Pod Save the World - Bloomberg’s foreign policy and the global economy gets the coronavirus

Episode Date: February 19, 2020

Mike Bloomberg’s foreign policy record and platform. How some 2020 candidates failed a foreign policy quiz. The humanitarian crisis in northwest Syria. The latest on the coronavirus and how Senator Tom Cotton is spreading disinformation. The Koch brothers funding foreign policy think tanks…for good? Mike Pompeo speaks at the Munich Security Summit and headlines about Afghanistan, Iran and John Bolton. Then Ben talks with Paris Climate Accords architect Christiana Figueres.

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, good to see it. Good to be here, man. On the pod today, we're going to talk about Mike Bloomberg's foreign policy record. We've talked a lot about the other candidates. Let's dig it to Mike's record. We're going to talk about presidential candidate foreign policy trivia and how big a deal it is.

The humanitarian crisis in northwest Syria, which is a very big deal. The latest on the coronavirus and why some right-wingers are spreading conspiracy theories, why the Koch brothers are supporting foreign policy think tanks that we like. which is a weird feeling. News from Munich, quick headlines about Afghanistan, Iran, John Bolton. And then, Ben, you did the interview today. What did you guys talk about? So I talked to Christiana Figueras, who was the lead U.N. kind of architect of the Paris Agreement.

She was responsible for hurting all the cats. She had a – it's a great interview. She really lays out, you know, what the stakes are on climate, what worked in getting the Paris Agreement done, what needs to happen in the next year, what she thinks of the Democratic plans. interestingly though, she started the interview. She was just in Antarctica where it was 70 degrees, which is the same as here in L.A. As she pointed out, the same weather is Hawaii. And let's just say, I want to spoil it, but that's not a good thing.

Ice melts when it's 40 degrees above freezing. Great. Well, I look forward to that. Our first topic is going to be Mike Bloomberg's foreign policy because he's in the first debate, which will air on Wednesday evening, I believe, or Thursday evening the day after this episode comes out, then we'll have the Nevada caucus results. Then that night wasn't quite the Iowa caucus results night or New Hampshire in my memory in terms of importance, but it was a really fun one because it was this dramatic reversal after the Nevada caucuses. Swing of emotions.

Yeah, or everyone thought Hillary Clinton had won. And then our delegate guy, Jeff Berman, genius. Figured out that in fact Obama had won more delegates than Hillary Clinton coming out of it. So we did this dramatic conference call with all these reporters. where they basically reversed all their stories in the course of this half-hour conference call. And you were in headquarters, right? That one of your back from Iowa. And so it was this kind of weird swing of motions

was like, ah, we didn't quite win, everybody's kind of sad. And then it's like, nope, we actually won. And so people understand it's because in a caucus, you award delegates based on congressional districts, and we had so out-organized Hillary in the kind of rural parts of the state that we won more delegates, even though we didn't win the raw vote. And so we snatched victory from the job. was a defeat. That was a good feeling.

Yeah. Pissed off the Hillary people. You know what? Delegate math, caucus math, electoral college. Get ready for it. All of it is weird and terrible. Okay, let's go dig into Mike Bloomberg's foreign policy. So let's start with his record because I think that's probably easier than the platform even. So Bloomberg has done a ton of great work combating climate change and he deserves a lot of credit for that. He's the leader of a coalition that's been pushing major cities to push.

for climate action. He's donated a ton of money in his personal capacity. He's done work at the UN. He's partnered with Obama and the business community. So tons of good stuff on climate. He's done some work with the World Health Organization on non-communicable diseases. And that is like literally all that is listed on his website under foreign policy. So we'll get to the platform later. So those are the positive, good side of the ledger. Some negatives. Here we go. Bloomberg supported the war in Iraq and endorsed. George W. Bush's re-election back in 2004. Seems like a problem. He opposed the Iran nuclear deal, but more recently has said he opposed Trump's decision to withdraw from it and that he would get

back into the Iran deal without preconditions. So a slightly confused record on that. He's been very close historically with Israeli Prime Minister Bibinayn-Jahu. He defended Israel's conduct in the 2014 war in Gaza, when most the international community thought that the use of force was disproportionate. He's defended the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip. He said he would never impose conditions on U.S. military aid to Israel. His comment about Trump's recently released Middle East peace plan was basically to praise it for saying it affirmed and negotiated two-state solution, even though the Jared Kushner Trump plan absolutely did not do that.

By the way, I'm drawing a lot of this research from good reporting by Friends of the Pod, Peter Beinart and Medi Hassan, so check out their pieces if you want more info. Beynard also points out to Bloomberg's great credit. He refused to join politicians that tried to shut down academics, who were supporting boycotting Israel. Bloomberg said, quote, if you want to go to a university where the government decides what kinds of subjects are fit for discussion, I suggest you apply

to a school in North Korea, which is kind of a great defense of academic freedom. So more negative things, the Bloomberg administration oversaw this massive surveillance program of Muslims in New York. Ben, I felt some guilt rereading all the reporting on that from the time, because it happened as like a joint CIA NYPD program during the Obama administration.

Yeah. It's pretty clearly unconstitutional, pretty clearly racial profiling. It produced no actionable intelligence, but we probably should have denounced it from the White House, and we just didn't comment for some reason. Medi also points out that Bloomberg refused to succumb to the hysteria around the so-called Ground Zero mosque. Remember, whenever that was 2009, Republicans, Fox News, conservative media melted down over this Islamic center near Ground Zero, and Bloomberg actually delivered this powerful defense of Muslims of tolerance of American values, and he's criticized the Muslim ban.

When it comes to China, Bloomberg said Xi Jinping is no dictator, which would probably come as a surprise to 1.3 billion Chinese people. And he's been accused of shutting down critical reporting about China at Bloomberg News. So, Ben, you know, I know I just take through a shitload of stuff there, but, you know, that record is mixed troubling.

Yeah, yeah. So I'm going to open by just saying, in part because I just got the shit scared out of me in this climate interview, that we should kind of begin all these conversations with, like, whoever the nominee is. Like, I'm going to support that nominee. And I put my cards on the table here. Like, Mike Bloomberg would not be my first choice of everybody who's run.

But he's been very good on climate. And frankly, we need a new president so that the world has a fighting chance. So any one of the Democrats running would be night and day on climate change. And on this, Bloomberg deserves credit, not only has he said the right things, he's funded a lot of efforts to take coal plants offline and to try to transition our economy. So I think you give the most credit for what he's done on climate. And he would be, you know, I think a very good climate president. I do have, you know, serious concerns with other aspects of his farm policy. I just highlight a couple.

The Iran deal, you know, he didn't. support it, but he also kind of was dripping with, you know, kind of condescension and, you know, so I would say arguments that, you know, echoed some of the more erroneous charges against the deal. Like he said, you know, President Obama was lying when he said there was a permanent prohibition on Iran getting nuclear weapon. That's in the text. You know, and look, I mean, he uniformly has kind of taken. the Israeli government's view on a set of issues, including this one, including the Palestinian issues. So I'd be, you know, that's obviously not the approach that I supported in government.

And I think it represents a kind of more conventional view of Middle Eastern conflicts, be it Israeli, Palestinian, or Iran. Then the other thing that I think is concerning, I want to hear more from him on. I mean, I think he has time to lay. this out and debates and stuff is on questions around, you know, democracy and authoritarianism. We've talked a lot about this on this podcast, but essentially, you know, this is the mega trend in the world. And I think on that comment that you said about, you know, Xi Jinping's not dictator, he's been pretty cagey on things related to say Hong Kong. You're right. When he was, you know, when we were in office, there was a case where a Bloomberg reporter reported on corruption

in the Chinese government. And the Chinese complained, and Bloomberg knew, and I think threatened Bloomberg, not just the news organization, but the terminal business, right? That's how Mike Bloomberg makes a lot of his money. And a lot of that is in China.

