Pod Save the World - Crisis in Sudan

Episode Date: April 26, 2023

Ben and Tommy talk about the evacuation of American employees from Sudan, expectations for Ukraine’s spring military offensive and Ron DeSantis’s trip abroad. Then they cover new intelligence about Russian influence in Africa and the ISIS threat in Afghanistan, Chile’s plans to nationalize its lithium industry, how former British PM Boris Johnson nearly gave Queen Elizabeth covid, and how the war on beer spread to Europe. Then Ben interviews Reuter’s Sudan and Egypt Correspondent Nafisa Eltahir about what’s behind the conflict in Sudan and the experiences of people left in Khartom. 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 back to Potta of the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, Joe Biden has announced his reelection bid. Did you see the Republican response? I did not. It was all AI generated video. Oh. Which is was savvy. Were you running the Republican I? I kind of wish I had. I mean, it's smart, right? Because you say the word letters AI and you get cover, but also the sort of like creepy, realistic but not real quality of the imagery. It was like this dystopian hellscape really worked. Well, this could be the first campaign run entirely on AI. You know, like if you think about those targeted annoying emails and text messages, there's no reason AI can't do that better than human. Yeah, I mean, if 2020 was a bunch of candidates, you know, from their basement or from the White House, why not an all-AI campaign?

I mean, think about it, right? Like a lot of campaign functions, like micro-targeting off datasets, those people at chat GPT maybe on something. Robots. Yeah. Robot candidates. We got a lot to cover today. we're going to talk about the crisis in Ukraine.

Ron DeSantis has taken a foreign trip, which seems very fun. The latest from Ukraine, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, is in New York City. The latest leaks of classified Pentagon documents. Some updates from Chile in India, how China's ambassador to France stepped in it and why some are calling former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson an attempted murderer. And by some, I mean me. And then finally, Ben, why beers can't escape cancel culture? And then you did our interview this morning.

What did you talk about? Tell us everything. I talked to Nefisa Elthahir, who's the Rewarder's correspondent who's been covering Sudan. So we talked about the Civil War there. She gets a very useful primer on just like who these guys are, how did it get to this moment. We talked a lot about the foreign influence, both before and during this Civil War, chiefly the UAE, our friends there, Egypt, the role of the United States is trying to play. And just kind of what life is like.

You know, she's been in an out of cartoon. She's talking to people there, obviously. What are people going through? What's the frustration among the Sudanese people who are getting screwed in this whole deal? So if you've been watching this and trying to figure out what's going on, like this is the interview that will, I left feeling much more informed and educated. Good. I want to learn more. It's very scary.

It is. And it doesn't have any endpoint in sight. No, it's like two generals battling out to the death. Zero-sum game, right? Like whoever loses is not, you know, is going to. going to lose a lot of wealth and all their power and maybe their life, right? And so the last Sudanese of war lasted decades. So these are the kinds of stakes we're talking about. Not good. Well, I'm excited to hear that. And in the Department of All Time Awkward Transitions, Ben,

if you're looking for a wardrobe refresh or a gift from the crooked obsessed friend, go to the crooked store. We're looking at you, crooked obsessed friends. We're looking at you, John Joie, militia forces. Just kidding. We've got lots of new stuff inspired by merch inspired by your favorite pods, progressive causes. Check it out, crooked.com slash store. And then a portion from every purchase goes to Vote Save America's No Offer's Fund to support the work of organizers across the country. Okay, Ben, so back to Sudan. You're going to get into all the detail and all the background later in the interview. But I just want to talk to you quickly about the debate over whether the U.S. can or should be evacuating U.S. citizens from Sudan.

So the short version of what's happening, you'll learn more later, is there are two militias fighting. There is the Sudanese military and then a Sudanese militia group called the RSS. They're engaged in all-out warfare for well over a week now. And there have been, you know, a couple brief ceasefires, but it's incredibly violent. It's happening in Khartoum, a capital city of five million people, but is spilled out into rural areas. So it's a catastrophic situation, like you said, for a country that's endured, you know, decades of fighting. So over the weekend, U.S. Special Operations Forces evacuated about 70 remaining American employees from the country. But now the White House is getting criticized for not leaving U.S. forces in

Sudan to help evacuate the estimated 16,000 U.S. citizens who still are there or who live there permanently. According to the Associated Press, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Jordan, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Spain, and Turkey, all have some staff in Sudan to help with evacuations. The U.S. is not doing that. They're instead using intelligence assets, presumably drones, to fly over evacuation routes from Khartoum to the port of Sudan to identify threats and help people get out safely. Obviously, the backdrop here is Afghanistan and the horrible bombing that occurred during that final stage of the evacuation. 13 U.S. troops were killed. About 170 Afghan citizens, many more were injured. You can understand, I think, the White House's hesitation to not

put U.S. troops in harm's way for any longer than is necessary. But you can also tell that the White House is frustrated by, I think, sort of unrealistic expectations of what they can or should be doing in this case. Here's a clip of Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor. We have been as clear, as consistent, and as sustained as we possibly can over the course, not just of this administration, but previous administrations, to tell people about the dangers of living in Sudan. It is not standard practice for the United States to send in the U.S. military into war zones to extract all American citizens. But Americans should understand that we will do, go to great lengths to support and,

facilitate their departure from difficult circumstances, that we will try to protect them from harm as best as we possibly can, but that there should not be a broad expectation of a massive military operation. So I should add that American citizens don't register with the embassy when they go to foreign countries necessarily. You don't know how many people are in another country. You don't know where they are spinning up an operation to get that many people out of Sudan as a massive undertaking.

But where do you think like this expectation came from that the White House or the U.S. government can or should kind of be able to get everyone out of a country at any time. So the point that I'm going to lead up to is that this all comes from deeply, deeply cynical Republican use of politics when it's the national security. I actually have like a big point I want to make about this. But to work up to it, first of all, there's an initial decision of just whether you close in the embassy. And that's a balance, right? Because, you know, safety demands that you remove everybody if there's a threat to them. But once you remove everybody, you do lose some capacity, not just for evacuations, but for diplomacy and for kind of eyes on the

ground and that kind of thing. And I'm sure that's what they're wearing in the situation room, but clearly they made the decision, this is just a war zone. And talking to Nefisa, the diplomats lived right next to where the fighting is. So it's not like they were often some suburban compound, right? They're right in the middle of it. I think there's a couple of things that are tied to the weaponization of national security by this increasingly cynical Republican party over the last 20 years. The first is the degree to which they are going to try to make political points out of any American that is harmed overseas. Benghazi.

Benghazi, after Benghazi, you saw a situation in which there was much less risk that people were willing to take in terms of diplomats, even operating in, forget, war zones, just like semi-dangerous countries, right? And so this dynamic of diplomats going to, behind high walls and being compounded, you know, like, that's not good for diplomacy. But, you know what, if any harm that is done to a U.S. citizen or a U.S. diplomat is going to be a multi-year political freak show, then governments are going to become more risk-averse. And by the way, I think that during the innocence of Muslims video protests, the U.S. Embassy in Sudan was breached by protests. Cartoon, yeah. That was one of the embassiesies was breached.

Now, the second and more important point I want to make is something. really strange has happened in the last 20 years. And again, I think it is tied somewhat to the way that Republicans weaponized national security. At the precise time that the U.S. has been steadily less influential in world affairs, the expectations of the U.S. government to be able to do anything and everything everywhere in the world have weirdly gone up. I know. I noticed that too. So like 20, 25 years ago, I don't think there was a expectation that the United States government should be able to extract any American who's in prison anywhere in the world, rescue any civilians that are any wars on the world like that.

