Pod Save the World - A Kingdom United against Trump

Episode Date: June 5, 2019

Tommy and Ben Rhodes are joined by former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Danny Russel. They discuss Trump’s trip to the UK, what Bibi Netanyahu’s failure to form a government means for his political future, Jared Kushner’s disastrous interview with Axios and the political influence of Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of the United Arab Emirates. Then they do a deep dive on US-China policy, the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and updates on North Korea, Cuba, India’s elections, Iran and why hiding the USS John S. McCain is actually a real problem.

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. This is a very special episode, Ben. I've been excited about this one. Me too. We got Ben Rosen's studio. We also have Danny Russell, former Assistant Secretary of State for Asia. Asia all-around expert, all-around great guy, friend of the pod in Los Angeles. Glad to be here.

Great to have you, man. And Danny's going to ride with us over all of these issues. But we're going to really dig into some China-specific stuff today. Some North Korea news. Jared Kushner did an interview on Axios that some people have heard about. So stay tuned for that. I think we'll kick it off with President Trump visiting the United Kingdom, who used to be our closest ally.

Let's see what happens after this trip is over. But just some quick housekeeping. First of all, please subscribe to this land. It's a fantastic show. It's a grisly true crime story meets an impending Supreme Court decision that determines the fate of five tribes and nearly half of the land in Oklahoma. So big deal, big stakes. Great show.

Second, I want to let you guys know that we've relaunched Crooked Conversations as a series called Crooked Minis. idea is to step back from breaking news and offer mini-series on important issues or an event that reflects a cultural, political, or societal change in America. The first one is hosted by Travelle Anderson. It's called Pride on Screen. It looks back at moments in TV and film, the change, of course, of LGBTQ history and representation in media. So good stuff coming your way from Crooked Media. Check it out. Subscribe. All right, guys, let's dig in here. So Clockwork Orange 2 was, I think, what I called this segment. President Trump went to the U.K.

He's the eighth U.S. President to visit the Queen, but only the third one to get a full state visit. So we should dig into why the hell that happened. The itinerary is largely ceremonial, lots of time with Her Majesty. But before Trump arrived, he was very busy attacking the mayor of London on Twitter. He called Megan Markle nasty and then tried to deny it. Then his own staff tweeted out a quote with a caption that showed he called her nasty, which was very smart press work. He was puffing up right-wing leaders like Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage.

And then he did a press conference with Theresa May this morning. and it was kind of just depressing to hear her lavish praise on him on her way out the door. So, Ben, first question is for you. I'd love to hear your general thoughts on the trip, and then his ongoing effort to kick every political beehive in the United Kingdom. And then part two of the question is, like, is there any point in having a state visit when the majority of a country dislikes you and you are seemingly trying to piss the rest of the country off while you're there?

Yeah, there was something kind of bizarre about the whole thing, because nobody in the UK, with the exception of the Nigel Farages and Brexit, you know, dead-enders, seemed particularly happy to have Trump there, including the Queen, by the way. And Trump doesn't seem to particularly like the UK and seems to want to attack it, particularly anybody who's a person of color like Megan Markle or Sadie Khan. However, I think the reason for them giving Trump a stay visit, there are really two things. One, they gave Obama one. And, you know, I'm sure the Trump people were insistent.

that if he's coming, he's got to be treated the same way Obama was for all the insecurities he has about that. And second, they are Brexiting and they're kind of desperate for friends. And so it's kind of like the Brexit crowd in particular, and, you know, Theresa May joined that crowd, had sold a bill of goods that when they left Europe, America could kind of make them whole through a free trade agreement. And so... How's that going? Yeah, so part of their Brexit messaging has been, there's really, to the thought with the U.S., Trump has made that look like not the best bet.

Yeah, we're not the best trading partner at the moment. But what was so striking for me to watch this is just how broken American standing is in the world, that the country that has been our closest friend is revulsed by the American president, is trying to one-up each other and protesting him, you know, projecting Obama's 72% approval rating against his 20% or the giant Trump baby in the middle of London. but also like how Donald Trump's only play is, you know, to mess around in their politics and throw his arms around a guy like Nigel Farage, like unreconstructed bigot, or Boris Johnson, like a Trump light figure who wants potentially a hard Brexit.

Trump has no agenda to work with the UK on, right? If we went there, it'd be like, what's our common plan on Iran, on ex-Midal Eastern country, on global trade? Trump has no agenda. He goes there and stirs the pot and attacks his perceived enemies and hugs his right-wing friends and breaks a bunch of shit and then leaves. That's the kind of house guest he is, you know? And that's not someone like I'd particularly want to have in my house. No, me either.

Danny, you have attended state visits in many foreign countries with President Obama and other leaders. You plan the state visits in the U.S. What kind of work in planning goes into a three or four day trip like this? Well, it's an incredible amount of work. have a strategy figure out, as Ben said, what you're trying to get out of it. I'd say, roughly speaking, just as a diplomat, sort of the benchmark for a state visit is generally speaking, you want bilateral relations with that country to be better afterwards, not worse, just saying. But I don't know, I think you may be reading a little bit too much into it,

because it looks to me from afar like this is really a royal procession. Yeah. You know, he's going from the imperial court. in Japan to the royal court in London, and he's obviously, you know, enjoying that and lapping up the attention. This is what you really call diplotainment. It's shock jock presidential. Sumo wrestling. What did you think of the visits of Japan? Do you think that was a success for Abe, for the United States, for anybody? So, Abe's got few places to turn, and he has conducted, I think, the world's most sophisticated experiment in extreme pandering. And we're seeing a little bit of that from Prime Minister May and from others because,

you know what? It works. It works to a degree. I mean, it's not stopping President Trump from going after the Japanese auto manufacturers with national security provisions, Section 232 and so on. But it certainly slowed things down. Right. To me, the main event in Japan wasn't.

the sumo match. It was the president of the United States standing next to the prime minister of Japan on Japanese soil saying, oh, those missiles couldn't hit me. Sorry about that, bro. Yeah, I mean, they could only hit you. And anyway, Kim Jong-un, he's my homie. You're a freaking freakloader, right? That was really the message. And the royal theme continues because, as you guys know, not only did he insist that the McCain be held out of sight, but he visited the USS Wasp and did this kind of weird pseudoscience about the catapults. You know who does that?