They kind of threatened that business, kind of like what we saw at the NBA. And, you know, they kind of hemmed and hawed, that reporter ultimately ended up leaving Bloomberg and going to the Times. It wasn't the finest hour either in terms of kind of standing up

for values. So, and look, I mean, you know, he might say, well, it's a business. I would say, you know, you got to draw a line somewhere, but certainly as present you do. So I'd like to hear him articulate and, you know, what, what his approach would be to democracy and trying to support democracy around the world. Obviously, he got in a little hot water in New York by changing the law to let himself have a third term. Yeah. You'll have noticed that. And literally the law said Mike Bloomberg can get a third term, but nobody else can after Mike Bloomberg. So it was not. not the most democratic process. So look, it's a mixed bag. Again, I want to give him credit on climate, hugely important figure in global efforts to fight climate change already. I think on some of these

other issues, he's been, you know, on the center right end of the spectrum for a Democrat on things like Iran, Israel, Palestinians, and some of these issues around democracy. So, you know, let's see what he says. On a lot of these other issues, he's, let's say, updated his positions to be somewhat more progressive. I think if he does, I hope he does that. I mean, that we should allow for some evolution here. Yeah. I mean, like the record to me, it's like if the set of Morning Joe had a foreign policy, it would be Mike Bloomberg's. And then there's some instances of business interest trumping, you know, what you'd think of as a foreign policy interest in the United States, which I guess isn't surprising, but you're right, it's something we should take no. It's not surprising.

And now he's running for a different office in mayor of New York. And let's see if he flushes out these positions. And again, like, let's give him a chance to do that. And, and, you know, if he does, like, we'll come back and, you know, give him credit. If he doesn't, you know, the record, you know, I think if you're looking for more progressive foreign policy, just about anybody else in the race, you know, would probably answer that mail. Again, with the very notable and important exception of climate where he's been a leader. Yeah. So let's talk about Bloomberg's platform for a bit. So as I mentioned, you know, his personal website is very thin on foreign policy, but the New York Times sent the Bloomberg campaign a questionnaire about the foreign policy platform going forward. And so I'll just flag some things that seemed either not notable or notable, but worth mentioning.

So, you know, the answer is about when he'd use military force were pretty standard. He'd defend the U.S. from attack. He's for, you know, potential humanitarian intervention. But he opposes using military force or covert action for regime change. So that's good. on Iran, he said he would reenter the Iran deal with no preconditions. Which is amazing. Yeah.

And further than some of the other candidates like Cory Booker, I think Michael Bennett, were not there. So good. Troublingly, the campaign bought the Trump administration's line that the Soleimani strike was legal and imminence-based and justifiable. We'll talk about that later. But that's been fully walked back and sort of self-evident. Even the Trump administration has moved away from that line.

On North Korea, he said Mike Bloomberg would not continue the leader-to-leader diplomacy with Kim Jong-un, but he also wouldn't continue to ratchet down sanctions. But the rest of the approach is sort of standard Obama, Clinton, you know, a bunch of things that haven't worked today, let's be honest. He said he would leave a residual force of around 3,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan to counterterrorism. We talked about the pro-Israel policies. Russia, China, NATO, cybersecurity seemed fairly standard or at least not that detail. Anything jump out of you?

No, you're right. I think you summed up well in that he's basically. taken, you know, pretty conventional set of positions. And look, the Iran deal evolution is interesting because, again, he was a pretty notable skeptic of the Iran deal at a time, you know, in 2015 where he was already kind of pivoting to being more of a national democratic figure. But what's interesting is he did criticize Trump for pulling out of the Iran deal. So, you know, he's in that category of people like, I guess, Mattis, who had all kinds of criticisms of the deal when it was reached, but then came around to thinking, well, actually, maybe this is better than

the alternative. So, you know, whether that was for political expedience or whether that was an actual evolution, I'm not sure. But like you said, like it feels like a guy who has some areas where he's developed views. And again, issues related to Israel, one area, issues related to climate issues related to kind of global trade, which is probably pretty far to the right of Bernie. But then a lot of these other issues, it's kind of the conventional, like what, you know, what you would expect to kind of centrist to say about Russia or NATO or what have you. Yeah. A couple other 2020 candidates were in the news this week because of foreign policy, much to their chagrin.

So at a candidate forum in Las Vegas last week, Democratic presidential candidates, Tom Steyer and Amy Klobuchar were asked to name the president of Mexico and could not. Only Mayor Pete was able to remember the name Andres Manuel, Lopez. as Oberdor, when asked. Ben, this reminded me of the 2000 presidential campaign when a Boston TV station asked George W. Bush to name the leaders of Chechnya, Taiwan, India, and Pakistan, and he went one for four, which would get you to the majors.

But you could only remember Taiwan. It also reminded me of a period back in 2006 when Congressional Quarterly asked a bunch of members of Congress, including the incoming Democratic nominee to be chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, whether al-Qaeda was Sunni or Shia, and which sect dominated Hezbollah. So, you know, if we're being honest here, when I read the story and I paused to test myself

to see if I remember the name of the president of Mexico, the first name that came to mind was Enrique Pena Nieto. I was a former president, but, you know, I'm bad with names and I'm not running for fucking president. So I guess I fail, too. But I guess I personally find the ignorance about the Sunni al-Qaeda question,

more surprising. We're not asking members of Congress to trace the Sunni shit. you split back to the death of Mohammed in 632, but maybe know the bare minimum about the people who attacked us on 9-11. Ben, where do you land on these kinds of questions? Are these unfair trivia? Is this a problematic knowledge gap?

No. Well, first of all, can we pour one out for the Amy Clobitor staffer who prepped her for the interview? Yeah, that's probably tough conversation. How do you like to see Amy taking off the microphone at the end of the interview and walking towards you? It must have been a harrowing moment. And I posit that I really like Amy. But this, I think, matters.

And I didn't see it totally as an indictment of Amy and Steyer because, frankly, probably a bunch of these candidates. To me, it's more an indictment of like, how have we gone a year of this campaign and never talked about the president of Mexico? Because it's Mexico. This is, like, arguably as important a country in the United States as any other. Totally. And, you know, Lopez-Zobrador goes by Amlo, his initials, is a big figure in Mexico.

Like, he's been around for a while. He's a left-wing populist. And, you know, counter-narcotics, the border, issues that are really important to the United States matter. The reason why I think this was a fair question, most of the time I don't. Like, if somebody sat down and was like, name the prime minister of Pakistan, like, that's just gotcha, right? But this is like they're starting to compete for the votes of Mexican-Americans, you know, in a context of an election where their family members might be getting deported back to this country that is led by Lopez Obrador. So I do think for that community, you know, the idea that once this election is moving to Nevada and moving to more diverse states that have large populations of Mexican Americans and large, and frankly even states, you know, put aside the ethnic background, states that are closer to the border that have a lot of, you know, trade or movement of people of Mexico, I do think it matters.

And it's kind of fair. And I see it again is somewhat less of an indictment of them, although credit to Pete for getting it right. But more just like how have we not had a question in a debate about the country of Mexico, right? Like it just, it points to how much issues that are really important. Like we talk endlessly about the border immigration and we never talk about Mexico, you know? Yeah, the most recent ABC presidential debate was like three nearly identical questions about whether the candidates would have killed. Soleimani. They couldn't mix it up a little bit? Well, and I would argue that Mexico is more important to America than Iran, you know. Certainly on an economic level. Yeah, in terms of the amount of trade, volume of trade, the border, counter-narcotics, things that affect the lives of Americans, you know. I mean, Americans are affected in Iraq, you know, if Qasem Soleimani

had militias that threatened them, but millions of Americans are affected by the Mexico relationship every day. It shows how our foreign policy is kind of distorted to elevate things like, you know, assassinating a guy and not to address pretty basic things like how are we dealing with our neighbor? There's like a mind share to importance mismatch on so many foreign policy questions. Like the amount of time that people spend pouring over like Middle East peace process maps compared to U.S.-Mexico relations or Western Hemisphere generally is completely absurd. It's absurd. And I don't know what will change it. And frankly, one of the things it might change it is like, you know, these these candidates having to get out and, and talk to different

outlets and outlets that care about these issues and raise them, right? I mean, these candidates, I'm sure, like, I care a lot about Cuba. Like, they're not being asked by Cuba. As I've said in this podcast, Amy is actually very good on Cuba, but when they go to Florida, they'll be asked about it, you know, and they'll be asked by Ben as well, right? And so one of the good things, I think, that happens in a presidential campaign is as you go around the country, you start to find, you know, people in different states who actually care about different issues, including including foreign policy issues. Yeah.

