simply for volunteerism. This is a crisis

that is akin to the greatest crisis that our parents or grandparents ever faced in their lifetimes. And we are not bringing the degree of urgency and all the tools that are available to the federal government, to the president to bear on this crisis. And it's absolutely negligent. It's inexcusable. People are dying and more people are going to die. Our economy will go into a deeper and longer recession, if not a complete, depression because of the delays, the negligence, the refusal to use all of the tools at

administration's disposal and to use them early enough to put a dent in this. Susan, you've done a really good job, I think, of unpacking the complete breakdown in terms of what should have been done domestically to prepare the health care system for the inevitable influx of cases. Then there's the international component. And as you detail very well in your book, under Ebola, what made all the difference is the capacity of the U.S. to essentially set up, you know, a logistics operation in West Africa through our military, and then to marshal an international response in which dozens of countries are contributing health care workers and equipment, and the U.S. is kind of driving the WHA to be more effective and aggressive, and we're able to work with other countries

to develop kind of travel guidelines. What do you make of this international response that we've seen or lack thereof. What are the kinds of things that, you know, that he should be doing or should have done already in order to coordinate across borders? Because it's very hard to identify any real international cooperation, you know, apart from China donating some equipment to some people. Well, let me answer that, Ben. But let me just observe something that also I find incredible.

And President Obama decided very quickly and very early. that to get ahead of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa and to be the leader and the force multiplier that only the United States of America can be in a crisis, he was going to do something that has never been done before, which is to deploy 3,000 U.S. military personnel to West Africa to help contain the Ebola epidemic and thereby not only save lives in West Africa, but prevent the disease, from spreading broadly and overwhelming Europe, the United States, other parts of Africa, et cetera. 3,000 U.S. military personnel.

Now, they were not there to treat Ebola victims. They were there as a logistical supply chain. They were there to build Ebola testing facilities and Ebola treatment centers. They were there to build a field hospital on the runway in Monrovia, Liberia, for health care workers who fell ill so that healthcare workers knew that if they risked their lives to come to West Africa, whether from other parts of Africa or Europe or North America and got sick, there was treatment for them. They enabled the airlift of sick and people out of the region.

They did all of this stuff, and it was absolutely critical. So now here, fast forward from 2014 to 2020. And here the crisis is on our own shores, in as extreme aversion as you can imagine. And the President of the United States has never woken up and said, well, what can I do with the logistical capacity, the construction capacity, the extraordinary skills that are resident in the U.S. military to save American lives? He's not doing that. You know, we finally belatedly have the USS mercy and the comfort, the hospital ships slowly coming out of port and making their way offshore, which is good.

But there's so much more that we could do with the United States military in this country. Again, not treating patients necessarily, but building and supporting the supply chains, the logistics, the infrastructure, the beds and hospital facilities that need to be constructed on short. order. And this president won't do it. So I realize I digress, but it just strikes me as extraordinary that, you know, what's easily done to help people abroad is inconceivable somehow to this president here at home. But internationally, Ben and Tommy, you know, there's so much that the U.S. can do when it seeks to lead globally. You know, we can organize countries and bring them together in common cause. The reality is, a global pandemic and a virus isn't, you know, wearing a flag of one nation or another. It is a

global phenomenon. And as long as there is a virus that is active and infecting people in one corner of the globe, none of us anywhere else are safe. And that's what this is proven. And instead, this president has tried to suggest that, you know, that viruses operate according to some, you know, cartographic map. That's not true. We can't put up walls. We can't put up barriers. We can't just stop flights and expect this to not be our problem. And so as a consequence, take a president who's refused to provide any sort of principled, moral, values-based leadership or interest-based leadership on anything in his entire presidency, whose whole approach is us against everybody, a zero-sum mentality, which completely doesn't work in this context.

When, you know, we may snuff this thing out in the United States if we're lucky and we take radical steps that the president seems unwilling to take. And yet, if we snuff it out and it's still thriving in, you know, South Africa or Ethiopia or India or Bangladesh, it's going to come back around. So we need the cooperation and the concerted efforts of countries from around the world. And only the United States can really provide that leadership. Trump has so squandered our global political and moral capital that even if he had the sudden willingness and ability to rally the world, he'd have difficulty doing it. But I still think in a crisis of this magnitude, that was within the capacity of the United States.

