Pod Save the World - CPAC Doubles Down on Creepy Autocrats

Episode Date: February 28, 2024

Ben and Tommy discuss President Biden’s claim that a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas may be imminent, the domestic political problems the war is creating for Biden, the latest on efforts to defer attacks by Iran’s proxy groups in the Middle East, and some rare good news about Iran’s nuclear program. They also discuss the staggering casualty numbers from the war in Ukraine, claims that a prisoner exchange involving Alexei Navalny was in final stages before his death, new reports about extensive Russian efforts to interfere in our elections, right-wing autocratic creeps at CPAC, an investigation into the Mexican president’s ties with drug cartels, Saudi Arabia dumping money on celebrities and CEOs in Miami, and why Taylor Swift’s dad was throwing punches in Australia. Then Ben talks with Wai Wai Nu, a human rights activist and founder of the Women’s Peace Network about the civil war in Myanmar. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, did President Biden just have the most newsworthy ice cream stop in the history of ice cream stops? Yes, I can't quite remember one quite like that. I DM South Myers. I was like, way to stick it to the White House press corps. You're like, you know, I'm going to interview this guy. I was thinking that. I was thinking like you don't usually think you're going to make massive news on a late night show.

And certainly not a late night show OTR. but I guess he did. He's standing there like, what? I thought we were just like, I don't think Seth, I don't think he expected to get that answer. No, no, I don't think you did either. But it was a really interesting interview.

You know, he pressed him hard on like age and on Gaza and a bunch of like, you know, challenging topics. He's his thoughtful late night guys. There is no offense to the other late night guys. But the, and they're all guys, right? I mean, that's one of the issues. The other funny thing, Tommy, is we've all been there where, you know,

if you're a staffer and you mention something to the principal and then you're surprised, like, because what Biden said was, well, my national security advisor, it sounded like he'd just talk to, like, Jake Sullivan. And so it's like, well, my national screwed advisor just told me that there's a ceasefire. Yeah. Jake Spice in there like, oh. Oh, God, please please please, everyone. We'll get into more detail on all this in one second.

Today we're going to cover the latest from Gaza and how this potential ceasefire news and how the conflict is creating domestic political problems for President Biden, even as Netanyahu keeps laying out policy visions that are, It seemed like they're snubing his nose at the U.S. We're going to talk about the latest from the International Court of Justice in efforts to deter attacks from Iranian proxy groups in the Middle East. The horrifying casualty count from the war in Ukraine, the latest news about the murder by Russia of opposition leader, Alexei Navalny.

Russian interference into our elections. CPAC gets real weird and goes kind of international then. We'll talk about that. Some allegations against the president of Mexico. The Saudis take Miami and then Taylor Swift, maybe doing battle with Australia at the moment. Have you heard about this? I have not.

So I'm looking forward to that. I like both Taylor Swift content and Australian content. So it's our wheelhouse. I'm ready for it. And then, Ben, you just did our interview. What are we going to hear? So we haven't checked in on the situation in Myanmar in a while where it's been pretty astonishing. The opposition forces is this kind of patchwork of different groups fighting against the military junta that came to full power in a coup in 2021.

The opposite force has been gaining a lot of ground. So I talked to Wai, Wai, Nue, who's a very prominent activist for the Rohingya community, which is the most persecuted of the communities in Myanmar. And we basically did an update on what's going on in the country. What is the nature and ambition of the opposition? What is the situation for the Rohingya, who've obviously suffered a lot and what can the U.S. and other countries do? So it's kind of a check-in on an issue that we probably should check in on more.

Yeah, important update. And also, I know something near and dear to your heart. Yes, yeah. You went there, when, 2021, too, before that? Yeah, I went pretty much every year starting in, oh, God, like, 20. I mean the last trip. Yeah, it started going every year in about 2011. The last time I was there was, I'm going to say probably 2018, actually. Oh, okay. So pre-COVID. Yeah, pre-COVID travel. Time has been flattened up for me. Yeah, time is a flat circle. So I'd love to go back. But, you know, that's on the cards for a little while. Yeah, just could get rid of a hoonta. Yeah, got to get rid of a hoonta. Then I'll go back. Work on that one. Work on that turn, the break. All right. Let's start with Gaza because there are some major updates. As you mentioned at the time, as we mentioned to the top, President Biden sounded a hopeful note on prospects for a ceasefire, both during an appearance on Late Night with Seth Myers and then during this ice cream stop.

We'll listen to the interview first. There is a path forward with difficulty, but here's the path forward. Look, first of all, the hostages being held must be released. And then we've got a recent principal agreement. There'll be a ceasefire while that takes place. Ramadan's coming up and there's been an agreement by the Israelis that they would not engage in activities during Ramadan as well in order to give us time to get all the hostages out. That gives us time to begin to move in directions that a lot of Arab countries are prepared

to move in. For example, Saudi Arabia is ready to recognize Israel. Jordan is Egypt. There's six other states. I've been working with Qatar. And so there's a process underway that I think if we get that temporary ceasefire, we're going to be able to move in a direction where we can change the dynamic. and not have a two-state solution immediately,

but a process to get to a two-state solution, a process to guarantee Israel security and the independence of the Palestinians, but without them being able to, for example, invite in another country to provide their defenses. As we mentioned during that ice cream OTR, he put Jake Sullivan on the hook to land this plane by Monday. So the specifics of the seapower

that have been recorded are complicated, it. The Times reported that the Israeli War Cabinet approved a six-week truce for the release of 40 hostages. This would also require Israel allowing much, much more aid into Gaza. There are also proposals to release a certain number of Palestinian prisoners being held by Israel for the release of every hostage. There are certain, like, math equations for different types of people. There's, like, a certain number of Palestinian prisoners for every female hostage being held. There's another number for the release of civilian men over a certain age. And this is where the politics, I think, for Netanyahu get complicated because Hamas is

demanding people in prison who are convicted of murder or people who are assessed to have been a part of terrorist attacks. So this is where, you know, you could see Netanyahu's coalition try to like pull the plug on any ceasefire deal and make it harder for him. So that's why I think, you know, we're all kind of nervously watching this. On Monday, Netanyahu said he proposed a plan to his war cabinet to evacuate civilians from Rafa, the city and southern. Gaza, where an estimated 1.4 million Gazans are currently sheltering. That would be done in advance

of a major military operation that everyone, but Netanyahu seems to think, would be catastrophic. So, Ben, negotiators are meeting this week in Qatar. They're racing to get the ceasefire deal done before Ramadan starts on March 10th. How hopeful are you feeling? I mean, it's interesting that President Biden would kind of preview it. It makes me think he's pretty hopeful. I think so. And look, I do think that it's not. the main point here, but probably don't do this with the ice cream cone, given, you know, gravity of this circumstance. But I think you made a good summary.

It's pretty clear what the administration's plan is, which is try to get a ceasefire, get as many hostages out in the ceasefire as you can, make the ceasefire so long that it becomes harder for Israel to resume its military operation on the back end of the ceasefire, and then use this time of the ceasefire to get some diplomatic process going with the Saudis and other Arab countries, both around some Gaza plan and around the pursuit of a Palestinian state in exchange from normalization of Israel. That's clearly been the play that the administration has in mind for some time. I was a little struck by the optimism. I mean, if they'd land that plane, you know, that would be significant progress from where we are. There's no question about that.

From the Israeli side, like you said, I'm sure there are elements of the right wing coalition that Nanyahu has that don't want to release Palestinian prisoners, that don't want to let in a lot of aid, they don't want to not go into Rafa. And so there's a Israel piece of this that remains in question. Then on the Hamas side, and you know, Hamas has actually kind of poured some cold water on this, and they may be trying to leverage the negotiation to get out as many prisoners as they can. So we'll see if Hamas is truly committed to it. I wonder about this Arab piece, because I just, you know, the two things that I, I'd raise, or first of all, who's in Gaza?