There was a, we lived with a sense that the world was a tough place. Or immediately negotiate some sort of ceasefire or peace agreement in Sudan. I've heard sort of like the smart commentator suggest like, oh, whether the United States, why aren't they solving this right away? Yeah, that's right. And Nefisa breaks us down well, but like the UAE and the Saudis who paid billions of dollars in cash to these people. both boring parties in some cases, and Egypt, the big neighbor to the north of Sudan,

have more influence than the United States does. So we can't snap our fingers and make things happen in Sudan. We can, you know, lean on the military and lean on this militia to allow for our citizens to get out. And I think we are doing that. But it's this cynical deployment, right? The Republicans have set up a dynamic. And it really only features in Democratic administrations.

Because remember, things happen under Trump, like, you know, member of the service members getting killed in Niger. Yeah. That are like weirdly not nearly as significant news events. Trump blamed the generals for it happening. Exactly. Like because the Republican's epitynamic where you damned if you do, you're damned if you don't, right? If you don't rescue every single American living in a war zone, you are failed and you're a symbol of American weakness. if you take the risks necessary to do those types of evacuations, inevitably, someone's probably going to get hurt, as happened in Afghanistan, for instance.

And then they're going to attack you for that. And look, Jake Sullivan is exactly right in this instance. Like, over 10,000 American citizens are living in Sudan. Many of them are dual nationals. We don't know where they all are. Never before has there been an expectation that the U.S. military would somehow hang around a civil war. I mean, Afghanistan was different because we, that was our war. And the people that we needed evacuated are the people that helped us in that war.

So I think there was, as we've said on this podcast, there was like a moral and practical reason why we had to do those evacuations. I have tremendous sympathy, and I've heard from many Sudanese-American friends who have family trying to get out. This is not a lack of sympathy for that. It's just the fact is the U.S. military is not going to do that. Now, what the U.S. should do is surge diplomacy in surrounding countries to help facilitate the people that are making harrowing, you know, 10, 15-hour drives to borders, and then they're going to need a lot of consular help right away. So there are things that you can do to help those people. And push for a seatfire as Tony Blinken has done seemingly successfully. I mean, I don't know, you probably learned

more in the interview. It seems like there's a couple days worth of at least reduced fighting. Reduced fighting, you know, and the question is can anything endure? And I think, you know, we have to have, you know, relatively low expectations about that. But yeah, you want to be reducing the fighting. And that's connected to both being able to have diplomacy to resolve the conflict. but that is also connected to reducing the fighting in the window that a lot of people are trying to get out, right? And so that if people aren't shooting each other and there's not crossfire in places like Khartoum, then people can get out of the city and get on the road, and then you have drones over the road to make sure that there's not risks to people there, and then hopefully have a lot of diplomatic capacity where people are going.

But this is a red herring, this idea that somehow we're going to run evacuations with the military. It's wild, it's truly wild. And just a horrifying situation. Hopefully there is some sort of durable ceasefire because a lot of innocent people are at risk. And, you know, it's a country that's suffered a lot over the last few decades. Yeah.

Don't need this. And the migration challenges that will spill out from it, the refugees and it will be massive. Millions of people. Speaking of cynical right-winger's been, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is taking a foreign trip. Good for him. You do a little backpacking, stay at a hostel,

you know, open his mind a little bit, I think. So he's visiting Japan, South Korea, the UK and Israel. It's ostensibly a trade mission, but it's obviously a campaign. sort of events before he has a campaign. The trip is being paid for by some sketchy public-private organization called Enterprise Florida, which takes money from private donors that it does not disclose and then promotes business in Florida abroad somehow. So DeSantis met with Japanese Prime Minister

Fumio Kishita Monday, and he praised Japan's defense spending. That was sort of the focus there. It doesn't sound like he's going to get a head of state meeting in South Korea or the UK. I mean, South Koreans are in Washington right now, actually. DeSantis might get to meet with Bibi Net and Yahoo while in Israel. It reminded me of... No question. Yeah, no question. You reminded me of Obama's 2008 campaign foreign trip where he went to, I believe, Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Germany, France, in the UK, that's on right?

A bit of a high wire act there. So, DeSantis's itinerary does seem to check a lot of conservative boxes to me, right? Japan and Korea, you rail on China, talk about defense spending. UK, I guess you do a bunch of special relationship talk. Israel, you get your evangelical vote. It is notable that he's avoiding the European Union entirely. What do you make Iran's itinerary here and possible political benefit? Well, I think that, you know, he wants to demonstrate that he can kind of look like some presidential figure on the world stage.

That's the reason for a lot of these trips is just so you can optics. You stand next to like a world leader and you're, you know, I think, honestly, I think part of the reason people go to the UK is it like, you know, there he is in London and. Americans kind of associate that with like our friends in the world. That's true. But like there's also the Republican box checking thing here. So you mentioned the China element. Japan generally Republicans have had like friendly relationships with Japanese governments. He got the meeting with the prime minister, which is like a big get for him.

Notable that the South Koreans kind of don't want to go there. In part, they're having a state visit to the United States. So kind of would be not great to accept that state visit invitation for Joe Biden and then meet Ronda Santos. And look, Bibi, you know, is more than happy to have some Republican come slobber all over him at the same time that he's trying to, like, destroy the democracy in Israel. So you see what's in for Bibi to demonstrate the fealty of the Republican Party to whatever the hell Bibi Nanyahu wants to do. And what's in for Ronda Santos is, you know, he gets the, you know, the BB is like a part of a Republican campaign photo op now. Hey, it may as well be a field organizer for you. Yeah, exactly.

Look, I mean, the reality of the thing is. is that, like, one, I don't think anyone cares that much about this. I mean, we do, right? Like, but, like, I don't know that this is, like, a lot of the DeSantis campaign. Like, he thinks he's checking all these boxes of, like, a cookie cutter, like, right-wing Republican politician in the, you know, early mid-21st century. And yet, like, one, no one really cares what Ron DeSantis is doing out of the country. And, two, like, the fact that he looks like a complete diabolical lunatic when he opens his

mouth on the trip is probably going to resonate more than the statement he issues on, like, the Chinese Communist Party. Yeah, so I'm talking about, like, direct flights from Japan to Florida. Yeah, yeah. Listen, man, it's a little too cute by half to do this when you're not a declared candidate either. Just, like, get in the race or not and then run your little campaign events. Well, can I just say, too, like, I'm just going to veer it in domestic, but like, this whole, like, Florida, like, as the laboratory of it. Like, nobody gives your shit.

Like, I honestly don't, like, I don't think anybody cares about this. Wait, the laboratory of what? Well, like basically he's running his whole campaign. He's like, look at what we've done in Florida. It's a laboratory of like MAGA, like Fox booking essentially. But like it's, I can't even see that story like traveling in their own base. Like I just this guy like has one trick and it's not a good one, you know. Yeah, I think I think there will be some audience for the like, you know, anti-CRT, anti-Chile.

Like he's just running all the nastiest culture war plays. But I think, you know, if he thinks he can out Trump, Trump on that, it'll be hard. Now, I'll say one interesting thing. Tommy is like from my own travel abroad is like some of the people that have like a lot of hope in DeSantis or a lot of expectations around him are foreigners because like what they really don't like is Trump and they probably think DeSantis seems a little weird and why is he fighting with Disney you know but like they probably presume probably wrongly in my conversations with foreigners that he's just cookie cutter Republican and we know what those people are like and we'd rather

have them and he'll hire advisors who we know and so they're probably like people around world, I think I have a higher expectation for the Desantis campaign than people here do at this point because they're just so desperate to not Trump. So if you're the Japanese, you're like, I'd love Ron DeSantis versus Donald Trump. Now, if they still think that after they meet the guy is another question. So, did you see Trump's truth about this? So he, Trump called it a, quote, emergency around the world tour to quote, see if he can remove the stain from his failing campaign. And he goes, perhaps he can, perhaps he can't. Who really knows? But I'll have plenty of time to think as he sits alone on his taxpayer-funded airplane, riding it out and thinking, why?

