Pod Save the World - How the CIA broke the world’s encryption

Episode Date: February 12, 2020

Tommy and Ben tell some stories about the New Hampshire primary in 2008, walk through a report on a decades-long CIA/German effort to crack encrypted communications, talk through several major data breaches, and explain why the QAnon conspiracy theory is a national security issue. Then they cover: good news from Sudan, North Korea’s nukes, a dustup between the US and the Philippines, the Wall Street Journal’s attempt to Swift Boat Mayor Pete, and Bernie Sanders' foreign policy doctrine and how the 2020 candidates differ. Then former White House Ebola Response Coordinator Ron Klain joins to talk about efforts to contain the Coronavirus.

Welcome back to POTS of the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, welcome back from Budapest. Here I am. We miss you. We're doing our best to fuck up democracy while you were gone. Speaking of which, we are recording that as the first exit polls starts dribble in in the New Hampshire primary, which is bringing back some of the worst memories of our 2000. Good and bad. Political career. I believe we win Iowa. We all hang out for a day or two, and then they tell me, get your ass to headquarters because we need you to do. I was already in New Hampshire. You're in New Hampshire.

Yeah. I missed Iowa. I was in New Hampshire for the Alicahawks. How did that go? What was in your New Hampshire election I like? So, well, first of all, I was staying in supporter housing, remember that? With a woman who had me in a room full of, she collected like ships and bottles. Okay.

So it's kind of interesting. Very New England. Yeah, very New England. But anyway, so, you know, like I was reminded this because Favreau just tweeted about the Yes, We Can speech. And, you know, first of all, what I remember is we thought we were going to win. I think our last friend of the pod, Joel Benenson, can correct us, but I think we were up 10 in our internals. So the first thing is, John and I had to write the speech together because I was a guy in New Hampshire and John was obviously coming in. And we did not write a concession.

So for Iowa, there had been a victory speech written and like a second place speech written. Then the other thing is we decided, well, what if we do this thing with the column response and yes, we can? And that was a kind of total accident of timing because two things had happened. And like Obama had dropped, yes we can, late in Iowa in one of his speeches. It had been his 2004 campaign slogan. And then in the debate, I'll never get this. Like Hillary started this attack line on Obama that he was raising hopes too high. And he kind of said something like, we need a president.

We'll say, yes, we can, not know we can't. And I remember hearing them being like, oh, that's a cool thing. And so John and I are going back and forth on A. Well, and some messenger. Oh, yeah. How we all good. That's how I communicated with every reporter. And so we're kind of like, well, what about this? we got to get to a speech that could get to this kind of cool column response about American history

where we say, yes, we can. You know, we're going to go to the moon. Yes, we can. And let's, let's face it, it was designed to be against Hillary's attack on us, you know? That's how you come up with some of these ideas. And that night, though, we had to drive, I remember a long distance. I don't even remember what, you know, Manchester to Concord or Nashua. And so we're driving in a car with like a laptop open on John's lap, like speaking this speech aloud to each other, then we're sitting in like the lobby of a hotel, like random people are coming up to us while we're writing this speech. But we're getting kind of giddy because we know it's good. We know that this column response is going to be so good. Yes, we can. And I remember the pivotal line that took the

longest, it took us, you know, to come up with that line in the long history of America. There's never been anything improbable about hope, you know, I think. And John deserves the lines share of the credit for that. That unlocked, you know, then this great call and response. And then I remember Obama calls us and we're like, we're super excited because we think we're about to win and we think we just wrote this speech that's going to do really well. And he's like, well, I think we need a little more humility at the top guys. Sounds like you guys are getting a little too, you know, feeling yourself. Feeling yourself a little too much. And so actually we added what became the first couple paragraphs that they kind of speak to like, this isn't done and it's

going to be hard. And we're really excited to watch a speech. And then New Hampshire primary day, I turn on TV and like, we're just losing. They got our asses kicked. We got our fucking asses kicked. We didn't just lose. And my first response was like, oh, shit, we didn't write a speech for that. And so I remember we went into Obama's like sweet and he's there and he looks kind of shell-shocked. And we're like, what do you want to do about the speech?

He kind of glances at. And he's like, well, just congratulate Hillary up top. And the fucking speech. And the thing is, it works better. It really did work better. Because we lost. Like if we'd won, then that speech would have seen. seemed like, you know, probably a little, you know, arrogant or maybe not arrogance, right,

but a little triumphalist, right? But in losing, it's as gritty, like, we won't give up. Yes, we can. And yes, we can, it always worked better when it's like there are a lot of people out there telling you no, you know. So I think the lesson for whoever loses tonight is your biggest losses, give your biggest victories in politics. Give your victory speech.

God, I remember a Reid-cherlin, who was the, who had my job in your manager. And then Ben LaBolt, who was another campaign spoke. were like on the press riser waiting for the results to come in and slowly they looked around and realized they were the only staffers left in the room with all these reporters and like just slunk away. They get descended. I think you know basically we were on like what is now our text chain was probably our email chain that had too like with all of us like you know going back and forth and not believing the results. But again then two days later I remember waking up like with a two day hangover in my Chicago shitbox apartment to a email.

of that video that they made of the S. We Can speech. And then we raised, of course, more money than anybody had ever raised. And our supporters got super motivated. And we came out and just kicked the shit out of everybody, you know, through South Carolina. And then through February, remember all those primaries and caucuses? So I think the motivation that people took in that loss in a bizarre way helped propel Obama to the victory. And again, a lesson, I see a lot of people ready to declare this primary kind of over. I mean, there can be twists and turns in these things. Things change. I mean, look, the best thing that happened to us maybe was losing New Hampshire because that meant the Reverend Wright stuff was vetted all out in the primary and it didn't get dropped on us in October before the election or whatever. But, you know, the good news is that it seems like so far New Hampshire is planning to count the ballots.

Yeah, that would be a good start. So that'll get us moving forward. But we digress. We have a lot of great foreign policy for you guys today. Here are some things we're going to talk about. There's a decade. long CIA effort to defeat encryption and global cryptography that we're going to dig into. A bunch of data security issues that I think should be more front of mind than they currently are. We're going to talk about QAnon because it's a terrifying conspiracy that's bubbling up again. Sudan, North Korea, the Philippines, there's a Wall Street Journal editorial page effort to Swiftboat Mayor Pete Buttigieg, which is outrageous bullshit and we want to talk about that. We'll talk a bit about the Bernie Sanders foreign policy doctrine. the movie Parasite, just because it's great. And then we're going to be joined by Obama's

former White House Ebola response coordinator Ron Klan to talk about the coronavirus, how bad it is or isn't, and what the administration is doing. So with that, let's do some news. Let's do it. Okay. So let's talk at the beginning about this crypto AG. It's the name of this company. So the Washington Post on Tuesday published a piece with the headline, The Intelligence Coup of the century. It details the CIA and German intelligence effort to secretly purchase and own and operate the world's preeminent encryption company and use it to spy on allies, adversaries, everybody for decades. This reporting is all based on official histories of these programs, these secret programs that were produced by the CIA and by German intelligence

that somehow leaked. The scope of this effort was enormous, but here's the gist. I mean, basically, the U.S. and Germany started controlling this Swiss company, Crypto AG in 1970. The company made encryption machines. Like imagine a big typewriter and you know, you type your message, it gets encoded, it goes the other end and they read it and it's supposed to be secret. And these countries all use it to send what they thought were secure communications. But the CIA and the NSA and the Germans ensured that flaws were basically hardwired into machines that made the codes easy for them to crack once they knew what to do. So the Germans stopped cooperating with us on this operation or stopped participating in it in the 1990s, but the U.S. continued it until 2018.

