Pod Save the World - France is not amused

Episode Date: September 22, 2021

Tommy and Ben explain why a security agreement between the US, UK and Australia has enraged the French, the latest on elections in Canada and Russia, the assassination of an Iranian scientist, Biden addresses the UN General Assembly, and the Space Force debuts its dress uniform. Then Senator Chris Murphy joins Ben to discuss the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the urgency for filling critical diplomatic positions that Republicans are blocking.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsavetheworld. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, all the way live from Washington, D.C. Has the blob found you yet? This is like slowly rolling to your studio? Yeah, there's a group of agitated people outside my hotel, you know. I have never laughed harder than I did the other day reading that New York Times story about the members of the D.C. foreign policy establishment or the blob as you branded them being mad about being called the blob. It was incredible. Yeah, I mean, it was kind of funny because the article only then precedes to quote people who I think would largely be perceived as a part of the blob. And I saw some people kind of complaining about that. Like, why aren't there other voices? But I think that was kind of her point. Yeah. Just to show how, like, agitated the blob gets by.

I mean, the best is the guy who's like lamenting the hurt feelings of the blob. And his title is the the Henry A. Kissinger distinguished something or other, you know, and it's like, well. The Henry A. Kissinger, distinguished professor of global affairs would be Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. I'm not knocking academia, but yeah, that was the, I think it was Sarah Lyle was her name. She did a brilliant job of June. I mean, I think she was trolling. Yeah, she's trolling everybody, including me to some extent, which is totally fine. Like the blob is something I invented on the fly, but it was good. It was, it was, it was great. Also, Ben, you know, before we get to a very serious, important show today, Dan had some very harsh words for your decision. to go to Bob Woodworth's house and to eat soup with him during a book interview. It felt like 2007, 2008.

We were getting our legs chopped out from Dan on comms issues. Do you want to respond? You have the mic now, open floor. I felt like I was once again 29 years old and in the campaign office in Chicago and had made some rookie mistake that here's the thing about podcast. It's great. Dan was the kind of guy that wouldn't like yell at you, but you would know that he was pissed at you. Like he had, you know, he wouldn't respond to your email for like seven hours. And it was like being able to overhear how he was complaining about something I did to somebody else.

Yeah. He obviously was correct, although I will say that it was a very good bowl of soup. And, you know, I think I, I mean, sometimes you got to play ball, right? I mean, I think I made our case there in that book. I wasn't, I wasn't dishing against the team, which is what you're usually most worried about with Woodward books. No, you weren't dishing. You were slurping. I did feel like I was listening to Dan talk to, like, Bill Burton about me.

Exactly. I am being Ben Smith in 2007. Exactly. And it hurt because Dan was 100% right. Like I didn't disagree with anything he said. I was like, yeah, yeah, he's right about that. Kind of a rookie mistake. Didn't make it again.

Sorry about that. Well, at least Dan now knows that he's going to come at us on this show. We're going to clap back. Yeah, we'll find a way to come back at Dan. With our platform. Speaking of clapping back, so we are going to talk about a lot of good stuff today, including why a security pact between the U.S., the UK, and Australia has our French friends furious. There's elections in Canada and Russia, the assassination of Iranian scientists,

more troubled the southern border. The UN General Assembly is happening now as we speak, Ben. can you feel the progress all the way down in D.C.? The world is changing as we speak underneath our feet. Incredible. The sea's rise is being slowed, you know, all those things are happening. Yes, all sorts of good stuff. We had a quick update on Ethiopia, some news about Boris Johnson and some news about

Space Force. And then, Ben, you did our interview today. You are in D.C., as I mentioned before. You were in the swamp. Which creature did you pull out of the pool to interview for today? Well, I think the most world member of the United States Senate, Chris Murphy. The least swampy, you know, we love Chris Murphy, but, you know, we covered a lot of ground here because I wanted, you know, he wrote a great piece for Crooked.com kind of defending the Afghanistan decision. We unpacked kind of his argument there. But then we really look forward to like, what does this mean for the future of American foreign policy? Shouldn't we be looking at not descending the Afghan war, but perhaps winding down our use of drones, given what we saw in the tragic drone strike? What are the priorities for U.S. foreign policy going forward? Why the hell can we not confirm? nominees because Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley are assholes. And he gave a good readout of his recent

trip to Lebanon with some pretty concrete recommendations for how to address an issue that you and I have talked about without a lot of good answers. So definitely worth the listen. Definitely worth a listen. Stick around for that. Before we get to the news, two very important updates. The first is something you all know, which is that we have a little more than a year to go until the 2022 midterms. And the truth, as we've all learned, is that we have to do work now if we want to win later. And that is why we at Crooked Media are launching through Votesave America a campaign to support organizations on the ground in key states who are working to register voters right now. So if you go to Votesaveamerica.com slash no off years, votesafeamerica.com

slash no off years. Click the link. You can learn how you can donate. You can help all these voter registration efforts in a bunch of really important states. And these are states where they really need your help the most. So check it out. If you want to donate, donate, it would make a big difference to these organizers. But it's an important initiative and we've got to get to work now. Also, listeners of this show know Washington Post journalist Jason resign well. Ben, you know Jason as well as anybody. Both professionally and personally.

Yeah, so Jason was unjustly imprisoned in Iran for 544 days. Imagine that in one of the worst prisons in Iran. He's accused of being an American spy. That was all bullshit. In a new podcast from Gimlet, Crooked Media, and 824, Jason tells that story of what it took to free him and, you know, trying to get out of this place while navigating this high-stakes nuclear diplomacy that was happening in the background between the Obama administration and the Iranians. The 544 Days trailer is out now. The first three episodes will drop on September 28th.

I have listened to it. They are fantastic. It's only on Spotify, but don't yell at us. You can get it for free. But just check it out on Spotify. It's an amazing series, and we're really proud of it and just really proud to get to work with. Jason, who's a phenomenal human being. And it's an amazing story.

I don't know. What else did I say then? You were on the other side of this whole, you know. Well, yeah, I was interviewed as one of the people Jason interviewed. And, you know, I think it's just going to be like a phenomenal blend of his very personal story. And the experience of being a prisoner in solitary confinement and not knowing, you know, whether you're ever going to get out of prison, not knowing whether you're going to see your family again. But then also working in these kind of massive. geopolitical tectonic plates that were moving around him. So this is definitely one you don't want to

miss. This is like winds of change level like, you know, binge listening potential here. Are you going to binge that thing? Yeah, it's one thing to read about someone's story. It's another thing to just hear them tell it in their own words and, you know, hear Jason's wife and family and, you know, it's just incredibly powerful stuff. One thing I'm actually, I've realized I should be telling you guys this because I'm kind of back out on the road for my book after the fall. I had a great event in your old stomping ground in Boston yesterday at Northeastern University. Thursday, I will be in Houston at their Houston Worldows, H-Town. I'll be at the Asia Society there.

We'll be letting it rip at the Asia Society. Blobbing down south. Yeah. And then I'll get some more details to you guys out next week. Wednesday I'm in Culver City at a great bookstore, so local in L.A. And then I'm in Stanford with our old friend Mike McFall on Thursday. So I'll keep you guys posted on these events. It's great to see the world those ads.

It's great to see the merch. Some people were showing me some very cool Pots of the World mugs yesterday. So there you go. Thanks for doing that. Well, Ben, I hope there are no French listeners picketing your event because the French are very angry. Yes. And we are going to talk about why in a minute. But let's the first back up and maybe give the listeners a little context here.

So last week, President Biden, Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia and Prime Minister Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom, one of our personal favorites announced a new security partnership between those three countries. They're calling it Ocus, which just rolls right off the tongue. They didn't say this explicitly at the event, but the goal of Ocass is to bolster militaries in the Asia-Pacific region to push back on the threat from China, which now has the world's largest navy, although, you know, we have smaller boats, but whatever, we're not going to. It's a motion in the ocean thing. Not boat measuring, yeah. Yeah, the biggest piece of this partnership is an agreement where the U.S. and the U.K. are going to help Australia. to build nuclear-powered submarines.