Kim Jong-un. Yep. That's a good point. It's called on-the-spot guidance, where the dictator looks at shit and directs things that he understands nothing about. There's a great website, Kim Jong-un looks at stuff.

I love that website. Isn't that? Yeah, it's a great one. So, yeah. Paint the missile green. It's shit like that all day long. You got it. Can we like in talking about, I was singing back our visit, Danny, the Quincy Jones story.

So Danny and I are in Indonesia for a summit, right? And it's the East Asia summit. So this is a gala dinner, like kind of like a state dinner. And it goes on for three, four hours. There's no booze because Indonesia was feeling, you know, like they wanted to demonstrate their Islamic cred. there. But towards the end of the night, we were kind of falling asleep. And then an announcement, the voice of God goes, please welcome to stage Quincy Jones. Cool. So Quincy Jones gets up on the stage and we're like, oh, this will be interesting. Quincy Jones invites Barack Obama and Wenjo

Bao, the Premier of China, to come up on stage and hold hands with him and saying, we are the world. Oh, shit. Right? So I'm sitting there with Danny and Jay Carney is the white aspresbyterian, and we're like, it's an election year. We have to stop this at all costs. So Jay and I literally spring out of our seats and we're prepared to go physically prevent this from happening. Obama starts yelling, no, Quincy, no, he's like waving his arms at him, right? So we shut down the fucking We Are the World with Quincy Jones. But then Quincy Jones is where the faux pa comes in. Quincy Jones starts singing We Are the World and all these children come out on stage, right?

At the exact same moment, we are told that we have to go load our motorcade because, you know, the staff has to leave to get the motorcade first. And we're all the way on the other end of the room. So the entire U.S. delegation gets up and walks out in the middle of We Are the World. And we're like bumping into chairs and stuff. And Quincy Jones is looking at us. And so we look like we were actually protesting We Are the World. That was the biggest fo' paw I could remember from our, that and the fact that Dan and I used to actually, after that occasion,

bring in our own alcohol to some of these dinners when we knew this thing where they weren't going to serve booze. Like a fucking Jets game, roads. That moment will live with me for the rest of my life because it was. literally a slow motion crash. When Quincy Jones stands up in front of all these world leaders and says, President Obama, Prime Minister, he couldn't even pronounce the name. Wend here, man, hear, man. Stand up here and sing with me.

Time slowed down. And I just thought, oh, my God. And that was the trip where I died on Air Force War on the way home. Yeah, we can end on that. But yeah, actually, like, was physically dead. Poor Danny. You hadn't slept for like seven days. He took like nine ambians and had a genital.

tonic and then they needed to prick his finger to wake him up on a plus one. Well, it didn't work. That was the point. Yeah, that was the problem. I mean, look, that story is funny because we know you, but also it tells a story about how hard people work on these trips. I mean, you go on a 10-day trip to Asia. You go on a 10-day trip to Asia.

There are two or three nights where you don't sleep just because of the jet lag. I mean, I would go down to the press file at like 1 a.m. and see four or five people there and we'd all be sitting under computers, and you just feel like you're losing your mind. and you try to take Ambien and things, and it kind of works. But sometimes you just stay awake through it and go crazy. But anyway, last question on this. I mean, do you think a trip like this to the UK where Trump is getting protested, there's, you know, massive crowds in the street,

does that do a lasting damage to the U.S. UK alliance? Or can that bad boy hold even if President Trump is reelected? If he's reelected, what's interesting about it is Europe, the U.S. continental Europe, like the people who are not Brexit, have more places to go in a way. I think you already see France, Germany, the EU kind of beginning to think about what is a more independent foreign policy from the United States. And we're willing to break from the United States on key issues like Iran, for instance. I think the Brits are in a bit of a trickier position because they're Brexiting. Right. So I actually think if Trump is

reelected, you will see a fundamental realignment, I think, in terms of European foreign policy saying, we just can't count on these people anymore. We need a truly independent European foreign policy, probably a more independent European defense policy. The Brits, if they Brexit, I think we'll have a harder time doing that. And so I think what you're seeing is the kind of shared values at the heart of that relationship and the ties among the people are being frayed. And they would not protest any other leader like that. They wouldn't protest, you know, the president of China or anybody else going there the same way they protested to Trump. That should tell Americans something about how we're viewed around the world. But I think they

have less places to go than the Europeans because of Brexit. It's not unlike Abe. You know, the two countries that Trump visited are countries that are in some ways have the hardest time figuring out how to deal with Trump because they can't just cut the connective tissue to the U.S. right now. But throughout Asia, you're also seeing, including in Japan, furious hedging. Yes. And they're developing innovative new ways of compensating for these sort of twin forces of a more assertive China and a less dependable U.S. And I mean, TPP is kind of the poster child for that because it's, at first, when Trump walked out on day three of his administration, the Japanese and the Australians and

everybody said, hey, come back, come back. And then the next week they said, well, we'll just kind of freeze this until you come to your senses. And they moved on. Now it's a trade block that doesn't include the U.S. We literally designed a trade block that we are now no longer part of. And we're paying the price for it. We're paying a price for it.

We negotiated the shit out of ourselves. Okay, let's turn to Israeli politics for a minute. So last week, despite winning the election, Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu was unable to form a coalition government, and he had to dissolve parliament. Well, he didn't really have to dissolve the parliament. He could have let one of his rivals take a shot at forming a government, but he's too much of a prick to do that.

So instead, he set new elections for September. So this is a huge setback. for Netanyahu politically and legally as he was trying to force through laws to give himself immunity for prosecution. So, Ben, can you explain why Bibi failed to form a government and whether you think this time, whether he's in real political trouble or if he'll somehow come out of this thing on the other end stronger like he always seems to do? Yeah, what's interesting about this is what Bibi's been a master of is holding together the

Israeli right and forming coalitions among all the different right-wing parties that allow him to be prime minister. What really broke the camel's back in this case was a disagreement between two of those political parties that he needed. One includes a kind of ultra-Orthodox community in Israel that has consistently leveraged its participation in these coalitions to have laws on the books or regulations on the books that allow for certain members of their community to avoid military service in Israel. So you have these ultra-Orthodox who Israel has universal mandated military. service and this party's leverage its participation to give its people an out from that military service. And that pisses off understandably. A lot of other people say, wait a second, if it's

the National Service, everybody should be a part of it. And so another one of the right-wing parties objected to that being a part of the platform of the incoming government. And therefore, he couldn't get every right-wing party that he needed to get a coalition that could form a government. So, ergo, things fell apart and we had this election. I think the subtext of this, though, is that The other thing that became apparent in the coalition building is that BB's top priority was to get everybody to agree to pass a law giving him immunity from prosecution, right? So like literally, BB's principal goal of his next term as prime minister is to keep himself out of prison by essentially passing a law that protects him.