The report says crypto AG sold equipment to 120 countries, including Iran, India, Pakistan, but notably not the Soviet Union or China, who probably had a very appropriate wariness of Western encryption technology. Ben, it's a fascinating article. It's just, it's cool sort of Cold War history. It's also notable that the recent fight with tech companies over end-to-end and cryptic communications is hardly the first time the U.S. government has tried to weaken the world's encryption capabilities or beat them. It's also not the first or last time that the intelligence community have used some sort of private company as a front organization or a carve-out. But, you know, I've been fascinating to see a decades-long intel operation like this just fully laid out. Yeah, I didn't expect to see that.

And we knew nothing about this, by the way. And I did, yeah. And this is actually one of the disappointing things about being government. You get intelligence, but you don't really get the briefing on where it came from. Yeah, that's the secret secret. Yeah, there's just another layer. I mean, a couple of things jumped out of me. The first is the extent to which I think we in the United States got comfortable over the course of kind of the Cold War in the last 70 years that we were so far ahead of other countries that only we would have certain capabilities, right?

And this felt like a story that is very much from a time when only the United States could do this. the sophistication of the technology combined with the sophistication of the foreign intelligence relationship, in this case with West Germany, you know, combined with like other countries kind of trusting Western technology as being the best in the world. Or having no choice, right? Or having no choice, right? And now in 2020, we're in a world where Chinese technology is pretty well caught up to our technology. You know, the Russians have poured a lot of money into cyber.

You know, I'm sure they had some good stuff in the Cold War too. but, and more and more countries are, you know, Israel has a huge tech sector. And so, you know, we were joking, you know, even before he came in, like, I wonder who owns, you know, a signal or, you know, WhatsApp is Facebook, but is there a back door there? I mean, I think part of what's frightening about the world today from both kind of an American intelligence perspective, but just for any individual, is how many countries might be exploiting similar vulnerabilities. It's a new world in that respect. And that puts more scrutiny on what the U.S. did because other countries want to copy what we did. The other thing I have to say is like,

when the Snowden disclosures happened, there was a bit of like, you know, among our allies, like we're shocked that the U.S. would be conducting surveillance. And at the time, even though I think it was right for some people to be, you know, asking very hard questions the U.S. government about why we were doing certain things, and that was wholly appropriate, and we had to reform some of what we did. I do think some of these countries, Germany in particular, were kind of expressing outrage about things that they knew through their history that we were doing, and frankly, in some cases they were doing with us.

And here we have a great example, even though they stopped in the 90s, clearly German intelligence knew they had a history of facilitating U.S. surveillance. So it does put a bit of a spotlight to me, you know, as someone who lived through it, on the fact that, you know, I think a lot of U.S. allies, you know, were either explicitly or at least implicitly aware that we're doing certain things. And a lot of that posturing around the Snowden disclosures was somewhat, you know, driven, you know, by being responsive to their politics and, and frankly, you know, glossing over what they themselves may have been parted to. Yeah, I mean, this article notes that at one point, maybe during the 80s, 90% of BND, the West German intelligence agency's intelligence products were derived from documents gotten through the crypto AG machines. Yeah, this was a pretty productive relationship for them. That said, you know, it does seem to suggest that the Germans and the U.S. had different levels of concern about who got caught up in this drag net. No, no, to be fair, yeah, Germans have always been more privacy concerned. in large part because of the history, not just of the Nazis, but of the Stasi in East Germany.

And it makes sense to me that they would stop this in the 90s because the Cold War is over, you know, and maybe they want to kind of usher in a new world where there is more respect for privacy. So, you know, I do want to give them that credit as well. I mean, look, I think part of this is how much technology is changing things too. I think, you know, just to look at Americans, like, I think there was a certain point, you know, in the Cold War and was like, well, spies are people who go try to capture. secrets about what bad guys are doing, you know, and obviously we know from subsequent history that they cast a much wider net at times, and there were a lot of abuses in there. The thing about technology,

though, is that this capacity now, you know, every single person in the world with any digital footprint, which is most people in the world, could feel vulnerable to this type of intelligence collection. And when you hear about encryption being busted, that's kind of your last frontier of privacy. And, And once again, it raises these issues we've been talking about about how can government simultaneously want to protect their national security and kind of uncover whether it's a terrorist plot or something dangerous while being able to assure their citizens that there's some privacy out there. Yeah, bulk collection becomes a real problem. Privacy and data security is going to be a bit of a theme of the top of this show. So that brings me the next issue I wanted to raise with you. So Ben, the Likud Party in Israel watched the Iowa Do you.

Democratic Party's app disaster, and they said, hold my kinnish. Hannah, help me with that joke. So apparently there's an election app that's been used by the Israeli Prime Minister, Bibi Nanyahu's party, that may have exposed sensitive personal information for the country's entire national voter registration list, six and a half million people. It's called the elector app. It was designed to manage the party's voter outreach and tracking around their upcoming March 2nd election. So I guess some whistleblower, some tech person realized that there was this bug and that the app could expose the names and addresses and private data for basically every registered voter in the country. And that person blew the whistle on the floss, the Israeli media

to Horat's, I believe. The developer said the code was quickly fixed, but there are concerns that personal details for like military leaders, government officials, celebrities, whoever may have been exposed. Netanyahu has specifically asked his supporters to download the app, add additional people, et cetera. So, you know, again, like, I am very much in favor of investing in and developing new campaign technology, especially because the Republicans have a huge advantage over us in terms of, like, voter data, et cetera. I'm very opposed to new election technology as the risk seems clearly way too high with these, like, dive old machines we've talked about in the past. I mean, let's just use systems with a paper trail literally. The Iowa Democratic Party app was sort of a

hybrid of both because it's a party run, you know, sort of election system. But it was obviously a disaster and unnecessary in so many ways. But I think more broadly, like this conversation we're having now, this story of that this app should worry people. Because political parties at every level are going to have to really modernize and professionalize how they're storing and protecting data. Because I was talking to someone yesterday who, you know, we used to work with who went and sort of did a tour of state parties and said, you know, if you look under the hood of some of these smaller organizations, it's not the most up-to-date software, you know, like things that could, you know, hackable. And I imagine even like local state boards of elections are pretty easy target. So it's frightening. And I guess the challenge is it's not totally clear to me who would be in charge of mandating standards to fix it. Yeah. I mean, I think what's frightening is that at a time

when more and more these types of efforts are migrating to technological platforms like apps, lots of data is being collected and potentially pieces of election infrastructure, you know, are even online, they are inherently vulnerable. And like, if anybody tells you they're not, they're lying to you. Like, anything that is relying and doesn't have a backup paper trail is vulnerable to cyber threats. And if you combine that with the fact that the most powerful people in this country, from the present on down, have now demonstrated that they cannot be held accountable for committing crimes.

