Pod Save the World - Foreign policy in 2019

Episode Date: December 26, 2018

Tommy and Ben Rhodes talk about Trump pulling US troops out of Syria, the MLB and Cuba, and then talk about how US policy towards Israel, North Korea and Russia could change in 2019.

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. This is Tommy Vitor. I wanted to start by saying Merry Christmas to you. Happy holidays. Happy almost New Year. I hope you're doing well, sitting somewhere warm with friends and family. I am recording this the week before Christmas in Los Angeles, along with Ben Rhodes, who will join in a second. But my body, as you download this, will be sitting in Boston, Massachusetts. So it's nice to see a little cold weather and snow for a time. The episode today is an attempt to talk about some of the big things in the news this week. to look forward to 2019. So we talked about President Trump's decision to pull all U.S. service members out of Syria, the announcement he made via tweet. We talked about a really cool announcement by Major League Baseball that the ways they're working with Cuban players that is impactful and that Ben Rose knows a lot about because he negotiated it. And then we tried to turn the conversation forward to talk about some things in foreign policy that we think might be noticeably different in 2019. So we talked about U.S. policy towards Israel and how that might be impacted by changing opinions about settlements and the Democratic primary happening on the left.

Then we talked about North Korea. Obviously, the Singapore summit has not actually eliminated the threat of North Korea's nuclear weapons program. What does that mean? And where do things go from there? And then we talked about the U.S. and Russia. And not in terms of the Mueller investigation or hacking, but we actually talked about a speech President Putin gave it as annual press conference where he talked about the rising risk of nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia because of the U.S. walking away from a whole bunch of arms control treaties. So, of course, because this is Crooked Media in POTS of America, and we are always getting one-ups by the news cycle, the minute Ben left the office, President Trump tweeted that Secretary Mattis will no longer be serving

as the Secretary of Defense. He's going to name someone new. It was notable because Mattis resigned clearly because he disagreed with President Trump's decision about Syria. His resignation letter might as well have just stated that in bold letters. There's also rumors that Trump might pull out of Afghanistan in a similar fashion precipitously. Who knows, maybe we'll have announced as much by the time this airs. But I think a lot of people are going to be worried about Mattis leaving. He's seen as an adult in the room.

he is someone that has decades-long relationships with foreign leaders, with foreign militaries, with members of Congress. You know, I think that people probably make too much of his influence. I think ultimately President Trump is reckless and impulsive and doesn't care to learn about issues and doesn't care to listen to advice that he doesn't already agree with. And he's going to do what he wants to do no matter who is in this job. But, you know, if I were a U.S. service member, I'd be concerned because, you know, you would go from someone running the Pentagon who's widely respected and who I think we all would agree has the best interests of the U.S. service members he commands at heart to an unknown.

And that really sucks if you're a soldier or an airman or a Marine going into Christmas. And that is not a great way to treat them. But before I get to the conversation with Ben, I just want to say thank you to you all for listening to the show. It really means a lot to me that I get to do a show every week about foreign policy, including some issues that are really tough to listen to, some things that are not necessarily breaking news. And you guys tune in and you care and you tweet at me about ways I can do better or ways to get involved and become more active.

And it's just, it's the most fun and rewarding thing I do every week. And I wouldn't be able to do it if you didn't listen and support the show. So I just wanted to say thank you. And that's it. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. Without further ado, here's the conversation with Ben. The first thing that we should talk about is pretty topical, which is Trump's decision.

this week to just pull everybody out of Syria. We just had a great conversation about the problem with his open-ended commitment of troops to Syria. The Washington Post reported on like Monday that he had open-ended. But yeah, I mean, you know, so like as of very recently, he said there were going to be 2,000 troops in Syria indefinitely. They talked about it as a policy designed to defeat the Islamic State, but also to check the growing malign influence from Iran. This is just kind of funny.

just days before Trump's announcement, Brett McGirk, who we worked with back in the day when he was our top diplomat in Iraq and other places, he was quoted saying nobody is declaring mission accomplished. This will be a much longer campaign. I guess they did declare mission accomplished. You know, John Bolton had also been out there recently saying that the mission was going to take a long time, but Trump changed his mind. He said he tweeted, actually, sent a little video out. He said, we've defeated ISIS in Syria, so it's time to get out. it is worth noting that there are like three separate reports, including one by the Pentagon and Specter General, that say that ISIS is not defeated and that there are between 20,000 and 30,000

fighters still in Syria. So this was obviously real messy. And maybe we start with the process point. I mean, there was no discernible MSC process, no deliberation, no heads up to Congress, key allies. Probably the worst outcome potentially is for the Kurdish forces in northeastern Syria, who have done the bulk of the fighting and are like, our key allies who are, they're worried now about getting slaughtered by ISIS, Assad, and the Turks who view them as a terrorist group.

They're also openly discussing whether to just release 3,200 ISIS prisoners. So I don't know. Maybe we take this in pieces. Like, what do you think of tweeting all troops getting out of Syria? Whatever. Yeah, before we get to the decision itself, the process was a complete train wreck. And the way to think about this is that those U.S. troops in Syria, facilitate a lot of things, right?