The details of exactly how are TBD. It's like an 18-month process to figure it out. But it's a big deal because this is going to involve sharing some very sophisticated nuclear propulsion technology with the Australians. American submarines, British submarines are powered by bomb-grade, highly enriched uranium or HEU. And it's likely the U.S. will have to give the Australians this kind of nuclear fuel to power their subs.

Just to clear out one thing. We're talking about the propulsion of the subs. and how they get moved, not nuclear missiles. We're talking about nuclear fuel. But anyway, why don't we start there, Ben? I mean, what do you think the strategy was behind this new alliance, the Ocas, and what do you make of concerns from nonproliferation experts who say that transferring this kind of nuclear technology is dangerous and it sets back effort to eradicate nuclear weapons?

So, first of all, what do people get out of this and then what are the concerns? On the upside for the countries involved, for the Australians, they get this kind of world, class sub and this kind of deeper association with the U.S. military, obviously the strongest military power in the Pacific region. The U.K., which kind of helped broker this, they get, I think, a very clear demonstration of how they would like to be seen in the world post-Brexit, you know, that they have these key allies like the United States and Australia. They're big players, even in regions like the Indo-Pacific. And what does the U.S. get?

I mean, what the U.S. gets is a demonstration that, you know, we are ramping up our alliances and our presence in this critical region. This is all about China. I wish they'd just come out and say that. I don't know why we have to, like, pretend. I know. The Chinese aren't confused. Yeah, yeah. The Chinese know what this is about.

But, you know, it's about sending a message that we're kind of evolving and advancing our presence in that region. And the fact that it's called Indo-Pacific, too, is a testament to the way in which this region is evolved. We used to call it the Asia-Pacific. It's Indo-Pacific because we want to bring the idea that India is a part of this and that the Chinese can't push everybody around, that we're building kind of this alliance of countries and partnership between countries like Australia, the United States, India, Japan, South Korea, all our kind of team there in Asia-Pacific. other countries, obviously, of course. So, and I think the Biden team would say that, look, this is, you know, at a time when the United States is pivoting away from the war in Afghanistan, this is a demonstration that, you know, countries like Australia are betting on us for a partnership in a critical military area like this.

And so it's a manifestation of their strategy, their China strategy, their Indo-Pacific strategy, and this kind of evolution of our alliances. There's some interesting stuff alluded to about dealing with the development of artificial intelligence and new technologies. There was not a detail about that, but I think what that's indicating is, you know, the next generation of threats and innovation. We're going to have these closer partnerships. I think on the proliferation concern is the technology that supports the nuclear propulsion you talked about has a proliferation risk. And so we are sharing sensitive technologies with Australia. that if Australia decided to kind of take that and repurpose it and use it in pursuit of a nuclear weapon,

it might make it easier for them to do that. And obviously they don't detail exactly the type of material that is used in the nuclear subs. But clearly, you're sharing something that is usually not in the possession of non-nuclear states. And I think the proliferation concern that people have is less that like Australia is going to take this and break out and build. the nuclear weapon, but that it could kind of break a seal where other countries like China, for instance, might start doing this with other countries who present a greater proliferation risk, that it's just a weakening of the non-proliferation regime in the same way, if World has won an analogy, that the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Cooperation Agreement did back in the earlier

2000s, when once again, with a kind of strategic partner with the China Nexus, we agreed to a kind of nuclear sharing agreement that was uncomfortable to those who think that the non-proliferation regime and goal should be more important than whatever strategic goal is advanced by this time of sharing. On balance, it makes sense, given the direction and orientation of U.S. foreign policy in that part of the world, obviously the French angle is in addition to the proliferation angle, which is real one and which I think should get a lot of attention and there should be, you know, continued accountability on, hey, what safeguards are there and how are you going to make sure that

this doesn't kind of break a seal for further proliferation? The main media concern is the French issue. Yeah, and then on that UK angle, I think the UK also will get to use Australia as basically a base for their nuclear-powered subs, so that will just help them, like, protect power even further into the region. I mean, I saw one report that mentioned that China accounts for 42% of all military spending across Asia. There are some people who are worried. that, you know, this partnership will essentially kickstarted arms race among countries like Japan or South Korea or others in the region to try to match, uh, match China's spending at the U.S.'s behest. But I don't know. I mean, I guess if China's already spending at those levels,

you know, you could kind of argue it both ways. I don't know. Yeah, I think there's, that's a right concern to have. I mean, the theory of the case that dates back to the Obama years, frankly, is that we wanted our friends in the region to be more engaged, more seized with the challenges coming from China and more connected, not just us, but to each other. And so that that includes like the kind of core allies we have in that part of the world, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, newer partnerships like India, and then countries that, you know, we work well with that aren't, you know, allies in the traditional sense, but, you know, Singapore, and Indonesia and others, we just want greater cooperation there. Now, I think an important piece of this is,

to me, the most important area for partnership is in the political space. You know, how are we dealing with human rights concerns, democracy concerns, how are we trying to make institutions work better to push back against China if they're trying to claim, you know, the whole South China Sea? So this should not just be seen as a military effort. And I think if the military people, of it is prioritized above other things, obviously there's a risk that that creates an increased chance of conflict. But the reality is that Chinese are doing things. They're building military structures on rocks in the South China Sea. They're ramping up dramatically their Navy. They're seeking to intimidate Taiwan. I don't think that means that we need to use that to justify

massive new kinds of military spending. I actually think it means more that you need closer political coordination among countries. Especially things like the Australians have, you know, criticized China's human rights record and just been hammered with boycotts of, you know, Australian beef or wine or whatever. They've been left out on a bit of an island. That's right. They get the shit kicked out of them by China whenever they criticize them and they get punished

in that way. And I think an agreement like this is meant to indicate, hey, we got your back. But I think it, like I hope that this is, you know, it's not just manifest in the military space. It's manifest in other forms of cooperation, technology, economic cooperation. people-to-people exchange. And yes, speaking out together on issues of human rights. Yeah. Okay, so let's get back to France. So in 2015, Australia signed a $66 billion deal to buy submarines from the French. That deal is now canceled. That is obviously a huge economic hit

for the French defense industry. And, you know, clearly a political hit for President Macron that's going to cause him, you know, political problems, basically. The French also say they only got a couple hours heads up before this deal was announced, which, you know, is going to cause him, you know, which added insult to injury. But I have to say the reaction has been so, so over the top, almost comically over the top. The French foreign minister accused the U.S. of lying, called it a stab in the back, accused the Australians of lies and duplicity. There's all this talk of a crisis questioning of America's commitment to Europe.

The French recalled their ambassadors from the U.S. in Australia. I'd point out that France didn't recall its ambassador to Russia despite the Russians repeatedly trying to interfere in their elections, which kind of seems like a bigger deal. the French also say they're going to release documents showing the U.S. lied to them that the real goal here was somehow to break up the French Australian alliance to put France in its place that this was like a deliberate attack of Macron. Like you're reading all of this stuff in the French press. So Ben, like I genuinely think it's important for the US have close ties with European allies, especially the French. This is so fucking stupid. I mean, isn't the more simple answer here that French submarines kind of suck?

They're powered by diesel fuel. Oh, man. They can't like, like they can't last underwater as long they have less capability. It's like, it's an arm sale. Like, what do you want for me here? Yes, it's a gross, huge, massive arm sale. Yeah. That's what this is.

Yeah. I mean, be careful. They're going to come after you now, Tommy. That's okay. I think that there's like, there's different pieces of this. Some of them are more legitimate than others. So on the baseline, you're right. Like, the Australians can buy subs from who they want.

Why wouldn't we want them to buy our subs? and why wouldn't we want to have this kind of closer partnership? And of course the French are going to be pissed. They lost a lot of money. It's an industrial hit for them. I do think it's a little weird that they kind of weren't notified in the sense that, like, I don't know how important, like, surprise was. You know, like, if you had told the French a day before something, it would have leaked out, okay. You know, but even that's, that's like a small notification kind of rollout issue, right?