And that they, frankly, also cannot be held accountable for having, other powerful countries commit crimes on their behalf, whether it be Russia, poor Ukraine didn't actually do it. But the point is that like, let's say the Trump people associated with Trump, or let's say Saudi Arabia, or let's say China, like Saudi Arabia that we know hacked Jeff Bezos's phone, right? Like there are plenty of powerful actors with aggressive cyber tools that could seek to disrupt an election app that could seek to disrupt. I mean, if you even take the Iowa case in miniature, you know, I saw the reports that in addition of the app failing, the Trump people were flooding the phone lines so that people couldn't phone in results too, right? Like that could happen digitally, right? Where China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, anybody who wants to see Trump to win is, yeah, is doing some kind of attack on democratic or

progressive infrastructure or worst case, you know, election results, right? And so I think, you know, that is a fear of just the vulnerability of being related. line on technology. The other thing, again, I just feel kind of creeped out. If you looked at the Cambridge Analytica effort from Trump in 2016, this was an effort to gain far more data on people for political purposes than anybody knew they were giving, you know, so that essentially if you could burrow into people's Facebook likes and dislikes, you could construct very detailed personality profiles of people for the purposes of data targeting. Presumably, you know, Democrats will be doing some of this too. It makes me a little uncomfortable, but I guess that's where we are.

Yeah, I just think it's a lot easier to use that information to suppress votes than to motivate them. And that's like the inherent advantage they have. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. It sucks. So in somewhat related news, federal prosecutors on Monday charged four Chinese intelligence officers with hacking Equifax. Remember this? The gigantic credit monitoring agency that has data on hundreds of millions of Americans, hundreds more billions of people globally. The hack itself became public in 2017. It was described by the FBI as the largest theft of private information by state-sponsored hackers ever. Equifax did a terrible job protecting all of our data. It's unconscionable when you really read through all the security steps they did not take.

And better news, Congress has done nothing to tighten security requirements for the industry since then. So, Ben, I guess it's not totally clear what the ultimate goal of this hack was by the Chinese. I think security experts probably think it's an industry. invaluable way to find and root out U.S. spies or figure out ways to hack people like us in the future or conduct industrial espionage. Like, pick your way. It's useful for them. But it's so frustrating because this is going to happen more and more. Like you and I both had our information hacked by the Chinese as part of the Office of Personnel Management. Yeah, I was going to reset. Right. It was like 21 million people. Yeah. And we've both probably been sucked up by countless other hacks of Equifax and other places like

that. And no one gives you a clear answer of what you're supposed to do about it. Right. You get a credit monitoring service. You can get life lock. You can change all your passwords. But no one's given you a new social security number. Right. I mean, like, what is, what's the long term fix for people who get fucked by these companies? Yeah. Well, and also, like, if you think about it, there's like the OPM Office of Personal Management hack you mentioned than this one, latest one. But that also makes you think, like, well, those are the hacks that we caught. You know? Like, I, I, I, What are we not seeing? Like, is it actually, if they hacked like kind of everything and these, we just happen

to catch these two? Yeah, what's left over? Yeah, like, so, you know, part of this, you know, we should not make the mistake of thinking that the only things that happen are the things that we become aware of, right? And so that makes you think, okay, this could be much broader and more comprehensive a danger than, you know, than we're even seeing in real time. You know, and in terms of what we have to do about it, again, I do think, there has to be a clear explanation and regulatory framework that communicates to people,

like what is private and what is not, what will be done in the event of a hack like this, what are you told in terms of your own vulnerability? And then the last thing I think we have to be mindful of is that a lot of people and corporations too are, in governments, for that matter, are making calculations based on the fact that. fact that they assume they might be hacked by the Chinese. I'll give you an example of this. I've talked to people in the private sector who have told me that they are not supposed to email internally, critical opinions even about the Chinese government. Seriously? Yeah, because they do a lot of business in China and the Chinese might be monitoring their emails and they don't want the Chinese

government to see a bunch of people talking shit about them, right? A little bit of victim blaming there. Well, but self-censorship is, you know, too. And, you know, just in the same way that, you know, when you saw the hack of Sony after the interview came out, the movie that made fun of Kim Jong-un with like James Franco and Seth Rogan, you know, not only that ramifications for Sony, but I haven't seen anybody else make any movies that are critical of North Greece since. You know, like, so the point is, I think.

There's a deterrent. China wants to be in your head, you know, and like, just like North Korea wanted to get in your head with that hack. We have to, you know, I worry that this could be like shaping behaviors more than we're even aware of, you know. I think that's totally right. I mean, look, like, online trolling shapes people's behavior. God forbid, like, they got all your personal information.

Yeah, if you know that someone might be reading your emails, it might have your personal information. Like, does that end up shaping corporate behavior? Does that end up shaping the behavior of organizations, of diplomats, you know? I mean, we're kind of in a new world here where this capability for, particularly for a government like China, can do a lot of work for them because it leads other people to kind of self-censor. Yeah. Well, it gets a little weirder because, you know, sometimes we're able to sow disinformation to ourselves. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We're the best at it. Yeah, we're the best at it. Demerratic party. Here's a good example. Yeah. So this is an issue that I've been obsessed with for a very long time. and it's become a national security problem, which is this Q&on conspiracy. Oh, yeah.

So it's literally impossible to summarize this thing fully because it's so complicated and crazy and diffuse. But here's the gist. In 2017, someone started posting on 4chan, which is a message board that's gotten in some trouble, under the name Q clearance Patriot. So Q clearance is the classification designation given out by the U.S. government, I think, to get you read into nuclear secrets. I didn't have a Q clearance because I didn't go look at the bomb, but I don't know if you did. Regardless, through these anonymous posts, this person Q, in quotes, they've woven this conspiracy theory that Bob Mueller was really investigating Hillary Clinton and that Trump was recruited to run for office by the military to fight a deep state cabal. And there's a child sex trafficking ring run by Satan worshippers and pedophiles and cannibals. I'm not making up any of that.