Another big issue I'd like to hear them asked about is Syria, specifically what's happening in Idlib province right now. So there are estimates of up to a million Syrians getting just pushed towards the Turkish border as the Syrian government troops begin to retake Idlib province in northwest Syria. The majority of the people fleeing are children, like over half the majority of the adult are women. Many of them, if not most of them, are sleeping outside in tents in below freezing weather. international aid organizations are warning that this could turn into the worst humanitarian crisis of the

entire Syrian war. So let that sink in for a second. The people who can't leave are caught in the middle of fighting between basically former Al-Qaeda affiliate fighters and Syrian ground troops who are being backed up by indiscriminate Russian airstrikes. On top of that, you have tensions escalating between Turkish-back forces in the region in those same Syrian troops. And there's also reportedly like Lebanese Hezbollah and other Shia militia groups in the mix. The U.S. and the whole world basically is trying to call for a ceasefire at the U.N. But the Russians have stopped all meaningful action at the UN Security Council. There are more than three and a half million Syrian refugees living in Turkey right now. And the Turks just refuse to take any more. So they're

not going to let them cross the border. In 2018, Turkey and Russia announced that Idlib would be a de-escalation zone, but that agreement has fallen apart. The Turkish delegation just went to Moscow on Monday for some talks. They're pressing for a ceasefire. Trump is called for a ceasefire, but so far the obsequiousness with Putin has not gotten that in return. So Ben, like this is about as bad as it gets. I'm not sure what we can do about it besides donate to relief organizations like the IRC and others and just, you know, hope something breaks at the UN. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, obviously we completely failed to avert the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria and President Obama to intervene. And, you know, that will be debated for, you know, for a long time.

I would say, you know, when you have a bad situation, it can always get worse, unfortunately, in the Middle East. And I do think a normal administration, even one that is not intervening militarily, would be doing much more to try to spotlight this, to try to make it harder for the Russians to do this, to try to get humanitarian assistance to people in need, and to try to take in Syrian refugees. And so, you know, I do think what Trump is doing is actually is worse than what you would expect any normal of America. administration to do because he's basically by kind of pulling out or pulling back from playing a role in Syria as he did a few months ago by kind of greenlighting Putin and Erdogan to just kind of figure this out between the two of them. Those are two pretty callous amoral guys, you know, who even though the Turks say the right things about this sometimes, like they're not really putting any skin in the game, you know, it just shows you what happens when there's not.

I mean, look, I'll betray myself and commit an Amy Klobuchar, Tom Steyer type of. I don't even think I could name who's our unit master? Wasn't the wife of the coal magnet that, you know, yeah. I mean, Samantha Power would be like flipping over tables at the Security Council and at least getting attention on this, at least making this more difficult for the Russians. So, you know, that's what's disappointing is to see, like, I don't claim that we would have solved this problem. We couldn't solve Syria, but we would have been doing more and trying to help more people, trying to take in more people, and trying to raise the diplomatic,

cost for Russia. And frankly, by this point, you know, the fact that there have not really been any meaningful negotiations about how to end the Syrian Civil War, it does feel like we're kind of mailing it in here, you know. Yeah, it's incredibly daunting. I mean, the U.S. could use our intelligence capabilities to highlight what's happening, raise funds for humanitarian relief. There's a lot of things that should be happening. Yeah. Okay, let's do a roundup of the latest coronavirus news with a special appearance by one of the Senate's worst people. Tom Cotton. Noted right-wing intellectual.

Yes, let's start with the stats. So the latest outbreak stats released by China as of Tuesday are 72,436 cases and nearly 2,000 dead. So more shocking to me is an estimated 760 million people in China are subject to some sort of limit on their activity. The restrictions vary place by place, but that number includes 150 million people that face restrictions on how often they can leave their homes. So you have business is closed.

Shopping is restricted. You can't get groceries. In a lot of these cases, the government of China can monitor where people are based on cell phone tracking. So that, you know, in some instances that's useful. They can say, hey, you were in this town where there's a bad outbreak, get tested. But it's also creepy. Creepy.

We're starting to see some serious economic impact. Apple warned it was cutting sales expectations because the virus had impacted the supply of their products when factories were closed and demand. Yeah. Because they had to close 42 Apple stores. all of them in China. The South Korean president warned of an emergency economic situation because of how much the Korea-China trade is being impacted.

Japan announced on Monday that its economy had shrunk 6.3% last quarter due to other things, a typhoon, some other problems. But that was before the virus hit. And so now they're poised to fall into a recession, right, if the economy shrinks this quarter. And then, you know, I've heard some economists estimate a 3% drop in China's GDP because of this virus. So that is massive economic impact.

So we, you know, we talked about this a couple weeks ago. Remember, and we said, like, hey, it's strange that the markets aren't pricing the same. It feels like it. I think this is a huge thing to watch. I mean, Apple's a bit of a bellwether here because they're like the biggest company in the world, right? And they're essentially saying our profit margins, our revenues are going to go way down from what we expected because our supply chains are disrupted because factories are literally closed in China. and because they had to shut down every Apple store in China for a period of time.

Wow. You know, and that's an enormous internet of you, and that's just Apple. So the impact this is going to have on American companies, many of whom sell goods in China or dependent on a supply chain from China, I just don't think we're pricing this in with an economy that had already showed some signs of slowing down. So this is playing out over here as kind of separate from everything else, But I think the coronavirus, if it sticks with us here, you know, really could be looking at risking the global economy, risking potential recession. I think people just need to take, you know, more time to factor this in because you're talking about the second largest economy in the world, a country of 1.3 billion people that is kind of partially offline.

And you're already seeing it drag South Korea and Japan down. and we're very interconnected with China too. I think this is coming here. Yeah, I mean, I think they just delayed or were about to delay the Communist Party meeting that's upcoming. So it's like literally everything is shutting down in the country.

And meanwhile, Trump is like praising Xi on Twitter saying he's doing a great job. I mean, literally Trump sounded like an editorial writer for like the China people's fucking daily, you know. When Xi Jinping and the Chinese government helped create some of this mess because they didn't tell the truth of people. They lied about it.

They tried to cover it up. They didn't level of people that made the outbreak that much, worse that risk the pandemic. And we've got a president of the United States who instead of trying to deal with that is like trying to flatter G on Twitter. Maybe because he's worried about these economic statistics. I mean, it's funny for all that we debate the Democratic candidates, what really might determine the election is where economic indicators and global events are around the election. And this is one that is not, you know, right now looking like it's going to be positive.

Yeah, agreed. And let me talk about somebody who has not been helping Senator Tom Cotton. So on Sunday, Tom Cotton, Senator from Arkansas, went on Fox News and suggested, again, that the coronavirus may have originated in a biochemical lab in Wuhan, China, which is the city of the center of the outbreak. He did this sort of classic rumor-mongering tactic by saying, I have no evidence that this was a virus they created maybe for military purposes. I'm just asking questions, right? Isn't it interesting that this all happened where there's a secret bio lab, which is pretty gross? this rumor, I guess, is being trafficked by Steve Bannon and other right-wing media people. I'm no epidemiologists, but real scientists quoted in real newspapers, citing the disease, point out that it's a lot like SARS and other diseases that come from bats.

And it's probably not the best bioweapon since it seems to mostly kill old and already sick people. In China. Not very useful against the troops. Yeah, right, in China. So the conspiracies also being spread by this Chinese fugitive billionaire. who hates Xi Jinping, their big opponents, who is the latest guy to bankroll, Steve Bannon's nonsense.

By the, that's the key to ban on success, right? Like, before it was the Mercer's, now it's this new guy. There's always a billionaire backing his demagoguery. But, you know, what Cotton is doing here has some weird echoes in history. Like, it's well documented that the Soviet Union planted the rumor that the CIA invented AIDS. And that info operation was so successful that it got picked up in U.S. media outlets. Of course, the horrifying truth that the Tuskegee experiments where hundreds of black men were allowed to suffer from syphilis without being treated makes it a lot more believable.