I think on the bigger issue there's a couple things going on. One, I think the French are probably going to try to extract some, something from us. So part of this is like, it's like when you get in a fight with your friend and you know that you kind of like, like, you know, you did something not wrong, but your friend was harmed by something you did here, you know. and they throw a tantrum and then they're like, can I borrow your car next weekend? Like, I bet you the friends you're going to come back in this conversation with Biden. They're going to have some list of asks.

They'll want to be made whole in some fashion for this, you know? Yeah, I feel like France is a Brazilian soccer player who was fouled and now is doing his seventh somersault on the ground trying to like get the red card. Like, we get it, guys. We'll get you back. Like, they could have been invited into this, you know, broader alliance.

It could have been aquifer or whatever. I mean, maybe that's the recommendation here. I don't know. Ocusfer. I mean, well, that was the other point I was going to make that is, I think, important. So you've heard this. I heard in the four years of Trump, I'd go to Europe and I'd get an earful about, well, you know, Obama started to pivot away from Europe. And there are these disagreements on things.

And then Trump comes along and that this builds on a series of issues where the U.S. and France have been out of step. And the French didn't like the Putin summit, didn't feel like they were brought into that. that that Biden did. But I mean, while some of that I think is, you know, is kind of noise, I think the true point that's hard, it's just difficult, is that I never understood this argument that saying that we were pivoting to Asia was at Europe's expense. Because what we're talking about is ending the wars in the Middle East. The pivot wasn't away from Europe. It was away from things like the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq. I do think what the Biden team needs to do it is you actually want Europe to pivot to Asia with you. Like, we want to have common

positions on issues that are implicated by China, whether they're environmental or human rights or economic. We want a common front with Australia and all the countries I mentioned, but also with Europe. And it would be bad if out of this, the French and the EU were like, screw you, we're not going to develop a kind of common approach to the Indo-Pacific or to China or all these things. So I think the Biden team does need to figure out a way to kind of find more common ground here. But yeah, I think some of this is quite performative and probably going to be used to try to leverage the Biden team for concessions in other areas. Yeah, you know, Macron's been calling NATO brain dead for a while and, you know, expressing concern about the waning commitment to the

transatlantic alliance and U.S. commitment. Like, I just, I do think it's, there's something real year, there's something a touch performative. They're probably really pissed at their intel people for not picking this up ahead of time. I don't know. It's just hard for me to suss it all out. Yeah, I mean, the NATO piece is always just talk about developing and more independent European defense. And frankly, that's fine. I mean, Europe, NATO can still be the kind of cornerstone of our alliance partnership. If Europe wants to develop some more independent defense capability, particularly to deal with challenges in their area, that's fine. I do think it's in America's interest and Europe's interest to have a common approach to these issues with China. Because if you're

talking about trade irritants, if you're talking about democratic backsliding, like our basic worldview is pretty similar to the Europeans. So I think it'd be a mistake on both sides of the Atlantic to let these kinds of irritants kind of distract us from the fact that we kind of agree about how we'd like the world to operate, like what the rules should be and what the values we should be upholding. Like, let's kind of get back to basics here. And, you know, hopefully the French returned to having an ambassador and the gala party, you know, that was canceled, you know, gets rescheduled. Yeah, they probably canceled that big party. There's some celebration of a war that, like, ended in the 17 or 1800.

Yeah, I think like the Biden administration should be like, look, like Emmanuel Macron, we owe you one. We'll get you back. Yeah, they should. And they should do that. Dial it down. They should find a way to get him back. And they should go an extra mile because we got this sub. contract and we can all move on.

Yeah, we all move on. Speaking of French-speaking friends, Canada just voted Ben. And things are kind of the same. Yeah, Justin Trudeau. It's going to be prime minister still. He'll be the head of a minority government. Trudeau had called this snap election a couple of years early because he wanted to win more seats in their parliamentary system and gain an outright parliamentary majority.

But voters said, nah, I don't think so. We're a little pissed that you called this election in the middle of the fourth wave of COVID. It looks like liberals will end up with around 158 seats. The conservatives will end up with around 119 seats. Both those numbers are about the same. The new Democrats will get around, I think, 25 seats. Any big takeaways from you from this election? I, you know, listen to your guys' analysis of like kind of the California recall thing.

It's kind of a similar result in the sense that it's basically what it shows is politics actually hasn't changed that much in Canada. I mean, what's different here is a Trudeau himself called the election. But, but yeah, I think it shows you that this idea of having like a minority-led, Trudeau-led government with a partnership with the more progressive party, like people are pretty much comfortable with that. And people should keep in mind here that even though it's a minority government, if you add together the liberals and the NDP, like this is a center-left progressive government. So to me, again, far, far preferable to a conservative government, even though the Canadian

conservatives aren't quite as insane as our conservatives. So, yeah, it's a kind of status quo ante. And I think the message that I presume will be digested by the Trudeau team is like stability, you know, and kind of plug forward and make the best of this arrangement rather than going for the majority is kind of the order of the day now. Yeah, that makes sense. So the Russians also had elections, or at least they pretended to have elections. Those Russian elections are bullshit before they start because the most popular opposition figures,

people like Alexanavalny we've talked about before, are not even allowed to run in the first place. But the cheating doesn't end there. Partial results of the election were released on Sunday. They seem to show that opposition parties had made gains. But then when the full final, quote unquote, official vote was released on Monday by Russia's Central Election Commission, you'll be surprised to hear that that lead or that progress for opposition parties had been erased and that Putin's United Russia Party was now firmly in control and will keep its supermajority in parliament.

Opposition leaders are particularly angry about delays in tabulating online voting. It seems like that was the place where they fucked with the vote tabulations the most. So far, Ben, the reaction's been pretty muted. There haven't been huge protests like there were in 2011. And one important development that did come out of this election then, like around it, was actually involves American tech companies. So Navalny's allies created an app that was supposed to help Russians coordinate essentially their protest votes to help you figure out, like, okay, how can I have an impact, even if we're not

going to actually win these opposition parties. But Russian authorities threatened to prosecute local employees of Apple and Google. And so both companies caved and removed the app from their app stores. Navalny's allies then tried to shift the dissemination of their. like protest vote information to Telegram, but then Telegram removed the account that was releasing information. So basically, you know, tough showing all around here for anyone who cares about, you know, freedom, democracy, or, you know, who is hoping for a post-P Putin future, but nothing real good. No, and people should understand that this was central to their strategy in the

Navalny team. They'd worked for years to develop this concept of smart voting. And the basic idea is wherever you live in whatever election, and this is a parliamentary election, but they've tried to apply this to other elections too, you select the candidate who has the best chance of beating the Putin-backed candidate. So in one district or in one election, it could be like the more liberal candidate. And the other one, it could be like a communist, you know. But if you believe that Russia is moving in the wrong direction, this is meant to show that the opposition is actually. bigger than Putin's block of voters. By the way, it's strategy that in different forms has taken root elsewhere. In Hungary, for instance, all the opposition parties that have hugely different platforms and different issues have similarly decided, hey, we're just going to pick the

person, we're going to basically have a primary and pick the person who has the best chance of winning to be the guy to running its Orban. So this is an innovation crossing borders. I think it's gross, man. So these people do all this work. Navalny's in prison. He's almost been killed. His organization's been rounded up. People have been exiled from the country. And like on the eve of the election, Apple and Google are like, yeah, we don't want to get in this fight with the Russian government. So we're just going to suppress this technology that was developed by other people. It's not like it was developed. The day before, right? Yeah, the day before. I mean, how is that anything other than, you know,

to write about this a lot and after the fall, like, but when you look at these tech companies, whether they meant to or not, like, once you kind of become a partner in authoritarianism, like, you're going down a slippery slope. And to me, every tech company, you know, and Facebook is obviously the most extreme offender and you had a great interview on PSA about their creepiness. But every tech company has got to take a step back and be like, what are we not willing to compromise for market access or profit? Because right now, in this instance, How were they not, like, acting in support of Putin's electoral priorities by pulling down this app? I mean, they obviously were.