Some Q fans literally believe that John F. Kennedy Jr. is part of this and that he is still a lot. live and will be revealed as the replacement for Mike Pence on the 2020 ticket as BP. So that's pretty cool. That's true. So next level, crazy shit. But what started as this fringe internety thing has become more mainstream. So you see these people at Trump rallies all the time. They're selling Q merchandise.

They're briefing people on the theory. There's a Florida cop protecting Mike Pence on a recent visit who wore a Q patch and it was in a photo. Candidates for office are promoting it. And Q adherents have been arrested in seven. different incidents, including an armed standoff with police at the Hoover Dam. So it's gotten very serious. There was like a killer, like a mob killer, wrote Q on his hand and held it up in court at trial. So Mike McIntyre and Kevin Roos at New York Times, they did this great big

piece on the phenomenon over the weekend, which sort of got into my head to want to talk about today. But there's two parts of this, I think. Like there's the obvious risk from these specific people and the fact that they think that there's like this death cult that they're solving. And and they will literally stop at nothing to take out these evil Democrats who are doing it. So that's scary. But there's this other bigger risk

of just people finding and believing these conspiracy theories online. And it doesn't matter if it's Q&ON or Flat Earth or anti-vaccination literature. When there's just a certain volume of material on a subject, I think you start to believe it, right? Because how could a thousand posts all be wrong? And it's dangerous.

It can get weaponized by bad actors. The spread of it is enabled by Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter. who help people make money off of it and make money themselves. And so it's just worrisome to see something like that's as on its face insane as this gets so much traction. Yeah. You know, there's something that must be irresistible to the human brain about conspiracy theories.

But you're right that the explosion of technology has made this much more serious. I mean, a brief story I give about this, Tommy, is that, you know, way back when, in 2002 to 4, I helped out with the 9-11 Commission. I worked for the guy who was co-chair of the 9-11 Commission for the Democrats. And so, you know, I learned a lot about that event. So I had a blog back then, right? I blogged on some website. Really?

Nobody read it. I don't remember what it was called. But like once a week, you know, I would like blog something and nobody would ever respond. You know, there was very little comments. And one time I decided to just make a blog about, 9-11 conspiracy theories and, you know, how crazy they were and how they were debunked in the 9-11 commission report. And I think I said something about, like, people, you know, in their parents' basement, like, you know, something kind of ad hominin. I got, like, thousands of emails,

because my email was linked to this blog. They were the most crazy, like, way before social media, right? It was like getting a garbage Twitter thread in your email inbox. And it made me, I'm like, who are these people and how are they finding each other? And these are just websites, right? Now you have social media. So the capacity, you know, of this information to spread. So like if those were the 9-11 truthers in like 2004, like how many are there today now that you have these very sophisticated platforms that are designed to breed clicks and to build networks and to get people connected to one another? And I think we can chuckle this stuff, but there's like millions of millions of people consuming this Q&Nan insanity. And you're right, like, we're going to wake up one day.

I hope this isn't the case. But what I fear is there will be a significant act of like political violence in this country carried out by somebody, you know. I mean, we all laugh at the Pizza Gate thing. But if that guy had like opened fire, you could have killed a bunch of people, right? Because of, again, some Q&N type conspiracy theory. And so, you know, I think this is like a, this is a national security threat, you know, that essentially this stuff disseminates, propagates with, you know, and it's treated like this kind of amusing novelty. And frankly, the Trump people surf it, you know, like they're, they know that it creates a kind of energy that helps fuel their guy, you know? Totally. All manner of conspiracy theories do. But this stuff leads to dark places. And,

one place it could is, is to very real violence. Yeah. I mean, I saw the, you know, the FBI put out a bulletin about the risk of political violence, including Q&N. The Atlantic, published a long piece by McKay Coppins about how Trump has basically built this billion-dollar disinformation campaign that is his reelection campaign. I mean, I saw Obama literally just tweeted out the article. And by the way, how many, in all this Trump stuff and all this Facebook stuff that they do, how many winks do you think there are at stuff like Q&O? Oh, tons, because they want the motive.

Totally. So they're giving the head nod. Like, they're just, they know how to do the dog whistle on some of the stuff. Yeah, I just think people need to realize that the 2020 election is not going to be fought through the press. It's going to be almost exclusive. on Facebook and social media. Like dark garbage. Yeah. Yeah. It's not good.

Let's do some good news. Yeah. I'm very happy to say that there is good news out of Sudan. So the Sudanese government has agreed to handover former president Omar al-Bashir, who is a genocinal maniac responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Darfur to the international criminal court, the ICC. That means he will likely appear at the Hague for a tribunal as part of a negotiated agreement between Sudan's government and these rebel groups. the ICC was basically created to deal with people like Bashir who were accused of genocide or war crimes or crimes against humanity.

It hasn't been as effective, I think, as some people would like it to be in terms of getting convictions, but good step forward. Ben, any best wishes for Bashir or thoughts on what this might mean for Sudan? Well, I hope it goes through, you know, like you can, I'm sure there's some people in Sudan and want to kind of throw some, you know, wrenches in the gears here. So until Bashir is literally handed over to somebody, you know, like it's still not. definite, but look, I think it's, if this does go forward, it's huge in that it, one, indicates that the current Sudanese government is getting pretty real here. You know, like, this is a big step for them to take. But, and also, like, the accountability message is important in two directions. Obviously, for people who were victims of the genocide in Darfur or had family caught up in

that genocide, you know, it's a measure of justice. But the idea is that this is also supposed to be a deterrent, right? Or it's a message, say, to the Burmese military, you know, like, look what can happen to you someday. Like, Bashir thought he was in the clear. Like, he thought all those years he was going to escape justice. And I think part of what the ICC has to demonstrate is no, eventually, like, you know, you'll face the music here. And that going forward, the more that happens, the more there is accountability imposed on things that have happened in the past, the more credible it is as a deterrent against atrocities going forward because people see, okay, I don't end up in the brig.

Yeah. Okay. So it's unrelated news at North Korea that should surprise no one. A confidential UN report seen by Reuters says that North Korea continue to enhance its nuclear and ballistic missile program in 2019, despite sending very nice notes to Donald Trump. So we learned that today. They also imported petroleum and exported coal, and all of that activity was in violation of a bunch of U.N. Security Council resolutions.