And I think that graded a bit on, again, on some of the coalition partners who were coming into this. So now there's another three-month period. There's another election. I think inevitably he's weakened. You know, he couldn't pull the rabbit out of hat and form a coalition. Everybody could see his naked interest in protecting his own ass. People could see the fishers in the right. It is still possible that he's just the last man standing once again. But I think this is a chance for the Israeli opposition once again to throw everything at this and to see if they can finally dislodge Beebe and maybe even form some of their own alliances. with some of these parties are getting frustrated with B.B. So there's an opportunity here to move in a different direction. It's by no means assured. So one result of BB's botched coalition building effort is that Jared Kushner's peace plan is probably on ice until after the new elections or maybe indefinitely, this could be a good thing because it sounds like a terrible deal for the Palestinians.

So Jared did this brief but impressively disastrous interview Axios on HBO this week. In it, he refused to criticize Mohamed bin Salman for murdering Jamal Khashoggi, or really any reason. He refused to say whether he believes Palestinians can govern themselves. He said it didn't matter how many refugees

are allowed into the country. And honestly, I was actually stunned at how bad this went. He couldn't answer a single question. So we're going to play a little clip and maybe shout at it, sort of mystery science theater 3000 style.

Do you understand why the Palestinians don't trust you? Look, I'm not here to be trusted. I'm here to... Well, you are, Frank. I mean, Yeah, she's a fucking diplomat.

You always look at things from their view. You've got three Orthodox Jews on the negotiating team. Two of you have at different points funded settlements, Jewish settlements in the West Bank. You've got the actions you've taken so far, moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. You've cut all aid to the Palestinians, including hospitals in East Jerusalem,

and you've shut down the Palestinian diplomatic office in Washington. I mean, can you not see why they might not want to talk to you and that they might not trust you. So there's a difference between the Palestinian leadership and the Palestinian people. They both fucking hate you. There's no fucking difference. All those things that you guys have done. The actions we've taken were because America's aid is not an entitlement, right?

If we make certain decisions which we're allowed to as a sovereign nation to respect the rights of another sovereign nation and we get criticized by that government, the response of this president's not say, oh, let me give you more aid. So, again, that was as a result of decisions taken by the Palestinian leadership. With regards to the Palestinian people. No, it wasn't. It was decisions taken by you. I do believe that they want to have a better life. And I do think that they're not going to judge...

They don't mind the aid being cut. Well, they're not going to judge anything based on trusting me or trusting anyone else. They're going to judge it based on... Based on you're taking away all the fucking age and terminating your diplomatic representation to them. A better life or not. Let me just say one thing here. Because you didn't play the birther clip, but the common threat of racism needs to be identified here. Yeah, it really was.

Which is, here's a fucking entitled guy who's only sitting where he is, because his father-in-law had a racist conspiracy theory that the first black president wasn't born in the United States that enabled him to get elected and put his mediocre son-in-law down the hall and put him in charge of the Palestinian account, right? At the same time that this guy can't even say where he stood on this birth or conspiracy,

he says that the Palestinians are incapable of governing themselves. Oh, I'm sorry. So over here, we said that the black president wasn't born in the United States, and over here, the brown people or unable to fucking govern themselves, right? It is an embarrassment and an abomination that this person is sitting in the White House of the United States of America and has responsibility for anything, never mind the most sensitive diplomatic

problem in the world. And it's telling, so audio leaked out of Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State talking about really how little confidence he has that this Middle East peace plan, Jared's been cooking up for like two and a half years, is going to be successful. So, Danny, you were like a big shot at the NSC and at the State Department. how weird is it to you that Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, isn't part of one of the most important and sensitive negotiations in foreign policy? It's not a surprise to me at all, Tommy. Going back to the royalty theme, it's because President Trump doesn't have a cabinet.

He has a court. Right. It's modeled on, I don't know, Louis the 14th. Tudors. Ivan the Terrible. You know, you tell me. Yeah. And courtiers spend their day trying to curry favor with the king.

that's the arrangement that Trump has sought and he's constructed. Now, in fairness to Jared Kushner, his unblemished and unbroken record of failure constitutes really a landmark in U.S. diplomacy. It's true. That's true. He hasn't really delivered anything. Okay, let's yell about one more thing before we get to some China-specific stuff. So one person whom I suspect had enormous influence on really all of Jared's foreign policy thinking is a guy named Prince Mohammed bin Zayyad of the United Arab Emirates. The New York Times did a really fantastic piece on him and his influence in Washington.

So some quick takeaways. One, he controls sovereign wealth funds worth $1.3 trillion with a T dollars. He's built one of the best militaries in the region by buying tons of U.S. made hardware, including from Obama. He hates Iran. He hates the Muslim Brotherhood. and you will spend tens of millions of dollars on lobbyists in D.C. think tanks to make sure that D.C. lawmakers hate those groups, too. Ben, what's the quick and dirty on NBCZ? And how do you think he's bent U.S. foreign policy to his will? Oh, I am entirely in agreement with the thesis that he's

the most influential leader in Washington among the Arabs and maybe, arguably, one of the most influential leaders in Washington in the world, you know, up there with Bibi. You know, I think you gave a quick thumbnail sketch that is accurate in that Mahab bin Zayyad has a lot of money and he's principally, you know, interested in his own political survival, right? And he sees the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamist movements as potentially an existential threat to him. And he sees Iran as kind of the main antagonist in the region. So his influence in Washington has been focused on obviously ensuring things like, you know, arms sales and military support to the U.E, but also hardline policies against Iran, hardline policies against the Muslim Brotherhood. Opposition to the Iran deal