But, you know, Cotton's response is basically, you know, what's wrong with asking questions? But I think he knows what he's doing here. And you could also see how this would make things worse because it does seem to me to be harder to marshal an international response to a disease, to a pandemic. if it's labeled Chinese bioweapon versus scary virus that just emerged. Yeah, I mean, first of all, the conspiracy theory is crazy. The Chinese are going to invent a bioweapon that is basically like, you know, flu-like symptoms that can kill you. That, as you point out, scientists say, very common for jumping from animals to people and release it in their own city to kill their own people.

But let's just talk about Tom Cotton for a moment here. We're talking about somebody that exploded onto the stage in 2015 when he had the bright idea to write a letter that he somehow got 47 other Republican senators assigned that he sent to the Supreme Leader of Iran at the height of the Iran deal negotiations in which he warned the Ayatollah not to make a deal with Barack Obama. So essentially made common cause, an American hardliner with the Iranian hardliner against the national interest of the United States. And at the time, this guy is held up as some kind of new young leader in the Republican Party, an intellectual in the Republican Party, a guy who went to Harvard that everybody should keep a watch on. Maybe he's going to be president someday. This guy sounds like a fucking commenter on a 4chan chain. You know, this guy, like, what, he logs on to 8chan or whatever hates-filled conspiracy theory website he's on in the darkness of night as he's like in a room that is lit only by his computer screen. Yeah, like the Steve Bannon podcast.

And he's in some thread, you know, with some dudes who are like, clearly this is a bi weapon. And then he feels the need to unburden himself of this conspiracy theory on Fox News while people are dying and people are quarantined and cruise ships and the global economy is potentially tanking. And all he sees is some opportunity. to score another cheap ideological point against China by planting a conspiracy theory in the minds of all Fox News viewers. While Steve Bannon gets paid. This is what qualifies as the intellectual leader

of the Republican Party in Donald Trump's America. This fucking guy. Our next president. Tom Cotton. Tom Cotton versus Don Jr. primary. At what point are people going to just stand up and be like, you know what? Marco Rubio Tom Cotton,

how many times you have to hear that there's some young Republican that we should take seriously, that ends up being a lunatic a conspiracy theorist or someone without any backbone. Because that's what this collection of people have presented themselves to us as. And unless we want to live in a country

that is governed by like a 4chan thread, like we're going to have to make some different decisions at the ballot box. Yeah. Tom. Sorry, it's been a while. No, no, no. Tom gotten also known for being just cruel for fun.

Yeah. He held up an Obama appointee to punish Obama. Oh, yeah. He passed away in the process. Yeah, Cassandra Butz. A wonderful woman, a close friend of Brock, Obama's nominated to be an ambassador. He held her up for two years, including after she got a serious illness, and she passed away while Tom Cotton had a hold on her. And he admitted,

acknowledged, and said publicly that he only did it really to stick it to Obama. That's who we're talking. Yeah, not a good guy. Okay. Okay. Let's talk about the Koch brothers, some other great guys. Friends of the Pod. Politico had a story last week by a friend of the pod, Nahl Tusi, about how Charles Koch of the infamous Koch brothers is doling out huge amounts of money to foreign policy think tanks. She talked about $10 million that's going to four places. The Atlantic Council, the Center for the National Interests, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and the Rand Corporation. Charles Koch's goal is to promote, quote, voices of military restraint and tests widely held assumptions about the use of military force. Specifically, the Atlantic Council is going to get

$4.5 million to support scholars and activities that promote a better balance of the use of diplomacy and international alliances. I don't know everything about all these organizations, but like the Chicago Council on Global Affairs is a good one. It's run by Evo Daldor, who was Obama's U.S. ambassador to NATO for four years. Good guy. Ben, I'm struggling with this one because some good organizations, a good goal, but the Cokes have done incalculable damage to our country and our national security. And it's just generally gross to know how easy it is for big money to distort everything, including foreign policy.

So I don't know what to make of this. Yeah, well, there's a theme here. We started with Bloomberg, right? Look, they, for a long time, the Kochs have been moving in this direction. They're basically libertarian. There's been this kind of strange alliance between libertarians and liberals and progressives around the use of military force. Cato Institute, which they fund support of the Iran deal.

They oppose the kind of forever war. The Quincy Institute that we talked about is funded basically by this Koch brother and George Soros. Half a million. Yeah. So to me, look, I'd rather they be funding this than, you know, funding anti-climate change. You know, climate denial research. Fair. What's interesting to me about this is so Quincy was set up, as we talked about,

to be like a new kind of thing tank that promotes research. restraint in the use of military forests and alliances. What they're doing here is they're funding much more traditional think tanks, Atlantic Council, Rand Corporation, that have been around a while. And I think what they're trying to do is use that money to move those think tanks in a different direction. So it's an interesting way to do it. Like one way is you set up a new think tank Quincy. Another way is, you know, some think tanks that, you know, probably in the past got a lot of money from, you know,

ran from the U.S. government, you know, Atlantic Council from, you know, a lot of defense. contractors probably. They're trying to change the funding equation at these sink tanks. It's positive? Yeah, I think. It's a good, but I mean, I wish there wasn't the name Coke attached. I know. I mean, it's like my kids like to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art when we're in York

City and they have those fountains in front and David Koch's name is on them. And you're like, well, they like the fountains, but do we have to look at the name? They took down the Sackler's name, the opioid peddlers. Yeah, that one had to come down. So hopefully if you took climate change seriously, you'd have to take the Coke one down. But what I will say is what this points to that is more interesting than just the Koch brothers is this trend where libertarian Republicans are joining with progressive Democrats. And that is a very welcome thing. That is how that Tim Kane bill just passed the Senate around

demanding authorization for any war with Iran. It's in part how we got the Yemen war powers through that tried to revoke support or did, but Trump vetoed it for the Saudi war in Yemen. So this, this this alliance between libertarian Republicans and progressive Democrats really does have the capacity to remake the consensus around the use of force in this country. I would take it very seriously. And frankly, as much as you don't like taking money from a Koch brother, the broader trend is a very welcome development. Yeah, net net, probably good. It's just still so weird to me. You'd be like, here's two million for your think tank, hire these people to study this thing to put out this kind of papers, move on.

You know, and what I'll never get over to Tommy is that, like, $10 million or whatever it is for these guys, is like you and me giving $50. Nothing. It's nothing. You know, it's a rounding error of a rounding error for these guys. And it does just show you how easy it is to buy influence and shape these debates. Because as we talked about, you know, there's like, what, 15, 20 think tanks that really matter.

And those sink tanks help shape everything from foreign policy to how the media covers foreign policy. And these, you know, these guys are not putting their thumb on the scale in a better direction. but it does show you it's not a lot of money to have a lot of influence. Speaking of a Koch brother favorite, let's talk about Mike Pompeo. So the Munich Security Summit was this weekend. A friend of the pod, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was there. Secretary of Defense, what's his face? Mark Esper was there.

I know his name. He's sort of useless. So they were doing what has become this constant effort to reassure our allies that were still on their side, basically. And, you know, I watched Pompeo's speech. I think it might have been effective, if not for how glaring the disconnect is between his rhetoric and Trump's words and deeds. So some notable lines and sentiments that jumped out at me include he said the death of the transatlantic alliance is vastly overstated. Ha, ha ha, ha, lame joke.

The West is winning. We are winning. We are winning. Do we get like a trophy? Yeah, participation. We talked about how Asian countries like Vietnam are looking to the U.S. for leadership. No mention of the Philippines potentially ending a security agreement with the U.S. or like the constant anxiety out of Japan. and South Korea. Or the Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement that we dragged the Vietnamese into and then Trump pulled out of it. Yeah, or the basing issues or North Korea policy.

Pompeo said, we don't interfere with other nations' elections, which I'm sure would be surprising to Israeli voters who have seen Trump intervene or attempt to influence in their elections three times in a year. He was a critical of assaults and sovereignty. He didn't mention that we're pursuing regime change in Iran. So Pompeo's big close was he talked about visiting a wounded Ukrainian surveillance. service member in a hospital in Kiev. Yeah, that really rings true.

