Pod Save the World - A fragile peace deal in Afghanistan

Episode Date: March 4, 2020

Tommy and Ben talk about the fragile peace agreement between the US and the Taliban, the Israeli elections, the escalating fighting between Turkey and Syria, the coronavirus, Iran, Putin’s political weakness and Boris Johnson is having a baby. Then Tommy is joined by Jomana Qaddour from the Syria Relief and Development organization to talk about what people can do to help ease the suffering in north west Syria.

Welcome back to POTSave the World. I'm Tommy Vitor and I'm trying a new tone in my intro. I'm Ben Rose. How you doing, Ben? Good. Happy Super Tuesday. Happy Super Tuesday. Voted.

You did? I did too. I voted by mail yesterday. I put it in the post office box. Same. I'm one of those guys who's going to have their vote counted in like two weeks. Me too. But voting by mail in California seems like a necessity because you really need to dig deep

to get all your traditional nominees and state assembly and everything. It threw me off, man. You know, like I did some serious research. Me too. It took me a little bit. but I was glad I did it. Unlike Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, I don't really have a deep memory of Super Tuesday from 2008.

There was a period after the Iowa caucuses where I think I just got stuck in rapid response world and I refused to let my brain learn about the primary process going forward because I thought that might hasten its end. Yeah, yeah. But I don't know. Do you remember? I do because one of the things I keep thinking as I read these wild swings and momentum

is that like in 2008, there were states that we'd never thought of that became like North Carolina in late May with Indiana. Like nobody thought those primaries would matter, and they mattered a lot, you know, and this thing could have many more twists and turns. Yeah, I mean, I think Pennsylvania is like April 28th or something. Yeah, remember that? I mean, one of the worst. Yeah.

We could be in for a ride. Speaking of in for a ride, we got a great show today. We're going to talk about the U.S. Taliban peace deal, the Israeli elections. the escalating fighting between Turkey and Syria that is really, really worrisome. A coronavirus update, quick update out of Iran, some news about Vladimir Putin, our friend, and Boris Johnson is going to be a dad. Again, wow. Our guest today is Jumanikador.

She's the co-founder of a great, great NGO that's doing incredible relief work in northwest Syria. It's called the Syria Relief and Development Organization. Check out their website. Do not skip the interview with her because there's a massive humanitarian problem in northwest Syria. And people like Jumana are the heroes actually trying to solve it because our governments are looking away. Before we get to the show, Ben, to quick note, there's some exciting news here, Cricid. We have a brand new podcast about sports. Maybe we can get Ennis Cantor to be a guest.

It's called Hall of Shame. What are I was going to say? What about Pats of the World? Well, we could be sporty. We've done some sports. We have. We have. You're right.

Some Turkish authoritarian sports, you know, a little soccer. Well, there's a real expert on this show, Rachel Beneta. She's at Fox Sports and comedy writer, Retchina Fruitbaum. They break down some of the craziest, funniest, funniest, weirdest scandals in sports history to get to bottom of what went down, why the stories matter, why they're still relevant today. It's a blast. You will enjoy the hell out of Hall of Shame. It's like 20 minutes of a great story that's about sports, but is mostly just a great time to listen to.

So check it out. Apple Podcast, Spotify. Wherever you get your podcast, the first episode drops next week. All right, Ben, let's talk about this weird. U.S. Taliban peace deal. So on Saturday, nearly 20 years after the war in Afghanistan started, the U.S. and the Taliban signed a deal to end the war in Afghanistan. After more than a year, I think, of negotiations, here's the gist of what they seem to have agreed to. So right now there's 12,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. 5,000 of them under this deal are supposed to leave in 135 days.

The remainder of U.S. troops, and I believe NATO troops, will be out within 14 months if the Taliban keep their commitment to basically keep international terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda. ISIS, et cetera, from using Afghanistan as a base to launch attacks. The U.S. also agreed to take the Taliban off of U.S. international sanctions lists and committed to the Afghan government releasing 5,000 Taliban prisoners that are currently being held more on that later. But the Taliban also committed to releasing 1,000 Afghan security forces that they are holding. So that could be a sticking point.

The U.S. and the Taliban have also negotiated close to a full ceasefire, but it's not at all clear that the Taliban believe that means that they also have to stop attacking Afghan security forces. So just a few thoughts. Like, I'm glad we're getting out of Afghanistan. I just want to be clear with our listeners that we didn't get anything out of this deal. And literally, literally,

the Taliban put this deal on the table before Bush invaded. So we could have avoided this whole fucking thing. All the hard work about the future of Afghanistan is in the future. It's going to require negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban. And, you know, the results

will almost certainly fall short of what we would want to see in terms of treatment of women, religious freedom, democratic institutions. I mean, this is not going to be our new ally, but great democracy. It's probably going to be troubling. We've talked before about Obama's decision to swap five decrepit old Taliban goons from Gitmo to get back Bo Bergdahl, who was an American soldier, was held by the Taliban for five years. The deal that Trump's team just negotiated was negotiated with the very same guys that Obama let out of Gitmo. Yeah. So it's part of that deal. Trump agreed that the Afghans would release 5,000 Taliban fighters.

So I just, my head is about to explode. No Democrat could ever cut that deal. Fox News would ignite Lindsey Graham. Mike Pompeo. If Mike Pompeo was not in the administration. Yeah. Lindsay Graham would just like Cavanaugh hearing himself into space. So like there's some signs already, unfortunately, that this deal could be fraying.

But why don't we just pause there? I'd love to know what you make of the substance of the deal. I know you were part of the very small group that were. worked on potential peace talks with the Taliban back in like 2011, 2012 when I was still in the White House. So what did you make of this? Well, you know, I really come at this not wanting to just be like a hater on this deal. Me too. Because I think that, you know, our sticking point was that we insisted that any negotiation

include the Afghan government in this sideline the Afghan government. I think that the basic concept that, you know, some deal was going to be necessary. as part of the U.S. leaving Afghanistan, you know, has been baked in. I just, I honestly, and I mean this from a constructive place, not like, you know, just, you know, criticizing Trump. I just don't think you had to give away as much. I just, I don't understand if we were going to withdraw our troops anyway, which is kind of what Trump seems to have been indicating, you don't need to take them off the sanctions. Like, what did we get from the Taliban that we had to, in return, release 5,000 prisoners, but also remove them from the sanctions list pretty quickly.