So they facilitate the training and organization of those Kurdish fighters who've actually been defeating ISIS on the ground. They facilitate the arming of those people. They facilitate the other allied forces that are active in Syria and their countries like, you know, the Australian Prime Minister was just going to go visit their troops. Really? He was in Iraq and didn't know. Oh, come on. No, I'm seriously.

Unbelievable. You know, he finds out by the tweet. They facilitate the airstrikes, right? So they help identify the targets that we then take out with airstrikes. So a lot of activity is tied to those couple thousand troops. And aid groups, we should say. And aid groups, you know, certainty that they can go into certain places, obviously, if they're U.S. troops there.

So by having no process, like let's hypothetically say you think it's a good idea to wind down our presence in Syria. And I think there's arguments to do so. But you need to set this out on a time. timeline and say, okay, if we're pulling out, you know, how do we phase that? Do our allies pull out in concert with us? You let them be a part of that decision making. How can DOD create hedges, you know, through air power and other things to make sure that they're keeping the heat on ISIS? The reason you have a process that brings together the State Department and the Defense Department

and our own government and hashes us out of a period of months and then you're very transparent with your allies, the Kurds on the ground, the other countries. So everybody can prepare for this withdrawal. And he did none of that. And then the second problem is what's clear is we've kind of had two policies. We've had like the John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, you know, neocon policy, which is we are going to confront Iran in Syria. And I always thought that was problematic. But you had Bolton saying things like, we're going to stay in Syria until the threat from Iran is addressed, which is kind of staying there forever. Iran's always been in Syria and always... By the way, we literally had this fight about Iraq a decade earlier.

That's the same thing that we had that fight about, right? So that was a worry to me. But the problem is other governments have been talking to Bolton and Pompeo. So they've been planning off of what they've heard from Bolton and Pompeo, right? So if you're the Brits or the Australians, the Iraqi government, the Kurds, the Turks, you've been hearing one policy this whole time from the administration. Now the president has something totally different. It just shows the extent to which nobody can count on us anymore.

They don't know who to trust in the government. They don't know what Trump's going to do in any given. moment. And that, whatever you think of the decision, that's a very dangerous way to manage U.S. national security. Yeah. I mean, I mean, let's say you're, you know, the top military officer in a foreign country, and you read in the New York Times that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was not involved in the decision-making process and learned of it when it went public. And your planes have been bombing ISIS targets. Maybe your troops have been on the ground in Syria. You are not going to follow us again, right? In other words, like, let's say

we have to do something next year or the year after that, why would you join a U.S.-led coalition on anything if the rug can get pulled out from under you like this? Yeah. So back on these Kurdish forces for a minute, the Syrian Democratic forces are, they're mostly made up of Kurdish fighters from the YPG, the people's protection units. So there are these Kurdish forces, I mean, they've been recruiting a bunch of anti-IS Arab fighters who now make up a big bulk of their force, which I read in, I believe the New York Times that they have up to 75,000 fighters. We've been training them, advising them, equipping them with these 2,000 or so special operations guys in Syria. President Erdogan of Turkey, who views these Kurds as a terrorist group, insurgency, whatever, said that he's about to imminently attack northeastern Syria to take them out.

Trump had a call with Erdogan and then apparently made this decision shortly after. That seemed very weird to me. Yeah. So when we started this, you know, the way in which the counter-ristle campaign unfolded, is in the Obama administration, we started in Iraq and started bombing ISIS targets, supporting Iraqi security forces on the ground. And then when we went into Syria, because we followed ISIS and hysteria, we worked with the Kurds, the YPG. They were the most organized fighting force. They wanted to fight ISIS. They wanted to work with us. In part to address Erdogan's concerns.

And here's what Erdogan is concerned about, right? There are Kurds in Iraq who wanted to have an independent country for a long time. And he's worried that the Kurds in Syria will want to have independent country. That borders Turkey. Turkey has a huge Kurdish minority. And Erdogan's long-term fear is that you have an independent Kurdish homeland that could cut into Turkey, right? Because the Kurds and Turkey would probably rather live in independent Kurdistan. So he's worried that if you get armed autonomous Kurds in northern Syria as in northern Iraq, you're creating the basis for what becomes a future Kurdish state. So we had to hold hands with the Turks very carefully as we started to provide arms to these Kurdish fighters,

we insisted that they recruit Arab fighters too, so it's not a single sectarian group, but rather it's Kurds and Arabs fighting together against ISIS. And that's the force that ultimately took Raqa with the U.S. air support and the rest of it, and kind of eliminated the territory that ISIS was holding. Now, Turkey was always agitating to go in, and they said they wanted to fight ISIS,

but we always suspected that part of their agenda was to deny territory from the Kurds and potentially ultimately to confront the Kurds. So if, yes, the U.S. just pulls out, those Kurds would be very vulnerable to Turkish military operations. And we've seen Turkey try to attack Kurdish forces inside of northern Iraq, too, for instance. So if you're a Kurd looking at this, you can't help but wonder if you got sold out in that phone call with Erdogan. The Trump talked to Erdogan's like, hey, I'm pulling out.