Yeah, surprisingly, he didn't mention when Trump held up security assistance to that soldier for dirt on Joe Biden. The other big message that Pompeo and Esper took to the conference was that Western companies shouldn't let Huawei, which is a big Chinese telecommunications company, build out their 5G networks and infrastructure because of concerns that it could allow China to spy on them. They've been working on this for years. The Obama administration tried to stop people from using Huawei stuff.

So far, the effort has totally failed. The UK let Huawei in. The Germans seem to be about to, in part, because there's no real other options to build out your stuff. The other notable thing that happened to Munich was the French president and Emmanuel Macron. He's pushing to approve relations with Russia, which is causing some consternation. Ben, I assume you've been to these summits. Does anything important happen at the Munich Security Summit? And anything jump out of you from these speeches or, you know, happenings?

I went to Munich last year. How was it? It was lively. Lively for a German conference. It was funny because it was like, you know, there's a guy who worked for me, a great guy named Graham Burkey, who now does really cool work on disinformation

at the Atlantic Council, actually. And he was there as kind of the representative of millennials. Let's just say that the median age of the Munich City conferences is not, it's up there. The crowd looked like 30 of Henry Kissinger's slightly younger brothers. Yeah, yeah. But some friends of mine were there. Look, what they're mainly useful for,

Munich is mainly useful for kind of taking the temperature of how people in the transatlantic alliance world feel about things. And when I was there last year, it was, you know, desperation, doom and gloom. Nobody was buying the message that the Trump people were selling last year. And I can't imagine that they were this year. And, you know, it's amazing that Pompeo even feels a need to say these things anymore. Like, does anybody really believe that the transatlantic lines is going well? that the West is winning something. And you made the right point, which is that put aside, like, what people say,

let's look at what they do and what they're asked to do. So Mike Pompeo's big ask of Europe is to keep Huawei out, and they're like, well, screw you. You've imposed tariffs on us. You've ignored us. You've thrown the Ukrainians under the bus, get dirt on the Bidens. So why would we do your bidding and do this really hard, if not impossible thing, of decoupling our telecommunications from Huawei.

They're not going to do it. And that's the answer, right? So you don't have to listen to what people say. It's like what people do. They're not doing what the Trump people are telling them to do because of the way they've been treated by the Trump people and because they don't see the Trump administration as aligned with them on all of these issues.

Macron, you know, we had to spend a lot of time shoring up, you know, European support for sanctions on Russia over the invasion of Ukraine. It's not irrational for Macron to be like, why do I have to carry all the water in this conflict with Putin when Trump is like cozying up to him, right? So this is what happens when the U.S. kind of absence itself from this role, you know. And, you know, the interesting Munich Security Conference will be next year because either there will be a new Democratic president. And I think that will be an important event. I remember in 2009, Joe Biden went to the Munich Security Conference like a month after inauguration and kind of laid out all our priorities and everybody was super enthused about it

and a lot of work started there. Or Trump will be reelected. And I think what you'll see next year is Europeans saying like, you know what? The transatlantic alliances is not really applicable anymore. That Europe is going to go its own way on some things. And that is a lot of things. They'll send Secretary of Defense Eric Trump over. to make like, you know, armpit farts for 15 minutes.

Or how about Ivanka? Did you see Ivanka and her glammed out hijab in the UAE? I can't even deal with it. It's just outrageous. All right, some quick hitter headlines because there's so much news this week. Afghanistan, so five months after the presidential elections in Afghanistan, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani was finally declared the winner of that campaign, even though his opponent is saying it was fixed, it was rigged, and he says he's the winner, too.

This is a major political crisis. It's happening as the U.S. is apparently, reportedly, has approved a peace deal with the Taliban that would start with the seven-day period of reduced violence, followed by U.S. troop withdrawals, followed by direct negotiations between the Taliban and Afghan leaders. So it seems like they've reversed sequenced it. So the troops come out and then all the hard things happen. Yeah. I guess I'm going to just be behind whatever it takes to get U.S. troops out, but this could go bad. Yeah, I have to say I think that ultimately was the right call.

I think it had to happen. I mean, this idea that we were going to leverage the troop presence and insist on that, you know, is a recipe for just staying there forever. What I think people need to recognize when you see anything about a quote-unquote peace deal is the real peace deal hasn't happened yet. The real peace deal is what Afghans negotiate amongst themselves. Right. And so it's not whether the Taliban talks to us and we withdraw troops. It's whether the Taliban's down with the Afghan government and figures out a way to end essentially a civil war in Afghanistan. And so to your point, yeah, like we're going to draw down our troops. No surprise there. Frankly, it's, you know, Trump's doing this three years later than he said he would if he even

follows through with it because in the past we've seen these things kind of not, you keep saying he's removing troops in Afghanistan and there's still the same number of troops. You pretend to be mad about something. Yeah, you know, something will, you know, and and again, I think the heavy lifting here will come and can we get the Afghans to sit down with each other, Taliban and the Afghan government, can we get other countries to play a constructive role, you know, from Pakistan to China to India, you know, so that there's multilateral support for an end of the civil war. And, you know, do we have some strategy diplomatically to help the Afghan people? So you're right, like, you know, positive development, but like the real work is really pushed back. Yeah, for sure. We talked about a bit of

before, but some news on Iran. The White House finally sent an official report to Congress outlining the legal and policy rationale for the Soleimani assassination and surprise, surprise. They have stopped declaring that Soleimani posed an imminent threat. So it's now official that all of those comments were lies. They've completely walked it back. They've done an official record to Congress. But more hopefully, the Senate passed a resolution last week to limit Trump's ability to attack Iran militarily without first getting congressional approval. That measure passed 55 to 45 and a bipartisan and manner. The House will likely pass some version of it next. Then Trump will undoubtedly veto it, but still credit to Tim Cain, credit to a bunch of Republicans for continually pushing this.

Yeah. And I would say like that it is just a pretty remarkable that we had the President of United States, the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of Defense all lying to us flagrantly for days. And I hope that the media takes a lesson from this finally because they parroted those laws. I mean, we talked about the time that the headline in the New York Times, you know, Trump says, you know, imminent threat, subheadline Pompeo says hundreds of Americans were at risk. A lot more people consumed those headlines than consumed the page 10 reports on this like post facto admission that they were lying. So they got everything they wanted out of the lies. You know, they got headline coverage that kind of parroted everything they said at the time. and, you know, a month later, our attention span can't stick to any one thing.

And so, oh, yeah, this happened. That, to me, you know, says you need to take everything these guys say with a grain of assault about everything, including matters of life and death. Yeah, a month later, 109 service members have traumatic brain injuries from the strike and zero were at risk of an imminent threat from Soleimani. So the entire rationale was reversed. So let's actually... We endangered people.

Well, let's step back to the whole thing, right? because now we know that the strike that killed an American contractor that might have instigated this latest chain events, that might not even have been Iran. There's a New York Times story saying that that could have been ISIS. So that might have been wrong. Then there's an assassination that they say is because of an imminent threat. That was wrong, right? Then Trump tweets all as well, and they come out and say nobody was hurt.

Over 100 people have traumatic brain injury, right? That was wrong. Like, everything in this was like a pyramid of lies, you know, that brought us to the brink of war. And as I've said, like, I don't think we've seen the end of the Iranian response to this, by the way. The Iranians play this out on their own timeline. They've already resumed their nuclear program, right? So the counter-IS mission had to be suspended. So it's almost remarkable that every piece of this story, like, has not held together.

Yeah, and a bunch of idiots sitting in green rooms or on TV sets or in Davos called it a win. And hat tip to Ian Remmer. Yeah, infuriating. Okay, last thing. So John Bolton, our buddy, former national security advisor, did an event at Duke last night, and he's still complaining. Some quick highlights. He said Trump's North Korea policy had been a wasted two years.