Still got it, man. He still got it. It's just so funny. Can I just say one more thing? Yeah. Because you mentioned the Obama trip. And granted, that was general election. So, but, like, every word we said was scrutinized for, like, substance.

And, like, I don't think anyone's going to pay any attention to whether Ron DeSantis gets, like, the formulation wrong on, like, the DMZ in South Korea or, like, the Palestinian issue. And, to be fair, Mitt Romney got, like, really screwed up. for his like it just shows you how much like this is now only about optics and nobody even gives a shit I saw Glenn Yonkin the Republican governor of Virginia is going to uh on a similar he's going to Japan, South Korea and Taiwan next week. I guess that that's also just a trade mission because he's sort of I think drawn a little harder line than he's not running this this cycle but it is interesting that that's become the route to show you're kind of tough on China

that's new that's new yeah that is interesting um so turning to Ukraine so the world Washington in particular, they were all watching for this spring offensive against Russia and to see if the Ukrainians can retake more territory the Russians captured last year. The Ukrainian offensive at the end of last year set expectations extremely high because the Ukrainians were able to recapture a ton of the Kharkiv region. It's going to be very tough to replicate that success because the Russians have had time to literally dig in, build fortifications, trenches, et cetera, and Russia drafted hundreds of thousands of additional troops to the fight. Meanwhile, Ukraine has taken heavy losses and weapons like U.S. tanks and German tanks haven't all arrived yet. So you're seeing the Biden administration's

anxieties about all this spill into public. Politico reported that the White House is worried that if this counteroffensive falls short of its goals, hawks are going to blame them for not sending more weapons. The left will say, okay, you know, you didn't succeed Ukraine. Now, no more weapons at all. Let's get some peace talks. I saw some analysts suggest that some of the documents in the Discord leaks that talked about specific units that could be used in the spring offensive have really tipped our hand or tip the Ukrainian hand to the Russians in a way that's challenging. So, Ben, what do you make of this sort of anxiety? Is this expectation setting or is this real? And, like, how do you message this? I think it's real. And I think that the administration concerns that

you articulated are likely, you know, to happen. And look, part of it is the fact that, as you said, the benefit of what happened in terms of the Ukrainian offensive in the summer and fall is they brilliantly managed expectations. You know, they feigned like they were going south. Then they made these enormous gains in the north and they kind of grinded out some gains in the south. And they exceeded expectations, which in a war that depends in part on international public opinion because that's the opinion that supports the arming of Ukraine and the sustainment

of like tens of billions of dollars in assistance, you want to look like you have a capacity. capacity to keep winning. Here what happened is because there was this long lull in fighting, expeditions got way too high. And we've been talking about a spring offensive now for almost six months. It's almost summer. Yeah, on this podcast. And so much has been hung on that, like, and just give us these weapons and we're going to do this spring offensive. When what we know from the leaks and from reporting and from, you know, conversations we've had is the reality is that they also just kind of don't have enough stuff to do, like in addition to all the things you said about the Russian preparations, the Ukrainians don't have sufficient weapons and numbers and manpower

because of the losses that they've suffered in places like Bakhmud to necessarily make enormous gains here. And so I think the big question is, what is the right way to calibrate expectations? Like what would a successful spring offensive look like for the Ukrainians? I think for the Biden people, it's getting back as close to the February 22nd, like borders as possible, right? Which even that, I think, would be tough, right? You're talking about Moriopeal. You're talking about breaking that entire Southern Langebridge. That would be fantastic success. That probably exceeds what the Biden people expect because the reality is, yes, there's going to be a push for some kind of negotiation. Maybe Putin will be trying to play like, you know, I want to ceasefire because

he wants to consolidate those gains. And so, you know, first order of businesses, I do think they need to be clearer about you don't want to telegraph the territory you're aiming at. But, I mean, if you want to turn down the dial of expectations, now is the time to do it. Yeah, I think that's right. In a weird way, these Discord leaks have kind of helped them, I think, maybe turn down some expectations. They have. I think so. So according to another document in the Discord leaks of these classified depending on documents, the U.S. apparently talked the Ukrainian military out of launching a strike on Moscow on the anniversary of the war, the one-year anniversary.

The stark example of how the U.S. has used all this intelligence we're apparently collecting on the Ukrainian leadership to prevent the war from escalating. The U.S. was also concerned that an attack on Moscow with Western weapons might convince China that NATO was really the aggressor and lead them to sell arms to the Russians. There was another leaked document that said the Ukrainians had developed plans to attack Russian forces in Syria using Kurdish proxy forces. That was a wild one. In non-Discord leak news, the Wall Street Journal reported that Iran is providing munitions to Russia. No surprise there. A Russian warplane accidentally bombed the Russian city of Bulgarod. That's a Russian city. So great work by that pilot.

So, you know, Ben, I think both of us, we talked about it on the show probably and wondered aloud if and when the Ukrainians might take the fight to Russian territory. Not surprising that the U.S. would try to talk them out of that, given the nuclear escalation talk that's been the undercurrent of this entire war. But that Syria angle really surprised me when I read it. Yeah. I mean, so what we've seen now, right, is clearly there is, clearly there is, in some sort of, side of the Ukrainian system and whether it comes from, you know, may not come from Zelensky, this may be like the more entrepreneurial elements of their security forces. But in addition to what we've already seen, right, which is an assassination of some terrible ideologue in Russia, some occasional strikes into Russian territory from Ukraine. Now we've seen this plot to attack

Wagner guys in Syria, this potential plot to launch attack on Moscow. We also have, by the way, they're reporting on the pipeline blowing up under water, you know, that maybe the Ukrainians had a hand in some partisans, some Ukrainian partisans. What does that all mean? It means I think that the longer the war goes on and the more that the Ukrainians are suffering this horrific human toll, I think it's going to be harder and harder to prevent those kinds of things from happening. Because imagine if you were that, I'm not saying those things are right to do, but like just naming a dynamic that year one, year two, year three, as this war goes on, the disaster. The disaster, to punch the Russians wherever we can punch them.

Break a stalemate. To make them feel like what we feel to break a stalemate, like that's going to get more significant, right? And the U.S. has this leverage, and overwhelming leverage really is the kind of supplier of the Ukrainian military. But at a certain point, I think it's getting harder to contain that. And this connects with the first conversation we're having,

which is that I think the Biden team is going to have to begin to try to paint a picture of like acknowledging this war is going on, but where are we trying to go with this? and are we trying to get into some kind of negotiation that would involve us giving the Ukrainians some security assurances and in return for them maybe accepting less than taking back every range of territory

or if we're in for the long haul then really sitting on getting on the same page with the Ukrainians about that. Because if we start to diverge from the Ukrainians and we kind of want to lower expectations but they don't want to concede an inch then I think you might start to see some of these types of events happening. You see this horrible story in the Times

about how HIV-positive Russian prisoners are being told, okay, if you go fight for six months, we'll give you medicine. If not, you're going to die in prison. It's just as dystopian as it gets. Just dystopian. You know, Russia is getting darker and dark. I mean, of all in these health, too, we haven't talked that much about, but it looks a bit like they might be poisoning him gradually. I mean, it's just getting dark in there.