Erdogan said, yeah, don't worry about it. of ISIS. But what Iran is really thinking about is I'll take care of these Kurds, right? And these Kurds are suddenly, who've lost thousands and thousands of people in the fight against ISIS, probably feeling very vulnerable, feeling like they're going to get squeezed between Assad and Iran and Turkey. And we've been the protection for them and now we're gone. Just brutal. I just talk about the reaction for a minute. I mean, Lindsay Graham was apoplectic. Most Republican members of Congress were apoplectic. Lindsay Graham said he's going to tweet that he's not letting this go. Oh, shit.

That's totally going to, oh my God, that will change everything. Just owned him. He's going to tweet back at him. This is another favorite of mine. Will it be a reply or a retweet with comment? We're going to have to find out it. It's a quote treat. It's going to be important.

Quotew is a big deal. Bob Corker, who's currently the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was apparently sitting in the White House waiting for a meeting with Trump about Syria when they announce this policy and then canceled the meeting. A man who's had control of the chief oversight committee on foreign policy for two years and done absolutely fucking nothing with it, and then goes out and gives mean Trump quotes to newspapers and tweets sad things like Jeff Blake,

and literally has done nothing from his chair. One person who was very happy, notably, was Vladimir Putin. This allows him to have free reign and prop Assad up until he fully takes control of the country and it's back to square one. Yeah, and not have, I mean, essentially, you know, the Russians and the Iranians have the maximum influence in Syria, us having a presence in eastern Syria, at least.

We should step back here. It's not just withdrawing troops. He's already withdrawn support for the opposition, and he's already cut the humanitarian assistance we're providing. So he's essentially, you know, the troops is the only thing to piss out the Republicans. But there's been a broader disengagement from Syria, which was the possibility for there to be some counterbalance as Syria kind of freezes in place and their discussions about the future politics of the country, you know, you'd want the U.S.

to help be a voice for other groups in Syria other than Assad and Hezbollah. And now that voice is diminished. So that's good for Putin. That's good for Iran. Interestingly, that's very bad for Israel. Israel Netanyahu has been worried about the presence of Iranian forces in southern Syria. So he loved the Bolton talk about staying there and countering the Iranian presence. So again, you know, it's a good day for Putin.

It's clearly not a good day for Syrian Kurds and U.S. allies. Noticably quiet from Netanyahu on this issue, which surprised me. And I should say, by the way, I think we should have had a plan to draw down our forces in Syria. Well, so let's talk about it. Yeah. I mean, so, okay, let's say the process fouls are all gone. And Trump announced today that he was going to get all troops out within six months or something. Yeah.

Support that. I mean, people are saying that they're actually. echoes in this decision of Obama's decision to get all U.S. troops out of Iraq, which obviously had a lot longer lead time. You had a fully trained up and established Iraqi security forces who ended up being terrible fighters. It's just, it's an incredibly lazy take. You know, I saw that David Sanger piece in the New York Times. It said, essentially, oh, this is just like what Obama didn't rock. No, I mean, you were there, Tommy. We spent a year in meetings. We explored a variety of fallen forces. We, explore whether the Iraqis would provide legal protections to U.S. troops inside of Iraq. We processed this question and we ultimately decided that we had an existing status of forces

agreement that required U.S. troops to leave Iraq at the end of 2011. We were not able to negotiate with the Iraqis some following agreement that could provide legal protections for our troops. So it was unclear if our troops would be vulnerable in Iraq and what their mission would be. And Obama ultimately decided, you know what, in this circumstance, I'm going to be. going to pull all troops out. So it didn't pop up on a tweet out of the blue. We had a multi-month process that was all geared towards how do you responsibly draw down. I think you could say, okay, look, ISIS has lost most of its territory. There is still an ISIS presence that needs to be dealt with, but it doesn't demand the same commitment of U.S. forces. I was worried about the mission

creep, this discussion of confronting Iran, all kinds of ways in which suddenly you get U.S. troops in there and they have more missions and then you need more troops. And there's, and there's risk of greater conflict. I think what you say is like, okay, let's figure out over the next year how to draw down these forces. And over the course of that year, you're able to both coordinate with allies who may be drawing down their own forces. You're able to build what is the platform that's going to support continued U.S. airstrikes. You know, we may need to have some intelligence capability that allows us to target airstrikes once we don't have troops on the ground. You try diplomatically to work to create some protection for the steering Kurds or your talks with the Turks.

I mean, there are ways under normal fall in policy circumstances to say, I'm setting the objective of drawing these troops down over the course of, say, the next year, and you manage it responsibly. Trump just tweets, we're getting out and we're getting on 30 days. So it's like a lot of things he does. Like, sometimes people ask me, like, well, tell me one thing you like that Trump has done is if they're trying to prove that I'm inflexibly. You got to get in the both sides club. Yeah, to get in the both sides. To be credible, you have to say nice things about Trump. But the problem is, even when he does things that I can see the rationale for, he does them in such a half-assed, egotistical, unproscential way that it's impossible to kind of get behind the way in which he does it.