Agree. He said that Trump's Iran strategy is failing. He seemed to suggest that regime change in Iran would work better than Iraq because they're different, which is thoughtful and nuanced. It's an N instead of a Q. Yeah. And then when he was asked about impeachment and Ukraine, he literally used it to tease his book that he hopes will get through the White House vet and sell a whole bunch of copies so he can make money and complain about being censored by the White House. So John Bolton, you suck. Yeah. As a side note, he declared North Korea policy of failure, Iran policy failure, and Venezuela policy failure. So the three signature initiatives of Trump, which we revisit here, all fail. but yeah, I'd like to compare John Bolton to Vindman, right?

Because, you know, you've got one guy who sees something that he knows is wrong in Vindman, goes through all the proper channels to register his concern that this is wrong, testifies before Congress at great risk to his career, and frankly ended up getting fired from his job at the White House, because he said that that was the right thing to do in this country, right? it was a morally right thing. Vindman has not made a dollar off of this. Like he's put up with threats.

Then this grifter, John Bolton, you know, if he really wanted to tell us so badly what happened in Ukraine, he's had every opportunity. Like he could go on television. You could come on our podcast, you know, like a... We're impeachment hearings. We could book him next week. Yeah, happy to have you, John.

Impeachment hearings, yeah. I mean, he said he would testify only to the Senate, not the House. He said that knowing probably that Mitch McConnell would make sure that never happened. He catches out, somehow manages to write a book in like, you know, a couple months. Can I read the exact quote? He said the leaks about Ukraine to date were the sprinkles on an ice cream Sunday compared

to what's in the book. Like, he's so thirsty to get people to give a shit about what he says about this, when and if he can charge you 32 bucks. Well, and it's not even subtle. Like, you know, you might as well have a pre-order button on his, like, Twitter account. Like he's just nakedly cashing in. And he's so cynical that he unfortunately knows that it'll work. And again, I just think like we've got an election coming up in nine months that I truly believe is a referendum on whether we're going to have a democracy in this country, whether the rule of law applies, whether there's going to be an unhinged, unloosed Donald Trump, never having to face voters again.

And we've already seen how he did, how he acted the week after impeachment. Can you imagine this man after re-election? These people who work for Trump know this, that John Kelly's and Jim Mattis's and Rex Tillerson's and Dina Powell's of the world, not to mention John Bolton. Tell us what you know. If you care about, you know, John Bolton likes to put himself forward as caring about democracy, even though I, you know, heededly object to the way in which he does.

But if he does, then you have a civic obligation to do what Alexander Vindman did and just tell us what happened. I think citizens need to be informed by what these Trump people know. And if they don't, then the shame is on them, you know, that you know something that is of need to know basis to the American voter. But instead, you're going to take that information and monetize it to the best of your capacity. Yeah. It's gross. He sucks. One last thing before we go to the interview.

I just saw a clip come through that said the State Department finally informed China that their five big news agencies, including People Daily, China Daily, are going to be treated as foreign government outlets, basically, and subject to the same rules as diplomats. So it's kind of nice that, you know, future flax, I guess, won't have to treat these media organizations as anything but state-run entities. I will say that I think this is a good move. So I'm going to give credit to the Trump administration. Yeah, I kind of do, too, to be honest.

We debated this in the Obama administration and ultimately decided that we needed to set a good example for how you treat media and therefore we could rental them as media. My guess about these people as at best they are paid propagandists of the state. Like that's the best case of what they are. If not. But I suspect they are reporting everything back to Chinese intelligence. And I'm not saying I don't know that. I'm not saying I read intelligence, but, you know, like they work for the government. So you know what?

And by the way, it's not like the Chinese revoked media, you know, visas and things for people who just report the news. The danger of this kind of move is whether the Chinese now reciprocate, which they very well may. And the Chinese may treat our journalists this way and we may lose some insight that we have from some of our reporters who are affected by that. So that's a real risk that you have to weigh. But I do think that, you know, pretending that like these outlets are anything other than, again, like, at best, propaganda, at worst, you know, Chinese intelligence spies. Like, we were like, you know, it was a fake dance. Like, I worry about the recriminations, too, or the possible retaliatory efforts.

But, yeah, I don't ever think you're in a good place as a government when you are pretending something is not what it is. Yeah. That disconnect is just absurd. Yeah. And again, it's not like the Chinese were giving us credit for treating them like media. They were still messing with our reporters, still harassing our reporters, messing with their visas. Again, we'll see, like, if what we do is lose like the New York Times Bureau in Beijing or whatever, that would be bad. That would be really bad. Yeah, so I think we had to watch it.

Okay. We're going to take a break, and we come back. We're going to have Ben's interview about global efforts to stop climate change. I'm now joined by Christiana Figueras, who was the former executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is a long way of saying she was the indispensable person at the UN in achieving the Paris Climate Accords. I had the honor of working a little bit with her around Paris, and she's as smart as anybody that you can talk to about climate change. She's also the author of the upcoming book, The Future We Choose, which is about the efforts to end the climate crisis. or at least combat the climate crisis. That book is out February 25th, and it's available for a pre-order now, so people should get online wherever you pre-order and look for the future we choose.

And she hosts the podcast, Outrage and Optimism. So many hats. But thank you so much for joining us, Christiana. Well, thank you. Thank you, Ben. Thank you for plugging our book. Thank you for plugging our podcast. Thanks very much.

And it's always a pleasure to chat with you. But it's a particular honor to be on your podcast. Thanks, yeah, no, I enjoyed being on yours. It's a great podcast. People should check it out. And I should mention Tom Carnack, a great guy, worked with you on that book, too. Indeed, we are co-authors. We are also co-host together with Paul Dickinson on the Outrage and Optimism Podcast.

So, yes, we do quite a bit of work together. Well, look, I want to start, because, John, I understand you're literally just back from Antarctica, which most people can't say. And the temperatures there were recently reaching, I think, you know, 70 degrees Fahrenheit. What is that like? What does it like to be in a place that is not supposed to be that hot? And how much did that kind of drive home for you just what we're dealing with here? Well, honestly, it's heartbreaking, right? It really is heartbreaking to see a continent that is, of course, the whitest,

also the coldest, the windiest, the driest continent. A completely unique ecosystem on our planet is just heartbreaking. to see it under temperatures that you have in the tropics on that day in which La Esperanza, the Argentinian Research Station, recorded 68 degrees Fahrenheit. It was almost the same temperatures in Hawaii. That is not normal. That is just not normal. And we were there for 10 days, and on one day, it just rained solidly throughout the whole day.

that's also not normal in Antarctica. It should be snowing. And the scientists who were with us were very, very concerned because they have never seen that amount of rain in Antarctica. And they did explain to us that actually rain is even more detrimental to snow cover than the sun. And so they were really very concerned. In addition to the fact, of course, that's just what we experience when we are

are there on the ship. But of course, there are all kinds of consequences on the wildlife in Antarctica. There is no single species down there that is untouched. There's no single species that is now being forced to either adapt very, very quickly to warming conditions, to less ice conditions, or if they can't adapt quickly enough, then they will just go into extinction. And for me, one of the most heartbreaking, and can I tell you a little story, Ben? One of the most heartbreaking examples that we saw were the orcas, unfortunately called killer whales,

because neither are they whales nor are they as killer as we think. They're actually dolphins, but they're spectacular animals. And we saw, you know, on one day we saw a pod of 50 of them, maybe even more, which is typical for Antarctica, quite spectacular, except they were not white and black and gray. They were yellow. Why are they yellow? Because the warming ocean means that there is a phytoplankton that grows on their skin. And the only way to get rid of this is actually to swim all the way up South America to Brazil, to warmer waters, and clear their skin and then come back down. But these orcas, they need a certain strength, a certain body weight, to be able to make that swim.