Well, meanwhile, Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov is in New York this week, leading sessions of the UN Security Council. I guess, you know, the presidency. advertisement for the broken international system. I know. So the presidency council, it rotates among members. Russia is up this month. So Lavrov, I guess, wanted to be there to make a mockery of the institution in person. So he got some heat, as you'd expect. The Secretary General denounced the invasion of Ukraine while sitting next to him, I think. The U.S. invited Elizabeth Whalen, the sister of Paul Whalen to attend. Paul Whalen has been held prisoner by the Russians for four years now. The U.N. is trying to

negotiate an extension of the Black Sea grain initiative. which allows grain exports out of Ukraine. It doesn't seem like there's a lot of progress yet. Lavrov is very mad that the United States denied visas to Russian journalists who wanted to cover his trip. He said, quote, a country that calls itself the strongest, smartest, free and fair country has chickened out and done something stupid by showing what it's sworn assurances about protecting freedom of speech and access to information are really worth. Now, first of all, fuck you, dude. Second, these journalists are probably, you know, like propagandists. I do wonder, obviously, I think this visa denial was probably a part of response to the Russians taking a Wall Street Journal journalist named Evan Gerskovich hostage.

But I also do wonder, I don't know, like are we playing into their hands a little bit rhetorically there? Like, do you give them the visas, let them come, cover the event, stand up for the principle of freedom of speech? Is that naive? What do you take? So I'm actually going to like zag on this one because I thought about this. And my instinct originally, you know, we used to have these debates. the Obama years about whether they give like Chinese journalist visas. And I usually supported giving him to them. But you know what? Fuck these guys. I mean like they've completely destroyed

the Russian independent media. It doesn't exist anymore. So the only thing that's left is like scribes for Kremlin fever dreams. And if there was literally one Russian independent journalist, it might be a different story. But to me, these guys are uniformly propagandists. They're going to take basically propaganda pictures, right? Like here's a lot of Ravov at the UN. And here he is that, you know, they're turning the UN into a mockery, right? Which, by the way, just quick point, you know, as recently as, you know, earlier Obama years, like, we were doing, you know, Sudan. There was a Sudan crisis that we, remember, we dealt with that the UN. Yeah, North Korea.

We had, you know, UN Security Council resolutions on Iran, on North Korea, and all these things. It's degraded that fast in 15 years. And they just want, you know, a bunch of Kremlin propagandists to sit there and take picture, you know, B-roll of Lavrov. going into the UN chair. And I don't know. Like, we don't need to play along with that. And if they're going to be, like, throwing American reporters in prison, like, like, you know what? Like, we don't need to facilitate their propaganda.

I'm genuinely torn. I mean, like the head of RT, like the sort of English language, Russian propaganda network, is one of the most, like, bloodthirsty, like, virulent propagandists out there. So obviously, I wouldn't want those people, they're not covering anything. They're just, they work for the government. That said, I wonder if it's a bigger propaganda win to deny them and make a story that's international. I mean, we're talking about it, but I don't know. You're right that where it hurts is internationally, right? And we'll see if when Tucker Carlson gets his RT show.

Yeah, good for him. Congratulations. You see that letter that they sent welcoming? Incredible. Great trolling. So there's a couple other notable reports out of the latest Discord league spend that just won't stop. One detailed how Russia is using the Wagner group, the private mercenary group. We've talked about a lot in the Ukraine context to build influence in Africa. This was from a Washington Post report on what seems like several intelligence assessments, which say that over the last six years, Wagner has gained a strategic foothold in at least eight countries in Africa, and they are basically fully entrenched in Libya, Mali, and the Central African Republic, and they're getting there in Burkina Faso. The Wagner forces create instability to topple

Democratic governments. They prop up Russian allies with information operations and insurgencies, and then they make those governments reliant on Wagner support and kind of own them in the long term. These Wagner creeps will help you rig an election, stage a coup, extract resources and minerals, set up shell corporations to help with corruption. It's basically like a one-stop shop for dictators. The report says that Gavgeny Prygosen, the oligarch who runs the Wagner group, is, quote, shifting his approach from taking advantage of security vacuums to intentionally facilitating instability. Apparently, the U.S. government has talked about targeting Wagner facilities with sanctioned cyber operations and even air strikes.

One document says France is willing to directly target Wagner forces if they support a coup in Chad. The French withdrew troops from Mali, the CIR, and Burkina Faso in the last few years, and Wagner groups have moved in or pushed them out. In January, the State Department designated Wagner as a transnational criminal organization. So, Ben, we've talked a lot about the Wagner group over the past few years on the show. We talked about their activities in Africa. But it was, I think, incredibly worrisome to see it all laid out and how important sort of a leg of the form of policy stool it's become for them. What did you make of these stories and in the the reports that the U.S. and France are considering military strike response options to deal with them?

Yeah, I mean, we've talked about this because it's kind of insane the degree of the influence just so people get a sense of this. I mean, I remember looking into this a couple years ago when we were talking about this issue and the national security advisor basically of the Central African Republic was like some Russian dude named Valerie Zakara. Right. Who's a Wagner group? I mean, that's how embedded they are. They're like in the, they're like the security forces for these governments. I think what was notable about the leaks, first of all, is the degree to which the U.S. is tracking that this is a systematic effort, right? Because it could have felt like episodic.

Like there's a vacuum opens up in a place like CAR where there's some mines. And so we'll send some dudes in to get the mines and pay off the people. But clearly what they're doing is for a while they would look and see, okay, where are there resources that we want and where, is there a political vacuum? And we'll get in there and try to exploit that. But now, I mean, I think what jumped out from the reporting that you cited is that they're actually actively trying to create the instability so that they can then fill the vacuum. And they're doing it all over Africa, by the way. It's, you know, in East Africa, Central Africa, West Africa, like they are getting in under the hood of these places. They are fostering instability in

coups and then coming in. And I think the challenge to the United States is at a time when you have, you know, the Russians showing up with guns and train mercenaries, which is something that, you know, if you want to be kind of warlord or coup leader you want, and then the Chinese are coming into Africa with tons and tons of money and investment in technology, what are we coming with? You know, because it's one thing to map this out. What is our counter to this? And I don't think, you know, yes, some of it should be sanctions and trying to cut off the Wagner Group's financing, but I don't know that the U.S. and France can do this like militarily. I think, you need an affirmative strategy for these places that has security component and development

component, a private sector component, and that you're just not seeding all this ground, and not like in some great game way, but just we care about these countries. We'd like to not become fiefdoms of the Wagner group. It's going to take that kind of comprehensive, sustained approach to beat back what is a really concerted effort by the Russians to get tolls of influence. Yeah, it seems like a real problem. Another Discord leak, so this is a tough headline for Biden, Ben. quote, Afghanistan has become a terrorism staging ground.

Again, leaks reveal. So this report, again, the Washington Post from a leaked document in the Discord that says ISIS leaders in Afghanistan are plotting attacks abroad, including on foreign embassies. And there was a plot or an aspirational plot to attack the FIFA World Cup in Qatar. They haven't pulled it. ISIS hasn't pulled any of these things off, but it's something they're planning. The White House responded in the story by saying, you know, we still have the ability to take targeted counterterrorism strikes against ISIS leaders all over the world, even without a U.S.

troop presence in Afghanistan. They pointed out that the Taliban put some pressure on ISIS and Afghanistan because they're essentially now competitors for control of the country. It's not clear to me from the story how the U.S. views a safe haven in Afghanistan risk-wise as compared to other places ISIS hangs out like Syria. The good news to the extent there is much is that apparently Western intelligence has been able to intercept these communications between ISIS sells. It's also good that there apparently is no indication that al-Qaeda has been able to rebuild after the Zwhahari strike. But Ben, I mean, this is going to be, you got to figure this is like the first, second, and third item when Republicans hold a bunch of Afghanistan

withdrawal oversight hearings. And you need a good answer here because this is going to scare people. It is, but I would caution about this one. First of all, any, and you know this, but any intelligence report about terrorism has like a super alarm to set up on. That's very true. And it's actually a problem because sometimes those headlines are totally accurate, right? Like the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria in 2014-15. Or the pre-9-11 PDBs. Yeah, exactly. But sometimes they're not.