that began when we were there, and the most belligerent stance towards the Muslim Brotherhood, including support for the dictatorship of Sisi and Egypt, support for the warlord we've talked about, Haftar and Libya, essentially the Mahamban-Saman agenda that we've broken down here. MDZ is Mahamban-Saman with the rough edges kind of smoothed off. He wants the same things, right? He supports the same belligerent war in Yemen and interventionist. policies across the region, he just does it with a deft or touch. I think what people need to understand about this influence, right? Number one, there's the obvious ways. They spend a lot of money to lobby Congress. They spend a lot of money on think tanks. And if you think that they're

giving millions of dollars to think tanks and there's no correlation to the products of those think tanks, I'm sorry. That's how things happen. I think it's even more insidious in this. And I say this with all respects to some of the people that Danny and I have worked with. But there's also a bit of a revolving door. You leave government, oh, come get paid an extraordinary lavish fee to give a speech at the, you know, Muhammad bin Zayyad conference in Abu Dhabi. Or why don't you join the board of this defense contractor who sells a lot of weapons from the U.S. to the United Arab Emirates? They've been very skillful at finding the kind of saw spots and the kind of legal corruption in our system, where they know the people who are in government

are thinking, well, when I leave, I don't want to have pissed off the Emirates too much because I can make a lot of money there. Or they have people who are coming into government who've worked with them. And again, I'm not saying that all these people have no integrity, but the piece ends, for instance, with like Jim Mattis,

who's made as a piece reports over a quarter million dollars that are tied to the Emirates, you know, sitting there and praising them for their tolerance. They're a dictatorship. They repress freedoms. They've imprisoned academics from other countries.

They've expelled people. They are buying surveillance technology from the Chinese. They put on a good face. And Abu Dhabi and Dubai look like progressive places. But nobody should be fooled about what this is an autocratic political system and a belligerent foreign policy. And this guy has kind of figured out how to wire the American national security establishment to be advocates for his positions. Yeah. Mohamed bin Zayad, weirdly, disappointingly shares Jared's racist.

view that Arabs can't govern themselves. I mean, it's self-interest for him. He wants to stay in charge. He doesn't want democracy. So, Danny, the playbook for messing around in the U.S. political system seems very not complicated to me. You hack people, you run targeted propaganda campaigns online, and then you dump money on lobbyists and think tanks. Are the Chinese following that playbook? And if not, why not? Well, fortunately, for us, thus far, they haven't been very good at it. Imagine what the world would look like if the Chinese were as good as the UAE when it comes to manipulating Washington and employing lobbyists. They also aren't quite like the Russians or they haven't been in terms of really just straight up wanting to fuck with us in our elections.

They're died in the world Marxists and they're reasonably confident that the slow rot of capitalism is kind of, you know, collapse the West in due course. But you have a lot of Twitter think that, yeah. It may be that partly as a result of the current operation piss off the panda that they're changing up a bit and might be willing to give the U.S. a little more of a push down the steps. The areas where they're really screwing with us, of course, are in the technology and in the economic field where they've made a fortune taking advantage of this sort of duality of being the world's biggest developing nation at the same time that they're one of the world's biggest developed nations. The problem is that, you know, we used to joke about the Chinese always, you know, claiming win-wins.

Right. In negotiations. Yeah. Well, we're pretty close to locking down a lose-lose because the current trade battle and technology battle isn't solving any problems. It's exacerbating them. It's sort of a duel with chainsaws. And, you know, nobody's going to come away whole from that. And when you look at the praise heaped on the Trump administration for creating leverage and for challenging China, you really got to ask yourself, okay, what have they accomplished?

What have they done? What have they gotten from all of that leverage and at what cost? So there's no redress on forced tech transfer, on IPR theft, market access, industrial subsidies, all of those things. Those aren't even really locked into the agreement that blew up. Right. That was all, you know, largely about soybeans and, you know, some generalized commitments on non-tariff barriers. And they couldn't close that deal.

Right. So we're not even addressing the major irritants in the relationship. I'd go one step further and saying that we're creating a political environment in which no one who's involved in decision-making in China dares to advocate for reform, dares to stand up and encourage shifts in the direction that we're asking for, because the United States is defining the relationship as implacably adversarial. Right. Yeah, right. I mean, certainly the Steve Bannon worldview is shining through. So, I mean, the trade world with China's escalating. I'm curious who you think has more leverage

or can absorb more economic pain. But in addition to that, I mean, there was really brusk back and forth this week between U.S. and Chinese officials at a defense summit in Singapore. The Chinese were particularly pissed off about increased support from the U.S. for Taiwan. How much do you worry about this escalating into something worse than a trade war, into something a little more, even more contentious? Yeah, because I was saying, Danny, like, I'm curious what you think about this, because it's almost like, have they discovered Taiwan? You know, like in other words, if the Trump people really wanted to push the Chinese

buttons, they could start messing around there. I've been wondering if they would go there to try to find another way to mess with China or to have leverage on the Chinese to say we might start playing a little more footsie with the Taiwanese. Well, I think there's plenty of evidence of that already. The thing to worry about perhaps more than the risks of pushing the Chinese buttons on Taiwan is the administration accidentally elbowing a big button on Taiwan without understanding what it is that they're doing. Yeah. There isn't a lot of erudition and research that goes into the decisions apparently by the president who's largely informed by his gut and occasionally by John Bolton.

Look. Gut and the stash. That's all I got in this world. I mean, the MO seems to be release the hounds. You know, hellfire and fury and let's everybody should do whatever they can to unsettle and. and backfoot the Chinese right now. And that this is, I think, in the president's mind, all in service of being able to close

an incrementally better deal on U.S. exports and a few other odds and ends that he cares deeply about. The problem is, like so many of these initiatives that he's taken, the end result isn't going to be better than we could have gotten through more conventional

and collaborative negotiations. It's going to fall vastly short, as it already does with China, of his great claims of what he was going to get. And it comes at an insanely high price. The Chinese have, shall we say, long memories. Yes. You know that Italian thing about revenge served cold? Yes.