Like, you know, I think that the preferred option would be that there's some Arab kind of peacekeeping force that is helping to secure Gaza while reconstruction proceeds. And yet Israel's not agreed to that at all. Israel's kind of suggested that they want to have this kind of de facto control over Gaza. And then also, I do wonder, I mean, obviously we've seen with the Abraham Accords, Gulf Arab states in particular, be willing to take this step toward normalization. It strikes me as a pretty big risk for new Arab states like Saudi Arabia to kind of normalize relations with Israel right in the wake of killing 30,000 Palestinians. So I just, I don't know. I mean, if that all comes together, that would be quite, you know, remarkable.

It does feel like there's a lot of different pieces of this that have to fit in the puzzle board here at a time when the humanitarian circumstances in Gaza is as bad as it's ever been. I mean, to that point, I mean, the Egyptians and the Jordanians have been air-dropping aid. I saw that UN organization that's able to operate on the ground in Gaza said the last time they were able to deliver food aid to northern Gaza was January 23rd. So over a month ago. So people in northern Gaza are just starving to death. In general, the average number of trucks getting into Gaza is something like 50 to 60 trucks, not 200 like the Israelis promise. So it's way under. And UN officials are saying that these aid deliveries have been severely hampered.

because there were Israeli airstrikes on the police officers who are guarding these convoys, and now they're not operating and supporting these aid deliveries anymore. So the convoys are getting attacked by people who are desperate or criminal elements who are trying to get the stuff and sell it. So it's an incredibly dire situation. Yeah, it seems like we've reached the tipping point that people have been warning about for some time of just people not having enough food, not having enough water. They're not being any hospital infrastructure left.

and there being the beginnings of the spread of disease as people don't have clean water and don't have any sanitation. And frankly, this kind of, you know, effort to kind of starve UNRWA is a part of that picture as well. And so one of the many reasons to try to get a ceasefire is it does feel like absent that in a major change in the dynamic of getting assistance in, there could be this kind of exponential spiral of the humanitarian crisis. And that has to be front of mind for everybody, I think, because it's obvious to anybody following this. We've reached that point. It's no longer warning about some future risk of all these different factors that's happening now. We're there. So,

President Biden is obviously feeling some serious political pressure to get a ceasefire in Gaza. We're taping this on Tuesday, February 27th. Right now, Michigan voters are going to the polls. There's this broad effort to get people to vote uncommitted instead of for Biden. in an effort to show, to be a protest vote to the administration's Gaza policy. Organizers say their target is to get 10,000 uncommitted votes, but it's worth noting that uncommitted got about 11% of the vote during the Obama 2012 reelect, which was about 20,000 votes. I wonder what we did. I did.

I was trying to remember why that happened, yeah. I don't know either. Maybe people just kind of like Mitt Romney. I think there's just like a large uncommitted vote often in Michigan. But look, I don't know. There will be numbers out by the time. are listening to this, but it was just interesting to see the expectation setting so low. Maybe that's just smart politics, or maybe there's something else going on. Also, in terms of domestic news,

on Sunday, a senior airman in the U.S. Air Force named Aaron Bushnell lit himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington to protest the war. Beforehand, he posted a video saying he didn't want to be complicit in genocide, and he shouted free Palestine as he burned and later died at the hospital, which is horrible scene there. Earlier today, Netanyahu released a video pushing back on Biden's obviously true statement from that NBC interview we just heard that Israel is losing international support for the war. Netanyahu claimed that he's been leading an effort aimed at, quote, countering international pressure to end the war ahead of time and mobilized support for Israel. Not sure that has been successful. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Not a deal. Also, Deniah, who released a plan for post-war Gaza that included Israel retaining indefinite military control over Gaza while allowing Gazans without links to Hamas to act as civil. million administrators, but it seemed like that language is framed to say the Palestinian Authority could not be in charge. And then today, Ben, I saw that the prime minister of the Palestinian authority are resigned, but not president Abbas, which was sort of an interesting shakeup in there.

Yeah, there's a lot of pieces moving around here. I mean, in the domestic politics space, we'll see what happens at the uncommitted vote. I mean, it's also the question of, you know, there have been reports that, you know, it's hard to get surrogates to go to Michigan because they're going to get protested, you know? And so it's not just the vote. share. It's also like the enthusiasm. A lot of the people that are sitting it out are the kind of people that might have been organizers for Democrats, but also like can you go to college campuses and can you go to communities like Dearborn and just show up when people are this angry? So that bears watching as well as the uncommitted count. I think the Gaza piece that you mentioned, again,

the two big outstanding gaps beyond the conduct of the war are this question of like who administers Gaza and is there some recognition of a Palestinian state or some at least aspirational recognition of Palestinian state? And again, it just bears repeating on both those questions. Israel's way out of step with not just the U.S., but just about everybody else. And that speaks to whether or not this deal can endure. So let's say they get the deal. Whether or not that deal leads somewhere kind of depends on those two questions, Gaza,

administration and Palestinian state. And the thing about the Palestinian Authority, it seems like, you know, the U.S. and other countries are probably pressing for some reform, and so you get some resignations, and you get some new technocrats in there or something. But it's got to be more than that. For the sake of the Palestinians, you know, there has to be this kind of bottom-up,

you know, investment in meaningful leadership that is close to the community. You know, the problem is not the caliber of the technocrat, although, you know, you can always try to tinker with that. It's about the legitimacy. Is this kind of old man, Machu Mokamah, bus sitting in Ramallah and the people around him, does he kind of connect down to civil society, to young people, it's a very young population. So I'd like to see that effort not just focus on,

like, who are the ministers and the PA, but can you take resources and direct it to people that have real credibility in these communities? Yeah, and the PA is completely broke. And that's going to be an enormous challenge for reconstruction. Also, I mean, B.B. Netanyahu's plan that he laid out for post-war Gaza says that Israel is going to take control of a sliver of territory in Gaza along the border to provide as a buffer zone and prevent another October 7th. That is incredibly controversial. The plan does not stipulate whether or not Israeli settlers will be allowed to return to Gaza, which- Well, that's a pretty big piece of-a mission. Yeah, it calls for the dismantling of UNRWA, the only UN agency operating in Gaza. Yeah. And UNRWA, by the way, they said that they have

lost $450 million in donor funding since Israel accused 12 UNRWA employees of participating in the October 7th attacks, and they will be out of money by March. So, just like desperation for every aid organization. We've talked about this. But what is achieved by that? You know, there's not some other entity that can perform these services. As we talked about, there's tens of thousands of, you know, people that are associated with UNRWA because they perform all these various services. I just think it's the wrong way of going about it.

You know, just starving the only means of reaching Palestinians in Gaza does not feel like the right solution to the problem of those 12 people. people. You know, it feels punitive to the broader population. Yeah. And the other sort of update from a U.S. perspective is last week, Tony Blinken announced that any expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank would be inconsistent with international law. That was longstanding U.S. policy until the Trump folks reversed it. I think, I mean, I was glad to see Tony do it. I guess my kind of reaction was, I wonder why it took so long. Yeah, I actually, you know, I actually got frustrated. I, to be reminded that they hadn't done it yet. because that was U.S. policy forever, you know, and it speaks to the kind of weird caution that they had on this issue out of the gate because it's not, it shouldn't be controversial that settlements are inconsistent with the national law. They are, you know. It's not some big new finding by the United States. So again, I'm glad they did it. I think what it speaks to is there's another pathway here where the U.S., you know, you also saw these sanctions on a few settler leaders. I don't know why that shouldn't, you know, go up.

to people like Ben-Gavir and the people in the government that are literally saying crazy shit all the time about, you know, moving settlements in displacing people in Gaza, kind of wiping out the Palestinians, taking all the land. Like, if that's not U.S. policy, then again, there should be some consequences for the people that are really driving an extremist agenda. And so hopefully this is the beginning of a tackling that problem and not kind of the end of a policy process. Yeah, and just, you know, when Netanyahu returned to power in 2022 with his far right coalition, the number of settlement expansions exploded. It went from like, it was like 3x

in 2023 what it was the year before just in terms of like all the stage of the bureaucratic process. So it does seem like they've been acting with a punity for a while. It's interesting the administration though, like there's all this pressure for them to do more on Gaza. They've really been focusing on the settlement piece of it in this case belatedly. But, you know, it just sort of interesting that the like the carrot and the stick are not necessarily about the same thing. Yeah. In terms of policy. Yeah.