Like there's not much conditionality with that. It happens pretty quick in the deal. And also, I was worried about really the absence of any process that is laid out with any clarity around how the Afghan government is going to be a part of this. And like you say, like, if they keep attacking the Afghan security forces, this isn't bringing any peace to Afghanistan. And so my biggest problems are just the amount of concessions that were made the absence of the Afghan government from this process, which, you know, the U.S. is engaging with an entity of the Taliban that is not the government of Afghanistan and is doing it independent of the democratically elected government of Afghanistan. I think that's problematic. And I do kind of worry about where this is headed. Do you see Trump, you know, called the leader of the Taliban today?

I can't. Why? Why do you need to do that? You know, like, these are, like, let's be clear, like, these are bad people, you know, they've not only killed Americans, they've killed and terrorized a lot of Afghans. And I've long since accepted, from the very beginning, frankly, of our administration that we were never going to defeat the Taliban militarily, that they were going to be around in Afghanistan. So I'm not suggesting that we had to fight all of them to the bitter end either, but you also didn't need things like a presidential phone call in my mind. The last thing I'd say, Tommy, is like things to watch. for that I worry about. Eric Prince. Remember he used to write, you know, he wrote that op-ed for the New York Times. Remind everybody who that creed is. So Eric Prince was one of the leaders of Blackwater, right? The contracting, kind of military contracting company that engaged in profiteering in Iraq and Afghanistan, for that matter. You know, there's scandals back to the Bush administration where they engaged in some pretty ugly behavior in Iraq. Shooting up intersections. and he's been pitching for years now since Trump came into office that the U.S. could just withdraw and kind of be replaced by some kind of contractor army that could keep training Afghans, frankly

keep profiting off of the war. So I would watch that space. If you start to see like Eric Prince filling this void, you know, it could be, you know, a pretty ugly way for the plane to land in Afghanistan. God, I hadn't even thought about that. Yeah. Yeah, that thought, a friend of mine put that in my head recently in Afghanistan. actually. And I thought, you know, of course that's where they may go here. Yeah. Your overall reaction is my reaction, which is I want to be responsible and I don't want shit on this deal because I want the war to end. But I do wonder why we had to give up so much for basically a soft promise that they will keep terrorist organizations out. Well, that's the thing.

Because they actually don't like support terrorist organizations anymore, really. We certainly didn't see evidence that they did. You know, ISIS is a competitor of theirs. You know, Al-Qaeda's pretty marginalized in Pakistan. So I don't know what the Taliban, what we needed to have them give us in return for these things, particularly if the ceasefire doesn't apply to the Afghan security forces, who are the main ones who've been fighting on the ground anyway. Yeah. So that's just what I really genuinely don't understand why you had to give away so much, both substantively and symbolically, for basically us to do something, which is to withdraw our forces. Yeah, I'm seeing a lot of references to Henry Kissinger negotiating the end of the Vietnam War and basically just trying to buy two years until the fall of Saigon so that Nixon didn't look bad.

Yeah, that's actually a good analogy. So let's talk about some of the ways that there are cracks already emerging in the deal. So there are already like the day after this agreement was signed and with weird pomp and circumstance in, I think Doha, Mike Pompeo was there. Lucky him, hanging out with Taliban goons. There were reports of Taliban attacks on Afghan security forces. And then Ashrafgani, who's the president in Afghanistan, mostly because they've had a disputed election for months, said that he hasn't committed to release. these 5,000 prisoners. And that's a big problem because the Afghan government, as you said, wasn't part of the peace talks. The Taliban are now saying they won't talk with the Afghan government

until this prisoner swap occurs. Meanwhile, like Lindsey Graham is calling on Trump to leave a residual force. So it was always clear that cutting the Afghan government out of this process might mean, or would obviously mean that like the hard work is in the future. But the sequencing of this agreement could mean that if the Afghan government won't do something we agreed that they would do, then the Taliban won't enter the rest of the talks and the whole thing just breaks down. So that's disconcerting. And then you mentioned Donald Trump calling a Mullah Barator, one of the Taliban forces. He said before that, I'll be meeting personally with Taliban leaders in the not so distant future

and will be very much hoping that they will be doing what they say. They will be killing terrorists. They will be killing some very bad people. they will keep that fight going. So he seems to think that the Taliban is going to be his like CT proxy force in Afghanistan against ISIS, which is madness. Yeah. Well, first of all, the Afghan government, yeah, we should not be making promises that only the Afghan government can keep. They're the ones who've been taking, you know, the vast majority of casualties, tens of thousands of Afghan security forces over the last several years. And, you know, they, the ones who would be assuming the risk of releasing these 5,000

Afghans who are presumably in their custody, right? So I don't know how we could promise that. And, you know, Ghani's right to be concerned, 5,000, if these are the kind of people who return to the battlefield that they're still fighting the Afghan security forces, that's a serious number here, you know, that could have a consequential difference. Never mind, you know, there's the Afghan government. There's also Afghan kind of civil society, women, who, who, who are right to be very concerned about what the Taliban might impose on them if they are able to return to power. So this really does need to be sorted out between the Afghans and some of the leverage that we might have had on things like sanctions and continue to support the Afghan

security forces, even if you believe that we couldn't really leverage our ongoing true presence forever because we didn't plan to stay forever. There are other tools that we had. And it does seem like we kind of front ran this thing. I think on this idea of Trump embracing, I don't know what he's doing. And again, it's a lesson to like our media, which I hate to be media critic all the time, but, you know, he got such lavish, fawning praise for this Singapore sum with Kim Yongun that he clearly just thinks that like dramatic meetings with bad guys is equals good, you know? These people are responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans. Like, so even if you think we should end the war, we just don't need to afford them a certain protocol here, you

know, yes, they're not going to provide safe haven't terrorist organizations, but they're not like, our CT partner preferred choice in Afghanistan should be the Afghan government, right, the Taliban, right? So other than Trump wanting a photo op, you know, because he feels like that's worked from in the past, I just can't see any reason why, you know, our negotiators would be suggesting that this meeting needs to take place. Imagine your Ashrafgani. Trump agrees to release a brigade, a big brigade of Taliban. of invaders against your wishes and then calls your sworn enemy and acts like their buddies. Yeah.

And says he wants to sit down with them, even though they're still killing Afghan security forces. Absolute madness. Well, look, hope this works. Keep watching it. I mean, there's a scenario where they just pull out no matter what happens, so we'll see. But anyway, not great. All right, let's turn to Israel. This week, Israeli voters went to the polls for the third time in a year.