Well, Marco Polo brought that back with spaghetti, you know? Like, they invented it. Yeah. So why are we? gratuitously fucking with these guys. There's a lot to complain about. There's a lot to push back on in terms of Chinese behavior. But if you're randomly pushing buttons and you hit a South China Sea button, you hit a

Xinjiang button, you hit a Taiwan button, sooner or later, you're going to get a reaction that you weren't prepared for and that you don't want. One question that I wrestle with Danny is that on the one hand, Trump has been a huge opportunity for China, right? because what I find, you know, when I travel across Asia or Southeast Asia, is the perceived diminution of U.S. presence and influence is palpable. And that the Chinese are the main beneficiary, right? So they have their Belt Road initiative. They're expanding their influence economically, commercially, and politically across Asia, across Africa, across Latin America. So they

benefit from Trump's America first, belligerence, unpredictability, et cetera. On the other hand, you know, They are getting rattled by tariffs and there has been an effect on their economy. They seem completely fed up with the seesaw of these negotiations. And I'm wondering if you're sitting in Beijing right now, are you looking at this as we want four more years of this to consolidate our expanded influence at the expense of the U.S.? Or are you looking at this and saying like, okay, we've banked all the influence that we're going to get out of the U.S. taking this crazy turn and we hope that the U.S. comes back

to its senses. Well, opportunism is a big part of Chinese international relations and strategy, but it is a distant second to stability. Predictability. That is what they absolutely crave. And they've made no secret about it over the years, and this continues to be at the center of their global strategy. They want a stable, secure, predictable environment in order to allow them to put the finishing touches on the internal pieces of the great national rejuvenation. They want, relations with the United States, which in their view is a decaying power anyway, to stay on an even keel, they have misread Trump, as I think most people have repeatedly. They certainly believed that Trump would be vastly better for China's interests than Hillary Clinton, who they feared and loathed.

Once he came into office, they were confident that he's a businessman and they could find his bottom line. But what they discovered is he's not a businessman. He's an entertainer with autocratic overtones. And he has been utterly unpredictable. Sometimes they have been able to take advantage of that, but other times they've really paid a big price for it. So no, they would trade the advantages they get in a heartbeat. Okay, let's do a little history. So we're recording this on Tuesday, the fourth, which is the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. I bet a lot of people listening have seen the famous photo of Tankman, I've heard of the term, but don't really know what happened. Danny, can you tell us why were students and citizens in China protesting and what happened

on June 4, 1989? Well, the thing to remember is that this 1989 was a year of considerable turmoil in the communist world. This was Glasnostroika. It was about 10 years after the cultural revolution in China and the death of Mao Zedong. And Deng Xiaoping had begun a series of steps aimed at economic reform. I remember reading when I was a kid about the French Revolution somewhere that revolutions happen when things start getting better, not when they're at their worst, that the reforms liberate forces that become hard to control. And that's very much what seems. have happened in the late 80s in China where students, workers, people throughout the country, this was not just in Beijing, not just in Tiananmen Square, became very agitated about corruption,

about unfairness. There was a serious upsurge in political protests throughout the country. And Tiananmen Square became ground zero for student protests. And at one point, there was apparently something in the neighborhood of a million people. Wow. Camped out. Like an OG Tarrier Square. Exactly. A million people. So I'm told. Wow. So this started a big debate or maybe exacerbated a big debate within the Chinese leadership between hardliners and reformers. And ultimately, Deng Xiaoping, who is the paramount leader at the time, made a fundamental decision that has really shaped modern China since, then, which was there is no price too high to pay for the preservation of the authority of the

Communist Party. And that reform is important, but a precondition for reform is absolute security and ideological control and conformity. So based on that, he called in the army. And the army rolled in and started shooting. And so beginning the night of Jesus. June the third overnight and into the following day, something in the order of 10,000 people were killed.

Wow. And many, many more were, of course, injured. The really astonishing thing, though, is the success that the party has had in the ensuing 30 years in this Orwellian effort to airbrush out of history, the very fact of Tianan men. So kind of just ask you about that? I mean, what would happen if I were a young teacher living in Beijing and I tried to teach my class about Tiananmen Square or if I tried to search for Tiananmen Square on my computer in China? Well, most Chinese don't know enough to search. Wow.

But today, even the numbers, 6-489 in pretty much any combination are considered to be a political offense. they're essentially outlawed. Teaching what happened that the Tiananmen massacre is completely unacceptable in Chinese political society. The Chinese have a lot of tools to correct bad behavior,

and it ranges from being called into the security office for tea, losing your job, having now your social credit score adjusted so that you can't buy a ticket on a high-speed rail, you can't get a passport, et cetera, or worse. This is a non-event, although I heard this year for the very first time Chinese official publicly defend Tiananmen.

It's quite rare for them even to admit that such a thing happened. In effect, what they were saying was it was highly unfortunate that those students compelled the government to commit such a distasteful act. Do you think, I mean, Danny, you know, you're familiar with this debate, but I think it'd be useful for our listeners. You know, I think the basic consensus that has emerged in recent years is that the U.S. policy community, after Tiananmen, doubled down on the bet that opening up to China, bringing China in the WTO, bringing China in from the wilderness into the international order, would over time promote not just economic liberalization, but, that that economic liberalization would lead to some form of political liberalization, right? And so that was kind of the frame of mind of people in the U.S., certainly through the 90s and the aughts. And now, of course, what we've seen is the economic opening in China has lifted hundreds

of millions of people out of poverty. That is clearly good. It has served to make China more of a stakeholder international system. I think that is generally good. But clearly, the political dynamic has gotten worse inside of China, not better. And if you look at the million Uyghurs in detention, if you look at the use of state surveillance, if you look at the crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, which was supposed to be a one-country two systems situation where Hong Kong enjoyed greater civil liberties and the repression of even any mention of Tiananmen, as you talked about, I mean, I guess I'm less interested in the like, did we get this wrong? But also, like, what, if you care about human rights in China, if you care about, you care about, you

the cultural and language heritage of the Tibetan people or the right of someone to learn them at Tiananmen Square? How do you even think about this current moment and where things are going? Well, in terms of were we wrong, I think we have to ask what the alternatives were. It was a reasonable proposition. In fact, a proposition shared by an awful lot of Chinese people that the steady improvement in the economy, the growth of the middle class would lead to greater political liberalization, freedoms, and more sanctity of contracts, rule of law. That's, that logic is not fundamentally flawed. Second, history hasn't ended. We really don't know how this story ends. What we do know is that in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, which convinced

the Chinese that the American model had some pretty serious cracks in it. Called Glass-Steagall. That is a nerdy joke, man. I'm proud and embarrassed all at once. Sorry, we are. And in the aftermath of the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War, where the Chinese started asking themselves, is this Pax America really poxie or it looks pretty violent?