And it speaks to, I'm sure, they're concerned that the settler kind of movement is the driving engine behind this governing coalition. That's right. Yeah. But that is manifest in Gaza more than anywhere else, too. I mean, the situation the West Bank is concerning as well. But it does speak to, we talk about military assistance being conditioned. We talk about calling for and voting for ceasefire at the UN, another pathway of trying.

of trying to affect this, you know, extremism on the far right of Israeli politics is going more directly at the agenda and the leadership of the settler movement in terms of sanctions and calling out the illegality of the enterprise. Yeah. I mean, speaking of international legal pressure, last month, we spoke about the case of the International Court of Justice that had been brought by South Africa accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. This week, hearings wrapped up in a different...

case that had originally been brought against Israel in 2022, which questioned if Israel is violating international law through the way it has controlled lands in the West Bank, Gaza, and occupied Jerusalem for the last 50-plus years. So the scope is huge because there's like 50 countries participating. Israel has refused to take part in the proceedings. The U.S. position is basically the ICJ should not be attempting to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through an advisory opinion that is just based on a case made by the Palestinian side. That said, the outcome could come in a few months. It would be non-binding. But we talked with Ona Hathaway again. She's the founder and director of the Center for Global Legal Challenges at Yale Law School.

And she talked to us about just the wide-ranging potential legal ramifications from this case. Here's what Ona had to say. If the decision says that summer all of the actions Israel's undertaken in occupied territories or in Palestine, depending on how you see it, are unlawful, then that could have an impact on all the organs of the General Assembly. So all the different bodies of the General Assembly then take that decision under advisement, and it may affect the ways in which those organs are willing to interact with Israel. And, you know, Philippe Sands, in what is one of the more powerful presentations that were given before the court,

basically called on all states not to support and assist Israel, going forward. And he said that the right of self-determination requires that member states bring Israel's occupation to an immediate end. And he said, no aid, no assistance, no complicity, no contribution by forcible actions, no money, no arms, no trade, no nothing. That's what he called on member states to do. And I think that that's what Halstine is hoping it will get out of this, is that if there is a decision by the court that the actions by Israel are illegal, then that is going to cause a cascade, that's the hope of the advocates of this position,

to lead states to pull back support and assistance for Israel as long as that occupation and certainly as long as this conflict continues. Pretty remarkable. Yeah. The complexities this could create for U.S. policy, both these cases. Well, you know, the U.S. is kind of an actor to it as well because we are the ones that are providing, you know, the bulk of the military assistance to Israel.

And so the U.S. government could find itself kind of dragged into these legal proceedings. And look, I think whatever your view of this, the reality is, you know, the kind of talking points loop of the U.S. government, at least under this administration, wouldn't be under Trump, is about the rules-based order. and this is the enterprise that is the rules-based order, even, you know, and the criticism always of the U.S. is we like a rules-based order when we're enforcing the rules on other countries.

Again, I think what this could do is lead to a further fracturing of whatever used to be the rules-based order because we seem to be moving further and further into reality in which all different big, powerful states just are being pretty selective on the menu of the rules that they choose to follow in the times that they do. And so one outcome could be a further fracturing of the international system that the U.S. frankly built after World War II. And I think whatever happens, I think that is a likely outcome.

It just depends on how much that happens. Yeah. Fascinating to watch. Let's talk about the reaction by Iran and its proxy groups to the war in Gaza. So a few weeks back, an Iranian proxy group fired a drone at a U.S. base in Jordan that killed three U.S. service members. That was one of at least 170 attacks on U.S. troops in the Middle East since mid-October, and part of this drastic escalation by Iranian forces since the war started in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. The U.S. responded to that strike in Jordan with airstrikes in Iraq and Syria against these Iranian-linked proxy groups, and there have been just wave after wave of air strikes in Yemen.

The idea was deter attacks on U.S. personnel or in the case of the Houthis, attacks on ships in the Red Sea. So the New York Times had a piece this week, kind of looking at the results. And they found that since the U.S. response in Iraq and Syria, there have been no attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq and only two minor attacks in Syria. So that's good. The Times reported that the head of the IRGC went to Baghdad and told these militia groups basically to dial it down because they didn't want a direct war with the U.S. and because Iranian officials believed it would distract from Gaza. I think they thought they were winning like the PR war in Gaza and they didn't want the focus to be on them. The situation in Lebanon and Yemen is totally different. Hezbollah and Israeli forces are trading shots daily, including there was a Israeli strike 60 miles deep into Lebanon recently.

And then the Houthi rebels in Yemen keep attacking ships in the Red Sea constantly. And the U.S., the U.K., this broader coalition of countries keeps blown up Houthi targets. I think there was one over the weekend. So, Ben, I mean, I don't know, it's hard for me to see what, there's not a clear takeaway from this story, right? But do you have any thoughts about what this says about, like, deterrence, what works? I think that, like, we shouldn't over or underread this news in the sense that it's pretty obvious that the Iranians were kind of watching this escalation happening and got to a place,

even before, by the way, the U.S. strikes because they could feel those coming. you know, Katab Hezboa, the group that was responsible for the strike that killed the U.S. service members was putting out statements being like, okay, we're done. Sorry, our bad. Yeah, yeah. And so it's pretty clear that they want to kind of keep their head down for a little bit here. And I do think it's tied to both this thing that this is escalating kind of beyond what we even envisioned, but also this idea that like, why don't we just keep the focus on Gaza?

But at the same time, I wouldn't overstate it either because there's been an ebbin-free. flow to these things for years. You know, the groups aren't going away. And yeah, the bigger, more powerful ones, which are Lebanese, Hezbollah and the Houthis, they're kind of still at their own pace. And so, yeah, I think for the time being, like, things have calmed a bit in this one area of Iraq and Syria, and that that's good. But I don't think anybody should think that that means that, you know, we've permanently restored deterrence and that these groups are kind of changed their colors. like, or by the way, that the U.S. shouldn't be thinking about whether or not, as we said a few weeks ago, it's a good idea to even have some of these troops in these outposts and places

like Syria. I'd actually be taking advantage of this window to maybe, you know, take a look at that footprint, get some people out of there so that there's not, the next time there's a flare-up, there's not as many vulnerable U.S. service members in the way. But for the time being, you know, it feels like we're, you know, in a downward trajectory in this one area of Iraq and Syria. less so in Yemen and Lebanon. Yeah, I mean, the Times analysis really ascribed a lot of it to Qasem Soleimani,

the former head of the IRGC, who Trump assassinated, kept a lot of these groups on a very tight leash. Yeah. The new guy apparently gave him a lot more room to run. A franchise model. Yeah, which caused some problems for them. But I'm still with you that I think solving the underlying problem in Gaza is the way to manage this for good.

But there was some more rare good news out of Iran been. So there was a new report from the International Atomic Energy Agency or IAEAEA. that shows that Iran has been reducing its stockpile of nuclear weapons grade material. So the Wall Street Journal reported that for the first time since they started producing highly enriched uranium at 60% in 2021. Iran has started to reduce that stockpile by diluting it. If that all sounds like technical jargon, that's okay. It is. Just know that we don't want Iran to have more highly enriched uranium because that's the stuff you use to make a bomb. And the more enriched it is, the more quickly you can do it. This news doesn't mean that their overall program

isn't expanding, it is, but it does seem like a sign of de-escalation to the U.S. and other Western countries who watch these things closely. Ben, reading these reports, it made my like NSC nerd, spidey senses tingle a little bit and wonder if this was some sort of like confidence building effort as part of, I don't know, secret talks we don't know about through Oman or something. I know, is that too hopeful? Too nerdy? No, I think that, look, the Iranians, like you said, they've ramped up their program. Congratulations, Iran deal opponents. They want to have the kind of capability, if they so choose to potentially break glass and maybe get enough material for weapon. They'd have to figure out how to weaponize it.