Yeah. Last question on Syria. Let's say he announced in a year, all these guys are out. What then do you think the best case scenario would have been? Is it ISIS is sort of defeated in terms of holding any territory, but probably remains as an insurgency. The Kurds have the northeastern part of Syria as some sort of quasi-independent state, and then Assad just resumes control over most of the rest. I think if you had a normal functioning administration for this whole time, right?

There are two or three basic challenges, right? One is humanitarian, and we should be providing more humanitarian assistance support the Syrian people and refugees in other places, and we should be resettling refugees. So we all agree on that, I think, in this room, at least. and Trump has not done that. But then there's the future politics of the country.

And I think in some ways Syria looks kind of like Lebanon in the sense that you have a horrific civil war. And now it's kind of frozen in place where Assad controls kind of one part of the country that isn't the most important part of the country. It's along the Mediterranean. It's where a lot of the population is. But frankly, he does not control huge swaths of territory in east and northern Syria. And you have some political negotiation about how. How is power going to be shared in this country going forward? And clearly Assad is likely to maintain his grip over the territory controls, but we'd be

trying to negotiate some autonomy for other groups, some safe places that they can live without the fear of bombardment in northern Syria and eastern Syria. So the area that was kind of under our control or at least were our allies on the ground controlled territory, they could be in some negotiation of what the settlement is. The last piece is the kind of terrorism piece. And, you know, there I think, you know, we maintain the capacity like we do in Afghanistan and allegedly parts of Pakistan, I should add, the capacity if we see ISIS regenerating to kind of take an airstrike.

But you don't necessarily need ground troops to maintain a counterterrorism platform. Right. What a mess. Especially if you have allies on the ground. Especially if we have Kurds, you can say, hey, we're a little worried about this ISIS camp over here, you know, and we can work with them to take that out. At the end of the day, I support getting our guys out of Syria, but I do seriously worry about all these Kurds who we've been supporting and working with who now could be left to survive in a very tough place. So one other sort of news of the week thing I want to ask you about.

There were reports this week that Major League Baseball and the Cuban Baseball Federation struck a deal to let Cuban players join the Major League Organizations without defecting. You worked on this. Yeah. Probably this specific deal. You certainly worked on the Cuba. new negotiations like what does that mean and why is it important yeah this is a total like passion project of mine because i like baseball and i like cuba um so here's the problem the problem is the only way under because of the u.s embargo and just because of the the frosty relations in the

u.s and cuba the only way that cuban players used to be able to get into major league baseball is to defect now you know the most famous cases of that are like you know if people were in the u.s and they like jumped a fence and ran. But a lot of Cuban players get trafficked to other countries, right? So they end up paying smugglers, you know, to go to Mexico. And there's horror stories. And Major League Baseball told me some of these horror stories. That's why they were interested of essentially people foregoing all their travel documents and giving away all their life savings to be smuggled someplace, to be stranded there. And, you know, it was a great source of danger to Cuban baseball players. And also, if they came to the U.S., they kind of had to cut ties to Cuba and

their families are still there. And so it was really difficult situation where you have these great baseball players in Cuba, and yet you have this kind of huge humanitarian risk associated with them trying to play baseball in the United States. So we started to, we tried to remove all the policy impediments to Cuban players being able to sign the majorly baseball. So for instance, we changed the regulations so that Cubans could take back their whole salary that they made in the U.S. to Cuba, right? It used to be that there were limits on that and the embargo made it difficult for someone, ironically for Cubans actually do well and make money in the United States and be able to take that money back to Cuba. So that was a regulatory change we made in part with an eye towards having it be possible for Cuban athletes to go back to Cuba. Then the Cubans had to figure out a formula with Major League Baseball where in other countries,

Cuban players go to play in Japan and they just have to pay a portion of their salary to the government. Oh, man. And they can't do that in the U.S., obviously, because of the embargo. So any contributions that Cuban players want to make back in Cuba have to be to Cuban baseball and to support programs for young Cuban kids playing baseball. The Cubans very much wanted it to be so that if you play an MLB, you can still play on the Cuban national team and world baseball competitions. And then there was this final question of like how many Cubans can be drafted in any year

because Cubans don't want to lose everybody in their league. They have a pretty good baseball league. So all this stuff had to be negotiated. But the bottom line is baseball should be something that brings people together. Americans like baseball and Cubans like baseball. It should also be the case that if a Cuban player wants to play in MLB, he shouldn't have to risk his life to do so. He shouldn't have to say goodbye to his family forever.

And so we were trying to remove all these obstacles for MLB. And it's just great news that they got this done. I hope at some point there'd be a MLB team in Havana. That would be totally awesome, right? Yeah, that's really cool. Well, I'm glad they got this done. Let's hope that Trump and idiots like Marco Rubi... Yeah, they're complaining about it.