Specifically, they conducted 13 missile tests. They launched 25 missiles, including some new sub-launched version that seems destabilizing. And, you know, just generally gave the finger to the U.S. and our allies in South Korea and Japan. So to summarize North Korea steaming ahead on its nuclear program, the sanctions are not working, but they are hurting average people living in North Korea. And I think Trump just wants to ignore it through the reelect, probably. Interesting, like, they had promised some sort of Christmas president or surprise at the end of last year that turned out to be a bluff maybe or maybe it got

we never know you know the deal cut but you know nothing about this is settled well you know chief antagonist of the pod mike pompeo uh let's just you know step back basically has been consumed by two issues right he's mr north korea remember he was like doing that account of the CIA and then came over state doing a bang-up job mike uh with north korea there's they build new missiles and nuclear weapons and draw huge divisions between the U.S. and our allies, like failed across the scorecard here. And then his other big thing, of course, is Iran, and we know how that's gone. They're going the way of North Korea now. They're resuming their nuclear program. So, again, in the running for most odious Trump administration character and in the running for

worst secretary of state in the history of the United States, like this is a good another data point for Mike Pompey. Yeah, I agree with that. And one other quick note on Iran, so we've talked a bunch times about the decision to assassinate Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian general. In response, we all remember that Iran fired a bunch of ballistic missiles at al-Assad airbase in Iraq. Initially, remember Trump said everything is fine, all as well. Then he dismissed early reports of people having traumatic brain injuries as just headaches. So weeks and weeks later, we now know that 109 U.S. troops have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries. 76 have returned. to duty, so that's good news, but I still think, like, to your point earlier, it is scandalous

how much Pompeo and Trump, and really the Pentagon as well, have downplayed or misled the public about this. Well, and Trump tweeted all as well that night, you know, at the same time that missiles are going off close enough to these service members that they're getting traumatic brain injury, which can have repercussions for the rest of their lives, right? at the same time the next day, you know, Trump, people are out there spinning on what a great win this is. Like, is it a win for these guys? You know? And also, though, it makes you, can you can you trust any fucking thing these people say? I mean, they literally lie about everything.

Like, they clearly didn't want to reveal that there were any casualties. But meanwhile, these guys are being medevaced to Germany, medically evacuated to Germany. And like, and then drip by drip, you know, week by week, we, the number. Number keeps growing. And how can you trust anything? And if you can't trust basic information from the U.S. government, like how many Americans were harmed in a ballistic missile attack, you really can't trust anything that they say about anything. And shame on the Pentagon. Like, somebody went along with this because they suppressed this information over time. Like, what is going on in the U.S. government? This is absolutely absurd. Trumpified, top the bottom. Yeah. We don't talk a lot about

the Philippines on the show, but there's two big pieces of news that we should cover. So first, the Philippines apparently, according to the AP, notified the U.S. that they plan to end in 180 days a security agreement that allows U.S. forces to train in the Philippines. It'll end this agreement unless we come to some follow-on agreement, I guess. So it's called the Visiting Forces Agreement or VFA. It allows large numbers of American Service members and U.S. military ships and aircrafts into the Philippines for joint training with the military there. We have agreements allow us to build and maintain bases and store equipment, et cetera. So it's a deep relationship that goes back decades. The president in the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, is just a

monster. He is best known for extrajudicial killings, misogyny, homophobia, generally being an evil guy. It seems like he's pissed off because the U.S. canceled a visa for one of his political allies who's connected to his anti-drug crusade where he just literally kills everybody. But, you know, Duterte has also just been generally. moving away from the U.S. and toward the Chinese because presumably they care less about his human rights violations and don't push him on it. The AP quoted him as saying, America is very rude. They are so rude, which is a funny quote. The U.S. has provided, I think, 550 million in military assistance to the Philippines in the last three or four years. We do all kinds of joint

military operations and exercises. It's hard to tell, Ben, if this is a bluff. We have a big, complicated web of alliances with these guys. But how big a deal do you think it would be if that military-to-military relationship was severed? Well, you know, first of all, it's funny for him to, you know, cues the U.S. being rude. We had to cancel our one scheduled meeting with Duterte when he called President Obama a son of a whore, I think, which was not polite. I don't know. You know, rude might be a good word for it. Look, it's a really big deal because essentially the way in which like the military of the Philippines is designed is like, you know, the capacity to have like training exercise with us to get equipment from us.

Like that's, you know, what helps that military run. And, you know, I participate in negotiating some of these base access agreements. And if you essentially begin to, if you cut that tie, if you cut that connectivity, that capacity for the U.S. to kind of cycle through and have some personnel coming through, then the the capacity for, you know, the Philippines military to operate at the level that it, it should, you know, begins to atrophy very quickly. More important, I think the political bond starts to break. And we have a mutual defense treaty with the Philippines.

Like, we have an alliance with them that is like our alliance with our European allies. It's a, if they're attacked, we will defend them and, you know, and vice versa. And here's what's at stake there. there are a number of islands. You know, the Chinese claim the entire South China Sea, the so-called nine dash line. That's the border that China says is their maritime border in the South China Sea. And if you look out on a map, it's totally insane because it basically snakes around the coasts of every country, Vietnam, Philippines, like China's just claiming all this water, including some contested islands,

some contested kind of fishing areas. And, you know, they've been really testing the limits. with the Philippines and frankly with that U.S. Philippines defense treaty on on how far they can push. But if the U.S. is pulling back and the Philippines is moving away from the U.S., like it is a blinking green light for the Chinese to just try to dominate that entire maritime space to move into the Philippines big time with corruption, bribes, and, you know, Duterte is probably an easy mark. And essentially to kind of begin to try to consolidate Chinese domination over this space, you know. And look, that's bad. That's worrying, you know, because trillions of dollars in goods flows through the South China Sea. So they're very real U.S. interest at stake there. I think it's also bad for, you know, things like democracy because if a corrupt authoritarian like Duterte thinks it's probably easier, even if his nation loses something in the bargain to just throw in his lot with the Chinese and put up with the Americans, well, then the future of Philippines is probably more likely to look like China than a democracy. And I think that's bad for people.

people in the Philippines too. So, you know, I'd only, I'd watch this as a measure of whether this is a broader Filipino shift away from the U.S. alliance and towards China. That's certainly what it feels like right now, but Duterte swings in different directions. Yeah. I mean, the other sort of related story that you flagged is that the government of Philippines is trying to shut down one of the country's biggest broadcast networks. Yeah. So Duterte's Solicitor General, he framed this move as an it's like corruption effort, but most people think he's just punishing media outlets that question his approach to fighting drug use, which again can be summarized as basically just literally killing anyone even suspected of being involved in drugs and or using drug raids as a front

to kill people that they don't want around anymore. So previously, Duterte tried to shut down a different news site called Rappler that hasn't been successful so far. But, you know, like he is running the authoritarian playbook that you see in Russia, Hungary, maybe the U.S. if we're not lucky. Yeah, no, that's right. And, you know, I think you see, you know, this is both the democratic backsliding and the emergence of China like in one place. Like, you know, you see these threads coming, you know, coming together. And, you know, this is happening in more and more places. And it's not always on the front burner. But it's a part of what I think is the macro trend in the world, which is rising Chinese influence, diminishing American influence, rising

authoritarian trend lines, diminishing democratic trend lines. And, you know, that should worry people. That's what, you know, we need to reverse. And there are a lot of really courageous people in the Philippines, including independent journalists who've, you know, some who've been detained in the Philippines who are standing up to this. You know, we should, you know, we should aim to have their backs as best we can. Because he's killing just drug users, too. Like sometimes they just shoot people for using drugs. I mean, there's really the extraditional killing piece that has propelled him. is really kind of odious. Yeah, and we're talking like thousands of thousands of people reportedly.