But what I wonder, the two things, you know, one is are there back channel discussions and is this some kind of signal of, you know, we're not looking for the nuclear crisis now? And maybe there's some diplomatic pathway somewhere with the U.S. towards some version of an Iran nuclear agreement that's probably not as ambitious as the last one. Or, you know, the key partners for the Iranians or the Russians and the Chinese, are they talking to the Russians and Chinese and saying, okay, let's not, like, introduce the nuclear piece to this now, like just, you know, dial it back a little bit, you know, keep the, again, keep the focus on Gaza. That's embarrassing the Americans. That's, you know, obviously undermining Israel standing in the world.

You know, there's got to be some reason for it. Yeah. And I have to think that it's some version of all three, right? Like not looking for the war of the nuclear program at this point. Maybe some consultation with their kind of key partners. And yeah, maybe, maybe some kind of back channel conversations that are just meant to signal a willingness to talk about this. Maybe they could do, get the negotiators some ice cream and like muscat or, you know, I don't know, where else? Switzerland somewhere?

Zurich. That feels like a good. Geneva, Vienna. You know, the last time it was Oman, Geneva, Vienna. Yeah, I went to the Iran deal talks in Geneva, and it was this beautiful chalet on the lake, and just a ton of people smoking SIGs. Yeah. Didn't seem like a lot got done. A lot of smoking at these diplomatic things.

Just ripping butts. That was not good for my health in the white house. Everywhere I looked, I assumed, like, that plant would be like a CIA listening tree, probably because it was. Yeah, you'd be in one of those lobbies, and you'd look around the lobby at these things and think that, like, what percentage of the people in this lobby are in some intelligence? 110%. Yeah. Yeah. Like a dude with like a flower lapel pointing.

that's you. Exactly. A lot of listening. Don't think that your AirPods aren't connected to nine phones in that lobby. Oh, absolutely. Okay, we're going to take a quick break, but it's an important news, Ben. So on March 7th at the State of the Union, remember when you had to write those fucking awful things? Eight of those I worked on. It's got to be some bad record. That's a tough record. This time around, if you want to watch with us, check out the Pod Save America YouTube channel or the Friends of the Pod Discord where you can submit questions for us in the chat. If that sounds like fun to you, go to cricket.com slash friends to learn more.

You can sign up, submit some questions, or just watch along. Group Threat is very fun on the Potsave America YouTube channel. Also, the final episode of Dissident at the Doorstep is available on the Potsay of the World Feed. It is such an amazing story about human rights activists, the outside expectations we put on them to be Western liberals, the inner workings of the U.S. government in competing interests and values. Just a truly, truly great show. So I hope everyone will check it out. So we talked a lot last week about the war in Ukraine in the run-up to this year anniversary. So we'll go a little shorter on that topic today.

But a couple of things we wanted to flag. First, Hungary officially approved Sweden's entry into NATO. That comes after the Swedish prime minister visited Hungary and announced that Sweden's going to provide Hungary with four Swedish-Nate jets. So that's how deals get done, I guess, Ben. But this along with Finland's entry into NATO last spring means that the NATO presence in the North Sea around the Baltics will be hell of a lot stronger, which Putin will hate. Though I did read that Finland dismantled 90% of its army and 70% of its Navy and air force after the Soviet Union collapsed.

That is a hell of a peace dividend for those guys. And also looks like Dutch Prime Minister Mark Ruta will be the next Secretary General. So anything exciting about him? You're kind of classic northern European. Well, he's been around forever, so he's an obvious choice. You know, the funny thing about the Orban piece is, you know, Orban thinks it makes him look like super strong to like hold up Sweden for a while. But in the end, it kind of looks weak.

You have four planes. Yeah, yeah, because it's like, oh, you know, look at me. I showed that I can like be the spoiler and hold these people out and make the Swedish prime minister come visit me. But at the end of the day, he caves. So I actually don't know that like he looks like such a tough guy, you know. I don't either. You kind of got strong-armed. Yeah.

Congratulations on your four plans. Yeah, way of you, Victor. Have fun at see it back. I was, I will say I was in Sweden. You know, great country. But you're, like, you're aware that under the surface, and it goes back hundreds of years, there's, like, a Viking thing happening under the surface. It should hit the fan.

Talking DNA or volcanoes? I'm talking about it. I'm talking about it. Like, the shit hit the fan. I wouldn't want to, you know, I wouldn't have fucking out. Like, the beards are going to grow and the swords could come out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're going to take you out.

Yeah. They're some serious dudes. Yeah, I mean, just watch Thor. I mean, and the Norwegians are involved in this, the Danes. I mean, it's not just the Swedes. but I'm just saying that these people, you know, they're reasonable and peaceful people, but, you know, there's a little arrogant in there.

There's some foreign, like, Viking comedy on Netflix at the moment that I tried to get into. I didn't take, but I'm going to go back. I'd be curious to the pitch meeting on that. That's what I made over there. Okay, the other thing about it, but I wanted to flag is just there's been a lot of news on just the astronomical casualty count from this war. So President Zelensky announced that 31,000 Ukraine,

soldiers have died in the last two years. A lot of analysts think the real number is even higher than that. On the Russian side, a Russian military blogger recently said that Russia lost 16,000 troops just during the battle for Abdivka, along with 300 armored vehicles. So 16,000 deaths in a battle for a place that everyone involved says has like symbolic value, but limited strategic value. So of course, like Russia's bigger, that is a bigger population. It's like three times the size of Ukraine and Putin conscripted around 300,000 guys in 2022. So I guess on paper, he can afford to lose all these people, but it's still shocking. And then on the Ukrainian side, they're debating whether to pass a new modified conscription bill. Apparently the military asked for 450,000 to 500,000 new troops.

Zelensky's not sure. It's workable. According to Michael Kaufman, who's a military analyst who focuses on Russia and Ukraine, the average age of Ukrainian soldier is over 40 years old. Can you imagine like being on the front lines for weeks and weeks and weeks at our age. And they're, they desperately need more troops. Zolensky is worried about calling up these young guys because of what it would do to the economy, what losing that generation would mean for Ukraine's future as a state and the uncertainty of whether the U.S. is going to be around to actually train and assist these guys. So I just wanted to flag that then because like obviously the human death toll is so awful. But also to make the point that one, I mean, again, like even you

Ukraine's ability to call up more troops is dependent on this U.S. fight in Congress. And two, when you hear about the status quo as is, it's just it's not a recipe for a stalemate in the long run. It's a setup where Ukraine is going to lose the war absent more support and like some serious internal changes as well. Yeah. And I mean, on the Ukrainian side, they've had this kind of theory of, you know, fighting for every inch of territory. and bleeding the Russians. But the reality is I don't know that they can continue to fight the war that way.

They just don't have as many people, even if the casualty count is higher on the Russian side, that's not how wars are won or lost. And so I think they're going to have to be more selective about how and where they go on the offense and the nature of the defense that they use because there's just more Russians. And there's a willingness from Putin,

I think, to do whatever he needs to do from a conscription basis. and given his kind of total dictatorial control, he doesn't have to worry about fractures in the society in the same way. Now, on the Russian side, I don't think he has to worry in the near term about sustaining the war effort.

It's in the medium and longer term, as we talked about last week. What is going to happen to the communities that are losing all these people? Right. It's unbelievable. And that, I think, is a real threat to Russia internally in the not too distant future.

And I don't know that that's, I don't mean that that's some strategy for Ukraine to win the war. But it's something to watch. Like, I just don't know what Russia is going to look like in five years. If they've lost hundreds of thousands of people, that's widows, that's people that are lost to the economy, that's veterans returning home with wounds and issues. You know, the bill will come due for this incredible loss on the Russian side. The question is just how and when.