Do we really want this? Is this right? And then with the fall of Baathist governments and the Arab Spring and color revolutions, the Chinese Communist Party had an epiphany. And the epiphany went something like this. Oh, shit. We could be next. And we need to double down.

We need to crack down. We need one man rule. Enough of this sort of collective leadership. We got to pick one of our number who's going to be a hard ass because China needs to be ruled with an iron hand, et cetera. And we got Xi Jinping. So over the last six years, we've seen two things. One is, you know, retrogression in terms of political space. And it's bad.

It's serious. And it's been augmented by the tremendous surge in Chinese wealth and Chinese national power. They're big enough, strong enough. They can do a lot of things that they hadn't been able to do before. And the technology that allows them to surveil people. That is the second part. Yeah. So we have never, we've seen this.

We've seen big brother, but we've never seen big brother with big data. No, it's never happened in the history of the world. This capacity was in the hands of a system that was going to use it full tilt. So this experiment is either a pendulum or a spiral. We don't know if it's going to swing back or if it's going to intensify. I mean, obviously there are pretty fundamental humanistic impulses the urge for freedom, the urge for fairness, the urge for justice. The Communist Party of China has its handsful

trying to contain control and suppress, but it hasn't been proven yet. The new technology won't give it the edge. So you guys were in a lot of situations in your meetings with Me Too where we'd be discussing a really hard thing and then President Obama would be sitting there and he'd have to make the decision. And everyone around the table would restate the problem

in some creative way. and not say a fucking thing about what to do about it. Right? So I feel like you hear that a lot from Democratic president-intentional candidates when it comes to China. They all talk about the rise of China being like one of the greatest geopolitical challenges we face, but rarely do you hear, therefore we must. So do you guys have like a 30 to 60 second kind of like three-point plan for these candidates for what they should be doing? Yes.

In the words of the great American political philosopher, Melania Trump, we should fucking be better. Yeah. So what does that mean? I mean, because I pick some of this. I'll tee this up and then Danny, I think, can fill in more detail. But number one, you need a China policy that is an Asia policy, right? So do we have the capacity to just change things in China?

No. But if we are deepening our relationships around China, right? And this is what we did. So, you know, we have a trade agreement that raises the standards to where we want them on things like intellectual property with all the other countries in Asia Pacific that matter. You set a standard that you then try to. hold China too with other countries, right? I think we want, it's more of a reason to double down on not just our alliance relationships, but getting our allies closer together, right? So that the

Japanese are closer to the Indonesians and the Singaporeans and the Indians so that there are these other countries that it's not so much containing China, but shaping the environment within which China is rising, right? So the shorthand would be your China policy has to be a regional policy. And you have to be working on all the things you care about, high trade standards, the promotion of democracy and human rights, responsible stakeholders in the international community. You want all of those things to be in the ether in the Asia Pacific in a way that allows us to either leverage China if we're confronting them or hopefully absorb arising China into a more mature set of arrangements in Asia Pacific. And then with China, it's a classic case where we want a ledger of things where we can work with them.

and on climate change, we need them to help us transition the global energy economy, and pick your spots on where you confront them on trade irritants, on technology irritants. But the basic principle I would have and that the Democrats running should have is, when we confront China, we should not do it alone as Trump is doing. We should be working with other countries in the Asia-Pacific region, with the Europeans as well, so that we're confronting China as an international community saying we're not trying to hold you down China. We are trying to hold you the same standards that we hold everybody else to.

I totally agree. with that. I think number one, we have to get our act together. For the allies and partners to work with us and to have some faith in us, they have to see that we can make our own government work. So our governance matters. Yeah, it's true. That's very true. Our economy matters, not just a trillion dollar tax break for the rich and not just a Google and a Facebook, but we have to be seen tackling our own problems, including problems of infrastructure, problems of education, problems of immigration. I mean, not only do we want a country that will attract the best minds from all over the world and keep them in our labs and our companies, but we want an immigration

policy that will let them in the goddamn door in the first place. I completely agree with Ben that we need to work with partners and present a united front. And America first is not exactly a flag that a lot of other countries are going to rally around. So countries to support us, to work with us, because remember, leadership is embossing people around. Leadership is other people deciding that they want to follow you because they have faith that you have the best interests of the group of the world in mind. For us to be able to collect that kind of unified front, they have to know that we believe in something. They have to know what our values are and they have to see those values at work. That is and has been our huge comparative advantage

over authoritarian regimes in the past. China has a China dream, but it's only for China. It's for the Chinese. You can become an American, or at least you could until recently. You can't become Chinese. Right, right. There is no export model of the China dream. There certainly is an export model of the American dream, and people around the world are living that, no matter what they call it, because it's about education, it's about opportunities for your kids, it's about institutions that will protect you and protect your rights. So instead of admiring the problem, which is what you're describing, really we need to get to what you. work. Danny said thing really important, which is the stuff at home, if I was a candidate,

talk about at home. Just a couple of quick examples. There's just concern that you're going to beat us in technology, right? Well, the way to beat the Chinese in a technological space race is not to kind of go around and scold countries that buy Huawei. We should be investing. The federal government should be investing in basic research and innovation here, right? You don't want to get beat on artificial intelligence, get the tech companies together, figure out what the investments are that have to be made for the U.S. to not lose that race. You don't want to have the authoritarian Chinese model beat the democratic model, then strengthen our democracy at home. Like voting rights in the United States is actually connected to our ability to go around the world

and promote these values. And lastly, by the way, don't fight a forever war in the Middle East. Guess one thing the Chinese aren't doing is part of their strategy, spending trillions of dollars fighting fruitless wars in the Middle East, right? So you can draw a whole critique that starts with our own democracy that goes through our infrastructure and our investments in technology and innovation, that goes to the need to end the Forever War and then gets to the China and Asia piece that's all about positioning the United States and democracy generally to be able to beat back any authoritarian trend that would overwhelm us.

All right, staffers for presidential candidates, transcribe and hand that to your various bosses. Okay, so we've got to do a little world-do speed dating now because we've got like six topics left and a little bit of time. So first one, Danny, I want to hear what you think about North Korea, just the state of the talks. And then there was some news from that same summit in Singapore where the acting Secretary of Defense, Patrick Shanahan, said he doesn't see a need to restore large-scale joint military exercises with the U.S. and Korea. So two questions. What do you think of how things have gone with Kim Jong-un so far and how important are those

military exercises that we seem to no longer care about? Well, I think Trump gets a lot of credit for not having gone to Hanoi and made a terrible deal, but let's ask the prior question, which was, what the hell was he doing in Hanoi? What was that all about? What did he really think? There were no talks. There was no negotiation. There was no preparation.