Yes, a year. So first we'll do the results. So I think there's 90% in the last time I checked. Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu is winning and projected to win 59 seats in Israel's parliament, the Knesset. So that is good news for Bibi because these five or six seats ahead of Benny Gantz from the blue and white party, who's his chief rival. But it still may not be enough to end this electoral purgatory for Israeli citizens. And here's why. So Israel system is not like ours.

You don't just win the election and then you're in charge. You have to build a coalition that controls 61 of the 120 seats in the Israeli. really conness it. In the last two elections, Netanyahu and Gans have failed in that coalition building task. So now they're going to try again. Ben, it's pretty depressing that voters didn't care about the fact that Netanyahu is going to stand trial in a few weeks on corruption charges. In fact, BB has gained votes since the September election. So cool. It's also depressing for those of us who want a two-state solution in Israel because both candidates were out there talking about annexing the West Bank. Interestingly, an alliance of Arab voters did well.

in the selection and they're now the third biggest party in Israel. So that's an interesting changing dynamic. But, you know, in the near future, I think a lot of people worried that Israel is careening towards a constitutional crisis or even a fourth election because BB is about to go stand trial and will likely demagogue it and say fake news and say it's a witch hunt out to get him just like Trump because they're the same person. Yeah, and I feel like we've had the same conversation now three times. And this question will be, can he form a coalition get to 60 votes? He may need the help of Avador Lieberman, Israeli politician who's kind of become quite an enemy of BBs to say the least. And in that case, you know, we could return to one of the formulas

that we talked about in the fall, some form of unity government or agreement where they rotate as prime ministers. All of this is pretty bleak because Israel just can't break this logjam. BB still kind of poisoning their politics with increasingly extremist positions. You know, we've evolved in the third election all the way to the annexation of the West Bank. Each election, it kind of gets worse in terms of BB's platform on the Palestinians. You know, it speaks to not just the polarization in Israeli society, in that BB has like kind of a big media apparatus and demagogues, the opposition. But also, you know, Benny Gans is just not a good politician.

You know, for those who don't follow us closely, like, you know, he's a former military guy, kind of the centrist who could be, you know, a safe space for a bunch of different parties. But political talent, like he didn't, you know, wasn't a natural communicator. And I think the only way for the center left, or even the center, I guess, in Israel to really break through is they're going to need someone with more political chops at some point. They're going to need a leader. Or, you know, grassroots movement combined with a leader that they can overcome, you know, Bibi's, support, which is not a majority of the country, but is a strong minority and enough to kind of, you know, hold the line here and prevent someone else like Gons from winning. So, you know,

we could be headed towards some messy coalition politics and some bizarre form of unity government, some, you know, tumult over whether these indictments against Bibi go forward. In any event, I think the situation with the Palestinians is very grim and Israeli politics until Bibi can finally exit, you know, stage right here, and hopefully the center or the center of left can get a stronger leader, we're going to be kind of stuck in this place. Maybe they can borrow one of our former candidates from our primary. Speaking of which, last week we talked about Bernie Sanders decision to skip the APEC conference, the big pro-Israel lobby conference. So at that event this weekend, the Israeli ambassador to the UN, Danny Dannen said, we don't want Sanders at APEC,

we don't want him in Israel. Anyone who calls our prime minister a racist is either a liar, an ignorant fool or both, which is very charming. The CEO of APEC Howard Corps also obliquely accused Sanders of demonizing Israel. APAC gave Mike Pence a platform to smear Bernie and said Democrats side with Israel's enemies. So it was nice of these folks to almost immediately prove that Bernie's decision was a wise one. And I would suggest to everyone listening that if you want a vibrant, democratic Israel, check out J Street. Yeah. To me, the biggest problem here, right, is the massive red carpet that they roll out every time for BB and his biggest goons and for Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo and these guys. And then, you know, they have some Democratic

members of Congress who've always gone to APEC and then they try to claim this broad, bipartisan, you know, few of things. This is not on the level here. You know, APEC wants to be able to put the bipartisan stamp of approval on itself, while relentlessly. Over the last several years, supporting the agenda of the Lakud Party in Israel and the Republican Party in the United States, relentlessly attacking Barack Obama, frankly, putting us in the shitty situation that we're in where we pulled out of the Iran nuclear agreement. So actively harming U.S. interests with the end of the Iran nuclear agreement and then complaining that people don't show up at their conference. I mean, come on guys. And then, you know, dunking on everybody because a bunch of other candidates like San Diego. videos. You know, like, I hate to break it to you, that people send videos to a lot of things.

Right, right. Also, BB is a racist. I mean, he's, he says racist things on the regular. He tries to pass laws that devalue human beings who happen to be Arab. Yeah, yeah. I mean, in every election, we, you know, get this rhetoric about the Arabs voting is inherently bad when they are citizens of Israel, you know. So, like, I'm kind of, you know, over this debate. Yeah, me too. We'll keep watching the election, though. Okay. So let's, let's, turn to Syria. This is a story that's not getting nearly enough attention, I think. And we're going to talk more about the humanitarian crisis in Syria later in the show in the interview. But we need to talk about this escalating war between Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Russia. So in recent weeks, Turkey has sent

thousands of troops into northern Syria in an effort to push back against Syrian troops who have been trying to retake that area. The Turks basically want to keep a buffer zone between Turkey and Syria so that refugees will stay there. More aren't pushed over the border. It's a Turkey. And, you know, there are three and a half million Syrian refugees in Turkey now. I assume they want to push most of them back into that buffer zone. So last week, a Syrian air strike killed 34 Turkish soldiers working out of some building. I believe it included like senior military officers. And that enraged the Turks. And they responded with a massive show of force and they did so publicly. I've seen reports that they've shot down three Syrian military aircraft.

And then Turkey released footage, I think drone footage, of airstrikes that are just lighting up Syrian tanks and troops and like really graphically killing a lot of people. And, you know, as we've talked about before, the Russians and the Iranians are all in when it comes to helping Assad in Syria. So there is considerable risk here of direct fighting between Turkey, a NATO ally and Russia. And the Turks are also, you know, putting pressure on the West to get involved by allowing. more refugees out of Turkey and into Greece and its other EU countries as a way of kicking back up that refugee crisis that we saw back in, you know, earlier times in the war. So Putin and Turkish President Tai Erdogan are going to meet this week in an effort to hopefully calm things down. But this is, this is very dicey and it is also exacerbating, you know, the worst

humanitarian crisis of the war. Yeah, I think everybody's so numbed to this conflict, but the humanitarian aspect of this has been, you know, as catastrophic as anything we've seen in the Syrians of war, the recent offensive in Idlib. And then the geopolitical crisis, you know, you basically have Turkey and NATO ally, like borderline at war with Russia, or, you know, certainly at war with a Russian proxy, but the Russians are very present in that part of the world. So, you know, this is a reminder that Syria is going to continue to be a flashpoint. And I think, you know, people need to understand, like this, this, not only is the Civil War, But, you know, even when this fighting dies down, the risk of a flashpoint between Turkey, Russia, Iran is still present.