And, you know, this is a conversation that needs to happen in both Silicon Valley and Washington. Yeah. I mean, you're right. For example, YouTube is not taken down Navalny's videos, you know, going after corruption from, you know, prominent Russian officials, including Medvedev or, you know, Putin, like, to their credit. To Google. And that's Google, right, to their credit. Right. Right to their credit.

And it was sort of surprising to see them cave so quickly here. Yeah, I mean, reading those Wall Street Journal articles, that series, it's just so clear that they're still, despite like actual genocidal behavior being fomented on their platform in places like Burma, they are still not adequately resourcing their, you know, trust and safety teams in places like Ethiopia where history is repeating itself. It's being used for incitement. It's just really, it's really frustrating.

Yeah. And it's, look, these are. These are capitalist creations. They are built to make profits and grow. But, I mean, there's, there's, it's got to be attached to some value proposition, I think. And by the way, these tech companies usually traded on the value proposition. You know, we are connecting people. We are bringing the world together.

So part of their marketing strategy over the years was tied to values. And in this case, a bunch of people did a lot of work. What the app does is it told you, if you're going to vote. Think of it in this, think if we had a bunch of parties in this country and you're going to a congressional election, you could check the app to see, okay, who has the best chance of beating the Republican, you know, and that's who you vote for. And removing that after those people that did that work, you know, that is betraying like any sense of a value proposition in your technology. Speaking of troubling technology, so let's talk about this long New York Times story that ran over the weekend about the assassination of an Iranian scientist believed to be. leading research into nuclear weapons technology. So to conduct this operation, the Israeli government reportedly smuggled a robotically fired machine gun into Iran that could identify its target

using artificial intelligence and then be fired remotely via a satellite link. So some person, presumably in Israel, because this was a Mossad operation, was kind of like pulling a remote trigger to actually shoot this scientist in his car. It's worth reading this piece in full because the reporters on the piece, Ronan Bergman and Farnas Fasihi managed to report just a shocking amount of detail about all the planning. They also talked about how the operation was run by and approved by the Trump administration in that BB Netanyahu rushed to get it done before Biden took office and quietly hopes that the assassination would derail future negotiations over the Iran nuclear deal, like exactly what I think everyone thought he was trying to do. So very cool. Thank you for that, BB. But a lot of

folks on Twitter, Ben, who read the article, were pointing out that this story doesn't spend any time questioning the legality of an assassination like this or talking about the morality of assassinating a scientist or the precedent it creates or like, really, there's no skepticism about, you know, Israeli intelligence about who this individual was and what his job was. And I just wonder what you made of that, Ben, because I've read Ronan Bergman's book on Israel and targeted assassination. It's called Rise and Kill First. And it's like 700 pages long.

And it does dig into all of these questions about, you know, the legalities, whether these assassination campaigns do more harm than good. But this time story just didn't really touch any of that. And I don't know. It was a little... Yeah. It was weird. It was really uncomfortable and gross.

Yeah. And I want to echo you, like, Ronan Bergman's a great journalist in that book, really wrestled with kind of ethical questions and moral questions around, and, you know, things like drones. You know, first of all, assassinating scientists is not the way to deal with the Iranian nuclear program. A diplomatic agreement that rolled back around Zucco program would seem preferable to me. Then you're not going to assassinate every single person in Iran who is a scientist. Like, just from the objective, then in terms of the legality and morality, I don't want to live in a world where countries

assassinate scientists in other countries that they're, you know, they're not even a war with. Like, what is going on here, right? And it's tied to this question of the automation of war. Like, we have to be able to think. It doesn't mean that everybody's equivalent here, but like, the Chinese are going to have that technology. Like, the Russians are going to have that technology. Like, how are we going to feel when they start, killer robots, start assassinate? assassinating people. How do we feel when Russia assassinations people with chemical weapons in other countries? We get outreach. Or how do we feel when an American drone assassinates 10 civilians by accident in Kabul? Exactly.

You know what I mean? Exactly. We're barely reckoning with this. And so this idea that we're moving into this space where we're eliminating any legal lines because we've assassinated an Iranian general, even though we're not at war with Iran with the Qasem Soleimani thing. We're moving in this automation of war and the U.S. use of drones has obviously been the most prominent aspect of this.

Yeah, I think that like let's take a step back because it was written like it was like a spy piece, you know, it was written like a- It was written like you were supposed to just be like, oh, what cool technology? Yeah, like, oh, when's the, film adaptation of this coming, you know? Wait, the profound legal, moral questions being raised about this and questions again about, like, we're, are we presuming that only the U.S. and Israel will ever have these technologies? Like, what, what Pandora's box is being opened here?

And, and, yeah, I was disappointed to see that. And I do think that, like, we have to recognize that, yeah, you wonder why the Iranians aren't rushing back into the JCPOA. And you wonder why other countries are not talking to us about the development of artificial intelligence and warfare. I would much rather see countries trying to figure out what are the constraints and guardrails we want to put on the development of new technologies in the same way that we did imperfectly, but we did do that with nuclear weapons and other technologies in the past. Instead, it's like, let's just show how cool this is. And clearly somebody wanted somebody was proud of this and gave. this whole story to these reporters. Like, they didn't, they didn't just discover it, right?

I mean, so the whole thing felt kind of uncomfortable. Yeah, I felt the same feeling. I think, like, several months back, we talked about a story about, like, AI drones that basically were not connected to any human and, like, were dispatched on the battlefield to go out and just, like, shoot at a target that matched some sort of, like, pattern of life that was assumed to be, you know, like enemy forces. It's like, there's very uncomfortable questions about these technologies. coming down the pike.

And like, it's weird that this New York Times piece just didn't even touch it. Yeah, because and then the drone issue, which we should continue to come back to, but like, it, like, there's the question of whether you use that when you're in a war. And then there's, there's a separate question about, like, whether you just kind of go into this place of, of, of assassinations, too. I mean, there's, there's so many issues that, that, that there's just no rules around. them, no guardrails around them. And, you know, that this is going to be a big issue for the next 10, 20, 30 years because a lot of countries are going to get these technologies. Yes, yes, they will. So one of the biggest issues President Biden is dealing with right now is a new border

crisis in Del Rio, Texas. There are reports that up to 14,000 migrants, most of whom are originally from Haiti, crossed the border from Mexico into Texas in recent days, and built essentially a temporary camp under a bridge. So this town is like 35,000 people. All of a sudden there's 14,000 migrants there. They feel overwhelmed. The conditions in these makeship camps are just horrible. A lot of these people who were born in Haiti and left 10 years ago, five years ago, three years ago, whatever, have been living in parts of South or Central America for years and decided to make the journey north, in some case, taking them months because they thought that our rules had changed, basically. They thought Biden's decision may to extend maybe temporary protected status or TPS to

Haitians currently in the U.S. could be applied to them too. For those who don't know what TPS is, a country can be granted temporary protected status because there's a conflict there or a natural disaster. And it protects individuals from that country in the U.S. without documentations from deportation. You get a temporary war permit. So, you know, some of these folks in Del Rio now, like, you know, they were living in Chile, and they left because they couldn't find work or they dealt with racism and or they've been given misinformation about U.S. policy or they just had like, you know, a family member who lived in

Maryland now and decided to risk it. And so the Biden administration response has been to start deporting them back to Haiti under Title 42, which is this Trump era rule that allows the U.S. government to basically deport everyone who tries to come to the U.S. in the name of preventing the spread of COVID. In practice, this. This means flying people back to Haiti in cases where, you know, an individual hadn't lived there in years and years and years. And now they're forced to figure out how to live in a country that was basically an economic freefall before the president of the country was assassinated and before they experienced another earthquake in July. So, I don't know, just like pausing there, Ben, because I don't want to sound self-righteous about this because this is a brutally hard problem for the Biden administration. Like Republicans are going to blame him for everything that happens at the border, fairly or not.

the infrastructure to house people crossing the border is already overwhelmed. We were talking about this months ago. I'm sure they, the Biden team is worried that, let's say they figured out a way to grandfather these 14,000 people under the TPS designation, right, and let them stay somehow. That could incentivize more migration. But all that said, like, it is totally fucked up and wrong to deport people to Haiti right now given the security situation, right? Like, it's deporting everyone under Title II does completely disregard our asylum laws to the point where even Chuck Schumer is criticizing this decision today.