So I think that Kim Jong-un has Trump in a box. Basically, what he's saying is, you're going to listen to your hardline neocon advisors and get fire and fury all over again and blow your storyline in the run-up to the 2020 election? Or are you going to sweeten the deal with me, give me a little bit of what I want, sanctions relief, and maybe you'll get a Nobel Prize to boot.

What is it? Kim Jong-un is basically offering to rent a suspension of tests for some relief. He is not offering to stop manufacturing more nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Yeah, that's ongoing, I believe. Yeah, according to the DIA, they're producing another weapon roughly every month. So maybe we're... So our own defense department believes there's one new nuclear weapon per month. Approximately.

Presumably President Trump gets that information on his desk. I don't know where your presumptions come from. So look, he's, you know, Kim forced Trump to pretend that the two huge volleys of ballistic missiles that he sent into the Sea of Japan didn't even happen. Right. That kind of shows you who's got the upper hand right now. Fair. So Kim Jong-un, he says, oh, my generals like to play these war games, but I don't think they're that important. Well, let me give you a little clue.

The Korean army is not a volunteer army. It's a conscript draft army, which means that soldiers serve for about 18 months. U.S. forces in Korea, 28,000 of them, rotate out every two years. What does that mean? It means that maybe a year from now, if we haven't done these defense exercises, they're training. They're not war games. They're training. if we haven't trained, you will have two armies,

South Korean and American, where no one below the level of an officer has ever practiced. What do you do when the fucking North Koreans come screaming down from the Kaysong Heights? That seems important. Sounds a good problem. All right. So things aren't going well. Okay, quick Cuba update.

So, Ben, today the Trump administration banned specific forms of travel to Cuba, including cruise ships. How big a deal is this? And what's the impact going to be on Cuban people? And I'll just do this quick. It's an enormous deal. We had opened up all this space for additional travel. The reason this sucks so bad is twofold.

One, why should the Trump administration be able to tell you whether or not you can go to Cuba? They don't do that for just about any other country in the world except North Korea. But it's 90 miles from the United States. People want to go there. Just from a basic freedom standpoint, right, our government is telling you that you can't go to Cuba, which is absurd. and cuts against the interests of the United States and people should call their members of Congress and complain. If you want to go to Cuba, call your member of Congress and say,

this is an insane policy and help us lift this travel ban. Number two, it will devastate the Cuban people because all of the promise in the Cuban economy was in its private sector that had emerged in recent years, where Cubans own shops and restaurants that mainly serve visitors, right? And so if there are less people going down on cruise ships or less Americans traveling down and staying in Airbnb's,

that is less money that is going directly to the Cuban people, not the Cuban government, right? This is like if you go, you stay in Airbnb, you're paying a Cuban directly, you eat in a restaurant owned by a Cuban, you're paying that person directly. Those are the Cubans who are going to be hurt by this, right? So Trump uses this language about trying to help the Cuban people.

He is screwing them, he is hurting them. Marco Rubio is helping him do it, and I hope that there's more outcry against policies that restrict Americans and hurt Cubans. Just in fury, it's me, it's such a dumb, wrong-headed policy. Okay, I know I'm jumping around here, but there were some major elections in India

that we should just touch on it quickly. So the Indians completed five weeks worth of elections. Remember, I think 900 million people go to the polls. It's incredible. The headline is that Prime Minister Modi in the Hindu nationalist BJP Party just crushed everybody else, including the more moderate Congress Party, who is run by Gandhi's son. So Modi's in charge for other five years.

He'll likely control enough seats in parliament to make, like, really big changes, veto-proof changes. So question for either or both of you, were you surprised by Modi's margin of victory? and like what do you think this means for U.S. relations with India? I was surprised by the margin. He had been coming down a little bit, Modi. That flare up with the Pakistanis clearly helped him, right?

Remind us what that was. So this is a terrorist attack that killed several dozen Indian service members in Kashmir and then, remember the Indians launched a bombing raid inside of Pakistan. It didn't really result in anything, but what it did do is kind of stir up that Hindu nationalist base that Modi depends upon. I think the main takeaway here, the Congress party, which was the principal governing party of India after independence, is kind of broken. And the Indian opposition needs to reinvent itself and remake itself and probably needs to expand beyond this dynasty that Rahul Gandhi is the latest iteration of, in order to beat back what is a very strong right wing in India. And then in terms of Modi, you know, he comes out of the Hindu nationals tradition, which can veer very far right, scarily so.

he's also tried to have some ambitions as an economic reformer and a global statesman. Before the election, he veered definitely in the far right direction, right, in terms of hitting these social issues, in terms of kind of playing into the stigmatization of minorities, including a Muslim minority that is over 100 million people, right? So this is a big minority? And I think we are at a defining moment for Modi. Is he going to govern going forward in that vein? Is he going to aim to consolidate India as a Hindu nationalist country instead?

of as a secular diverse country, or is he going to pivot back to being this guy who's talking about economic reform and fighting climate change? If he goes all in on the national side, I think that's a very worrying trend because then you have an India that instead of being a pluralistic democracy is increasingly like a Hindu national state. I hope that Modi resists that direction and kind of pivots back towards being more of a modernizer, and I hope that the Indian opposition can figure out how to reinvent itself. Yeah, I mean, J.P. is just virulently anti-Muslim. It is alarming. Yeah. Well, it's a familiar kind of mix.

Yeah, it's the same mix. Cocktail of nationalism. Same cocktail. Religious intolerance and sort of strong man. But, you know, Modi has huge, huge challenges. This is a little bit of pottery barn here. Like, you won the election now, you own it, and you own the problems. He's got immense economic problems. He's got huge challenges coming from China, and China's belt and road. It's really aiming to sort of cement in. supply lines and product transport at a cost that will block India's ability to really compete for the European and for other markets. And the country's quite polarized right now. So he's got

his a lot of work ahead of him. I'm sure. Quick Iran update. So first, Mike Pompeo said he's ready to talk to Iran without preconditioned. So I was just wanted to flag for Ben that it's good to see Pompeo embrace Obama's position from 2007. Hopefully he reads up on the Iran deal and maybe besides he likes that. Yeah, there's his thing got the Iran deal. Second, so apparently the State Department was funding something called the Iran Disinformation Project. It was created to counter foreign propaganda, but instead, I guess, was spending lots of time trolling journalists, human rights activists, and academics on Twitter.