Yeah, I mean, so in Ukraine, men between the ages of 18 and 26 can't be drafted, but they're encouraged to volunteer. Men between 27 and 60 years old can be drafted and forced to mobilize. They're kind of debating whether to adjust the ages under conscription laws. But part of the challenge is exactly what you were just describing, which is that Ukraine just has a much lower percentage of this population in that younger generation. And they're worried about just hollowing out the future of the country. Yeah. Killing off the people who would live there and like keep the. this day going. Yeah, and will people return? And they also have the question of how long do people stay in? Because, I mean, some of these people have been like two years in front line, like you said,

and like there's got to be some ability for them to rotate out. I mean, people have to see their families, people have to, they need a break, you know. Yeah, yeah. Last week, we also talked a lot about Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption activist who was murdered in a Russian penal colony on February 16th. Some updates there. So according to Nalny's team, his body has now finally been returned to his mother. She had been in this awful public battle with prison officials. She was trying to locate the body,

then get them to release it to her. It was awful. Prison officials were putting conditions on the release. They were telling his mother that she had to agree to a secret funeral or else he would be buried at this penal colony. Now Navalny's team is saying they're unable to find a venue in Russia that will hold his funeral for him. They're like releasing videos, trying to ask

anyone for help. And they want to hold a public service at the end of this week. Nivalny's team has also said that negotiations for his release as part of a prisoner exchange were in the final stages before his death. That was supposedly a deal that would have included Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gerskovich and security executive Paul Whalen, who's been detained for several years. They were all in exchange for a man named Vadim Krasikov, a Russian convicted of killing a former Chechen separatist fighter in Germany. So it sounds like the U.S. and the Germans might have been talking about the outwe. lines of this deal, obviously, since the Germans are holding the guy that the Russians want.

But the U.S., the scoring NBC News, the U.S. hadn't yet approached the Russians about this deal yet. I don't know what to make of this report. I'm skeptical that Putin would release Navalny. And I'm also skeptical that he would kill Navalny to scuttle a deal that he would have had to approve anyway. But I don't know. What do you make about this? I don't.

I just don't think that that was going to happen. I mean, I don't think Putin would. Putin swaps people that he says are spies. Evinger squirts is not, but they categorize it. that way. Releasing a Russian opposition leader for one guy, it's clear the Russians want that guy. He came up in the Britney Griner context. Yeah.

But I just think that that's highly unlikely. I will say, like, when you watch this stuff about the body and you watch this absurdity of them saying that Navalny died of natural causes and then not wanting to have a public funeral, again, like, for a guy who's supposed to be in such control here, what is he so scared of? You know, I mean, there's a paranoia, there's a pettiness, but also a paranoia, like, that they clearly feel like they have to keep the lid on so tight. It might be because they sense that if you allow the lid to peek up an inch, like it could explode. And so I think in death, Navalny is once again illustrating the kind of weakness of Putin in a lot of ways.

I don't want to overstate that in Putin's in control. But it is the case that, like, if you can't even allow for there to be a funeral. for somebody because you're so afraid of what that would be like, maybe you're not as firmly in control as you're projecting to the rest of the world into Tucker Carlson and the Moscow metro. Yeah, it does seem so petty and so small. And we talked last week about how they were, you know, security officials were beating up people just like putting down flowers at memorials and things. You know, it's just brutality.

Speaking of Russia, Ben, so it's election season's coming up. We've got artificial intelligence making it easier than ever to make fake images and audio and videos. And then NBC's... You make good ones, huh? Thank you. I've heard them, yeah. I did not make the Biden robocall, but I wish I had. Mine would have been funnier.

Yeah. NBC News had a story on Monday. The headline was Russia's 2024 election interference has already begun. That is mostly about Russia using these fake online accounts and bot networks to spread disinformation or just real negative stories about Biden or Democrats or anyone who wants to support Ukraine or NATO. The Russians are doing similar things in Europe ahead of the European parliamentary elections in June. But Ben, it gets even we're even we recently learned that the key Republican witness

in their farce of an impeachment effort against President Biden has ties to Russian intelligence. Here's a clip from Congressman Jamie Raskin. Now we know that Russian intelligence operatives were behind creating the propaganda and disinformation at the very foundation of this investigation. So I think it's time for Chairman Comer and the Republicans to fold up the circus tent and we should get back to work for the American people. Certainly it was a shattering revelation yesterday. when we learned that Smyrnav was collecting his information from Russian intelligence operatives

that were at the very base of this whole investigation. Yesterday's revelations demonstrate that Putin's pattern of interference and destabilization of foreign democratic elections around the world, including in America, has continued to this very day. And this impeachment investigation is nothing but a wild goose chase that is based on Russian disinformation and propaganda. There's a little background. named Alexander Smyrnoff. He was a trusted FBI informant who'd been paid by the U.S. government for information about like an oligarchs, officials, whatever. In June of 2020, so in the

middle of the last presidential election, Smyranoff told the FBI that the owner of Burisma, the big Ukrainian energy company that's been swirling around all the stories about Hunter Biden, had paid Joe Biden and Hunter Biden $5 million each to stop an investigation into Brezma or to have Joe Biden do it when he was vice president. The FBI is now indicted Smirnoff for lying because, because those allegations were made up. It was very easy to call him on this lie. Smirnoff said he met with Burisma officials in 2015 and 2016, but the FBI knew he met them for the first time in 2017. There were lies about where he traveled. And prosecutors also said that the information Smirnoff shared about the Bidens came from officials associated with Russian intelligence.

So Smirnoff's allegations, like they quickly leaked to the right-wing press and to Republicans. So the House Republicans doing the impeachment, they demanded these FBI documents about, you know, what he had told them. They then went public with them. Now they look like fucking morons because this guy was clearly a Russian intel op. Ben, even describing all of that to you is exhausting. It makes me have 2017 PTSD. But it's obviously also like a huge deal that these guys are already trying to mess with our elections or I guess. And got all the way into an impeachment.

The 2020 election. Yeah, got through impeachment. How do you combat this stuff when you have a Republican Party that would clearly rather destroy Joe Biden than guard against it? Well, I think, I don't know. I mean, there's these different categories, right? Because first of all, in the information space, it's just a cesspool. And what people have to recognize is that the Russians don't create the origin of a lot of these conspiracy theories. They see what's happening in our weird right-wing fever dream ecosystem.

and they come in and basically just pour gasoline on it and try to turbocharge conspiracy theories and anti-Biden content. They'll be doing that and they'll be doing a lot of that. And AI, like you said, makes it easier for them to do that. I mean, there's some efforts that are underway to at least try to label the AI. You know, water market.

So, and this came up, and I was in Munich in part, you know, to be in some of these conversations because, you know, at a minimum, you know, people should know. I mean, the sad thing for me is that Twitter actually last time was labeling state-sponsored content. You know, now it's like an obsessible of Elon Musk. It's the worst.

But so one thing on the information space is you'd like to at least be able to empower people with the information about where this is coming from. I do worry this time about whether the Russians given the stakes are very high for them. What do they do around the election itself? You know, is there much more dis and misinformation about, you know, voting or their efforts to kind of interfere with the voting process itself? So you have to kind of watch that space. And then on this stuff, I mean,

I don't know, Tommy, like the thing that is really frustrating and probably obvious is that there's such an over-the-top effort by Trump and his allies to kind of make all the Russia stuff feel like it was overtorked and it was a hoax and that people, you know, and I've even internalized it. I haven't. Well, and look, again, I hate to call out trolling, but like, you know, Glenn Greenwald's been like after me for years because I said something about the laptop being part of a Russian disinformation campaign, which, you know, some of it was. Like, like, this guy was a part of, you know, there's this, this policing of the, the center left and left on this stuff that if you, like, if you get, like, anything is overcranked at all,

you're cast as like a lunatic. And yet, actually the underlying truth is still there. Like, they're Russian agents spreading disinformation to the point that they're literally the basis of impeachment of the President of the United States. And so. Pretty got ineffective. I just think that we need to not be,

that, you know, self-constrained. Sure, we need to be careful and not make statements that we don't have information about or don't have credible information about. But, like, don't let them work the refs so hard that we're not at least calling out, like, hey, this is what's happening, you know? Yeah, and it's a good point. I do think that, and this is more of a just an online phenomenon. But, like, we probably shouldn't have called Mitch McConnell, Moscow, Mitch. No, and we didn't need, like, Bob Mueller and, like, a superhero's uniform next to, like, what's his name, Michael, Evan Anato. Yeah.