It's just... What should Rubio? Like, this guy says he wants to help the Cuban people, and like, all the approaches he embraces are wildly unpopular in Cuba and fuck over the Cuban people, right? Like, who in Cuba is for not letting their players, like, play on the biggest stage? Like, who is Marco Rubio standing up for other than his own... own hard line political interests in South Florida. I'm sure it gives them enormous pride to see like great Cuban baseball players.

Yes, or Pueg and Cespittus. Depends on the season. But yeah, yeah, yeah, Pueg, fine. Okay, a couple of issues where we wanted to look forward because we think that there could be some, you know, interesting developments or changes on these issues in 2019. We have talked a lot about Israel recently on this show. Some of it was pegged off of an interview I did with Congresswoman Elect,

Ilhan Omar, because she said she supports the BDS movement. There's also like right now, as we speak, a bipartisan bill being debated in Congress that would prohibit U.S. companies from joining any boycotts of Israel. So like that sort of question of sanctions or boycotts has really been swirling recently. It's clear that Washington and the foreign policy establishment in Congress is almost entirely against BDS, and I don't want to relitigate that argument. But there was an interesting poll out by the University of Maryland recently that shows that 40 percent of Americans support imposing some. kind of sanctions against Israel if Israeli settlements in the West Bank continue to expand, and that includes a majority of Democrats who support that position. So I think that polling surprised me.

But it also made me wonder again about something you and I have discussed offline, that there could be space or the likelihood for a Democrat in the presidential primary in 2020 to try to run to the left of traditional U.S.-Israeli political positions. And I don't think that means embracing BDS, but you could see a much tougher position on settlements, for example, because it does seem like support for those types of policies is higher than people might think. Yeah. So that's just something I've been watching. I was wondering what you...

Yeah, no. Well, first of all, we already see it a bit. Like, I know Bernie Sanders and Dianne Feinstein came out against the BDS legislation. Yeah. And they said, look, they don't support BDS, but this legislation is pretty... extreme. It basically, it's, you know, basically criminalizing speech, right? I mean, people is, clearly unconstitutional. Yeah, people should be, and courts have already struck down some of these state BDS bills that essentially criminalize political speech because people say, just saying

that, you know, your company, you know, that you're going to not, you know, invest in Israeli settlements could put you on the wrong side of the law here. So I thought the Bernie staking that position out was an indication of how the politics on this are a bit fluid. I also think that there's always been this odd disparity between public opinion, particularly in Democratic Party and the way the conversations had in Washington. So, for instance, the optic of the Iran deal was, oh, this is a big problem for Obama in the Jewish community because APAC opposed the Iran deal and really aggressively opposed Iran deal. But a majority of American Jews supported the Iran deal. In fact, in higher numbers than the rest of the population.

Really? Yeah. So there's always been this weird disparity between what everybody feels like the accepted line is and where the public actually is on these issues. And I think that that is just growing, that gap between public opinion related to Israeli policy and elite policymaking in Washington. That gap is growing.

And I do think that opens up space for a pretty interesting debate in Democratic primary because Netanyahu's policies are moving Israel so far to the right. Right. You know, on settlements, on nationality bill, that, you know, you can't really tow that line without being totally out of step with where the Democratic Party electorate is. Yeah. And the situation on the ground has just so fundamentally changed. I mean, we've moved the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. And because of that decision, the Palestinians have boycotted, I think, any meeting with the U.S. envoy ever since.

Nikki Haley said that Israel wants a peace agreement, but it doesn't need one. So it sounds like she is maybe following some voices in Israel who were walking away from two-state solution. I mean, you could see someone saying, I think we need to fundamentally rethink our approach to this challenge. I mean, to sum it up, Netanyahu is said publicly now that a Palestinian state won't happen on his watch. Right. The people who would be most likely to succeed Netanyahu are to his right. The settlements are making a Palestinian state impossible. the Palestinians are living in decrepit and dehumanizing conditions in Gaza, right?

And that's just the reality. So mouthing platitudes about supporting two-state solution, but then supporting the Israeli govern all these issues isn't going to be a credible position anymore, right? And I think that opens up space in the Democratic debate to test what does it mean to support Israel and support the Israeli people and to oppose terrorism and to support Israel's security. but to not support the policies of this Israeli government. And so taking positions on providing more assistance into Gaza to help Palestinians, taking positions on creating actual international pressure on Israel related to its settlement expansion.

You know, taking positions on public positions as we did at the very end of the Obama administration over what a Palestinian state should look like to create at least a basis for that. I think all these things would be on the table. And I think people would make a mistake to assume that everybody's just going to kind of hue to the pro Netanyahu line in the Democratic Party, which has been the case in the past. Yeah. I think it will be very interesting to watch how these discussions emerge, especially in states like Iowa that are pretty liberal. Yeah. Another important issue is North Korea.