The risk of ISIS reemerging is present. The risk of some insurgency developing against an Assad regime that is not at all accepted by huge amounts of Syrians is still there. And this massive humanitarian refugee issue is still very present, you know, with millions of people outside the country and Europe not wanting to take people in. And frankly, the U.S., what I would like us to be doing, and we're obviously not going to under Trump, is, yes, one, trying to figure out ways to provide massive amounts of support to those who are suffering in terms of humanitarian assistance, in terms of assistance of countries that are hosting refugees, efforts to resettle refugees that involve the United States taking some refugees and then trying to work with a collection of countries to figure out a way to, you know, in an orderly manner, resettle refugees. Because what happens is when you don't have that, you have this kind of breakdown and people trying to reach, you know, Greece or potentially Italy via water. You know, you have people potentially dying at sea. And we're back in 2015 in that terrible refugee crisis. So, you know, this bears a lot more attention.

I wish there were more resources coming from the U.S. and the national community. I in the first to acknowledge that there are no easy solutions to the underlying challenges inside of Syria. but I wish that there was more kind of multilateral diplomacy around trying to find ceasefires in a way to resolve the civil war. But in the interim, I think you're just going to see a lot more occasional flare-ups like this that have huge human consequences. Yeah, and meanwhile, it's winter and it's freezing. Yeah.

There's like a million people just living outside. Yeah, there's like kids, you know, freezing to death. And it's been almost a decade now of this kind of horrific violence, so it has this kind of numbing effect. But I also think that when Trump kind of washes hands of Syria, interestingly, so like the American media and Americans generally, you know, it's no longer a political issue here in the United States. So we don't talk about it when it's still precisely as bad an issue, if not worse, than it has been in the past in this latest round of fighting.

Yeah. Don't skip the interview today because you can hear about some ways that you as a listener can help contribute to relief organizations and do something to help people on the ground there. Let's do a coronavirus update. So at the time we're recording this, there are more than 92,000 cases in 71 countries with major outbreaks in China, South Korea, Iran, Italy. The death toll is over 3,000 globally, including six that I'm aware of here in the U.S. 10% of Iran's parliament has coronavirus. A senior advisor to the Supreme Leader died of it. There are really scary videos out of Iran of citizens torching health care centers. And the government is pulling a China 2.0 by lying about what's happening, like censoring people locking down news. So it's very, very bad.

in Iran. As of Tuesday, there are confirmed cases in 15 states in the U.S., including nine deaths. But, you know, Ben, I assume that number is artificially low because we just can't seem to figure out how to test for this thing, or at least to make these test kits available. I mean, look, I went from sympathetic to how hard it is to deal with a pandemic last week to, like, I cannot believe how badly they fucked this up. I mean, Mike Pence is now in charge, which is great because he's a right-wing hack, who, as governor of Indiana, made an HIV outbreak way worse by failing to respond. We learned today that Pence met with a kid last week who has the coronavirus. So he could be, you know, infecting the task force. So that's cool.

He's probably not getting invited to many meetings with Trump now. Yeah, yeah. What else? There's new travel restrictions ordered by the U.S. Trump suggested he's considering closing the southern border, I guess, to prevent U.S. patients from infecting Mexico. Major conferences are getting canceled. The stock market took a 12 percent dive before being propped up by a quick interest rate cut by the Fed, but I don't think that even worked. I think it by the end of the day today. The stock market was way down again. The Trump team is starting to blame the HHS Secretary Alex Azar for the response. Meanwhile, like he did some press event where he asked his team in front of the press corps whether the flu vaccine would help prevent the coronavirus. So this far into an

outbreak, he is that dumb and understands that little about what happens. So, you know, Ben, the only the only good side is Democrats are starting to think through how a nominating condition. would work if no one can go. Yeah. Which is my Airbnb in Milwaukee. Yeah, right. How you feeling? Yeah, I, look, I think it's worth kind of walking through the ways in which I see,

you know, this getting fucked off. First of all, once there's a pandemic that, like, circulates in the population and it's an outbreak, then you're pretty limited in what you can actually do, right? And, you know, and this, Trump's talking about vaccines as if he's, you know, personally going to discover a cure when the fastest a vaccine would be available is like a year to 18 months. And he tweets coming soon. Which is horrible misinformation. It's disinformation. And media that reports on things that Trump says without immediately in real time and in the headlines, fact-checking it, are spreading

this information. A vaccine is something on the back end. It's not going to prevent the outbreak. And the way that you prevent the outbreak is by containing its spread. And this is why the steps that Trump has taken are so damaging really, in two regards. First, he dismantled the architecture of global health security that was built by Obama. This seems like technical stuff, but what you have to understand is the outbreak starts in other countries. The way to deal with the pandemic and stopping it from spreading and getting here and killing people is to try to stop it with infrastructure in those countries. He dismantled the Office of Global Health Security in the White House, shut that down. There were offices

funded around the world by the United States set up under the Obama. administration through USAID and through CDC offices in several dozen countries. He shut down almost all of those offices. So there goes the capacity to have a presence on the ground in those countries, right? And frankly, just deprioritizes generally the United States leadership of global health preparedness. And we are far and away the leader. We are the infrastructure. We have expertise that other countries don't have, right? We have experience that other countries don't have. We have resources that they don't have. And he had before this outbreak even started, put us behind the eight ball and being able

to respond to this. And you can go back and check the record. People who work in this field have been warning about this almost since the day Trump came into office that they were worried about the scenario. And a related thing I'd say about that is, you know a pandemic is coming. It's a common occurrence in today's world where there's such globalization and there's such movement of people and goods. Like every few years, there's a pandemic.

We had H1N1 in 2009, the swine flu under Obama. We had Ebola in 2014. This happens on kind of a five to 10 year basis. So he knew this was coming and did this anyway. The funding cuts, right? The funding cuts to CDC, that's the kind of thing that forces them to make choices like not having enough testing kits. I'd like to see the reporting on this.