So, like, again, I know I'm like literally sitting in the cheap seats, like outside of government criticizing one of the hardest things they'll deal with. But I'm just wondering if you have a thought on how they're handling this and what they should do. I did see that the Biden team said they're going to raise the refugee cap back to $125,000 in 2022. So that is a, you know, sort of a good piece of news on this, on the ledger here. Yeah, I mean, there's, there's the image, the question around the images that we saw, clearly what we should all agree on is that enforcement is grotesque and needs to stop. And it's both kind of cruel. It's also like, I kept thinking, what does this look like around the world?

Like, people are watching, this is America. This is still America. Donald Trump's not president. And this, this garbage is still happening. And by the way, that kind of... Actually, I failed to mention it. What you're mentioning is, like, you know, customs people like a CBP on horseback chasing down, you know, Haitian migrants.

Yeah, and kind of flogging them. Horrified. You know, and it kind of reinforces the kind of worst stuff we've seen in coming into Southern Europe or, you know, and dehumanizes these people. And then there's this question of sending people back. I remember, you know, during the Trump years, I randomly was in Cape Verde. Now, I don't think I was hanging out there. I was on like a stopover on a flight.

And I was talking to somebody there and I was like, oh, what's the issue here, you know? And it was like a lot of people had been deported back there who would like not live there, like you're saying, for really long period of time. I mean, the idea of like sending people back to a place that they haven't even lived recently that. that is in a shambles, it has multiple challenges and, you know, earthquake and political violence, that just doesn't strike me as the humane answer. And the thing that combines these two issues, the kind of the appearance in those images and the issue itself is like, this feels like it's still a punitive policy. It's like punishing people that get to the border.

instead of an orderly rules-based kind of legal policy where there's some process other than kind of rounding people up on horseback and putting them on planes to like adjudicate asylum claims. And look, it's a wickedly hard problem. You're correct. And like, where do you put them? And how do you finance that? And how do you get more asylum judges? But like, I think we have to be going the extra mile to show that this is this is a. kind of a being done with with an appreciation for the humanity of these people with like a

fidelity to a set of rules and that it's it's not kind of punishing people who are already in dire circumstances to kind of make some demonstrative point you know um it's just and look it's it's it's Haiti we have some ownership you know over the centuries um for the circumstances is that those people find themselves in. This is the same argument that I think Europeans have to wrestle with too. You know, like, why should we like take our share of refugees? Well, we created a lot of the circumstances that, like, contribute to the fact that there's still refugee flows from these places. And so that has to enter into it. Yeah, not chasing people around on horseback, treating them like cattle as like the bare minimum. Yeah, for the bare minimum. Let's at least clear that bar. Yeah. And let's be clear. I'm sure that allowing people, resettling people in the U.S. who cross the border without documentation polls horribly. You got to figure out a way to do with it. We got to make the case. Like, I'm well aware it's horrible politics. It's sending someone back to Haiti where gangs are kidnapping people where the Haitian government's basically saying, we'll give you $100 in local currency. Best of luck. Like, that could be a death sentence for a lot of people. And we'd have to be honest about like the stakes here.

And we should also be clear, like, Joe Biden didn't order the Border Patrol to like chase people. No. Border Patrol is an out of control agency. Yeah, like, so some of this has to do with, like, the need to reform the kind of the way in which agencies like the Border Patrol and ICE operate. Because clearly, you know, when the Trump people like unleashed, I mean, those were already challenging agencies in the bomb years. I don't want to sugar credit. But, like, Trump kind of unleashed, I think, the kind of fury of of those agencies. And so, like, reforming those has got to be a piece of this, too.

Big time. So the UN General Assembly is this week. That is the annual gathering with members get together. Leaders give really long speeches and then they try to coordinate on major issues, sort of on the margins usually. So President Biden spoke today. Ben, the media narrative going into the UN General Assembly, or Unga, as we always called it, is that everyone is mad at Joe Biden because of Afghanistan. They're all pretending that this previously mentioned dust up with France is some sort of big deal and overplaying you. that. Biden has one-on-one meetings with Boris Johnson later this week. I believe leaders from Australia, India and Japan are coming to the White House on a few days. Any big takeaways from news we've seen so far? The Xi Jinping announced some news about coal that caught your eye right before we came in. And then, you know, any favorite uncle memories you want to share about, you know, all of us fucking trying to clean up some PR mess at 11 p.m. in a hotel suite? So I'll start my my favorite memory here, Tommy. I'm certainly the only person who had to write eight

Unga speeches for the American president. And they were immensely stressful because every piece of the government wanted to get their line in there and the Ungus speech. And Obama always wanted them to be good speeches. And so I was always navigating, you know, I remember Samantha Power one night. She really wanted him to have this line in there that was going to be like the first time that a U.S. president really hammered LGBT. issues in front of the UN. She was right. But I was out doing something. She was like sleeping outside of my door to get this line. She's like banging on the door. She's there in the middle of night. Like just dog it exactly what you want from Sam. And then in the morning, Obama would always give me

his final edits over breakfast and then immediately get in his motorcade and go to the speech. And making kind of no allowance for the fact that it took time for me to get his handwritten edits on the speech, go to my laptop, insert them and send it to the teleprompter guy, right? So one morning he's eating eggs and bacon and he's taken a long time because he worked out and he gives me a bunch of edits and takes off. Now, if people, you'd have to work for Obama to know that he was not that good at reading a speech in a binder on a podium. Like, there's a teleprompter. And it's not that he didn't know the words and he needed a teleprompter because he had no idea he was talking about. It said, like, do you want to watch Barack Obama looking down at a binder flipping pages and reading something.

Yeah, no, she's where your eyes are. Yeah. So one year, I just couldn't get the speech to the teleprompter guy in time. And I thought I had, but there was like a mix-up and the prompter guy had the wrong speech. And I see Barack Obama go up, take the stage, you know, the iconic, shakes hands with the guy and just look down and start to read, you know, in these times. And it's like for about four minutes, I was like, oh, my God, this is going to be the worst hour of my life. And then suddenly I see him like, look up. And I was like, oh, the proctor's on, you know. There it is.

We're back on. So a small thing. Look, I think Biden's speech, you know, he didn't roll out big new initiatives. You clearly saw the argument that's at the heart of their farm policy, particularly post-Afghanistan, which is running the Afghan war and we're moving us into this new period. and the issues have to change that we focus on. And those issues are COVID, climate change, and democracy slash China, right? And he kind of made that argument. I happen to agree with a lot of that argument.

He also went out of his way, I think, to say, we're not trying to have a new Cold War with China. We have to find ways to cooperate. I think that's a good message. I think it's important for people to hear that message. I think, you know, we'll see in the coming months, there's a couple of big milestones out there. If the first phase of Biden's foreign policy was like America's back and kind of good feeling about that. And the second phase was kind of this Afghanistan withdrawal. The third phase is this fall you've got the climate change summit in Glasgow.

You've got his first meeting with Xi Jinping and while probably from the G20. We'll probably find out whether or not we can get in the Iran deal. So to me, this speech is kind of a bridge to the next phase of Biden's foreign policy. On the climate change front, Xi Jinping made this announcement that China's going to stop building and financing coal plants around the world. that's a big deal. You know, the concern was that China's taking steps at home, but they're building coal plants on the Belt Road Initiative. China, Japan, and South Korea have been big financiers of coal plants. If they all get out of that business and the Japanese and South Koreans have made similar pledges, that's big big. That's big. I mean, if we're removing international financing for coal, that, to me, is a big step. Yeah. I mean, obviously, China Hawks, we will watch and make sure he actually does it before we give him any praise. You always, you know, what's the timeline and are there car outs?