State has since cut off funding. Question for both of you. I know this was through the Global Engagement Center, which, Ben, is something you worked on a lot. My understanding was it was illegal for the State Department to fund basically infoops on U.S. persons. Am I wrong about that? You're right.

And I helped set up the Global Engagement Center and the purpose of it was to combat ISIS and Russian disinformation, right? And so how do you marshal the resources U.S. government abroad to do that? And this is fileless in the category of things that should get more attention because it's crazy.

It's obviously crazy that there was a State Department funded Twitter account trolling Americans. But like Jason Rezaan, a friend of the pod, who was thrown in an Iranian prison for 544 days. And they're trolling him. lecturing him about, you know, understanding how evil the Iranians are. Like, give me a fucking break.

But secondly, there is a law, and this is why Congress should look into this, because I was responsible for a lot of these programs. You can't use foreign policy dollars. You can't spend the money that is allocated to the State Department to combat disinformation abroad to have Americans as your principal audience, right? Again, if you have a VOA voice of America station overseas, that's one thing. But, you know, you can't essentially launder money through foreign policy accounts in order to propagandize against Americans.

That is a firewall on our system. And so if people should be foiling these documents, Congress should be investigating this, because again, if they're spending State Department money to attack Americans and influence American audiences, that's illegal. Yeah, it's bizarre, too. I mean, I don't know, Danny never did those things, though.

Yeah, no, no. But you would know about that. Well, I'm sure they're good people on both sides. Yeah, right. All right, last question for you guys. So our president is so petty that someone from his team asked the Navy to hide a ship honoring three generations of Navy veterans named McCain.

The fact that this probably won't hurt Trump and his team makes me insane. Politically, it won't hurt him politically. It makes me insane. Democrats would be impeached on site. Lindsay Graham would make us reinvade Iraq to, like, prove our worth. I mean, I'm just trying to imagine both of you have planned trips. Danny, you were the number two in charge in Japan, I believe, for a long time. Can you imagine any scenario where the White House would dictate the location of

U.S. naval vessel during a presidential visit? No, I mean, it's beyond absurd. But look, this is how the system adjusts to an authoritarian leader whose rages are feared and whose kind of whims become law. If you can anticipate the whim of the leader, then your place in court is secure. Did you ever see the movie Twilight Zone? There was an episode with this six-year-old kid who had magic. powers and the entire town was in mortal terror of him losing a toy or not getting a double-dip

ice cream call. It has that flavor. Yeah, that's a good vibe. The point is not that Donald Trump woke up that morning and told people make sure I don't see. It's even worse than that. It's much worse. It's much worse. It's that he has created an environment where the mission of government is to cater to the

whim of the leader. And that's not consistent with my definition of democracy. Yeah, certainly the military shouldn't be doing that. Ben, any deep thoughts on what would have happened if you had sent that email saying, please hide the USS McCain during Obama's visit to Japan? Oh, my God. I mean, Lindsay Grant is apt. You know, I mean, this is a guy supposed to be his greatest friend in the world. I mean, it just shows you that there's no bottom. You know, like, that's what it tells me. Like there's no bottom to the pettiness of Trump and the people around him. John McCain is passed away and they're still doing this. And frankly, there's no bottom to the enabling of people in the Republican Party

who love to praise John McCain when Trump's not around. But, you know, we're not going to take aim at Trump when he does, when his administration does crazy petty shit like this. Yeah, I just closing thoughts on this. I mean, we just, Democrats need a better way to fight Republicans on national security and what it means to support the troops or to be. respectful to the institutions because it became support the troops meant send them to war for a very long time and hopefully we've corrected and keep them at war but yes it'd keep them and keep them in

keep them and we hope we've corrected a bit for that but they're just want and blatant disrespect from Donald Trump for the military starting with McCain but you know for the institutions for giving political speeches in front of service academies I mean the list goes on and on and it's something that you know it will create a set of institutional memories with within these organizations that will actually persist long after he's gone. And we don't want our military to get politicized. I mean, I certainly excuse pretty fucking Republican at the top, but like a highly politicized military would be a scary thing.

Well, you raise a really important point, which is we take for granted the separation of civilian and military in this country. And we've never really seen this deliberate an effort to politicize the military, to use them as campaign props, the parade Trump wants to have. Oh, my God, the political comments and speeches he makes in front of troops. Remember the troops in the MAGA hats with Trump? What we don't know is, you know, if you break that veneer, like if you puncture that

civilian military divide, you know, how do the antibodies just fix it when Trump leaves? You know, it's like watching an x-ray where there's a fracture and then it just heals. Or is, like a lot of things in the Trump presidency, is he breaking down? walls and barriers and norms, essentially, that are not necessarily going to regenerate on the own. And that's kind of a scary thing to think about. Well, there's a clue here. Look at the FBI. Yeah. Look at the CIA. Look at the systematic effort to reshape independent institutions to be politically pliant. I think there's a clue there. You were in the Foreign Service, Danny. I mean, what's your sense of, I mean, I know a lot of people are just leaving like you did. But what's your sense

the morale there and dealing with this. Because I'm sure they're asked to do a lot of stuff that is pretty political. Like I've seen statements coming out of the State Department that, man, we never would have asked them to make, praising Trump, you know, and kind of celebrating him in ways that, you know, kind of go well beyond normal, you know, PR. I think quite a few people have fallen into a kind of Stockholm syndrome in the sense that they content and console themselves with the fact that it, would have been even worse if they hadn't been there.

And maybe they scaled an initiative back from being a Class A felony to being a high crime and a misdemeanor. And like, wow, a good day's work. So you see people gradually acclimating. They're abnormalizing. This is sort of becoming a new bar. And it does raise the question of at what point does the resilience of the institution

snap and as change and regeneration are going to become impossible. Something we will watch. Danny, thank you so much for being here. It was a blast having you in studio to talk through all the disasters around the world from aircraft carriers to all of our negotiations. But I really appreciate it. Thank you all for listening at home and we'll be back next week.