Because the job of the intelligence community is a kind of warning on terrorism. So that's the first point. The second point is that this is not like a pre-9-11. Like Republicans want to cast this is like, you lost Afghanistan. And now it's like revered it back. There's plenty of things to hate about the Taliban. but their attitude towards ISIS is actually not one. They don't like ISIS.

So this isn't like when they were inviting al-Qaeda in and kind of facilitating al-Qaeda using this as a platform to launch attacks. Why does this matter? Because if ISIS has to worry about its security in Afghanistan, like their capacity to just sit there for years and plot like some 9-11 is much, much reduced, never mind, just the geographic proximity of Syria to Europe made that more of a launching pad into the West, than Afghanistan is right now. Obviously, we saw 9-11, you have to take that seriously as a threat. So, yeah, it's something to watch, but I look at this more, frankly, as a threat in Afghanistan.

And you mentioned, like, to embassies, the thing I'd be more worried about is less like complex, you know, 9-11-style attacks or even complex, like ISIS-type attacks in Paris and Brussels like we saw in the 2015 time window. But whether this leads to more fighting in Afghanistan and kind of car bombs and attacks on diplomatic facilities meant to kind of paralyze an already paralyzed a paralyzed country. As we were recording this, this headline just popped up in New York Times. The Taliban have killed the leader of the Islamic State cell responsible for the suicide bombing at the international airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, in August 2021, they killed 13 U.S. troops and as many as 170 civilians, four senior American officials said on Tuesday.

So it seems to be some real-time evidence. We did not time that. He did not time that, but yeah, ISIS K guys. Yeah, listen, I think your assessment, right, of intelligence documents writ large is right. You don't get promoted from under alarmist in the intelligence community. Obviously, based on this New York Times report, I just read aloud, that the Taliban took out this ISIS cell. They're going after it. It's just a really tough story to sell.

It's a tough story. To the American people, the Taliban are now our friends when it comes to dealing with ISIS. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. And, you know, it's an old idiom, but it's not even that. It's just like, again, you know, if you look at the 9-11 attacks, it was the capacity for them to not even have to worry. They could just sit there and, you know, hatch their schemes and move their people around. They have to worry about, like, some Taliban dudes kicking down their doors, their ability to kind of project complex operations way outside of South Asia. Yeah.

It's not impossible at all, but, like, it's just harder. It does sound on what they're doing, too, ISIS, is trying to recruit people online who are in these countries already. They're not dispatching a bunch of Saudis in the United States to go to flight school. Yeah, exactly. That's a little more complicated. Okay, a couple quick follow of us, Ben. So a few weeks ago, we talked about how the Indian government had undertaken this massive manhunt to capture a Sikh separatist leader named Amrit Paul Singh. Singh lived in Dubai for a while.

Then he moved back to India late last year where he started leading protests calling for the protection of the rights of members of the Sikh minority. and he grew very popular among those who want an independent Sikh nation. That brought back memories of separatist groups and insurgency. They killed lots of people and flipped out the Indian government. They tried to arrest him after Singh's supporters stormed a police station to free one of their guys. Sounds like a no-no. That led to a month-long manhunt that involved thousands of security forces and the periodic suspension of communication services across major swaths of the Indian state of Punjab.

So they finally got this guy. Good, I guess. I don't know. It's just every story out of India is troubling and the variety. It is. I mean, look, clearly this guy was resorting to very extrajudicial tactics. The challenge here, though, is it like these are very, very different cases, right? But what we're seeing is, you know, the arrest of Rahul Gandhi, literally the leader of the opposition, alienating the kind of secular base of the Congress party in India.

You've got Muslims relentlessly targeted. We talked about a Muslim politician like literally being killed on. on television. Now you have a Sikh separatist leader. Like the common flavor here is this Hindu Nationalist core like going after all their enemies. Now, in some cases, like this guy, like there may be a reason for the rule of law to do so. But in other cases like Rural Gandhi, absolutely not. And obviously what they've done in Muslims. So all of this speaks to sectarian tension going up, which tragically like a Hindu nationalist movement may want that sectarian tension, right? because they want to mobilize their followers, right?

And so sometimes you see this non-virtuous cycle where attacks on minority groups lead people to go to extremes, which lead to crackdowns. Right, of course. And also I think I said this week, India surpassed China in terms of aggregate population. So pretty big milestone. Yeah, no one-child policy in India.

No, no. Turning to Chile, Ben. So Chilean president, Gabriel Borich released his plan to bring Chile's lithium extraction industry under state control. Chile supplies a quarter of the world's lithium supply, and the need for it is likely to grow exponentially in the coming decades because lithium is a critical component of batteries and electric vehicles. So Barrett says he wants to create stricter environmental rules through this sort of quasi-nationalization plan, but that plan still has to be approved by Congress, and it will take a long time to implement. He didn't go as far as left as wanted.

They wanted full nationalization, but he also pissed off business leader, so he's sort of carving that path down the middle. The FT noted in a piece about this that Mexico nationalized lithium mining last year. Zimbabwe recently banned unprocessed lithium exports. So Ben, I thought the story was interesting because as the world shifts from fossil fuels to electric vehicles, you're seeing a lot of horror stories about rare earth mineral extraction and child labor and human rights violations and just wondered if in success this kind of plan could be a model for how to get these materials without destroying the environment or siphoning off profits

to a couple corporations. That's exactly right. I really hope this works because you do clearly, this is kind of part of the next fossil fuels, right? This clearly needs standards around it. And for environmental purposes is an obvious one. But also, like, part of what's happened too often

in places where you get a very valuable resource is, you know what, like the big multinational comes in and most of the profits end up going to other places. They go to like- A couple corrupt leaders. Corrupt leaders or they go to like, you know, like foreign investors, you know, like hedge funds that invested in something, right? What Boeach, if he can pull this off is trying to do is put not just environmental standards around it, but keep the resources in the pockets of the Chilean people, right? Now, the challenges here is these kind of state-run companies tend to be not as precisely because they don't ruthlessly cut corners. They're not as efficient and fast at getting the stuff out of the ground as the multinationals.

you know what, if we can create some best standards and the long burn for this, for the Chilean people, they may look up in 20 years and be like, well, we're really glad that that happened. Yeah, I mean, which Nordic country does that sort of natural gas dividend that pays it right off, right? Alaska, you get a check every year because of oil and gas revenue. So, yeah, that would be a great outcome. Ben, so turning to China, so the Chinese ambassador to France stepped in it big time after he seemed to question the sovereignty of all post-Soviet nations like Ukraine. So this was, here's the description of the New York Times report on this.

Responding to a question from the French television station, TF1, about whether Crimea was part of Ukraine under international law. He said that Crimea was historically Russian and had been handed over to Ukraine and then added, even these countries of the former Soviet Union do not have an effective status in international law, since there is no international agreement that would specify their status as sovereign country. So this understandably pissed off everyone in the Baltic nations, many other countries in eastern and central Europe. that were part of the Soviet Union or occupied by the Soviets. The French summoned this guy, Ambassador Liu, to the foreign minister. He's one of those like wolf warrior, you know, hard-ass, like, you know, toxic ambassadors.