I suspect that, you know, if you start slashing funding in budgets and squeezing these agencies like NIH and CDC, they have to make some hard. choices and it just makes it harder to move faster. So the most important thing is before you even get into Trump's response after coronavirus emerged in China, which has been mixed at best in terms of his completely wacky statements and praise of China and obsession with the markets, most of the mistakes were made before you even had the first case of coronavirus. Now they're being compounded because once there is an outbreak, Tommy, what the most important tool you actually have is communication to the public, communication to state and local officials who have to make decisions

about whether to impose quarantines, whether to shut down schools, whether to restrict travel. And if you cannot trust what the government is saying to you, that's a very dangerous situation. Because look, I've got kids, I've got older parents who might be vulnerable populations. My parents, not my kids, the one thing I'd say about this virus thus far is it doesn't seem to have had a huge impact on small children. But I genuinely worry that they can't trust the information that Donald Trump gives them. I do believe they can trust the information that Tony Fauci gives them that the government experts do. And so I'd encourage people to listen, look at the acronym after the name of the person speaking. If that person is from CDC or NIH or one of these very professional civil service-based organizations, that is very trustworthy information.

I hate to say that if it's Donald Trump or Mike Pence, it seems to be spin, you know? Yeah. And I've had to engage this. I've had to go on television and talk about this. And they'll play some clip of fucking, you know, Mike Pence or Mick Mulvaney at CPAC talking about this. Why are you talking about this at CPAC, you know? Or they're asking me about, is this a hoax? Like, just stop it and let the experts talk about this because this is really serious now.

Yeah. And Tony Fauci has been working on infectious diseases for 35 years. But to just hammer home your point, the 2021 budget proposed cuts of 16% to CDC funding and cut 3 billion for global health. In 2018, there was an 80% CDC funding cut for global pandemics. Think about that. Think about that. I mean, madness. He discontinued a Bush era program that monitored the threat of animal-borne diseases moving to humans.

Which is what this appears to be. Pretty on the nose right there. And just so you feel a little bit better. one third of the pandemic response team took time off to go to CPAC. Yeah. And I mean, what are you doing? And I think the important thing here, too, is that this illustrates, these failures are tied to the core failures of the Trump administration, right? So they have a hostility to expertise in government, the deep state, you know, all this stuff.

That's who you need right now, right? And what I also don't know is how many people have left these agencies, because, they feel so beleaguered by the kind of anti-science view of this administration. So one is hostility expertise. Two, hostility, anything Obama did. I'm sure anybody who wanted him to get rid of the global health security office or cut his funds could just say, this is an Obama initiative. Okay, cut it.

Well, now we're paying the price for that as well. Then this hostility to the truth, right, this idea that you can spin anything. And so we spent time here talking about, like, why does it matter that he lied about the reason that he killed Qasem Soleimani? Or why does it matter that he lies about, like, the direction of hurricane? It matters because when you really need to trust the words of the president, you know, you'd like to trust the words of the president and you just can't. And the norms busting because this would also be a good time for a daily White House press briefing. And we can make fun of that all the time.

We can make fun of the reporters who ask the questions. But the reality is if they had to stand up every day and provide information and answer questions and if they answered them truthfully and had experts standing there with the White House Press Secretary, that would be a tremendous service to people. Think about how useful it would be if every day during a bull, I remember, Josh Ernest going out there. and, you know, standing with a bunch of experts, that was like the most important platform we had. And so these failures arise out of the innate characteristics of this administration. Yeah. And you know what? You take a political hit. When your spokesman and your administration is standing at a podium every day delivering bad news about Ebola or whatever it is, that's tough politics. Part of the job. But that's the job, man. Yeah. That's the job. And, you know, you want to prevent the

market from tanking, then you have a better response. You don't prevent the market from tanking by spinning. And you can say all you want at CPAC. I mean, the tragedy of that is if the goal is to convince the Fox News audience of the world that this isn't that bad, then you're spreading misinformation to your own supporters. There's something particularly kind of dark about that. Totally. Yeah. You're counting on them to be dupes, which is pretty gross.

Or blame Democrats. Okay, a couple more quick things. So, you know, we were just talking about the coronavirus is raging through Iran earlier. Well, I actually want to say one thing about that. Shame on us, too, because this is. is part of our sanctions policy. And they've tightened all these sanctions so much that there's supposed to be exemptions for things like medical equipment. The Iranians used to complain under us that it was hurting their public health sector. We went out of our way to try to facilitate

licensing and the capacity of humanitarian goods to go into Iran. I'm sure that with the added enforcement of the Trump administration, that's got much harder. And so if people are asking, why is the outbreak so much worse than Iran than other places, part of it is they cannot get what they need for their health sector because of the way in which U.S. sanctions are being enforced. That doesn't absolve the Iranian government of the horrible, horrible things that they're doing, you know, and I'm sure that they're behaving in a totally authoritarian way. They're restricting information. They're trying to cover it up. They're probably giving preferential treatment to certain populations, not excusing them, but also, like, think twice before we put these sanctions

regimes in place that get people killed. Because these are things that a bunch of politicians in Washington, and both parties, by the way, like to get up on stage at APEC and brag about how tough they are on Iran and how they wrote all these sanctions bills, blah, blah, blah. People are dying because of it, right? And so just spare me the tough talk from a fucking conference stage in Washington or a, you know, fundraising appeal that you sent out about how hard-ass you are in Iran. And look at these pictures of what's happening and then look at yourself in the mirror. Yeah.

If the Iran nuclear deal was in place, I assume this would not be nearly. is big of a problem. Or there'd at least be a capacity to help them be managing it. Right. And also, the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, says that Iran has nearly tripled the stockpile of enriched uranium since November. And they are now refusing to answer questions about possible undeclared nuclear sites. So that gives them enough material to make a bomb. So the situation is materially worse. It's also just worth noting while we're in this sort of constant gnawing problems section of the pod that North Korea fired a bunch of missiles over the weekend. So, you know, the two biggest nuclear threats may be in the world.

Still a problem. Yeah. And again, just how obvious was it, you pull out of the Iran deal, you stack up a bunch of sanctions and provocations, so they're tripled the stockpile. Mike Pompeo and Donald Trump and all these Iran deal opponents just tripled Iran's nuclear stockpile and eliminated the breakout time for them to get enough material for a nuclear weapon. Congratulations, guys. Maybe you can get an award at APEC for your effort on behalf of the Iranian nuclear stockpile, right?