Wow, good call back. The kind of stupidity of some of that stuff undermined the fact that there really was some real, not just smoke. There's a lot of fire there, too. And it'll be here at this election too. And not everyone who disagrees with Biden's Ukraine policy is a Russian student, right? Like, there's good faith disagreement.

But also, two weeks before Salakia's parliamentary elections in September, there was a fake audio clip showing like, you know, that purported to show a pro Western party was trying to rig the election. It was all made up in bullshit. But like, that's going to happen. guess what? Like the pro-Russian autocrat won the Slovakian election. I mean, so this stuff is real and has a real impact. And the only anybody we can think of is just trying to empower people with as much information as you can, knowing that even that is going to be out in this crazy space where there's no objective reality.

Yeah. Speaking of far right weirdos abroad, let's talk about CPAC, the conservative political action conference. It just ended. It was, you know, your standard right wing buffet. of the bigotry bullshit in like Trump worship. Trump spoke for an hour and a half. A bunch of literal Nazis attended. They mingled with guests. They were like goose stepping around and like doing the salute thing. Once again, there were a smattering of right-wing leaders.

There was Liz Truss, the idiot who was British prime minister for like six minutes. There was Javier Mule, the right-wing anarcho-capitalist president of Argentina. There was the Bitcoin community's favorite dictator, Naibu Kali, from El Salvador. We wanted to play you a couple of clips from Buckely's speech to just get at how weird it was to have these guys come to the U.S. Talk about kind of being autocrats publicly, all but endorsed Trump in the kind of Maga-Bannon worldview. Here's a couple clips. Let's go with the first. The global elites, they hate our success and they fear yours.

The people's free will to choose their leaders is something they despise. because they cannot control that. You have experienced this firsthand here in the United States. The global elites control the mainstream media. They finance campaigns. District attorneys, to mention a few. They abuse their powers. They persecute political opponents.

In Osama, we don't weaponize our judicial system to persecute our political opponents. A practice that's a practice that may sound familiar to you, but we don't do that there. And who's the dictator? That's a little joke. Who's the dictator?

How weird is it here like at us versus them with a president of a foreign country versus like democracy or Democrats? I guess, you know, first of all, what it does kind of demonstrate, though, is that there, and this is another, we, you know, poking a little at the resistance that, you know, we were part of.

I think there was this effort to kind of cast Trump as his buffoon, you know, who kind of was dangerous, but, you know, a bit of an outlier to anything we'd seen in America. Now, this is like, there's a real ideology behind it that, like, Buckele and Mule, these guys, like the fact that it travels around to such different places, you know, Trump is as much a reflection of something happening in the world as he is somebody driving it. I mean, there's just this kind of anti-globalist, anti-elese, anti-elie. autocratic populism that travels and that has like a potency to it that needs to be taken

seriously even if it's totally hypocritical right i mean bukele like trump is projecting he does all those things he persecutes opponents he's got people in prison so i'm not suggesting it's true march troops into parliament yeah yeah yeah this guy's like yeah so like it but it like let's you know this is going to be around for a while and and actually that's my second point which is that we we don't do this Why don't we do this? Why don't, I'm not saying we have a CPAC that says crazy, but like there's this reticence to kind of, you know, align with political parties and movements around the world. Like I'd like there to be some gathering of, I mean, I've been to some of them, but they're like much more muted than this. I mean, I, my-

The US president probably doesn't speak at them, right? Like, Trump's stamping like his reputation imprimatur on this thing, getting a lot of eyeballs there. Like, that makes a difference. Yeah, my point is that the devil's. Democratic Party in this country needs to feel more invested in the success of center-left and left politicians around the world and need not be shy about it because, look, these guys are very coordinated. They're sharing messaging. They're sharing media strategies. They're sharing resources.

And we're just not doing that at the scale that we should be. And so weirdly, we could learn something from CPAC. Yeah. And, like, we have one more clip. I'll just summarize it because we're going a little long. But like, Bukali has like a minute long extended riff about George Soros. And it's just fascinating that these guys have all found a common enemy to like bring this group of right-wing zealots.

A man in his 90s, you know? It's like, when I was listening to BBC World podcast, they were running around TEPAC talking to people. Like these folks now all oppose Ukraine funding. They're all like big Bolsonaro fans, right? There's like a herd mentality on foreign policy where they're all getting behind the same things. Yeah.

And it's what they're doing that's interesting and smart is people are sick of globalization for some good reasons. The inequality that's been created, the sense that the system is broken and doesn't work anymore. Now, what they're doing is they're somehow tying all this to like George Soros, who's not, I mean, it's basically an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. And that's the other thing I'd say is that like all the people that are so concerned about like campus anti-Semitism, like, why don't you look over here where the actual not. Nazis are showing up. Literal Nazis. And even the leaders are like engaging, you know, saying there's like a shadowy financier Jewish man pulling the strings.

But like, so you have to separate out the crazy and the bigotry from what is them connecting to because the problem for center of left parties right now is we're like the defenders of the establishment, you know, like, how dare you impugn the integrity of the intelligence community? And it's like that's a little like no offense to the intelligence community, but that's not like the politically smart place to be these days. Not a winning message. We're also like usually hodgepages and coalitions that are multi-ethnic and different views, etc. A couple more quick things, Ben. So the New York Times reported that American law enforcement officials spent years investigating allegations that President Lopez Obrador, Amlo, the president of Mexico, had met with and taken millions of dollars from drug cartels after he took office.

Apparently, these investigators found links between the cartels and officials close to Amlo, but no connection to Amlo himself. so there was never a formal investigation. ProPublica also recently reported that in 2006, the DEA heard allegations that drug traffickers had donated to Amlowe's campaign at the time. So this all became public, and Amlo did a press conference to respond, and he took it about as well as you'd expect.

He denied all the charges, and he even read the New York Times-Mexico Bureau Chiefs phone number allowed on TV during the press conference. Obviously, you want to laugh at that because it's sort of peccullin and diggish. He's like, remember when Trump did that? That's a Lindsey Graham. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, that was actually pretty good. But in Mexico, you got a lot of reporters are getting murdered. It's actually illegal to doc someone like that in Mexico's from now investigating Onlo for doing this stupid shit. Anyway, not great all around. The allegations, the response, all of it. Ben, we should note that the former president of Honduras

is currently on trial in New York for drug trafficking. So it's not unprecedented to prosecute a former head of state. But could you imagine what would have happened if they tried to bring charges against a sitting head of state like this, how the fuck would that work? Yeah, and a very popular one of a big, important country that is absolutely essential to any effort to deal with our border or deal with the cartels. So it was interesting that this kind of leaked out.

I'm kind of curious, like, were people that were investigating it disgruntled and they put it out? The fact that the U.S. kind of furiously backtrack, I mean, it shows you how much they need Mexico. We can't solve any of these problems without Mexico. And so Amo has a lot of leverage in this case. Yeah, he really does. you'd be like, come and get me.

Yeah. Let's see it. Speaking of corrupt presidents, former French president, Nicholas Sarkozy, was found guilty of illegally overspending during his 2012 2012 presidential campaign.

How many crimes is that guy, you know, like, buffet. Yeah, well, it is buffet. He's going to appeal this one. He might get like six months

in his house with an ankle monitor, but whatever. Is he still married to Carla Breit? I wondered that too. I don't know. We should look that up. We should check that. But to your point,

in 2023, he was found guilty of trying to bribe a judge, and next year, he's going to get tried for illegal taking money from now deceased Libyan dictator, Omar Gaddafi.

So that's a pretty big one. Yeah. Especially given how much, you know, Sarkozy wanted to take him out at the time. Not exactly a master criminal here. No. Not very good a job. Ben, remember back in 2018, the Saudis executed the Washington Post opinion writer Jamal Khashoggi.