It was the first such summoning by the French since Tiananmen Square in 1989. So that's so seriously they took it. On Monday, the Chinese foreign ministry, their spokeswoman had to play cleanup. And she said, quote, China respects the sovereign status of former Soviet republics after the Soviet Union's dissolution. So she slapped him down hard. Ben, I just sort of thought it was fun to see real political pressure on the Chinese government, make them move quickly, and just like smack the shit out of an ambassador who strayed from the party line. It was like kind of nice. Yeah.

And there are a few things here. I mean, first of all, the Chinese have been pouring money into expanding their diplomatic corps and encouraging this kind of wolf warrior diplomacy. Well, they say wolf warrior diplomacy, but it's something diplomatic about it. It's just wolf warrior dickishness around the world. And this guy's probably saying the quiet part at loud. like this is probably what a lot of like those officials think. It's a problem for them for two reasons. One, they're trying to kind of separate the Europeans off from the Americans, right? That was the whole Macron trip that we talked about. And saying shit like this is a way to make America's case in Europe

that the Chinese actually, you know, you're talking about NATO member states that they're saying don't exist, right? This is a country that maybe you want to draw closer to the Americans. And the other thing that probably speaks to why he was smacked down is the set of the state. Central Asia countries, right? It was Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, these countries where the Chinese have a lot of influence and want more influence. Like, those are for Soviet republics, right? And so, like, that's kind of a problem for them. That's, like, the heart of their new Silk Road that became the Belt Road and whatever they're calling it today. So they managed to piss off, like, a couple of their constituencies that they don't want to piss off.

You just like, look, a quick flag to all ambassadors to France. You don't want to make this much news. You don't make any news. Ever. Yeah, yeah. Just enjoy the, enjoy the cafe lifestyle. Why are you doing TF1 TV? Just like, don't try to defend your indefensible position on Ukraine.

Yeah, you know, just, yeah, just not, not like what he's, they say these things to also impress the bosses back in Beijing and not to actually achieve foreign policy objectives in France. That's what's weird about it is when they put on this wolf warrior guys, it's like, it's, and by the way, American ambassadors have performed at times for domestic audiences. Sure, of course. They're the only ones. But, yeah, this is not an audience. This is not an effort to communicate with the French people. This is an effort to communicate back to Beijing. Look at me.

I'm really pushing the envelope back. No, no. We've had a couple clips recently of ambassadors, Russian and I now Chinese try to defend the invasion of Ukraine and it has not gone well for any of them. Here's another story that did not go well. for the people involved. So, Ben, according to a new book, it is now confirmed that former British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, tried to have a face-to-face meeting with the Queen

at Buckingham Palace while he had COVID. I saw this in a tweet from Pippa Crirar. Apologies, I trust Pippa completely, yeah. I trust Pippa too here. She was then at the Daily Mirror. She reported this out back in 2021. Number 10 denied it, shocker, that they lied. But then she this week tweeted excerpts from a new book called Johnson at 10.

that comes out in May confirming that Boris did, in fact, try to go to Buckingham Palace with COVID. So the context is that the Queen is at a state. She has had a standing weekly meeting with the Prime Minister, the head of government, since I think, like, 1952, something she likes to do on Wednesdays. There's no staff. There's no transcript. There's just the two leaders. When COVID started, Boris had symptoms, but he didn't want to look sick or constrained by new rules, I guess.

so he pushed to keep the meeting in person. His staff fought him. Her staff fought him. Eventually, Boris was convinced to talk with the queen via phone. And afterwards, the queen apparently said to an aide that she couldn't understand a single word he said because he was coughing so much throughout their meeting. So, Ben, I was just trying to think of a U.S. equivalent of Bojo killing the queen. I thought it might be like...

Well, Trump almost killed Chris Christie, but that wasn't quite the same drama. I thought it might be sort of like a U.S. president burning to nothing to ashes the original copy of the Constitution because he demanded to read it by the fireplace or something. Like I just, it's unfathomable, this guy almost killed the queen of England. And also, do you remember, we're not talking about like last week, you know, with like the weekend variant and all the vaccines. Like this is that time, you know, when I remember like if I had a cough, like, if I cough once, I would like be freaked out for a day, right? So, imagine, the thought process he's going through where like let's say he hasn't yet tested positive

because maybe he did who knows because we can't trust there might not have been tests available or there weren't tests available right but he's like coughing a lot like at the height of COVID and this woman is like deep in her 90s and he's like you know what I can either be careful and stay here and just do this on phone call or transition to Zoom like everybody else all the Queen Pride in Zoom or to keep up appearances that everything's okay I can risk killing the beloved monarch of the United Kingdom for over 50 years, however many years, like forever, so that I can like have this meeting. Like this man is either like completely like idiotic, uh, sociopathic, like, there's just, none of that makes any sense. It's one of the most extreme examples of short term

political expediency overtaking like actual common sense I've ever heard. Yeah. Killing the Queen of England. What do you think would happen? Were they beheaded? him like on the spot the where they just storm put him in the tower of london or something you know like like that like it's just insane like that this almost happened and by the way the reason this also still relevant is that this guy wants to amount to political comeback yeah so it's important to remind people like hey you put a guy in charge of the country that was going to kill your monarch you know like that's not uh it's not the guy you want to holding the keys that's how bad his judgment is uh last story before ben's interview so um anti beer oh but do you watch the crown no should i

Okay. Well, only because you mentioned those audiences, like it's gotten worse with time. But the coolest thing to me as a nerd is you see all the audience. You know, like there she is with Churchill. It's a young woman. There she's throughout the years all the way up to Tony Blair. And it's kind of fun to be a fly on the wall. Except Boris Johnson, I'm sure the queen was trying to wrap those meetings up pretty fast. Yeah. Did Liz Truss never get one? She must have gotten one, right? An audience at the very beginning. Yeah, she got the PM ship. And then I think the queen went on vacation, right? And then the queen died, like, what was the stress prime minister? I think she might have killed her. Like the fact of her becoming prime minister may have been the final strong. We don't know.

That did it. It wasn't Bojo. Anyway. Okay, next story. Some of what we said there might be wrong. Don't hold it against us. We listen to Pod Save the UK. Yeah, well, there's a better show coming for that kind of info.

So anti-beer cancel culture, Ben. It's spread to Belgium where customs authorities. seized and destroyed thousands of cans of Miller High Life after deciding the slogan Champagne of beers meant that the contents were counterfeit champagne. So French authorities, as you know from your trip, they're fiercely protective of the champagne brand, which can only be used to describe sparkling wine from the champagne region of France, made from certain grapes, done in a certain way, blah, blah, blah. So Belgian authorities intercepted 2,352 cans of beer.

were on their way to Germany, emptied them, crush them, took photos and videos, and released them to the media to send a message to other beer cans. What the fuck? Thankfully, Kid Rock and his machine gun were not involved in this episode. It doesn't mean it's not as stupid. Have you taken out your anger on any brands lately? Any trademarks? I have not, but this outrages me because, number one, Miller High Life is the champagne of beers. It is a pretty good beer.

It is undisputed champion as the champagne of beers. number two, I don't know where these people have been because they've had champagne of beers like written on the label since I was drinking Miller High Life when I was like 15 years old and it was like the first beer I was drinking. Number three, they're doing a good job of like calling back some of those classic high life ads.