I mean, and these guys used to dunk on us for things that were in sunset provision, so things that might happen 10 and 15 years where Iran can resumes for nuclear activity. Well, thanks to your policy, the things that you were worried about happening in 15 years are happening right now. You sped it all up. You sped it all up. Great work. And you mentioned North Korea. Like, I'm waiting because there'll be more of these thought pieces from these considered, you know, pundits saying, well, you know, what's the argument to be in, you know, Trump's foreign policy?

policy, Trump's foreign policy is an unmitigated failure. Like, North Korea is firing missiles, building nuclear weapons, Iran's accumulating stockpile, the U.S. reputations and tatters. Like, this should not be a hard case to make. I really hope that the Democrat makes it. We should be making it. One other, you know, foreign policy challenge that we've been dealing with an ongoing basis since Trump's election was Russia interference in the 2016 election.

It's happening again. But one of the most annoying parts about that having happened in our history is now people blame Russia for everything. And we talk about Putin like he's invincible. But I just wanted to offer everybody a data point that explains why that is just simply not true. So back in January, Putin proposed a bunch of constitutional changes that people believe are his way to hang on to power after 2024 when he's supposed to step down. We talked about it in great detail at the time. To pass those changes, he has a referendum on the books for next month. But there seemed to be no interest in this vote. People weren't excited to go out for this referendum. So now Putin is taking a

page out of the 2004 Bush-Karl Rove playbook, and they're putting divisive social issues, like defining marriage as between a man and a woman and making Russian the official language of the country on the ballot. So they are adopting right-wing Republican strategies to pass. To make Russia great again. So a reminder that Putin is not all-powerful. He's an authoritarian who controls every lever of power in the state, including the media, and he still has to do shit like this to enforce his will. Yeah, and a reminder, all these guys swap strategies, swap ideas, like, sometimes chair consultants, right? And you're right. Like, I think Putin's popularity is one of these overstated things. Like, the way to, you know, sound smart is like, well, but the reality is Putin's

super popular in Russia. Like, and again, I just don't think we know that. He has been very popular, certainly at times. But, you know, this is not the same as it was. you know, 15 years ago when he had a lot of oil revenues or even five years ago when he was at the height of his, like, you know, Crimean annexation, uh, popularity there. They're paying the bill now for that annexation. The economy is in the complete tank. Um, you know, Putin's been around a long time. Um, and, and it, to me, it's a sign of weakness that he has to gin this up. I also say, like, you, I'm glad you pointed this out that the, because Russia is sometimes like the wizard of Oz behind every curtain. You know, know. And first of all, like, we do a lot of the damage to ourselves. Totally. A lot of what Russia does is they just amplify disinformation. Frankly, without Facebook as their partner in crime, they couldn't do what they do. So frankly, in the hierarchy of people that I think have a negative effect on our elections, Facebook, I'd actually put higher than Vladimir Putin, right?

So we had to look at the totality of this situation instead of just crying Putin, Putin, for everything. Yeah, note to MSNBC. All right, let's end with a happy, keynote in the United Kingdom. So Boris Johnson, who we all know is the bloviating prime minister of the UK, who is trying to run the country into the ground, is having a baby with his partner, Kerry Simmons. This is Simmons' first child, but oddly, it is not clear how many kids. Boris Johnson actually has. He wouldn't answer, I think. Yeah, this is an actual line from Mark Landler's fantastic New York Times story. Quote, during a radio interview in 2019, Mr. Johnson declined to say how many children he had, end quote. Landler notes that in the past,

Boris has predicted that birth rates would skyrocket after the London Olympics. That was false. And then he said that like Cubad's arrow would fly after Brexit. So weird thing to say. But there you go. Let's hope that this child is a lot like his or her mom. Yeah. When Boris is up there.

I mean, I don't know he's exactly. He's 55. Okay. Well, let's just say that Boris is not a man who's like, if you do a little rabbit hole work on the internet who's embraced a traditional family model. No. No, he's not. Very colorful, sordent of mistresses and children and hurt feelings in the past, you know,

taking a playbook from, you know, the Newt Gingrichs of the world here in how he conducts himself while, you know, positing himself as a defender of traditional English values. Yeah. and the good, hardworking families of Northern England, whereas Boris lives the most kind of urban, cosmopolitan, philandering life of a swinging Londoner. Yeah. I guess he's bringing back, you know,

the pre-European Union swinging London days, you know, coming to 10 Downing. Sounds like a blast. Ben, that's all I got for today. Anything else? That's all I got, Tommy. Happy Super Tuesday again. Yeah.

Yeah. It was first time my vote has mattered in a long time because I was a D.C. resident and your vote really doesn't matter in D.C. for much of anything. So it was interesting. Yeah, it felt good to vote and really feel like I had to pour a lot of thought into it and agonized over it a little bit. I remember Super Tuesday was a really weird day because throughout the night, the idea of who won kept swinging back and forth. Yeah, it's going to happen. or Obama. Because we, yeah, this is my warning to the stands out there. Like, because, you know, Obama won some states and Hillary.

Then I remember, like, it looked like Hillary had the advantage. I think very late at night we won Missouri, which it's amazing that Brock Obama won Missouri. And then we went on just some massive winning streak in February. So, you know, these things can change both within the night and beyond them. Yeah, that's true. Okay. When we come back, we'll be joined by Jumanikador, who is the founder of the Syria Relief

in development NGO. I'm thrilled to be joined now by Jumanukadur. She is the co-founder of Syria Relief and Development and a doctorate student at Georgetown University Law Center. Jumana, thank you so much for doing the show. Thank you, Tommy, for having me and for giving me the opportunity to talk about Syria. Honestly, we've been desperate for platforms that allow us to talk about what's going on there and to bring the world's attention to this disaster.

Well, you are doing incredible work. Actually, your organization was flagged for me by a, a great journalist who I trust who has done a lot of great work in Syria. So I'm really glad we got connected. But, you know, let's just start at the beginning, I guess, because people are years and years into this crisis in Syria, starting to call what's happening in Idlib province in northwest Syria, potentially the worst humanitarian crisis of the entire war. And I imagine for a lot of people who have been just tracking the misery and suffering and fighting, that that can shock you and make your head spin. So how did we get here?