Because once they start that journey, they don't stop to eat. They have to make it all in one swim. And many of them were just, many of them were just too thin to make the trip up. So they were yellow and getting, we saw a whole pod getting more and more yellow, which means are we? now, you know, threatening even orcas, which is a species that we hadn't thought was under extinction, it is very, very concerning. Yeah. And when you're there and you're, you know, experiencing those temperatures and talking to

the scientists, is that a sign that things might be, you know, worse than even some of the models predict to, like, that essentially, you know, in terms of the, you know, in terms of the the forecast of where this is headed that we might be in a deeper hole than we even thought? Well, I think that is actually the trend that we see, right? Every time that we see a new scientific report, the scientists tell us, actually, we underestimated the impact. Actually, we underestimated the speed with which these changes are occurring. Actually, we underestimated the intensity with which and the frequency with which we're seeing

these disasters. And every single report, that is the conclusion of scientists. So what we have to understand is that climate change at this point is no longer on a linear trajectory. It is on an exponential trajectory. And that is the concern. Well, let's talk a little bit about what to do about that. And first, we'll go to the past and one of the pieces of good news that we've had in recent years. But, you know, the Paris Agreement, you know, succeeded where past efforts had failed, including, you know, I was at Copenhagen in 2009 when that kind of unraveled. And you survived. Yeah, I survived. It was a chaotic scene.

Barely. We're both survivors. Copenhagen survivors. You know, there are a lot of Copenhagen stories. Our office was in like a store in like a mall area. That's a whole other story. But I do remember you playing this incredible role because, Paris was a different kind of agreement than had kind of ever existed in the sense that every single country had to be part of it. Each country had to do something different, right? So each country had a different emissions target in terms of emissions reductions. Some countries had to pay into, obviously, a fund to help the poor countries develop with cleaner energy. There was, you know, a system set up to monitor and have transparency around whether nations are meeting

their commitments. There was an effort to bring in, you know, non-governmental actors. Why do you think Paris did succeed? You know, what was it about that agreement that allowed the whole world to come into it? And is there a lesson we can take from that about how to mobilize collective action going forward? There are many lessons that we can learn from Copenhagen. And actually, one of the first things that I did when I took over the guidance of the climate convention was do a very, very detailed analysis of the strengths and weaknesses, the mistakes and the positive things out of Copenhagen.

And it was a big, fat, 300-page book that turned out to be our Bible, because, you know, when I always call Copenhagen the most successful failure of the United Nations. And it was a failure because we all concluded that it was a failure, but it was successful because we learned so much from it. And much, certainly many of the procedures that we then put in place, the processes that we put in place, and the logic and the structure of the Paris Agreement is very, very different from the Kyoto Protocol

because we learned from Copenhagen what we should not do and what is actually a much more realistic and also ambitious goal. to set when you have to get 195 countries to agree to something. And that's not, you know, you shouldn't underestimate that because we had actually reached

way before Paris, we had reached the conclusion that it would not be enough to just have consensus on the global framework, but that we would actually have to reach it beyond consensus by actually having every single country agree to it.

Unanimity, political unanimity, is much more difficult to attain than consensus. So, you know, it was quite a, quite a task, but we knew that this was so important and that whatever the new trajectory of the global economy being set by all of these countries together, it would affect every single country. So logic tells you if it affects every single country,

every single country has to agree to that structure and to that path. So a couple of things that I think are worth highlighting that we turned around in Paris. The first that I think is worth highlighting is no country was forced to do anything. This was not a top-down process. This was a bottom-up process. Yes, we knew what science demands. Yes, we knew that we had as a global economy,

all of us need to reach a net zero emissions level by 2050. But contrary to what was there before, the previous legal instrument of the Convention, which is the Kyoto Protocol, there was no emission reduction level that was actually the result of a negotiation among countries, which I would call a top-down approach. it was very much bottom up.

We understood that the emission reductions were so dramatic that there was no way that we could pit the interests, even if short term of a country, against the long-term interests of the planet. And we understood that the only way forward would be to have the conversations with all sectors within each government, each country that would allow us to identify where was the overlap? What is the nexus between self-interest, self-economic interest, self-political, social interest,

and the global need? Because it's only if you identify that sweet spot that you can actually have a very clear movement forward and a very clear impetus. self-interest, Ben, honestly, for us, as people or as societies or as cities, communities, countries is the most powerful motivating force. There is no lever that is as powerful as self-interest. So what we did under the Paris Agreement was we did not deny self-interest. We actually encouraged every country.

Go home, do your homework. Figure out what you want in your values. vision of the development of your country and where does that overlap with the planetary needs. And every country came forward with their own contribution. And that is the basket of what is called the nationally determined contributions because that's what they were. They were nationally determined. So, you know, some people in the White House have said that the United States was forced into a situation that they didn't want to and that someone imposed upon them. Absolutely not true. Every single country came forward with its own nationally determined contribution.

Now, the trick with that, of course, is that the sum total of all of that does not lead us to what science demands and what the planet needs for security, safety, and stability. So what we then did was, okay, we will not have all those nationally determined contributions add up to the final result in one, swoop, we will extend the time. And so what the Paris Agreement does is it invites every country to determine what they're going to do to contribute as a starting point, only as a starting point. And so that's the starting line. Every country starts at a different point. But everybody puts one or two or three feet forward. And everybody agrees to what the end, the finishing line is. And that is net zero emissions by 2050, so that you have a process that will be checked every five years. And this year, and I hope we talk about Glasgow, because this year is five years since Paris.

And so it's the first time that that five-yearly cycle will be checked. So basically, you know, we're all in this process together. It's going to be a multi-decadal process that is already established in Paris. we know where we have to get to, where science demands, in order to keep us safe. But we realize that this is not going to be delivered in one year or two years, but rather that it is going to be a process of increasing decarbonization. That's a very different logic to what we had before. Yeah, no, and it's a great explanation.

And, you know, just to give the listeners a sense of this, right, you know, each country makes its own target in terms of reducing emissions. And you can get more ambitious based on the actions you're taking. So even before Paris, in his second term, President Obama did a whole bunch of stuff, you know, to improve fuel efficiency standards to address, you know, coal-fired power plants. And because of the steps we took, we could put forward a more ambitious climate target than we could have a few years earlier. In an alternative world, you know, if President Obama had another five years, presumably we would have been raising our ambition, doing more things so that five years after Paris, we could come forward and say, actually, you know what, we can get more ambitious.

You know, because of the steps we've taken, we can do more to reach that net zero goal in 2050. And that brings me to COP 26 that you mentioned. So the idea that you and others, you know, put together that is so good is that there's this kind of accountability and convening that takes place on a regular basis. and the hope would be that five years after Paris, everybody comes together, and you can raise the ambition from where it started, from that starting line of Paris. And so that's going to happen in Glasgow in November of this year. What is your expectation for COP 26 for this conference? If you're watching this from the outside, what would show that we're making progress and what might be warning signs that we're not doing everything we can heading into COP 26?

Well, you know, ironically, Ben, all of these conferences keep on being called negotiations, but the irony is there's nothing to be negotiated at the end of this year, right? We have a path that everyone has agreed to, and we're not negotiating with each other anymore. We are in the process of, as you say, of an increasing accountability about how we're doing with respect to what we've already agreed to. there's no negotiations that need to take place. In Glasgow, what will happen is that every country will come forward and will have reviewed what they put in, what they registered under Paris, and they will compare that with advancing technology because technologies have advanced

hugely in the past five years, certainly all the renewables, certainly carbon capture and storage, certainly hydrogen. All of the solution technologies, let's say, have advanced incredibly. So first, we will look at how much has technology already contributed. Secondly, we will take a look at what policies are being put in place in countries that accelerate the dissemination and the uptake of those technologies. And third, these countries should also be looking at shifting capital. And, you know, I hope for your listeners it didn't go unnoticed that Larry Fink,

just came out as being the largest asset manager in the world already with $7 trillion is what Black Rock manages. He just came out with his yearly letters saying, okay, you know, I have finally understood, sorry, this is not a direct quote. This is my interpretation of what Larry said. Larry has finally understood, and it's honestly, it's been a while because there are many asset managers and asset owners that have been ahead of him. But he finally came out to say, right, I have understood.

that investing in high carbon assets is hugely risky. I have understood that we need to get out of coal, and I have understood that we need to be moving our investments over to the new economy to clean technologies. Well, that's a huge message to the entire capital market. In addition to that, we now have a group of asset owners beyond the asset managers, asset owners, who, from my perspective, are basically at the top of the financial food chain,

who in total can bring their assets that they own to $5 trillion, who have now understood that it is in their financial interest. They're not doing this to save the planet, right? Fortunately, there is a coincidence here of interest, a total alignment of interest. They have understood that moving their investment portfolio over to a portfolio that is zero net, certainly by 2050, if not before, is actually protective of the assets that they own. And so they are encouraging their companies to move over as quickly as possible. That just to give

you two examples from asset manager and asset owner perspective of how the financial markets are actually also aligning themselves. So once you have technology, policy, and finance coming together to help the acceleration of decarbonization. Now I get back to the exponential piece, Ben, that I talked about before, because climate change is definitely on an exponential curve of damage, but solutions are also on an exponential curve

of impact, a positive impact. And honestly, I think when you step back and you look at this, you say, okay, which of these two exponential curves is actually going to win? There is a race here, a race between climate, negative climate impacts and positive climate solutions. The two are racing against each other, and we know which one has to win. So to get to net zero, basically, you know, everybody's going to have to get more ambitious, right?