Two 2020 things before we get to our guest, Ron Clayne, to talk about the coronavirus. So the Wall Street Journal editorial page this week decided that they wanted to jumpstart the process of swiftboating may repeat this cycle. And for our listeners who may not have been paying close attention to the 2004 election, swift boating is a reference to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which was this just odious right-wing front group that tried. unfortunately with a lot of success to undercut denigrate John Kerry's military service in Vietnam. So the author of this piece and the journals Abed Page is a Marine Corps veteran and a current host at the right-wing outlet Newsmax. He criticized Mayor Pete for basically getting what's called a direct commission. That means he didn't attend a service academy or go through ROTC.

He also just generally seemed to suggest that Pete's service wasn't gritty enough. He criticizes him for knowing how many times he went outside the wire, meaning was driving. a convoy or providing security for one off a base in Afghanistan as if that's a safe thing to be doing. So just a few thoughts on this. Like first, just factually, Pete signed up to serve in the military knowing that he did not have to and knowing that it put his life at risk. Second, like, again, driving around Afghanistan is not safe. There are Taliban attacks, kidnappings, horrific car bombs. And just living in a war zone is dangerous, right?

I mean, these bases are frequently targeted by rockets and mortar fire. We just assassinated a military leader in Iran because we thought his proxy forces were firing rockets at a base in Iraq. So obviously things can get hairy real fast. Now, politically, I think that, like, Democrats need to be clear-eyed that Republicans care more about their political party than they respect military service. I mean, a military record will not prevent or protect Democrats from these attacks. George McGovern was a war hero, a bomber pilot in World War II. John Kerry was a war hero. Like, the list goes on and on.

They were attacked and smeared without a second thought. That said, if you're a Democrat, I don't care who you support. We should all push back on this kind of bullshit because it is a disgusting smear. Yeah. And look, you're right. Like the Kerry, Carrie was a legitimate war hero. You know, in addition to serving, I mean, he was in some serious shit and, like, came to the aid of his fellow service members. And they look what they did to him, right?

So, of course, certain his Pete Buttigieg. And, you know, the bottom line here, yeah, did Pete, you know, rescue, like, 20 people from, like, enemy fire and dive on a, you know, like, no. But, like, the bottom line is, like, Pete Buttigieg signed up to serve. I didn't. Like, I don't know. You know, probably most of the fucking Washington Washington Washington Journal editorial page didn't. Donald Trump sure as hell didn't. Yeah.

And you're right. Like, you sign up. You're going to be in harm's way. Like, you're going to Afghanistan to serve in a war. Like, yeah, you're driving convoys. Like, that's how there have been a lot of casualties in these wars is, like, roadside bombs or, like, insurgent attacks on convoys. So, like, this is such complete and utter bullshit.

And I'm glad you made the point that, like, look, even if Pete Buttigieg is not your guy in the Democratic primary, like, we should all have his back on this, because this is fucking bullshit. And this is how, like, you know, they seek to undermine support for whoever the Democratic nominee be take the thing about them that is admired and admired and just go right at it, you know. So I, I do think this is one where, you know, everybody should call out the BS on this and have Pete's back. Yeah. Let's talk about Bernie for a minute because the Atlantic tried to take on, describe, define what the Bernie Sanders foreign policy doctrine would be. So, you know, Ben, you and I've been

through a few rounds of these like doctrine stories and they're always a bit frustrated. Yeah, yeah. It's hard to summarize how you'd approach the world in a simple doctrine. But it's an interesting piece, and it suggests some ways that I think Bernie would be different from past presidents or Obama on foreign policy. So some of those specifics are, you know, like he's professed an even greater hesitation to use military force. So probably a more likely a 2016 version of Obama where he ended up versus 2009. Yeah, that's a good way to say it. And a greater emphasis on diplomatic and economic tools.

some of the top priorities he would put forward our climate change, kleptocracy, global economic inequality and dealing with authoritarian and far-right political movement, so all things we should deal with. You probably see serious efforts to cut Pentagon spending. Bernie's top foreign policy aid Matt Duss said Bernie would get U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, Iraq, in Syria by the end of his first term. And he said they'd also consider shrinking the U.S. military footprint in Japan, Korea, in Germany, which I thought was interesting. And then Congressman Roe Kana, who I believe is like a co-chair or something in the campaign,

suggested that Bernie might be open to withdrawing troops from South Korea as part of a broader process to denuclearize the peninsula, meaning like that's what the North Koreans want to get rid of their nukes, right? They want us the fuck out of there. So that might be part of an eventual deal. And then the bar for using military action was described as an imminent threat to Americans or preventing mass atrocities. So interesting piece. Curious what you thought. And then I'm just curious, like, also kind of curious what you think the big differences are between kind of the top candidates on foreign policy.

If anyone, besides Bernie, feels particularly distinguished or different to you. Well, I think, you know, I do think what I like about Bernie's approach is, is not just, yes, you know, ending the wars and trying to kind of definitively put a period on the kind of post-9-11 Iraq, Afghanistan. military interventions. But more than that, I really like that priority set, you know, climate change, kleptocracy, which is tied, you know, very directly to authoritarianism, which we talk about here. You know, there's, I think, a reprioritization of American foreign policy that is really important. That, like, you know, when you and I went into politics, like American foreign policy was about terrorism, Iraq, you know, well, that was it. It was the dominant, you know.

And now, like, what do we end up talking about on this podcast? Like, technology, social media, vulnerabilities, disinformation, authoritarianism, climate change, which is going to have all these other effects. And so what I do think is really constructive is Bernie refocusing on the actual priorities that I think implicate American national security and, like, on this planet for the foreseeable future. And by the way, that is a big shift because if that is actually implemented, it's not just about getting troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan in the first term. It's about how do you spend money? Like what is a budgetary priority here? And saying,

yeah, this means we're going to have to spend less on defense so we can spend more on some of these other things is, I think, both necessary and a brave thing for them to say. It means changing how you develop your national security workforce, you know, all the incentives. of for careers were to be like a terrorism person or a Middle East person. Like you got to get people trained up and focused on these issues. So to me, like Bernie reflects like this shift towards not just away from the wars, but to what the next chapter is going to be about. You know, the Germany, Japan, South Korea stuff. Like I'm maybe this is like the, you know, I've, you know, saturated in the juices of the blava at times. But I'm just, I always,