Exactly. Yeah. Ben, one fun thing about Ungah is the good leaders show up and then all the shitty ones do too. I mean, we used to, speaking of long speeches without teleprompters, MoMAGaddafi used to speak for like three, four hours. That year was crazy. Remember, you were there. He, like, had an all female bodyguard unit and spoke for hours and he was like pitching a 10 at Trump's place.

He's live in the park? Yeah, it was like Trump's house, maybe. The club in New Jersey. Right. He's on the lawn there. It's a real borot field of that year. Yeah, that was a weird year. Yeah. So this year, like the standout asshole so far is President Bolsonaro from Brazil. He is unvaccinated because he's a Trumpist moron. He's going to be allowed into the event to speak because you kind of have to accommodate world leaders when you are leading the UN General Assembly. But what's funny is Bolsonaro

can't get into restaurants. So people keep tweeting photos of him and his entourage eating pizza on the sidewalk in New York City because everyone's like, sorry, bud, you're not coming in. Yeah, the picture looks hilarious. Like, he seemed to think it made him cool that he couldn't go in to get a slice. And so he's hanging out with, like, his, like, fascist enablers outside, just, like rocking a slice. But, like, it's not that cool man. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Maybe he was. Probably was. Who knows? One other quick on the story I want to throw out there, because it's with our French theme. Remember the year that Sarkozy's surprise? us for calling for a Palestinian state in his speech at the Union Assembly.

I was just thinking about this. Was it in your book? Yes. So he surprises us, just like we just surprised the French. So just to show it can go both ways. And Obama was meeting with him right after. And Obama comes in, he's just like, look, man, you got to give us a heads up. You know, just he's pretty casual about it.

He didn't get all freaked out. Like, you know, he's just like, gives a heads up. And Sarkozy sends up and he pounds the table and he said, I did this because I despise that man, Netanyahu. He humiliated you, Barack in the Oval Office. And he made this whole speech about how part of the reason why he was doing it is like defending Obama's honor or something. And like Obama's like, look, man, just give us a heads up.

You know, like we need a heads up on these things. We need to work on it all of it. It was wild. And he's like, no, I'm going to, I'm going to do Middle East peace. And Obama's like, yeah, get your Nobel Prize. I already got mine, man. Yeah, good luck with that, Sarko. I don't know.

Maybe you just hire a good lawyer. A couple more quick things. So quick update from Ethiopia. So last week, we had Nimma al-Baghir from CNN joined the show to talk about her, like, really brave, amazing reporting about the ongoing fighting in Ethiopia where the government has been attacking and reportedly committing atrocities against the people living in the northern Tigray province. Last week, President Biden signed a new executive order that authorizes sanctions against the leaders behind those atrocities. So very good move here by the Biden administration. And I think credit to Nimah for her reporting, which is a very good move. I think probably shed a lot of light on what was happening in the region and the reality of

how dark it was. And I'm sure it was influential within the government. I certainly got a lot of attention outside of it. So credit to her, credit to President Biden for doing something good. Yeah. No, we should stay on top of this. This is a story we'll keep coming back to because this isn't going away. But it's good to see that that kind of reporting has an impact. It ripples out. It influences policy ultimately. Yeah, it really does. Pretty amazing. A couple more things. been so prime minister boris johnson made some news this week by finally confirming to savannah guthrie on the today show that he has six children now the context here was a question from savannah about what it's like to have a new baby in the prime minister's residence i think he said he changes a lot

of nappies um johnson recently remarried they just had a son like congrats good for him he also has four children with his ex-wife but in the past he has ducked questions about whether he had also fathered a child in an affair. So I don't know why Boris decided to directly answer this question now. We know Savannah well. She could just be that good at interviewing. I suspect that's part of it. But I guess congratulations to Boris. Congratulations, the extended family. Godspeed to the Boris Johnson communication staff who will have to now answer to all the British reporters who've been chasing the story for years since he just coughed up the news to the American press. But I don't know. All right.

It's amazing that someone could be like prime minister of the United Kingdom and like a prominent one too, like a giant figure and that people didn't know this. It's also amazing that like if you were like asking me like 15 years ago to plot like something where what could really bring down a politician, you know, like I'm old enough and maybe we're portraying her age when like an affair was like a bad like. politicians' careers could potentially be ended. Like, the idea that they have multiple children that people don't know about was like, like, it just shows you. It was rumored, but it wasn't, he just never confirmed it, which is even worse. Yeah, it's so interesting how some politicians can defy gravity because I'm sure that there are other politicians that if it came out, you know, that they had all these children with different women and you didn't know about it. like that like imagine anybody becoming president of united states without that getting out somehow you know yeah and i think like who cares if you if you if you know you have another child out

of wedlock whatever i'm not going to judge you that i'm going to judge you for denying the existence of your own child or refusing to talk about your own child i'm i do think that there's human there's room for people to be human beings and to have like you know so i'm not suggesting like a puritanical standard for all politicians it's just it's just curious to me, that Boris, like, defies these, these laws of gravity that other politicians, I mean, I guess that's part of his appeal in a weird way, like, not on Trump, you know. Sometimes he, uh, literally dangles from a wire above, uh, uh, in the UK. So what, what do I know? Uh, last story, Ben. So I don't know if you saw this, but the Space Force released a prototype

for a dress uniform today. So for the listeners, basically gray pants that are just horribly tailored, didn't fit either person modeling them. And then like a black or a, uh, a, a, uh, a navy blue jacket. Hannah makes fun of me, she says I don't know the difference between the two colors, but the little twist on the jacket is that the buttons run

a kind of an angle on the side of your body. So the top button is basically halfway between your head and your right shoulder. And then the buttons go down the body on an angle as if they are trying to point to your belly button. So that's the Space Force prototype. Not a lot of innovation there.

No, well, also like a totally lost merch potential, right? Yeah. What if, yeah, what if they fund the satellites and spaceships with the merch? You could. If we had like a crooked brainstorm on Space Force merch and uniforms, like we could have come up with something much better than that, you know? That's a good point.

I'm sure Elon Musk is thinking that SpaceX can can up the game on that too. Yeah, well, you know, he's certainly doing well on the government dime himself, despite all his faux libertarianism. The other, you know, the other sort of international story that was out there, Ben, was Nikki Minaj, her cousin's friends, balls, the COVID vaccine. I think that's kind of run its course. I didn't know if you had any thought. I thought everyone should watch, you know, the Trinidad Health Minister having to knock down

this story about some sort of adverse testicular reaction to the COVID vaccine. But it lit up Twitter for a couple days. Here's my world, though, take on that. Whenever something like this happens, it kind of makes you feel bad for. like the Trinidadians. Because like they don't get a lot of spotlight on them, right? And like the one time that suddenly the eyes of the world are on Trinidad is because of like Nikki Minaj's cousins, friends, balls, you know?

Yeah. Probably not. Like that guy is, when is that guy ever going to have like international press attention on his, on his, you know, press conference, you know? Probably not ever. There was some really amazing local news reports going. viral that kind of touched on that point. And they're like, come on, Nikki.

Get it together. Also, collaborate with more artists from Trinidad when you're making music. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good. That's a fair. Some good that could come out of this. Yeah. That's some good. That's some good. That's some good. That he'll spin this one positive. TBD, if she ends up going to the White House, there was some confusion about that.