Government policies, as you said, follow the money, you know, where investments are going. I want to talk about a couple other pieces of this puzzle. then there's kind of private individuals investments. You know, Jeff Bezos just announced a $10 billion commitment essentially to make grants to fight climate change. I mean, how important is that? And what is the role of private individuals in helping to fund some of these efforts? Well, I think his announcement is very interesting because it complements a previous announcement that he had made, which is that he had already, as Amazon,

announced that Amazon would be carbon neutral or net zero by 2040, which is 10 years before the Paris Agreement stipulates zero net. So that's very interesting because you now have a growing number of large companies that have understood that they can do better than the Paris Agreement. Microsoft then, of course, jumped up and said, what? Amazon is doing it by 2040? We will do it by 2030. And so now you're beginning to see the race to the top.

Corporations that have understood that they actually do have the technology, they do have the finance, to protect themselves quicker and afford themselves a much safer business continuity scenario. So that's on the corporate side. And we can also talk about recent announcements of oil and gas, Ben, that are quite exciting. But then in addition to that, then Bezos comes out, and he says, in addition to what Amazon is doing,

doing as a company. Now, I from my personal, for my personal war chest, will donate to climate solutions. Very interesting that he has recognized that there is a very important role for corporates to reduce emissions, not just of their own company, but throughout the whole value chain, but that there's also a role for philanthropy. And the role for philanthropy is pretty clear because there are some areas that are not quite ripe for our traditional investment that still need de-risking. And that's where philanthropy should come in to de-risk some sectors and some areas and some activities that are still a little bit too risky for the capital markets,

but that if you just de-risk them a little bit, can actually attract the kind of financing that is available now. So it's very interesting to see him play both signs of the solution space in order to accelerate. So, and, you know, derisking, you know, basically allows people to invest in things that, you know, might not have a guarantee of success. It might not attract private investment, but philanthropy can fill that gap. Then there's obviously the hugely important aspect of government policy. You know, we have a president and, Donald Trump, who's both pulled out of Paris and really reversed a lot of Barack Obama's climate regulations, although state and local governments have tried to keep them in place.

And frankly, the automakers are still abiding by, you know, higher fuel efficiency standards than even Trump would want them to. But if you look at the current campaign wherein the Democrats have largely put out pretty ambitious climate programs, particularly with respect to domestic efforts. I wanted to get your sense of what you make of the climate plans that you've seen to date. And, you know, do you think that those efforts are sufficient and how might they be coupled with international climate policies that could try to bring other countries along and getting more ambitious? Well, I think the first thing to be said here, Ben, is, oh my goodness, what a massive difference to where we were four years ago, where we were four years ago, where during that presidential campaign,

climate was barely alluded to and, you know, almost in an apologetic way, because the sense was it is, it just will not win any votes. And now you have this massive shift, honestly, that was started by Jay Inslee, I must say, although he's now no longer in the race, but he was the first one to recognize that there is a sizable portion of U.S. citizens who are increasingly concerned and who do want solutions on the table. And he put forward his platform. His entire platform was organized around climate change. What that actually did was invite slash nudge every single one of the other Democratic candidates to also adopt a responsible climate change platform. And it is a massive of different, right? They're all aligned. The differences between them is sort of emphasis here or

there in the way that they would go about it, but they are all aligned toward zero net emissions by 2050 for the United States for many different reasons, right? For competitive reasons, it is just pathetic. It would be pathetic, let me say, because I don't think we're there yet, but under President Trump, we're very quickly moving into the direction of. of letting U.S. industry become uncompetitive in low emission and in low emission technologies that are in very quickly in rising demand for those technologies because young people, for sure, want products and services that are not high carbon. So competitiveness is one of the first reasons why the industry.

why the industry in the United States, despite whatever the White House is doing or not doing, continue to decarbonize, there is also the national security issue. And we have heard that from almost all candidates that there is a national security component. There's a public health component here. There's a jobs component. There's an economic growth component. I mean, it is really quite remarkable the plethora of arguments to decarbonize the society. And what I think, in addition to the massive change that now climate is in every single Democratic candidate platform,

the other big difference from four years ago is that the arguments that are being given are actually all positive arguments. Climate change is certainly a threat, but addressing climate change is being in. increasingly understood as an opportunity. That is the major conceptual shift that has finally occurred in the United States, but also in many other countries, that we have moved from a burden to an opportunity. What is sad, man, is that this is only on one side of the political spectrum in the United States. And it shouldn't be, right? Because competitiveness should not be a partisan issue.

Public health should not be a partisan issue. national security should certainly not be a partisan issue. That's really sad. And it doesn't need to be like that in the UK where I used to live. It's not a partisan issue. And you'll have all parties supporting with very small differences, supporting decarbonization. And honestly, that that is a much more, I dare say,

a much more mature understanding of what is ahead of us. Well, look, Christian, that's a great note to end on. Thank you so much for joining us. And I encourage everybody to check out your upcoming book, the future we choose, again, available for peer order now. And we will be looking at Glasgow later this year, just as I know many of us in our country will be looking at our election as well. So thanks for joining us. And Ben, can I just say on Friday, this Friday the 25th, we release on our podcast a fascinating interview with John Kerry on this topic. So also something to look at.

forward to. Yeah, everybody should check that out as well. So thanks a lot and good luck with the book tour. Thank you, Ben. Thanks everybody for tuning in. Enjoy the Nevada caucuses. It should be hopefully better than the Iowa caucus results. Yeah. But we'll see. You went from like Iowa stand to reformer. Every moment I spent in Iowa up and until the caucuses ended was fantastic and wonderful. The guy who ran the caucus we were at, an incredible job. He was Conscious, thoughtful, great, smart, funny. The counting part was bad. But then the problem was the counting and the app problems and all the other stuff

led to a broader effort to sort of dig into these results where we realized how many mistakes were underneath that first layer of mistakes that really called into question the results. Maybe it just reached that question. I will say, Tommy, because there's a Nigerian Nexus, I'm surprised we didn't discuss the Liz Smith sock puppet Twitter account. For those listening home, a bunch of fucking idiots on Twitter spent their day on Saturday or Sunday to siding or accusing Liz Smith, who is a flack for the Buttigieg campaign, of running a sock puppet of a fake Twitter account out of Nigeria. Without ever pausing to think to themselves, what is the value of this to her?

Yeah, yeah. Why would she want to do this? But you had people losing their fucking minds. Blue checkmarked journalists. Supposedly serious people. We have this text chain, right, Yumi and John and Dan and Cody. And every now and then I'll look down and I'll be like 47 messages, right? So I'm catching up and it's all about this.

I'm like, what, this can't be that crazy? And I opened Twitter and within like nine seconds of opening Twitter, I'm like, how have these people just lost their minds? Yeah, I was like in New York run around doing stuff and I would check in on that. I literally couldn't believe the accusations. And like there's just the invective. Like people were threatening violence if you disagree with them that they're little theory was wrong.

Everyone, log off. Everybody's got shot out a little bit. All right. Talk to you guys next week. Potsy the World is a product of crooked media. The senior producer is Michael Martinez. Our assistant producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Chris Basil.

Kyle Segglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Malconian, and Milo Kim, who film and share these interviews on video each week.