get a little wary. I see what Roe is saying. Like, I want to make sure that we're not giving that away on the front end, you know, of, you know, that they've what China and North Korea wants is the U.S. out of that peninsula. Like, what are we getting for that? You know, that unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, for instance, the goal should not be the removal of U.S. troops. The goal should be a change in the dynamic and the peninsula, change in North Korea's nuclear program. And then let's see, like, how U.S. troops come into the picture. But I think it's worth revisiting. Look, I'd like to close the, you know, not just the prison in Guantanamo Bay. I'd like to close the naval basin in Guantanamo Bay. I think that's something maybe Bernie could get

into. There you go. I think in terms of the differences, I do think there are real differences. I mean, I think that, you know, Biden would reflect kind of wanting to go back to a familiar approach to U.S. foreign policy that has a lot of very good things about it, that is invested in our alliances and invested in trying to support democracy and human rights around the world that is invested in multilateral approaches, but that is probably more in line with the traditional issue set, you know, Russia, China, terrorism, Middle East, you know, whereas Bernie's talking about a different issue set, you know, with climate and authoritarianism, kleptocracy. And then I think a warrant is very much kind of like in between.

maybe a little bit closer to Bernie end of the spectrum, where she's reorienting American Farm Policy, maybe not pledging to move quite as fast as Bernie. And, you know, Amy, you know, it's funny how the spectrum is the same as on domestic issues in some ways, where you got, you know, Bernie out here kind of really setting a new paradigm that I think is the right paradigm, I might, you know, the speed of which you move to that and how disruptive that is, I think is a legitimate question. Then Biden is the more kind of consensus status quo candidate. And then you've got to Warren a little bit closer to Bernie, Amy a little bit closer to Biden, and Pete kind of like right in the middle. Like when I look at the foreign policies of the candidates, that's, they all

want to move in the same direction. They all want to wind down the wars. They all want to focus on climate change. They all want to be more multilateral. You know, they all want to promote democracy and human rights. I think it's a bit of a question at how fast you move in that direction, how much you're willing to try to do things like cut the defense budget that will be contentious. And as usual, you know, breaks down where Bernie's probably for the most dramatic rapid change and the other candidates are different levels of speed and incrementalism on that. The one last thing I would say is that Warren has put some really good meat on the bones

on this question of standing up to authoritarianism and corruption around the world in ways that kind of also dovetail with their domestic message. And, you know, I think that there are going to be a lot of good plans to look at at the end of this primary where I hope the nominee can take. good things from each candidate. Like Pete had some good ideas for how to end the war and changed the authorization around the use of military force. I think Amy, you know, was, you know, was really important to getting the Iran deal done. And frankly, Amy was a huge supporter of the opening to Cuba, too. So I think there's elements of all these foreign policies that if actually melted together would make

for a strong Democratic Party platform. Yeah, I mean, like they've all staked out some interesting ground, like Warren put forward a no first use nuclear weapons policy, which we never got to during the Obama administration and probably should, which basically just says, we won't nuke a country first. Yeah. Because a bunch of scary people in uniforms convince you that if there's a biological attack, you need to be able to nuke a country in response, as if you couldn't just fucking do that anyway. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, whatever. But, you know, in other areas we haven't heard, I don't think most of the candidates talk much about are like drones. Yeah. Right. I mean, I imagine that's an issue that animates a lot of Bernie supporters, a lot of progressives. generally, I don't think I've, you know, you, it's hard to talk about the details of a lot of, you know,

how you use certain tools in the world. But, you know, it'll be very interesting to see if these folks win how far they actually go. Yeah. When you sit down in that meeting and you're told, like, there's a scary, you know, Al-Qaeda cell growing in fill in the blank country and, you know, our options are X, Y, and Z. Well, and one way to think about this is that, you know, you have to envision, you know, as someone who's on a campaign, you come into government and you have to try to envision how they'd act. So let's say you care about drones, right? Right now, the U.S. is, I would assume, engaged in, you know, pretty aggressive use of drone strikes in lots of different countries, right? Our air strikes, I think, have ticked up so much across the board exponentially.

So that massive infrastructure will be in place on January 20th and on January 21st. And if Bernie Sanders is President of the United States, what is he going to do? Is he just going to shut that infrastructure down? And when everybody comes to him, and says, well, you're going to put U.S. lies at risk and then go to Congress and leak that the lives are at risk, you know, how will Bernie respond? And, you know, frankly, I do think pretty would be more likely to say, I'm going to shut the shit down. You know, whereas with Biden, you'd envision, like, well, he'd probably want to have the aspiration of unwinding it, but, like, there'd be a pathway. So I think that it's interesting. And by the way, I'm not saying one is right or one

is wrong, you know, but I do think the basic differences that Bernie would be most likely to kind of upend certain activities of the U.S. national security state. Joe Biden would want to take an incremental approach towards pointing them in a different direction, you know, and I think the other candidates fall on that spectrum. And they also bring different backgrounds. Like Bernie's been kind of an activist, a cage rattler on the outside of these debates. You know, Warren's been on the Senate Armed Services Committee. I think she's developed a pretty good depth of understanding of a bunch of these issues, too, from that perspective. You know, Amy's taken a particular interest in some of these issues in Congress. And like I said, might surprise you, like literally no bigger supporter

for lifting the embargo against Cuba than Amy Klobuchar, right, which doesn't fit on the left-right spectrum, but she's from an ag state, Minnesota, and she, you know, wants to have agricultural cooperation with Cuba, and she's traveled and done the homework to know that it would help the Cuban people to do that, right? So, again, I think there are things to take away from each of their experiences and their plans that could lead to a very interesting platform for the party. Last thing I had before we get to our interview with Ron Claim about the coronavirus is you just want to talk about Parasite because you love the movie. I love Parasite. It's an awesome movie.

Yeah, like I have to say like, well, first of all, you know, my wife was a little more mixed on it because once it got to like, and I know there's spoilers here. Spoiler. Well, I won't say in a way that's a total spoiler, but like once basements came into the picture, you know, like she was a little weirded out by it. I have to say when I saw it though I just remember thinking to myself like about 40 minutes in like how has nobody made a movie about inequality like this before? You know like the

the dominant story arguably in the whole world for the last 30 years has been growing in gross economic inequality and this movie in a pretty ingenious way both highlights that satirizes it or however you want to you know, overly dramatizes, obviously, the consequences of it. But, I mean, it takes an amazing snapshot of, like, what is happening.