Do you remember those ads? Where it was like the High Life Man. Talk about canceled. These things couldn't exist today. Because I remember the one where this guy's like the French had to bail him out of two big ones in the last century. But you gotta hand it to him for mayonnaise, you know?

And like, this is where my mind goes when I hear about, like, a bunch of people in Belgium. The nationalism kind of perks up. This is what I'm saying is they're getting my nationalism up here. Like, who are you to, like, smash up a bunch of high life? I got to say, also, like, Belgium, you guys might be great. I don't like your beers. Yeah, you can send over these wheat beers and stuff. Like, you know, like, no wonder they're destroying it, by the way.

It's not champagne they're defending. It's the fact that someone might have a can of high life and be like, you know what? this is the champagne of beers. Yeah, you can drink more than one and not feel full for three days? Yeah. Sounds great. Come on. All right, Belgium.

Get your shit together. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. And we come back, you will hear Ben's conversation with Nefisa Elthahir about everything happening in Sudan. So stick around for that. I'm very pleased to welcome the Potsade the world. Nefisa Al-Tahir, who's a Rortar's correspondent, who covers Sudan, among other countries in the region.

Nefisa, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. So you've been covering this since. the outbreak of violence and civil conflict there, and obviously before that as well. For people who are watching this and are having trouble making sense of why this is happening, could you just kind of set the lay of the land in terms of who's fighting and why are they fighting now? Right. Okay. So on one side, pretty straightforward, we have the Sudanese army. on the other side, the more complicated part is that we have this paramilitary group called the rapid support forces.

They are a group that emerged out of the early 2000s conflict in the Darfur region, which is a conflict that got some attention in the United States. And they were basically tribal militias that were used by the Sudanese government to, help put down a rebellion there. And one of the leaders of those militias is this guy named Mohamed Hamadaloo, but he goes by the nickname Hametti. And so he kind of used his position during that to kind of build a larger apparatus for himself. So that included expanding his original kind of small tribal militia into what is now by some analysts, um, estuels. it's about 100,000 man force.

He also used his connections with the government, because again, they were fighting with the government at that point, to enrich himself through gold. He also later forged connections with Gulf countries and started sending soldiers to Yemen. And the Sunni's army did that as well. So he's kind of formed him to. created himself into a force he reckoned within the country. And in 2019, he, along with the

army leader, General Abd al-Fattah al-Burhan, they together deposed the regime of Amar al-Bashir, who was the president of Sudan for 30 years before that. They together formed a new transitional government along with civilian groups. But in 2021, together again, they did away with that partnership and started leading together. So that gives us, that gets us up to like about two years ago. It's a slightly complicated story. But I'm getting, I'm getting to the end of it. After that happened, Himmati seemed to be getting very uneasy with the fact that the army started kind of drawing more and more on Bashir-era Islamist cadres. He, for a lot of complicated reasons we don't need to get into, doesn't have a very good relationship with those people. So he started to kind of

inch closer towards what the international community was advocating for, which is kind of a new civilian transition to democracy and elections. And part of that transition is a demand by politicians, by the international community to integrate the forces. So again, you kind of have a situation where you have this army, you have this man who has now created 100,000 man force, which is technically legal in the country. It was legitimized in 2017, but it is not the army, right? So then they were starting to be asked that they need to integrate these two armies and they need to put the entire apparatus under civilian control. For both the army and for the RSF, though that means reducing a lot of power, which comes with a lot of economic power as well.

And that is kind of the tension, that that was the pressure cooker that we were under. On Saturday, April 15th, there's kind of competing narratives about what happened, but either the RSF attacked the military, the military or attacked the RSF. and that kind of gets us some situation we're at now. Yeah, there's a lot there, but I mean, it makes sense in the sense that you have this huge vacuum created when Bashir is removed. Then you have a traditional army power structure that is trying to fill that vacuum. But you have some other guys with guns, and particularly one guy with a lot of guns

and a resource-driven economy, right? Yeah. people can enrich themselves if they have power and now they're fighting a kind of zero-sum conflict. We've talked mainly on this podcast about the role of some of the neighboring states. It was pretty clear, I think, after the fall of Bashir that, you know, the Gulf countries in Egypt weren't exactly looking to see a flowering democracy in Sudan. But what's complicated here is it seems like, you know, those have been influential countries. Obviously, there are other states that have interest in Sudan. But it seems like those countries, the UAE, the Saudis, the Egyptians,

you know, that they've kind of, they have relations with both sides of this divide. To what extent do you think some of these countries have been active in kind of supporting the military or supporting Hekmeti, to what extent do you think they were surprised by this? Or are they behind, or do people think that they're, they played a role in precipitating the violence? Or do people think that this kind of got out of their control? Okay. So I think it's, you know, I have to be very careful, especially speaking as a Reuters reporter, we have to be very careful about what we can and can't prove, of course.

Yes. But I can kind of give you a sense of what the dynamics have been. Let's start with Egypt. It's Sudan's most influential neighbor. Egypt has pretty openly kind of supported the military. They kind of, as negotiations were going on that were supported by the United States, also by Gulf countries, and most of kind of the international community were kind of on one track, the Egyptians kind of tried to create a new track for like a different kind of transitional

agreement that included a lot of parties that, were traditionally pro-Bashir, traditionally pro-military, pro-the-coup that happened in 2021. And so they kind of very clearly kind of took us a different tack than kind of what everyone else was doing. Because they want a military government in Sudan that kind of mirrors the military government in Egypt, right? Yeah, I mean, I think the thing I can say is that I think Burhan creates kind of Burhan is a much more digestible and familiar model to Egyptian authorities. than the Democrats that we're trying to come in, or then Hemetty, who's kind of this militia, or originally a militia leader.

It's not something that they're very familiar or easy, it's easy, not easy for them to work with. When it comes to the Gulf, like I said, the Gulf does have, especially the UAE has a close relationship with Hametti, at the same time ever, like for the last few months, I would say for the last four, five, six months, they have been, really pushing for this transitional agreement.

They have a lot of business interests and potential business interests in Sudan, and those interests are served by a stable country. And the prevailing wisdom is that a stable country, particularly kind of the way things looked in Sudan last year, a stable country would be better served under some kind of civilian democratic arrangement. So kind of, at least externally, those countries were quite supportive of this kind of new transitional situation that Hemet-Din Burhan ended up rebelling against. But yeah, so those are kind of the three big Middle Eastern players in this.

So for the two warring parties, right, it's a completely zero-sum conflict at this point in a lot of ways because, you know, this is, if you lose, you lose, and you're on the outs and you lose all that power and status. Usually in those circumstances, you know, some kind of foreign mediation to get to a ceasefire or to get back into a process is obviously needed. There's been a lot of diplomatic activity. What is your assessment of the role of the international, well, we used to say international community, but the different countries that have interest, whether it be United States and Europe, whether it be these countries who just talked about in the Middle East, whether it be the neighboring African states as well, the UN. Who is trying to broker ceasefires

right now? And who do you think the most important diplomatic actors are? So who is trying all of the above? Everyone is trying. There's been flurries of phone calls to Burhan Hametti from all sorts of world leaders, including presidents of Turkey, Ethiopia, Egypt, South Africa, Secretary Blinken, across the board. In terms of the most influential, I would say that would be primarily the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia, United Air Bar Mitz, because of the positive relationships they've built with the leaders, as well as the fact that they have resources that can serve as kind of a carrot. Yeah, and they've given, you know, they've pledged or times given billions of dollars. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. The United States is, by all indications,

trying very hard, a ceasefire that began last night, one of several that haven't been held to, but it was even announced by the United States and not just brokered. So they seem to be kind of pushing as much weight as they can. However, we're in a situation where the United States has been trying for a very long time, and there's indications that it's just not having the impact that I think American influence used to have in Sudan or in a lot of other kinds of. countries. And so even though it's still an important player, it's becoming less and less clear whether at U.S. intervention, particularly U.S. intervention, I think, in the style that's been pursued so far has as much influence in Sudan as it used to.