And instead, we basically said, you know, we're not helping anybody. And by the way, now Trump's people at the State Department are dialing 911 for countries around the world to send us personal protective equipment when normally we would be in a position to be helping them. I don't mind the United States asking for help. I just think it's ridiculous that we're in a position where we're passing. the hat for ourselves when we could have led this in a way that we were taking care of ourselves and helping others. So who's benefiting from this more than anybody? Ironically, it's China.

China who mishandled the response domestically, you know, abused human rights, hid information from its own people, even though they did give the virus sequenced to the WHO in a timely fashion. China, as it comes out of this, is saying, well, hey, this is a great opportunity for us to launder our reputation, which was initially deeply tarnished by their approach to coronavirus, and be the leader that America normally is, and be the benevolent one that is, you know, sending equipment and support and supplies around the world. And it's not just Jack Ma of Alabama, it's the government of China. And so you have American allies, Italy, Hungary, elsewhere in the world saying we don't want

American help. We want China's help because they're here when we need it. And meanwhile, we're saying, well, can we buy your companies that are, you know, that are trying to produce tests and do it, you know, behind your back? It's just outrageous. Yeah, it's staggering. I'm glad you were out of China because that was my last question for you. I mean, you mentioned this zero-sum mentality.

I mean, the only thing that seems well coordinated here is the. racist spin. And when I hear Trump and his goons say the China virus, it's nails on a chalkboard because obviously it's racist. But it's also just a stupid way to talk about a virus. As you noted, last time I checked, they don't have nationalities. But I mean, how much do you worry about that kind of language pissing off the Chinese to the point that, as you note, when this disease comes back because it will, that they might decrease their willingness to cooperate or provide us critical information or otherwise cut off work with the U.S. on big topics? Well, it worries me on so many levels.

I mean, in the first instance, it worries me because, you know, this is part of a pattern that Trump has employed from before he became president. He demonizes every group of color in this country, Latinos, African Americans, Muslims, you know, now Asian Americans. You just go down the list. and he denigrates them, he demonizes them, and he targets them, and he makes us all more vulnerable. Now they're Asian Americans who, you know, are constantly plagued by bigoted actions and statements as they walk down the street trying to mind their own business. It's absolutely unconscionable.

And for the president to get up and, you know, from the briefing room and say, oh, I'm so sorry to hear that, you know, our Asian American community is having some difficulties. Well, they're all difficulties that he helped create by his bigotry. And so it's just, it's absolutely awful and it's part of a pattern. And frankly, you know, none of us should allow him to get away with it because the reality is it's not going to be just African Americans or Asian Americans. It's anybody, when it's convenient for him to employ his us against them rhetoric and mindset to stoke his base. Now, the international implications are also grave. I mean, look, China deserves its share of the blame for how it handled this domestically, and nobody should let them out of that.

But the fact is, we have not managed this well domestically either, and we have done it through a prism of race baiting. You know, the 2009 swine flu pandemic, which swept the globe, and killed many more people abroad than it killed here in the U.S., originated in North America, Mexico and the United States. And, you know, the notion that, you know, we can label viruses and blame them on a people or a race is not only completely factually inaccurate, it's totally counterproductive. Because A, what goes around comes around, and B, you know, we are all in this together,

And we're not going to get out of this with, you know, one country on its own. So we need the cooperation in getting ahead of this and behind this virus, this pandemic, of the Chinese, but also of many other countries around the world. And, you know, we have just wasted, pissed away so much of our global standing, goodwill, moral authority, leadership. and it's going to be exceedingly hard to recoup. And every day Trump gets up there and starts talking about, you know, the Chinese virus. He's just digging us deeper and deeper. Yeah. Well, Susan, I think I can speak for our entire audience when I say, we wish you were in charge of this response.

But, you know, if people want to learn more about how you managed it, the Ebola crisis, they should buy tough love, my story of the things worth fighting for. Everyone has a little more free time these days to read a book. It's a great option. So thank you for doing the show and for everything you did for the country. Thank you both, Tommy and Ben. It's always great to be with you guys. All right, that's it for Potta the World this week.

Thanks everybody for tuning in, and we'll see you next week. Potta of the World is a product of crooked media. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our assistant producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Chris Basil. Kyle Segglin is our sound engineer. Special thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Melconian, and Milo Kim, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.

Thank you.