But a story for another day. All right, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, you will hear Ben's conversation with Senator Chris Murphy, the least swampy for policy thinker in Washington, D.C., one of the smartest folks out there. So stick around for that. Not a member of the blob. So we are very happy to welcome back to Pod Save the World, Senator Chris Murphy. Welcome back to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. Good to talk to you. So, you know, I want to start on Afghanistan, and we've covered this very, very closely on the show,

including the particularities of withdrawal. But I want to kind of step back with you because you were one of the voices, I think, challenging the conventional thinking that this was the end of the world, that the withdrawal itself was a faulty decision. And I think, you know, also speaking to the fact that the hysteria in some quarters about the withdrawal kind of actually exposed just how divorced from reality, kind of aspects of our foreign policy discussion are. Now that we've had a little time, like, how do you reflect on this as an inflection point, potentially? obviously President Biden was trying to make this case at the UN that this is an inflection point. How is Afghanistan an inflection point? And what does it say about kind of the disconnect

between a lot of the kind of established voices on foreign policy and kind of the reality that Joe Biden's dealing with? Well, Ben, first of all, thanks for the great work you and the team have done on this trying to right-size our expectation. Thanks for letting me put up an opinion piece on Crooked that sort of goes through. what I see is the primary danger. So I'll talk about the inflection point, but first, you know, my real worry is that these lessons are refusing to be learned by the DC foreign policy establishment that this magical thinking I talked about in that op-ed about what we could achieve in Afghanistan just continued into the way in which we talked about the withdrawal,

this idea that we were going to be able to pull off a seamless withdrawal without scenes of chaos and confusion after the overnight collapse of the Afghan military and government. It was frankly just as irresponsible as the endeavor we were engaged in for 20 years. Neither was possible. In the end, 130,000 people in two weeks is pretty damn impressive. And I just think it was unrealistic to believe you were going to pull that off without some scenes that were really hard to stomach. You can't stop the Afghan people from rushing to the airport when they hear hear that American planes are lifting off. But the overall theme here is from the administration, I think, is right. that we have been bogged down in Afghanistan. And as you know, it's hard to sort of overestimate how much intellectual energy that takes inside the White House, the State Department of the Department of Defense. And now we have sort of freed up a lot of resource, both money, personnel, and intellectual resource to be able to put into other projects, like, as we just saw, the announcement of

this new security agreement with Australia. I think you'll be seeing more innovative partnerships like that, in part because we just don't have to sort of worry about a US occupation of Afghanistan in the way we used to. Obviously, there's still threats there. We're gonna still be present, but we have the ability now to move on to fights that are actually winnable.

Afghanistan, at least for the last 10 years, was clearly in my mind, a fight that was not. You're exactly right. And everybody, I think, should check out your piece on crooked.com, which really lays this argument out. But before we pivot to use the word to some of the other priorities that I think that you would like to see America turn to, and I think President Biden is turning to. There's one other issue, which is the drone strike. And the way I wanted to approach that with you with humility of someone who was in an administration that, you know, I think overused and overly institutionalized use of drone strikes. when we see that that degree of mistake and tragedy, and we're aware that we're still doing this

in a lot of other countries, is part of the shift that you're describing to a different foreign policy have to be looking at whether and why we are continuing to use drones in, and let's face it, Yemen, Somalia, North Africa. Are you, from your purview on the farm relations committee, you know, given that we've seen this tragedy under a magnifying glass, what does it suggest about what might be happening other places and how dismantling the war post-9-11 war and terror infrastructure, not entirely, but may have to include not just pulling troops out of Afghanistan, but looking at our use of drones and other military action and other places. Yeah, I think you have to back up 10,000 feet and then 20,000 feet when talking about this issue.

To 10,000 feet, you have to understand the long-term consequences of continuing to make mistakes like this. There's a really interesting study out of the Northwest Territories of Pakistan that showed that in the areas in which we were using drones to strike at terrorists, we actually saw a growth in recruitment numbers, meaning for everyone we killed, two more were being drawn to the cause. And, you know, it's not hard to understand why. Because many of these strikes are hitting the wrong people, it ends up becoming recruitment fodder for the groups that we are trying to organize against. kill a handful of bad guys, often kind of run-of-the-mill rank and file bad guys, and then they just recruit twice as many because people are just so, so aggrieved at what the United States is doing. But, you know, to sort of back up even further, drones have nothing to do with the underlying causes of terrorism, right? You are just trying to kill people and hope that the terrorist groups don't repopulate. And the reason why, for instance, I have taken such an interest in U.S. policy towards Saudi Arabia is that, you know, I sort of figured out, as many of us did long ago,

that the brand of Islam that Saudi Arabia is pushing out into the world, this very conservative, very intolerant brand, it forms the building blocks of a lot of these extremist ideologies. And if you really want to have a counterterrorism strategy, it can't be so heavily reliant on military force, whether it be through conventional means in Afghanistan or more targeted means like drones. You've got to ask yourself, what is driving all of these individuals, these young men into the terrorist fold and have a strategy that gets at the root cause? And the root cause is not just poverty. The root cause is also the way in which Islam is perverted by many of these groups. And the U.S., I would argue, has facilitated that in many ways.

So even as we're managing those ongoing issues, you know, you mentioned the kind of opportunity in ending the war to focus on a different agenda in the world. And that's what President Biden focused on a lot today. He talked about China. He talked about COVID. He talked about climate change. But part of what I think, you know, the lesson you highlight from Afghanistan is America can't do everything in the world and we can't, you know, control events beyond what is realistic in the world. what would you like to see kind of be the post, if we're in a post post-9-11 chapter, if we're turning the page here, what is that agenda? What are the issues you think the United States needs to be prioritizing the world

as we are winding down the big chunks of the war on terror? I think China and Russia celebrate when we are so hyper-focused on conventional military threats to the United States. What I would like to see is a complete reorientation of the tools that we present to an American president so that the only thing, so that we are allowed to do things other than deploy brigades and sell arms. And so, you know, when you look at a country like China, they are winning friends around the world, not necessarily through security partnerships, but through economic partnerships. and their development bank is 10 times the size of the U.S. development bank. Russia is undermining democracies through this massive propaganda effort. They're spending similarly probably 10 times as much money on propaganda

as we're spending on counterpropaganda efforts. And so, you know, when the United States has more people working at military grocery stores than we have diplomats in the State Department, when the Department of Defense is the only organization that has resources to deploy quickly to conflict zones, you know, we get what we asked for, which is asymmetric warfare with countries like China and Russia that we're losing. So to me, it's being willing to contest territory in non-military ways and deciding that we are going to actually plus up the State Department, plus up USAID, in order to win those fights.

And are there, do you see that as connected directly to climate as well in terms of how we have a capacity to help countries transition there to clean energy? Climate and, you know, pandemic, right? So, you know, you part of the way, to the extent that there are people around the world that are sort of asking themselves, wait, does the withdrawal from Afghanistan telegraph a broader withdrawal from the world by the United States? We can very quickly answer that by passing a substantial climate change initiative in the United States, which allows us to be a credible negotiator globally, and to supersize our COVID relief efforts to dramatically expand the capability to produce and distribute vaccine all around the world. We could within six months answer the question, is America deploying or withdrawing? and to do it with sort of climate change capacity and global health capacity will win us a whole lot more friends than deciding to make up for the withdrawal of Afghanistan by just invading a different country.

Yeah. And obviously, diplomacy enters into this. Just because given your recent travels, I wanted to ask you a couple quick questions. One is Lebanon. We've talked about Lebanon on the show and have had precious few answers. You were recently there. Is there a light at the end of the tunnel? And what is the role of the United States and the international community and trying to help a country that is just besieged by so many problems? Well, there's no doubt there can be a light at the end of the tunnel. I will say Lebanese are sort of not convinced of that yet of the folks we spoke to. Half of them believe that Lebanon could survive this moment.

But the other half worried that Hasibullah had so affected. effectively just helped destroy the economy and political infrastructure of the country that it wasn't going to be able to be rebuilt. But they do have a government now. It's a government of all the sort of same old corrupt players, but at least they have a function in government. And there is a short-term answer that the United States can be a part of. They've got a fuel crisis right now in Lebanon. They don't have enough fuel to power vehicles or to run hospitals. the Iranians are very publicly sending in tankers.

And the United States right now is seen as the bad guy because there's a way to get fuel into Lebanon from Egypt through Jordan and Syria that the United States can help facilitate. We would have to make sure it's not subject to sanctions and we need personnel to help effectuate it. That's made difficult by the fact that Ted Cruz is holding up all states for our nominees now.