I think it's clear that the North Korea talks to Singapore summit was just a failure. The Koreans just this week said they're not going to give up their nuclear arms. until we do. Meanwhile, there's all this reporting that they're expanding their missile program. They repeatedly just blow off Pompeo when he's supposed to meet with them. It feels like there is a run-out-the-clock strategy. But my question going forward into 2019 is, like, do you think it's possible to go back to a tougher position on North Korea the way we did before? Like, would the world reimpose sanctions or have they accepted this new reality? In particular, President Moon of South Korea seems fully vested in the embrace of Kim Jong-un and North Korea and, like, hoping against hope that

this reproachment works. So what happens if North Korea inevitably, you know, tests on IBCBM or nuclear warhead? Like, where do you think this goes? So, I don't know, I get to do this once per show. The imagine if we, I mean, we negotiated the Iran deal, which had these highly intrusive inspections and verification regime and everybody could read the reports every three months. months about what they were doing and they're dismantling infrastructure and they're shipping nuclear material of the country. And we got raked over the coals for the whole year and half that we had the Iran deal on hand by Congress, by the media. Imagine if we fucking flew to Singapore and met this fat dictator and cut some deal with no inspections, no requirements

whatsoever in the North Koreans, said we solved the threat. And like nobody's paying intention to this. It's like, oh, yeah. And every now and then Trump tweets out what a great guy Kim Jong-un is, right? He wants to meet him again? Yeah, he's looking forward to another meeting. I mean, so, okay, that was my complaint. On your question, no, I think what Trump has basically done is, and this was a concern some of us had at the beginning, like, diplomacy is great. Yet another thing that Trump did that I could support in principle, but in practice the way he did it was idiotic. Because by front-loading the head of state summit, by heaping praise on Kim, he sent the message to the world that, oh, I'm legitimizing this guy, right?

And then to follow up on it while, you know, by bragging about the beautiful exchange of letters he had with Kim and by calling him such a great leader and all this stuff, the message to everybody else around the world is, okay, this problem is off the front burner. Meanwhile, the North Koreans have given us nothing for that. Nothing. They're not giving up any of their nuclear infrastructure. There are no inspections. And I think that if you're China or the other countries that we would need to enforce sanctions, you're thinking, well, actually, I thought this problem was solved. Trump said it was solved. We don't like to enforce sanctions.

It's difficult for us to do. I think it will be almost impossible to go all the way back to where we were, where North Korea was cast as this illegitimate actor. We had strict sanctions regime on. If Trump tried to pivot back to pressure, I think he'd have a hard time dragging China and other countries to it. So I don't know what happens here in the next couple years. I mean, I think what the North Koreans are aiming for is just the de facto acceptance of them

as a regime and of their nuclear weapons. Right. It feels like we're heading there. Yeah. And they, you know, maybe they don't need to test this stuff anymore, right? So they just have it. Everybody accepts it. And over time, sanctions begin to erode.

And we get to a place where their play worked. You know, they have their nuclear weapons and they have their security. And ultimately, they begin to open up some of their economy. That feels like where this is headed unless Trump decides that he's going to turn back to being, you know, anti-rocket man. Yeah. Hopefully he's too invested in. wanting this to be successful. And I think if your moon, yeah, if your moon, you're like, you know what, given the choice between

having this nuclear armed neighbor or President of the United States who could get us in a war that could have get us all killed, that's why Moon's like, you know what, I'm all in. I'm all in on the, you know, I'll change the calculus. We'll praise Trump and all this stuff. And as long as we can survive the next two years. Yeah. Speaking of nuclear annihilation, let's talk Russia for a minute. Not the hacking, not the Mueller investigation stuff.

but the much more important, I would argue, scarier traditional great power dynamic and nuclear arms race set of issues. So Putin did his annual press conference just recently, and he warned about the rising threat of nuclear war between the U.S. because we were pulling out of all these arms control treaties. Specifically, he referred to the 1987 intermediate range nuclear forces treaty and are apparent reluctance to renegotiate the new START treaty. So just quickly on the INF Treaty, what that is. Basically, back in the 80s, the Soviet Union deployed a missile to Europe that was capable of carrying a bunch of nuclear warheads. So we followed suit with our own hardware. The reason this scared the hell out of everybody is because these missiles launch and land in as little as 10 minutes.

So nuclear annihilation could happen quickly and by mistake and there's no way to walk it back. Yeah. So this treaty, the INF Treaty, prohibited land-based cruise missiles or ballistic missiles that have a range of like 300 to 3,400 miles. So you're not on this knife's edge at all time. It should also be noted that Russia has been violating the INF treaty for a while. We, the Obama administration, accused them of. But it does strike me that Putin has a point that the United States, led by John Bolton. You want to know where that in mustachioed creep is, is hiding in these kinds of issues,

is pulling us out of and walking away from these major arms control negotiations. Like this feels like a major, major issue that could arise in the next year. Yeah. And then, you know, you had the New Star Treaty. which restricted substantially the number of nuclear weapons and launchers that we could have deployed. If you dismantle this architecture of arms control between the U.S. and Russia, it's incredibly dangerous, right? Because that limits both the numbers of weapons we have, the numbers of weapons we have deployed, the types of missiles that we can have deployed to put nuclear warheads on.