Yes. And felt like there was a sea change. Business leaders wouldn't do business with the Saudis. Some CEOs refused to go there or attend there. Davos in the Desert Investment Conference. I have some bad news for you. A couple years and a few trillion dollars can make a hell of a lot of difference. So now we have Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salomon's personal think tank, the Future Investment Initiative Institute.

What a name. It's holding conferences here in the United States, including last week in Miami. The topics were notionally big ideas like AI or climate change, but really it was just a bunch of starfuckers who wanted Saudi money. We had Gwyneth Paltrow was there. Rob Lowe, the CEOs of Blackstone and Palantir. Some former Trump, I'm going to try to trigger you now, former Trump officials like Jared Kushner, Mike Pompeo, Steve Mnuchin.

According to a great report by a friend of the pod, Jonathan Geyer and the American prospect, Larry Summers and Eric Schmidt did a panel where they reminisced about how much they missed Henry Kissinger. Is this working? God, it's all my favorites. The hits just keep on coming, Tommy. Some American journalists hosted panels,

hopefully not about bonesaws. Gwyneth was unironically talking about fighting the patriarchy during the Saudi hosted event. So, Ben, I get the only silver lining here, I guess, is according to Jonathan, there were like only 50 people watching this live stream, this event that cost like millions. But I don't know, man, like, what's the lesson? Money always wins? Yeah.

It's so depressing. It's really depressing. I mean, and, you know, what I'd say is, like, how much is enough? I mean, we said this before, but, like, Gwenith, you're doing fine with the goop. So much money. Is it really worth the appearance fee? Like, you just sell your group and be cool with it. Rob Lowe, like West Wing, like, you know, filled everybody with an earnest idealism.

What would Sam Seaborne have said about this appearance at the Davos on South Beach or whatever it was? You know, like, it just, there's other ways to make a living without that appearance fee. And yeah, like the Larry Summers chuckling, like about the good old days with Henry Kissinger, when you could take money from dictators and not get called out about it. I mean, it's just, there's just a got to be a better way. And it, by the way, connects to the C-back thing. Because that's the kind of stuff that people are mad about. Now, obviously, like, it skews right.

I mean, Jared's there and Trump is buddies at these people. But, like, that kind of stuff is what people are, like, looking at as this elite that just is totally out of touch with. And hypocritical. Yeah. It just, you know, it just makes everybody look like hypocrites. It's so maddening. Yeah. It's so maddening.

And they're doing the U.S. under the guise of these think tanks and you know the Saudi sovereign wealth fund is buying teams you know and they're pretending that it's not Muhammad bin Salman pulling the trickles like of course he is of course he's behind all of this it's just the worst he wins we lose

finally that's a life lesson here that's a life lesson finally Ben listeners to the show know that we're big fans of Australia and we're very grateful to the Aussies in particular for filling the back half of this show this portion of the show with lots of fun stories but today we owe you an apology

So an Australian photographer has accused Taylor Swift's father of punching him in the face as Taylor and her crew got off a yacht. Yeah. They were at a wharf in the Sydney area. It was after Taylor's final concert tour. Where the hell was Travis Kelsey is what I want to know playing defense here. So Taylor's dad is 71. He punched a 51 year old photog. The Australian media has this amazing video of Taylor walking with her dad, hiding under an umbrella.

And then her dad gives the photographer the bird in the process. So I don't know what to make of this. My favorite part of the story is that Taylor's spokesperson is quoted everywhere, and her name is tree pain, which makes me wonder if, you know, she's being... Like tree pain? Like she's trying to stop the tree's pain? I don't know. That or she was unfairly maligned for using autotune, but it's actually very talented.

Could be either way. Here's what I want to know. Are we going to have to take Hugh Jackman hostage like Putin style so that we can swap him or Taylor Swift or her father? Is there like a legal proceeding though? I mean like I can't imagine it's legal to just wind up and clock a photographer. Well, it's Australia. Yeah, actually that's true.

Maybe that's all part of the. Maybe that's the way to look at this whole incident. It's like this is going to go over there. You get in a fist fight after the yacht comes in and everybody like talks about it for a while and then, you know, moves on. I mean. Yeah. I don't know what to make of it. It feels a little aggressive for the Taylor Swift's Dad.

Yeah. I mean, where's Jason Kelsey with his shirt off? I don't know. Just kind of taking up a lot of space so you can't get a picture. They could have beaten up everybody. I don't know. We'll see what happens. I have been listening to Colin Hay from Men It Works solo stuff a lot recently.

Truly great. I didn't know that there was solo stuff. Well, some of them are like Men at Work songs that he just does like acoustic in places. I listen to that. Excellent. Yeah, that is excellent. Excellent. Excellent.

Thank you TikTok for injecting that. Maybe what the solution is is that Taylor lets him be the opening act at the next. Colin Shea? Who's the headliner? Well, you know, it depends on what demographic you are. Depends on where you are. Yeah, yeah, exactly. If you're in Sydney, maybe it's Colin. Yeah.

That's probably Taylor anyway. It's probably Taylor. Okay, well, good luck with that, Australia. We hope you sorted it out. We're going to take a quick break and we come back. You will hear Ben's interview about all the things that are happening in Myanmar. So stick around for that. So it's now been three years since a military coup in Myanmar ousted the elected

government of Aung San Suu Kyi. That followed, of course, like a brew. period of ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya, during which Aung San Suu Kyi was silent. And since the coup, we've seen a bloody civil war that the UN estimates has led to the displacement of 2.6 million further people. Interestingly, in recent months, things have been shifting against the military junta inside of the country. So joining me to talk about the latest developments and where this is all leading is a terrific

activist and advocate, Wai Wainu, who is a human rights activist from Myanmar and the director and founder of the Women's Peace Network. It's so good to see you again after a few years, Wai. So good to see you too. Thank you for having me. So I want to start with the situation just generally in Myanmar, and then we'll also talk about the situation for the Rohingya people, beginning in Myanmar, so it's been three years since the coup. Since then, I think to a lot of analysts, you know, opposition forces seem to have shown a surprising strength in the Civil War. In recent weeks, there have been reports of thousands of young people trying to find a way out of the country to avoid a new conscription law that the military is trying

to use to regenerate manpower. That conscription move follows gains made by various rebel groups across the country who've been uniting and taking territory. The exiled government, the national unity government, that's the opposition force of the kind of umbrella over the opposition, now says that some 60% of Myanmar's territory is under the control of resistance forces. So just starting there, Wai, based on your contacts and what you're following, what is your sense of the situation? Is it the case that the junta is kind of losing control? How do you assess what's happening in the country? Indeed, we have to acknowledge that the junta, the hunter was never able to control the country and consolidate its powers since the attempted coup in February 2021.

Due to their popular resistance to it, now add into this collective military operations by the ethnic arms group. It's become even harder to retain control of the territory, which we see they are losing by the day. And it also shows how the Myanmar military or junta is weaker than many thought. At the same time, we have also seen that Hunter uses every possible means to maintain the power, including commissions of serious international crimes such as crimes against humanity war crimes through their discriminated uses of forces as shellings against the civilians and villages, widespread and systematic arrest, detentions, killing rapes, and so on. And now the latest information we are documenting is that the junta actually arresting

young people on the street in the villages across the country. And that is why many of them are lining up in front of the embassies and even to the point that resulted in unfortunate death of young people. So there are a lot of optimistic view around what is going on, and people are still hopeful and committed to defeat the military. However, we are also extremely concerned about the situations on the ground, the impact on the women, young people, and the people of Burma. So there is a mixture of feeling among the people, although people are committed and united to defeat them, but we also have to acknowledge this, the catastrophic situations and find ways to end or to resolve the crisis in Burma as soon as possible.