Sure. So let me start off by telling you a little bit about where we are right now, and then we can take a little bit, a step back and tell you how we got here. So first of all, you are right. This is absolutely the largest humanitarian disaster we've seen so far over almost 10 years now since 2011. My organization, Syria Relief in Development, I'm the co-founder with my father, actually. we have done over $90 million worth of aid since 2011. That's incredible. In the beginning, we used to have access to all of Syria, you know, in areas that it would be unheard of now. Most, you know, most of our work now is confined to northwest Syria because the Syrian government has taken over most of the territory and doesn't allow NGOs like ours to work independently

and neutrally. We've tried our best to work on providing medical care, shelter, food, and food. education, to the millions of people that desperately need it. In Northwest Syria, you have four million people trapped in this area, sort of between regime-held areas, Turkey, and, you know, so that's sort of the corner that they're stuck in. The UN says, of those four million people, 2.8 million people require humanitarian aid to survive, just to sustain themselves. since December 1st, you've had 900,000 people displaced.

Now, just to put this in perspective, the largest displacement before this point in Syria was the Ruta displacement, which was only 80,000. I mean, at the time we thought, wow, 80,000 people are displaced. You have, you know, 10 times, if not more, that number, you know, being displaced right now. 82,000 people are living under trees in temperatures that are below freezing. I mean, 20 degrees Fahrenheit. They're sleeping and living on blankets without tents because, frankly, there are no tents left. The UN doesn't have enough to distribute. I mean, imagine there's no latrines, no proper place to wash, no food.

People are burning their clothes to stay warm. And remember that 80% of these people that are displaced are women and children. So this is sort of the crisis that's the humanitarian crisis that's taking place. At the same time, you have an active military campaign waging on, right? There's active targeting of schools and hospitals. We've lost 113 schools that affect the education of 190,000 students. 67 health facilities have been bombed out of service, including two of our own hospitals. that provide absolute necessary care.

Wow. So it's like a city the size of San Francisco or Austin, Texas, has just been completely displaced, all of them without homes. Absolutely, absolutely. And they're just left out in the cold. You know, we always hold our breath every time the winter comes because these are, northwest Syria is largely agricultural lands, right? They were not meant to have tents put on them.

And so you find flooding happens every year. Every time there's a snowstorm, or a lot of rain, the tents and the camps completely flood. And this has happened now for nine winters in a row. So it really makes our job even more challenging. The winter conditions make our job even more challenging than the summer. I'd love to know more because I think people are probably confused about how this challenge became so cute in northwestern Syria. And I think it would be useful to have some of that history.

Sure, sure. So as you, you know, as you're well aware, this didn't happen. overnight. Syria got here after almost 10 years of a conflict that the international community was unable to resolve. There are regional players, there's international players, and frankly, the current crisis is happening because the Syrian government and its allies are waging a military campaign to take over the last of the rebel-hulled areas in northwest Syria. Remember, as I said, you have four million people here that have been displaced from all across Syria. Many of them, this is the sixth or seventh time they've been displaced.

And this is in large part a tactic by the Syrian government that uses displacement, starvation, and fear as a weapon to force people to submit to its authority. Now, the current military campaign is coming after a direct violation of the Sochi Agreement. Now, for those who don't know, the Sochi Agreement is an agreement between Iran, Turkey, and Russia that they agreed to in 2018 that was meant to determine ceasefire lines in Syria. Now, those lines have repeatedly been violated, and the Syrian regime and its allies have used the pretexts that they're going after radical armed elements and terrorist groups.

Now, the problem is that the Syrian government and its allies define everyone who's against them as a terrorist. And that's a big problem. And the problem is the data shows us that the regime strikes are actually overwhelmingly targeting millions of civilians, hospitals, and schools. Like I said, like the hospitals my organization had, that are actually even underground hospitals to protect them. And I still remember when one of our doctors, Dr. Ahmed, he told me, Jimana, no one wants to live anywhere near our hospital. Because the hospitals are targets. And living next to a hospital means you're increasing your chances of being killed. Right.

And so that's really where we are today. God. And yeah, there's a lot of reporting. I think the New York Times recently proved pretty definitively that Russian airstrikes were, in fact, targeting hospitals. hospitals. Yes, that's true. It's just the worst people in the world making this problem worse. I saw today that the UN Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs said that he believes they need $1 billion per year to sustain operations, relief operations in the Idlib region. The U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Kelly Kraft, actually visited the area today. I credit her for that.

I announced 180 million in funding, and I saw that the U.K. announced that some portion of another $114 million in funding is going to go to Idlib relief. I'm not good at math, but I know that doesn't add up to a billion. Are others chipping in? I mean, what's the shortfall looking like in terms of U.N. donations? I mean, my understanding, the U.N. says they, to address immediate response, they're short, $361 million. I appreciate, I appreciate, of course, the United States are European allies,

regional allies stepping in to offset the humanitarian cost. But Tommy, you and I both know that this remains, this is continuously like putting a band-aid on a wound. I mean, every time we put in money into Idlib, which is absolutely necessary. And we absolutely need people to donate to my organization and organizations like ours. But this, I mean, every, like I said, I mean, just every winter alone, we deal with the flooding that is happening in all of the camps. people being constantly displaced from one area to another, rehabilitating shelters and hospitals that we set up, that we get funding for,

and that the Syrian government and Russia come in and bomb. I mean, this is, this, it's sort of, you know, this going running around in circles, addressing the same issue and the same crises, the same humanitarian crises for 10 years in a row is just the most ineffective way of addressing, I think this addressing this crisis. we need long-term solutions.

We need to come to the political process. We need to come back to the political process and revive that effectively so that we can actually come out with a more permanent solution to this. Yeah, I totally agree with you. Way too much time is wasted talking about U.S. troops going here or there or military intervention

when what we are lacking seemingly is a massive international effort to push for a political or diplomatic resolution to this problem because until we resolve the tension between the Syrians and the Turks and the Russians and the Iranians, I'm not sure that there's any amount of relief that's going to be able to, like you said, stop the bleeding, right? You're just sort of putting a band-aid on the wood. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, what complicates all of this is that Russia is a member of the Security Council and it's paralyzing the work of the UN. I mean, we, I absolutely believe

that the UN can play a vital role in this, that multilateral institutions that are are partners that are allies, they all have a role in this, right? But if if one of, you know, the security council members is a party to the conflict, well, that makes moving forward all the more difficult. You know, the United States needs to support its partners, particularly its NATO partners whose security interests are directly at stake. But at the same time, we need to support our allies who helped us fight against ISIS, for example, who shouldn't, we shouldn't abandon to be killed and displaced and attacked by the regime and Russia and Iran. You know, I think that it's critical to, for the United States and our allies, to push Russia to let the political

process move forward and to really alleviate the humanitarian crisis and to mitigate the suffering of millions of people. And we need American leadership for that to happen. Yeah, we do. We also, look, we need administration. that doesn't treat refugees like they are by default terrorists. And the U.S.'s inability or refusal to allow in refugees is horrific. It is so callous. It is so cruel. But I would also point out that there are a lot of other countries across the world

that should and could be taking in more refugees. And you're right, though, with the lack of American leadership, it's unlikely that, you know, we will find the political will in the near term to fix that. But that's where I think the story can feel. So daunting and so hopeless because the fighting has been going on so long and the scale of the suffering is so enormous. But then I hear about the relief work people like you are doing and your organization is doing. And you can read about other organizations like the International Rescue Committee or Save the Children or Doctors Without Borders or the Refugee Trauma Initiative. And you realize that there are good people doing their part to help manage the problem even if we can't solve it as individuals who aren't governments.