So you obviously covered these evacuations of the U.S. Embassy, the U.K. Embassy, a lot of foreigners generally, pretty unusual deployment of U.S. forces to facilitate that. What does that do, though? I mean, what is the absence of an embassy and the absence of foreigners do? Obviously, the security of citizens is usually the first part of governments, and I'm not suggesting it shouldn't be. But is there now a sense that there's less of a check on fighting? What is the impact to the people you've been talking to in Khartoum of that exodus? There is a fear of that to a certain extent. there is a fear that, you know, they're leaving and now we're going to be really hit.

Like, we weren't being hit before and now we're really going to be hit. But I think, to a large extent, I think a lot of students people are resigned to the fact that, you know, all these international efforts weren't necessarily coming to anything. They weren't really, there wasn't any result. You know, they've been having these talks now since at least October and nothing had come of it. So I don't think that there was a lot of hope being placed in the international community. or however you want to call it these days. So I don't know if it's having the biggest impact,

but I think it is kind of it's a disappointment to a lot of people to see a lot of these people just leave and to see that a lot of soon these people can't leave. But I don't know that it's having the impact that it might have in the past in terms of people's feeling about how this might go. And what's your sense of just how difficult it was to get those people out?

I think it was quite difficult. You know, we have one thing that kind of is an odd coincidence of this particular conflict in the capital is that Hortem is kind of very centralized city. And so you have a lot of zones that are very, very violent zones of fighting right now right up next to residential areas and right up next to the kinds of quieter, upper class places that a lot of expats live. So you, first of all, had a very big issue with a lot of these expats actually being caught in some of the worst. fighting, which I think, again, kind of makes, it kind of lessens the impact of their leaving because they were in truly terrible places, a lot of them. At the same time, it seems like, yeah, a kind of a wide variety of things were used. You know, there's convoys that, you know, took 13-hour trips to get to our Red Sea port, which then were met with warships, or sometimes

now container ships that are carrying people. You have flights that touch down in military bases. It seems like there has to have been a lot of, or it not just seems to, there are statements to show that there was a lot of coordination with the army. The RSF also claims, as they kind of are really kind of controlling the ground in Sudan right now, that they have also kind of been in contact with foreign ministers of different countries and that they've also been an active part of the evacuation,

which I think is probably a little bit of north. compared to a lot of other situations. And so what is your sense to someone who's, you know, spent a lot of time in Cartoon? What is life like for the people there right now? I mean, what's it like to be like just an ordinary person who's fed up with all this politics and you're stuck in your house in Cartoon? What are the shortages? How does it feel there?

It's for a city that's been through, you know, two coups and, you know, massacres of protesters and the coronavirus pandemic, this is somehow still the worst thing. that's happened for most of the people there. There's issues in a lot of places with water, because water facilities and water treatment plants are part of kind of the battleground, basically, that these people are fighting over. Electricity, same goes for electricity, same goes for telecommunications, so there's shortages of all those things.

None of it is stable. We are hearing now about shortages in different, like, foods. Prices have been hiked up for a lot of food. foods as well, so that's becoming harder and harder to afford for a lot of people, and because of the nature of a lot of the fighting being in neighborhoods, it's hard for people to physically access the food as well. There's also become a very big safety issue, in part because we have reports that the RSF has, or members of the RSF have entered people's homes and kind of try to use them as shelters. We also have reports of prison breaks and of just kind of general criminals looting

homes and businesses. So it's just becoming a very unsafe situation and also just kind of very deprived situation for a lot of people, for most people in the capital. And so what are people, you know, people have been through so much, like you said, and had this brief hopeful moment after the revolution in 2019. I mean, what are the people you talk to in civil society or people who are not directly involved in this conflict? What do they want to happen? Like, what do they just want peace?

They just want this thing to end. What do you hear from the people that have had, let's just say, better intentions for the future? Yeah. I mean, they want peace over just about anything else. I think, you know, you get people who kind of say that they side with this side or that side, but most people, I think, are kind of, have a lot of anger towards both sides. They blame them equally, and they just want the fighting to stop.

If that means one side has to win, fine, but they just want the fighting to stop desperately. I think that there are fears that if one or the other wins, you know, if I think the feeling is that if the army wins, then that means that we are going to have a return to the three decades of Islamist autocratic rule that Sudan. really suffered under, under Bashid, and that it would kind of be a rollback of all the gains of the last four or five years. At the same time, I think there's a fear by a lot of other people, and one of these people are the same people that, you know, rule under Hametti is a bit unpredictable. He doesn't have the kind of infrastructure or the, or is, and is not

in touch with the kind of infrastructure that, like, the National Army would be. And so, but I think people are kind of at this point willing to accept either outcome as long as it means that they can kind of leave their homes safely. Yeah, but right now nobody has like an overwhelming advantage. So it feels like this could go on, right? Yeah, it does. Yeah. Well, look, thank you so much for all you're doing to cover the story, bring it to us. We'll keep following it. It's a tragedy for the people there above all, but it's also obviously impacts a lot of other countries. Oh, and I should, let me just add people where people can follow your work on Twitter. We'll put that in the show notes. Are there other places people should look for your work?

Reuters.com slash Nefisa Altahir. Most of my stories should be up there as well. Nefisa Altahir, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. Thanks again to Nefisa Altahir for joining the show. Also, Ben, there's lots of places you can find us. I hope everyone is subscribed to the Podsafe of World YouTube page. They have, right?

To get exclusive access, exclusive to the full episodes in other YouTube exclusive content like Explaner videos. Check out the Pod Save the World Cutdowns on Snapchat. Follow Crooked Media on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. I've never made it. TikTok. I'm a lurk on TikTok. I deleted it recently because I was sort of trying to take back some free time and practice what I preach. Well, I actually don't. I mean, it's like, you know, I start scrolling through it and within, you know, three minutes you can feel your brain start to, like the

circuits begin to shut off, you know, like that's the beauty of it. Which is the same as all social media. Let's be clear. But I was like, you know, I have enough other social media platforms that are doing this to me. Yeah. And Twitter just gets worse. every day and it's just like intolerable so we'll see. The weird thing for me with TikTok is like I like to run on the beach and I like to run early in the mornings and it's like you'll be running along

and there'll be some person in the distance who is like all by themselves and they're just doing like some dance over and over and over again and as you get close you realize that they're recording like 100 versions of the same TikTok dance and there's something really dystopian about watching

like a human being out in public, doing something like you could be staring at the ocean and taking in the scenery, but they're just doing this TikTok video? Just grinding on that dance. Griding on that dance. Yeah, well, I don't know. Not going to be me.

Yeah, but it looks cool in the end result. If it got clicks for Potta of the World, maybe I do it. That's right. Post away. We'll do a dance if you all subscribe. All right, well, that's it for us this week. Talk to you soon. Pod Save the World is a cricket media production. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor, Ben Rhodes and Michael Martinez.

Our producer is Haley Muse. Our associate producer is Ashley Mizzou. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick, Kyle Seguin, Charlotte Landis, and Vesilius are our sound engineers. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, B.B. Bradford, and Milo Kim, who upload our episodes and videos to YouTube every week

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