So I'm curious about your view of the opposition forces, you know, for people who don't follow this that closely over the years. It was always the case in Myanmar, Burma or Myanmar, that we can use that interchangeably, that you had these ethnic armed groups who were in conflict with the military. And what I've noticed since the coup in 2021 is a greater degree of unity among different ethnic groups that are fighting and also among some Burmese who have joined forces with ethnic armed groups to oppose the junta. So you have kind of a bigger tent, if you will, over these opposition forces who've put aside differences in some cases to fight together against the junta or to fight at least from a shared cause. What is your assessment? How much is there a new sense of unity in forces opposing the junta? How much does the national unity government kind of reflect those opposition forces?

And do you think that that can be sustained going forward? It is incredible that we achieve this level of unity and common understanding among the different ethnic groups and different political groups. After these attempted coup in 2021, people across the country have started to realize the military is common enemy and we must defeat the military. basically we must be able to dismantle current military institutions, which have been in control, a full or in part for six, seven decades. And they are the main sources of many atrocities to the economic poverty, to the situations in general in the country, the repressive military institutions.

institutions. So that's the common understanding. Then once we are able to dismantle the current military institution, then there will be a political negotiation. And it is already happening among the different diverse political actors and ethnic groups. And then we will have a security sector reform that will include the reformations of the military. At the same time, the current revolution, what we have also, being witnessing is that the young people of Burma, especially the Burman young people, are not only talking about military dictatorship at this point and reinstating or replacing a new form of government, but we are talking about the eliminations or ending all form of dictatorships. So not just the military dictatorship. So it's the revolution we call it. It's not just about fight against the military, it's the fight against ideology around the authoritarianisms or all forms of dictatorship. So young people are committed to really building a true democratic values, inclusive democracy, federal democracy, that assure equality and justice and peace for

every communities and individuals in Burma. So, you know, that includes. for for instance, the gender equality and in patriarchy and so on. So that's why I think for me I'm very optimistic in a way how far we are able to come and how far we can actually go for the future of the country. It's not just about the political actors that are important in finding solutions in Burma, but also young people, the younger generations of this country who are committed to build a new future for all of us. Yeah, no, I mean, for people, again, who don't follow us closely, I mean, you're describing a much more radical and I think necessary transition to an inclusive society than the past transition to democracy or partial democracy was essentially the military maintained a lot of power and made kind of a deal. with Aung San Suu Kyi and her political party to relinquish some of that power, but it didn't

kind of entrench this military hold on a lot of the society and economy or the kind of Buddhist nationalism that was evident in the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya that you have represented as an activist. So that does speak to a moment in which the ambition in response to the coup has actually gotten greater with respect to democracy. I'm interested. in the situation for the Rohingya, nobody suffered more over the years in Myanmar than your community. First of all, do you find that there's a greater inclusivity of Rohingya in this vision of a future of Myanmar? And how much of your community remains inside those borders versus how much is in Bangladesh and in other countries? Yeah, right now, there are about 600,000 Rohingya

remain in Myanmar, inside Myanmar, across different cities in Rakhine states. Specifically, there are about 130,000 internally displaced Rohingya in Situay, Chaupew, and a few other cities. Outside, in Bangladesh, there are approximately 1 million Rohingya living in mostly squalid refugee camps, and there are several hundred thousands in other countries. like Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, and Thailand and other neighboring countries. People are risked in their life and to take this very dangerous journey to find a safe haven. And the UNXCR actually said that in their report,

23 was the deadliest year of the Rohingya Sea crossing. So that's the situations on the ground. And now with everything happening besides the humanitarian crisis and catastrophe, in the political discussions and political future, where is Rohingya lies? I do believe that until unless we're able to secure equality and future for the Rohingya community in Burma, which is one of the most persecuted and the most, as you mentioned, the community, the community, that suffered the most. If we're not able to protect them, if we're not able to secure a future for the Rohingya community and equality and equal rights of Rohingya, I don't think we'll be able to find a peaceful future or democratic future that all of us, the entire country, is envisioning. But the Rohingya, it is not just that they lost the political rights and basics,

human rights in Burma for over the past decade, but also it's all, they become actually the victims and survivors of serious international crimes, such as genocide and crimes against humanity, as was acknowledged by the UN and as well as the US government. So I think that when we find solution for the Rohingya, when we have any political discussions around the Rohingya, it's not we have to figure out, we have to actually pursue two parts. One, political dialogues and political discussions, how do we integrate, reintegrate Rohingya into the Burmese society and assure equal rights, including the political rights,

which we already had in the past. At the same time, how do we bring justice and accountability and how do we repair the harm that has been done to the Rohingya community? Yeah. Well, so last question here. I mean, you paint a picture of both really dire circumstances for people and violence and atrocities being committed. And at the same time, there's some hope in the sense that you have this unity among different forces and this progress that's been made in fighting back. The last question when asked is, what should external countries be doing? The United States, obviously, what policies would you like to see the United States pursue? And I know, what policies would you like to see the United States pursue? And I know, also the Southeast Asian countries, ASEAN, the block of Southeast Asian countries is a key actor. What would you like to see from foreign governments that could help push this in the right direction? There are many, many ways that the U.S. governments and ASEAN, the country in the regions, can actually support the Burma. One, the neighboring countries should basically provide the people of Burma with more

protections and more sustainable path until we are able to go back to Burma. The situations in Bangladesh is so dire. The conditions in the camps become extremely concerning over the past several years. And the situations in Thailand, it's been extremely difficult for the Burmese diaspora and refugees in Thailand to obtain any kind of documentation. or to be legal to be able to remain in Thailand for for in the meantime for a while until we're able to go back So you know all of these neighboring countries are very important for us We people of Burma need their support at this point and

And the last thing would like to see is they Engaging with the hunter and legitimizing hunter's power because that will not resolve crisis in Burma That will only empower the junta and exacerbate and prolong the military dictatorship and prolong the humanitarian crisis. So what we want to see from the U.S. is U.S. working with this strategically important country for people of Burma and listen to our demands. There are so many of them, including now that Thailand is trying to do the humanitarian corridor

through the Myanmar Red Cross, which is under control of military, we're saying that Thailand shouldn't do it because it is, the Myanmar Red Cross is controlled by the, under the Hunter's authorities. Instead, Thailand should work with the civil society and stakeholders on the ground, including ethnic leaders, organizations and ethnic political organizations, to be able to provide the,

humanitarian assistance to people who need it. And when it's come to the Rohingya refugees, and there hasn't been any coordinated or collaborated effort to provide protections, especially to address the boat crises, and I think there should be a lot more could be done. A lot more could be done in this regard. There should be a coordinated effort

to do search and rescue missions when necessary and to provide necessary protections and safety procedures to their refugees. And right now, I mean, U.S. have done actually a lot, and we acknowledge that. There has been a lot of sanctions in the past several years since the coup. And now that we're looking for a more effective and coordinated actions, sanctions around aviation fuel and supply change area around the aviation fuel, as well as the helping the Rohingya. So we want to see UN Security Council resolutions under Chapter 7, which is binding and

enforceable, which include addressing the justice and accountability and in impunity and prosecutions of the serious crimes that military has committed. So, you know, there are there are a lot of, a lot of things that can be done. And we are talking about it, engaging with the U.S. government, but we like to see a more rigorous and coordinated actions on Myanmar as U.S. is very important country for us. Well, look, that's a great update on a lot of dimensions of this. So we appreciate it. We'll be following this going forward and appreciate all of your activism on this over the years.

It's good to see you. Thank you. Thank you. I hope this is helpful and hope to see you again. Thanks again to WaiWI Nu for joining the show. Thanks to ONA for talking with us again about the ICJ. It's good to have smart friends you can just reach out to it. Yeah, no, we're building a roster of them.

Can you explain this wildly complicated thing to me in a minute and a half or less? Yeah, better than I ever could. Better than I ever could after years of learning. Thanks to men at work. Yeah. And, you know, don't punch anybody. That's all we got. It's a good rule.

And don't go to any Davos and whatever. Yeah. See at the, see you in Riyadh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, that's it for us. Talk to you soon. If you want to get ad-freg episodes, exclusive content, and more. Consider joining our friends of the pod subscription.

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