And so I was hoping you could tell us about the work you're doing, what's happening on the ground, who's there, what are they doing? Like, what does it look like in Idlib right now in terms of relief efforts? Absolutely. And I appreciate you highlighting our work. So, you know, we currently have several hospitals that we work with, that we fund. We have 1,200 staff members inside of Syria. That includes doctors, nurses, engineers, humanitarian. workers, professors, teachers, people that have chosen to stay and serve their country and

their countrymen and women instead of fleeing. Oftentimes, especially the doctors for every Syrian doctor. I think the number has, it's probably he's responsible for, I think, in the hundreds now. It used to be, you know, in the beginning, a natural number is like, you know, one doctor for every 50 people or something. We're now in one doctor in Syria for every 100, if not almost a thousand people. Because most of Syria's doctors have fled, there's been a mass exodus of people who can make a living elsewhere, frankly, because Syria is completely devastated. And so what we've done is try to build as many health centers inside of Syria. We focus also specifically on maternal care and programs for children. You have a lot of preemie babies.

that need to be moved every time there's an offensive. We have to move these preemie babies and take them to places where we can connect them to, you know, appropriate electricity, et cetera, that's needed really just to keep them alive. I think right now we currently have more than 450 preemie babies under our care. But we have, you know, we're especially looking right now

with the shelter situation because shelter is such a unfortunately politicized area of aid because technically Syria, is still part of the Syria, you know, it's still part of, you know, the UN deals with it as a sovereign state. The Syrian government doesn't want us to rehabilitate any shelter that it doesn't have control over. At the same time, these areas are outside of its control. And so, and it's outside of its control, and it's housing four million people. And so we're trying to address this in a way that doesn't violate the technical regulations at the UN,

but also doesn't violate the dignity of Syrian people. And so it's really this dance around, you know, a lot of technicalities that are present in our international system while offsetting this great, you know, the needs of people. And so, you know, that's where a lot of our programming is. Of course, we provide food. You know, we do provide more short-term aid. We're also working on providing education programs

and college programs. for students remotely that have been out of, you know, education programs and don't have access to universities in Syria anymore and haven't had that. So if they don't have an education, how are they going to be able to rebuild their country? So we're really trying to address that gap. Yeah. So if someone's listening, they're inspired by what you're doing. They want to help out.

Where can they go? What can they do? They give money? Is there a website they can go to? Are there any, can they donate supplies? Can they donate time? Like, what's the scope of ways people can get involved with your organization? Absolutely.

I mean, the first thing they can do is go down our website at srd. NGO and contribute. Even a dollar, you know, $1, $5 more, anything is helpful. And I assure you that money will go a long way. We try to keep our staff very thin and so that we can reach as many people as possible. And you can see our annual report. It shows our overhead and all of that information. We work with the UN. We work with a lot of the great NGOs that you discussed.

lot of their implementing partners. And we take that very seriously because we're really the face and the people who connect, you know, the donors to the people on the ground. And it helps keep Syrians, frankly, working. You know, it helps keep them working and staffed inside of Syria and being able to earn a living while providing for their own people. And then on then the next thing they can do is really just if they could really, you know, care about, you know, just remembering why they should care about the Syrian conflict. I understand, listen, I'm a Syrian American, so I would naturally care about the subject, but I know a lot of people don't have that tie to the region. And I just want to remind them why Syria is important, because we've seen firsthand that what

happens in Syria doesn't just stay in Syria. Take the refugee crisis, for example, that you just mentioned. And we're watching right now as, you know, horrific images of the Greek, I believe they're called the Greek patrol off the EU borders trying to prevent any refugees from coming. The right-wing parties in Europe have absolutely weaponized the refugee crisis to their advantage. And so this is no longer just a humanitarian issue. It has repercussions, political repercussions, security consequences, etc., that really affect all of us, even all the way across to the United States. And the last thing that our viewers can do and our listeners can do that I would really

encourage them to do is this year there were two great films great two great documentaries that were nominated for the Oscars for samma and the cave and if you watch those two films which are absolutely outstanding and i know i know uh people who worked on both documentaries very well that's going to give them a better idea of what series like today and why should they should care so i would really encourage them also to watch and to support those two uh documentaries those are fantastic recommendations um everyone should check out the Syria relief and development NGO, check out the website. Jumana, thank you so much for the work you're doing and for talking with me.

And I hope we can talk again soon about how much better things are because of your work and because of something breaking the right way at the UN. God help us, we need it. I hope so. I hope so. Thank you so much, Tommy. I really appreciate it. My pleasure.

Talk to you soon. Take care. Thanks to Jumana for joining the show. Ben, the next time we talk, we probably will not have a nominee or any news. more clarity. Yeah. But maybe we can talk a little bit more about the foreign policy differences. We've talked about them to date, but it seems like there'll be a little more clarity.

Yeah, I mean, next week we'll record a week out from the March 17th primaries. And after that, like two-thirds of pledge delegates will have been allocated. So maybe there will be some sort of agenda. I don't know, man. I'm very eager to have a nominee just so that I don't have to experience the awkwardness of people I know and respect on all sides of this fighting with each other online. Online. Basically, everybody I know who's working on a campaign accuses me of hating that candidate. I'm ready to go work my fucking ass off for any one of these people.

I just want to max out and then go knock doors. I will be eagerly and enthusiastically as support of any of them. I think Bloomberg I'd be the one that I'd say I'd be less enthusiastic about. Tough road to ho. Yeah, but I still work my ass off for him. So I just want to get to that point. Yeah, me too. Well, you're still hoping.

All right. Talk to you guys next week. See it. Pod Save 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 Seglan is our sound engineer.

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