But if the United States was, able to sort of figure out a way to get gas and fuel into Lebanon through this transit line from Egypt, we would be celebrated. And we would solve a short-term problem. We would deal a blow to Hezbollah, but it takes manpower to do that that the State Department doesn't have. And it takes a bit of creative thinking on sanctions, something that has hamstrung the United States in the Middle East and a lot of other places. We get so addicted to sanctions that we don't see the damage they often do to our ability to be nimble. Yeah, no, that's a great point.

And the last thing, you've hit this point about the lack of confirmations. What is happening? Why is it happening? And in addition to just kind of breaking the logjam, should we be thinking about reforming a system that so handicaps the United States that people are languishing up there for months and years at a time sometimes? Yeah, I mean, I think right now we have one ambassador that has been confirmed and almost no assistant secretaries who oversee these regions. So in the instance of that pipeline I'm

talking about, it goes from Egypt through Jordan, Syria to Lebanon. No one ambassador can make that happen. You need an assistant secretary for the region. That is amongst the positions that being held up. Never before has a United States Senator done this held up every single State Department nominee and every single Defense Department nominee because of a sort of particular compartmentalized objection they have with the administration. I hated the Trump administration's foreign policy, but I knew it was bad for the country if every single Trump ambassador and every single under secretary wasn't able to be situated in their post. So I never held up every single one. You're asking how do we unblock it? Well, the first thing we can do is just work through weekends.

I mean, right now the Senate packs up on Thursday afternoon. Well, we could work on Fridays and Saturdays and Sundays, and we could begin to process some of these nominees. But second, we probably do need to add this to the rules that need to be changed. Right now, it takes about a day, day and a half to do one ambassador in the United States Senate. That's even after their hearing has happened. That's after their vetting process has happened. We could shorten that. And maybe that's a beginning rules change that 50 Democrats could get behind that might open the door to, you know, future bigger rules changes. Yeah. Well, it's all these pieces, and we covered a lot, but I'm from the Murphy wing of the Democratic Party, so I like to pick your brain. But I mean, what they

kind of add up to is you're trying, you're pushing against kind of a conventional thinking that is not ready to turn away from Afghanistan. You're pushing against a recalcitrant Republican Congress that is blocking nominees. You know, you're pushing against the lack of capacity in the U.S. government for some of these things. But it does feel like at least these debates are advancing. I mean, do you feel like that in breaking a bunch of China, the Biden team is at least beginning hopefully to open up some space where we can have some more structural change? And we'll end on this hopefully some optimistic note. But if optimism is misplaced, that can be the case too. Listen, I've been really pleasantly surprised at the way in which this administration has sort of taken

seriously this pivot. And it's not just a pivot geographically. It's a pivot away from a very sort of military first focus on America's power abroad. It's not just the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. Biden is proposing a, you know, double digit percentage increase to the State Department and USAID budget, which is going to significantly increase their capacities. So I do think that this can be that inflection moment that we're talking about. But back to this issue of nominations. The problem is, you know, the Department of Defense, it's primary leadership, right, which is military leadership, doesn't need to be nominated and confirmed. Their secretaries do. But every day that you don't have assistant secretaries at

state, you don't have ambassadors, it's another day that the generals are empowered. So to help the president sort of make this, this pivot towards different kinds of power projection, we've still got to do our job in the Senate. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no. Need people in there, need more resources, need to rebuild these agencies, and you need to focus on this new agenda. Well, look, thanks so much for joining and covering up a whole bunch of stuff in a short amount of time. But it's great for our listeners here from you. People should follow you on Twitter. Check out the article you wrote for Crooked and you pop up obviously all the time on these issues. But thanks for popping up here today.

Yeah, I appreciate it. And I'm glad to know there's at least two members of the Murphy wing of the Democrats. You and me, man. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks to Senator Chris Murphy for joining the show. Thanks to The Blob for not getting to Ben's Tenly Town studio before we concluded this recording. It's good. The blob moves slowly. Yeah. Well, that's part of the problem.

It's part of her appeal. Yeah, yeah. Part of the part of the part of the, that's why they're so hard to stop and also part of their challenge. When you call them the blob, were you thinking of the movie or was it an acronym? Like, what was the genesis? Yeah, I was. So I want to actually say this for the. record, right?

Please. Which is that, because everybody else has their own definition of the blob. I is the person who, like, coined the term should be able to, like, offer my own, right? And that article kind of, like, acted like there was, no, there is a very specific thing I'm talking about, which is it's not every single person who works in foreign policy. It is very particularly the group think among people who work on foreign policy that presupposes that military intervention in particular. and America's dictates can shape events in the Middle East.

And this is in the context of the same people that had supported the war in Iraq, were now giving a shit about the Iran deal and all of Obama's foreign policy. That's it, right? And like, if you want to know who the blob is, just look at the more hyperbolic reaction to what Biden did in Afghanistan. Like, this is not hard to figure out what I'm talking about. But the blob, to me, was a way of capturing a growing group think, you know, that kind of overtakes people. And yes, it brings in, you know, defense contractors and think tanks and the kind of, you know,

hardcore Gulf funded right-wing pro-Israel elements, you know, all this stuff. If you live in D.C., like it is kind of just all one big thing. So, yeah, Blab is very, as a child, though, I was a big fan of old horror movies. My mom and I used to love to watch like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the Blob. Those are some good fucking movies. People should go check out the back catalog. Yeah, there were some scary stuff. And they were like thoughtful and kind of interesting.

And yeah. What's the one recently about the silence? Shit. Oh, right. I see, I can't watch scary movies because they ruined my life for six months. The silent place? The silent place. That's a really good one.

Because there's just some thought behind it. Like, if it's just someone like sawing up people or something like that, that's not that interesting to me. But like if there's this kind of like vague, threatening thing that is growing, like quiet place. That's a good. Yeah. I love another one of the people who got really upset about the blob terminology. It was a guy named Peter Fever who worked for the Bush administration. And I Googled him.

He'd be like, all right, what is this guy written recently? And one piece he wrote was a decade later and the Iraq debate is still contaminated with myths and it's all him getting huffy that people still accuse the Bush administration of conflating Iraq with 9-11. It's like, come on, man. It can't be that intellectually dishonest and then get all worked up if you're criticized. The best thing about the blob in these debates is, first of all, I just kind of, I said that to one reporter. And like, the reason it became a thing is because of how piss these people got, right? And they're kind of proving every time they open their mouth to to take umbrage, they kind of prove the point, you know, like, as that article does. But like,

you know, the, no, me and my colleagues in the foreign policy establishment, you know, are not in the, and something called the blob, we're just going to tell you the 10 reasons why the Iraq war wasn't as bad a thing as you think. You know, it's like, thank you for proving the point, you know. Yeah, I imagine some guy in an ascot removing his white gloves to defend his honor as the Henry A. Kissinger, distinguished professor of global affairs at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Yeah, people are like, what's the blob? Real title. There you go. That's a real thing. You, sir. You, sir, are the blob. And the problem that they have is, like, how divorced they are from public opinion. Like, there's, there's, there's, I think someone in the article said that, like,

there's no, my problem was that I just couldn't change people's minds. So I resorted name calling. Actually, it's the opposite. The only people who agree with the blob anymore, the blob. You know, like, people of public opinion is not where they are, you know. They like to say things like, we got most things right except Vietnam, the Iraq war. That's a real quote. That's a real quote that someone said. Yeah. We got most extreme.

It's not like Richard Haas or somebody. Yeah, you got most of the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, you know, Afghan War. It's like, well, yeah, the common threat is the wars. I'm all for the liberal international order. I'm a member of that club, you know, like. Pronato. You could have all those things without going to war in Vietnam. in Iraq and Afghanistan and Afghanistan.

Yeah, we'd be a little better off. Okay, we've been a little long, but that's okay because it's fun to talk about the blob. Talk to you guys next week. See you. Pod Save the World is a crooked media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our producer is Haley Muse.

It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Segglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Yale Freed, and Phoebe Bradford, who film and share our episodes as videos each week.