And, you know, it puts us back in a position where we're pretending to have a nuclear arms race. Also, you get verification regimes, right? So you get the ability to monitor each other's what the other party is doing. Like, are they keeping their commitments? And that's obviously a part of why you have arms control regimes so that there's transparency and nuclear arsenals. I do think this kind of this hostility to any international agreement or treaty, this is another example where underneath the radar, the Trump people are dismantling architecture that's been in place for decades, much of which was set up by, Republican presence, you know, like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, who did arms control agreements at the Soviet Union. And they're leading us in the direction of a world in which there's just

like no rules and no international agreements. And we'll be back in a place where, you know, we're in a nuclear arms race. And that's crazy for a host of reasons, right? Including the fact that, as we talked about on the pod, like, we're getting ready to spend another trillion dollars to build some new nuclear weapons. Like, what is the point of that, right? And so you want this. set of agreements in place to prevent mistakes, to prevent escalation, to have transparency and what the other party is doing. You'd like ultimately to limit and reduce the numbers of nuclear weapons around the world and go in the direction of trying to eliminate nuclear weapons. And Trump is leading us in the opposite direction. And that's an incredibly destabilizing thing.

It could lead other nations to want to get nuclear weapons. It could lead us to have no idea what the Russians are doing. It could jack up our budgets because we're back in an arms race is nothing good about this. Yeah, there's nothing good about it. I just, of all the things for Trump to this, I mean, I guess maybe he just described it to him and say Obama supported all these policies, so we should reject them.

But I would hope that some sort of better minds to prevail in that White House on these issues. It doesn't seem like there's any constituency for just pulling out of armed control completely, unless you're John Bolton. Yeah, it's Bolton, you're right. And where this comes together with his other crazy policies are there are a lot of countries

that could build nuclear weapons and don't. And the main reason they don't is because they're international agreements that restrict them from doing so. But also because they know they trust us, right? So Japan, South Korea, countries like this, they trust us to be their security guarantee. And the combination of Trump dismantling the nuclear arms regime and also being an unreliable ally, we could live in a world in five or ten years where more and more countries are acquiring nuclear weapons. And that's a bad thing because the more countries have nuclear weapons just, the more risks there are that there's some conflict that actually leads to the use of a nuclear weapon.

Yeah, we don't need the Saudis. Exactly. Like, it's scary enough living in a world where Indian Pakistan have nuclear weapons and are constantly on the nice edge of conflict. That replicating that in different parts of the world is not, it's not a good idea. Not a good idea. It's one thing we haven't had to worry about that much, and I don't want to have to worry about that on top of everything else. No, I don't either. All right.

To conclude this really uplifting New Year's show, we wanted to do a quick. sort of power ranking type thing to see how everyone feels about these some horned heads of states as you head into 2019. If you're Vladimir Putin, how are you feeling going into 2019? So I think he's feeling just fucking great. You think he's up?

Yeah, I mean, I think he's up. Because like, you know, the U.S. is in disarray. The Western Alliance is in disarray. All these things he wanted. You know, everybody always says, did he want sanctions relief? No, he wanted the U.S. to be not a credible actor anymore. And he wanted the U.S. in Europe to be divided. And he wanted

these kind of right-wing creeps to take over more and more European countries. And he wanted the UK and disarrated from Brexit. So he's got kind of what he's bet on. And he's just kind of sitting back this New Year's, like, you know, with, I don't know what Vladimir Putin drinks. I don't think he drinks.

Yeah. The teetotaler. It's another example, Tommy, that... That's why we don't like them. It's better to drink. Yeah. I mean, all kinds of respect for people

who need to give up drinking, but these guys like Trump and Putin, you know, you wonder if we, be in, they'd be a little less uptight. Yeah, you know, Tip O'Neill and Reagan used to go have a drink of night. Actually, we don't think that's true. I actually don't think they. Historians have told many of us that that's actually a bullshit Washington trope that just exists forever.

But hey, don't let me get in a way of a good story. So I'm going to take a, I think Putin's sitting pretty right. Yeah, he's sitting pretty. Okay. Wishful thinking contrarian. What if he's peaked? And what if he's looking at the U.S. and saying, oh, God, this special counsel thing is closing in on Trump. I'm going to have a new president soon.

My life is about to get worse. That's my hope and a prayer. I think the scariest thing for Putin was in midterm election. That's true. Because if the pendulum swings back hard in the U.S., including the next presidential election, you could see it begin to swing across the West, and you could see this authoritarian tide reverse. And that's the thing Putin's most afraid of.

All right. I'm going to combine two euros and get your take. Yeah. How do you feel right now if you're Emmanuel Macron in France or Theresa May in the UK? I suspect could be the same answer. I think Theresa May is at the bottom of the power rankings section. and put her below McCrone. I mean, she has no answer.

She has no way out here. Like she's got a shitty Brexit deal that nobody likes. She's got the hard Brexit, right? The Brexit with no deal that would be like a national catastrophe, the worst own goal of any country in history of the world, or at least recently. Or she has to give up and have another vote on this. Either way, her time as Prime Minister is done and everybody was just going to blame her, right? So she's at the bottom.

McCrone, he's on like kind of life support. He was rotting high a year ago. These protests have knocked him down. But we have to keep mind. Like, French presidential terms are long. You know, he can weather this. The question is whether you can recover some political standing in the country.

Yeah, that's a good point. And internationally, I bet. Okay. I think I'm with you on both of those. So Xi Jinping just gave his big speech on the 40th anniversary of the party. He has consolidated power in a way that I think even surprised some China experts.

but he's in the middle of a trade war. How do you think he's feeling? A little stressed. I still think right now he's probably the most powerful man in the world, which is rare because the U.S. president has always been that, but Trump is so unreliable. And people look at Gene, they know he's going to be around, and they know he's going to be around for a while,

and they know they've taken seriously. China's hugely expanded its influence. You know, the Trump presidency has been this mixed back for them. The huge payoff for them is they're much more influential in Asia, and Africa and Latin America. They're basically coming in behind. us in all the places where Trump is absent and filling a lot of the space that the U.S. used to as a trading partner as a source of influence.

I think the trade war has stressed him out. The Chinese economy is slowing down because of it. He doesn't really know where Trump is headed with it. And it could be headed towards a global economic slowdown that hurts the Chinese economy and our economy. So, you know, Trump has kind of made them nervous because they don't know what the hell he's getting at and where this is all leading. I do think they have the capacity to wait him out, though, right? Because one thing Xi Jinping doesn't have to worry about is next election, right?

And so he knows that he can squeeze the U.S. in certain industries and states and compel Trump to make a deal or, you know, make it very hard for Trump to campaign for re-election. So he has cards to play. So the way I put it is he's sitting generally pretty. They have, some headwinds that they didn't want in their economy because of this trade war. He's got some cards to play yet to deal with that. And so, you know, he's doing pretty good. Yeah, I think he's doing pretty good. I think that he is probably a little more worried about the economic trends than we think

because they're sitting on a mountain of hidden debt. That's a good point. They don't talk about publicly. But, yeah, I feel pretty good. If I had absolute power and the country of a couple billion people, you know, you're rocking. And if I'm the Chinese, I'm thinking to myself, I've gotten all the dividend from the Trump presidency, which is this diminution of American influence. And now I'm just dealing with the problems, which is this kind of arsonist in the global economy. So they may be getting a little

tired of Trump. Yeah, I bet. How do you think our boy, B.B. Netanyahu is doing over in Israel? I mean, you know, the indictments are stacking up, potential indictments, I should say. So, you know, I think there too, like you get the sense that this could kind of slide away from pretty quickly. Like his high point was probably, you know, year one of the Trump presidency, embassy move into the end of the Iran deal. And like that was kind of the top of the mountain. And now he's looking down the mountain. He's got potential indictments coming, an election to deal with, you know, what the hell he's going to do about the Palestinian issue.

So I think actually like he's on a downward slope here. But he's a survivor. And so, you know, he could, that could be a very long downward slope. I know. The thing about Nanjahou is his first. infuriating is, and sometimes you think maybe, well, maybe he's a bad politician, but then you look at, you know, he's watching the A&E Clinton tapes about impeachment and, et cetera, and like, you know, there's Bibi Nanyahu in the Oval Office, sit next to Bill Clinton

when he's talking about the Lewinsky. 20 years ago. God, go away. Last one, Angela Merkel. Stalwart. Stallwart, friend of the pod. You know, you know what? Like, she kind of found some footing.

she basically made it so that she could leave on her terms, right? So she said she's not going to serve past this term. Her kind of handpicked successor got chosen as the next leader of her political party. So much weaker position than she was a couple years ago, but she kind of righted the ship. And I think at least heads into next year thinking, I may be able to define the terms of my own exit from the stage. And that's a better place.

I mean, I think what's notable about this list, Tommy, is that the leaders of democracies are kind of on their back foot, you know, Theresa May, Miracle, Macron. The leaders of these authoritarian countries have had a better run under Trump. And the goal for all of us should be, how do we swing that pendulum in the other direction? And I cannot tell people enough how much, like, that is not something to be settled by people Davos. It's going to be settled by people within this pot, right? Because the other side has been well organized, well-financed, you know, you've got Bannon traveling around Europe, you've got common media platforms with Brightbart,

common political strategies, if the energy we brought to the midterms can be extended through the U.S. presidential election, but also across the progressive political movement and civil society around the world, there's like more of us than these people. And we can be sitting here in two or three years

and be like, wow, like the pendulum has swung back away from this authoritarian creepiness to progressive small D Democrats. But we have a lot of work to do. A lot of work to do. Well, that is a great, hopeful place to end it. Thank you all for listening to this show over the past two years. It means a lot to both of us.

We get to talk about things we care about and try to focus attention on issues that might not otherwise get discussed in the news. So I appreciate it. Yeah, I hope everybody had a happy holiday and it'll be an interesting 2019. Yeah, we'll be in 2019. Hopefully we'll be allowed to talk to you all next year.

Yes, we'll still be here. Happy new year, everybody. Happy new year. Bye-bye.