And also, it's just, like, a very cool shot at, like, Korean filmmaking. Yeah, I mean, it was a beautiful film, incredibly well done. I also think it's jarring maybe for an American audience because of the fatalism around class in South Korea. Like, if you are born poor, that is your destiny, right? Unless you literally, like, leach off this family of some of the message. In America, that may also be true, having rich. parents is the biggest driver of you being successful and wealthy, but we tell ourselves this

story about up from our bootstraps, et cetera, et cetera, that I think, like, leads to much more hopeful, optimistic art and filmmaking, whereas this was, like, pretty brutal. Well, one of the reasons I liked it is because it was, like, on this trend, on this issue. And look, I don't, there's some great American movies that are made, including some movies about to mention. But, like, I do think that the politics has been, like, kind of oddly. absent from a lot of big American movies lately and may have something to do with, you know, the global audience they're trying to reach. But if you look at the other movies that are up,

like 1917, okay, let's go back and tell a story about World War I, like once upon time in Hollywood, which I love, but like let's go back and revisit the Manson family. You know, meanwhile, it's the Korean movie that is like talking about the issue that is shaping our politics inequality in my mind. And I, you know, and I don't know if that's because studios are afraid to touch certain things. Studios want to get into the Chinese market or what is it? But like, it was interesting to me that in the of these contenders, you know, little women, great movie.

But, you know, and yeah, sure, are there some echoes in terms of like today? Sure. But like, this is a movie that is like spot on like, hey, hey, I'm going to like take one of the most uncomfortable issues in the world today and just put my thumb right on it and push, you know. And, you know, it'd be cool to have more. I mean, haven't you been waiting time for like the. Like, I grew up watching those 70s movies where it was, like, coming out of Vietnam and Nixon, and you're watching, like, Apocalypse Now and all the President's Men and these fucking paranoid movies about the government. And when Trump got elected, I'm like, okay, we're going to have, like, a revival of like, like, where are the fucking movies about, like, the world we're living in?

Yeah, that's a good question. I just finished, like, a 900-page book about Nixon that was the most fascinating thing I've ever read called Nixon. What book is? Nixon land. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's so good. I immediately bought the next version of it. It gets you to Reagan, basically.

But yeah, I mean, you're right that, well, I guess I think we'll probably learn that the current government is doing unbelievable things behind the scenes that we don't yet know about. Yeah, and it might be a lag. It might take a few years. Yeah, because the juxtaposition of what Nixon was saying and doing in public versus what was on those tapes where he was, you know, swearing that Haldeman and, you know, Olson and all this, like the plumbers unit that was breaking into the DNC and all this shit is unbelievable. and the fact that he was using CIA operatives and shutting down FBI investigations like it's staggering when you put it all together. Yeah, yeah.

Maybe the good art comes in like five years. Yeah, maybe, yeah, the art, when Trump is safely out of office, so the major conglomerates that own these studios no longer have to worry about. Don Jr.'s first term. When we come back, we will have Ron Claim. We are thrilled to be joined by Ron Claim,

who is Obama's White House Ebola response coordinator. Do we call you a czar? Are we allowed to use that word anymore? You know, it's a little passei, but if you want to use it, you guys go right ahead. Okay, great. From 2014 to 2015, where just the height of the outbreak, the media panic and everything else, he's also a current advisor to Vice President Biden's campaign. Ron, thank you so much for joining it.

Thanks for having me. So we want to talk about the coronavirus today because as of early afternoon on Tuesday, the latest death toll is over 1,000 people. There are over 43,000 infections that we know about globally. In your opinion, I mean, how serious is this outbreak as compared to previous outbreaks like SARS, H1N1, Ebola? Where would you rank the YRQ level of concern? Well, so I think it's important, Tommy, to start off with this point, which is people

remember when I took over the Ebola response in the fall of 2014, there was a lot of confusion about Ebola and what it meant and how dangerous was, so and so forth. But the fact is we knew a lot more about Ebola in the fall of 2014 than we know about this new virus right now. the world's leading medical experts didn't know what existed six weeks ago. And so there's just a lot of uncertainty about the basics, uncertainty about how infectious it truly is, how much it's going to spend, how much spread already in China, how much we should expect to spread outside of China. Doubt's about how lethal it is. What will the fatality rate, the rate of serious illnesses wind up being? So what I'd say is I think we have reason to be concerned. I think there's reason for the U.S. to be more aggressive in the response that,

than what's been mounted so far in many respects, the reason to be prepared for something. But I think no reason yet to be fearful, no reason to really panic or anything like that. I just think there are just a lot of unknowns about this virus and what it's path is going to be. So, Ron, you got very familiar, obviously, when you were running that response

with what the tools are available to the U.S. government. And, you know, you had to make use of, you know, a lot of existing tools and investments have been made over many years in organizations like CDC. But also coming out of Ebola, we made some structural changes in how the U.S. government was organized to be able to deal with disease like this, having a strong coordinator in the White House, having a kind of working group in the different agencies of the U.S. government that are prepared to respond, and also building linkages with other countries globally. How concerned are you that we're going into this

potential crisis, having under Trump dismantled some of that structure or having tried to slash the budget for some of that preparedness that you know you have to count on? Yes, so I think it's a big concern at the leadership level. And that starts, as you said, Ben, with the fact that after I left as White House a ball response coordinator, President Obama accepted my recommendation to create inside the National Security Council a directorate that would focus on these global health security issues that would have a high-level person that would be helping us get ready for potential epidemics like this, helping us get prepared, helping us respond. And President Trump actually

kept that structure for the first year and a half of his presidency. But when John Bolton took over in July of 2018, he basically disbanded the unit. I didn't really fit with his hard power vision of national security. And so we don't really have that coordinating function inside the White House. Now, why is that important? It's important because, because this is going to be a big interagency challenge. President Obama said with regard to Ebola, he was mustering a whole-of-government response. To fight something like this, you need to not just have the agencies inside HHS,

but you need the Defense Department working out. You need the State Department working on it. You need Homeland Security working on it, and you can only really manage something like that from inside the White House. And secondly, it's an international issue, and foreign governments need to know who they're supposed to contact, who they're supposed to listen to on behalf of the United States. And again, I have a lot of respect for Alex Azar.

I think he's doing a good job running the HHS part of this, but it's impossible for our Secretary of Health and Human Services to really represent the entire U.S. government. And so I think there's a big hole there. And then, of course, there's a second leadership hole inside the White House, and that's the one in the Oval Office. As you guys know, right, President Obama made a very hard decision, a controversial decision in the fall of 2014

to say, I'm going to let science and medicine dictate the direction of this response, dictate our policies, not politics, not fear. And it was an unpopular decision in ways. I think it's one of the braver decisions President Obama made. And he stuck with that through thick and thin, and he saved a lot of lives. People need to remember that back in 2014, the leading forecast was that a million people would die in West Africa from Ebola. The death toll, tragedies as it was, was 11,000. Hundreds of thousands of lives were saved, thanks to President.

Obama's leadership in conjunction with other countries in conjunction with the people of Africa itself, of course. They took the leading role. And now we have President Trump. President Trump attacked the Ebola response back five years ago. He called Obama a dope. He called Obama incompetent. He said we should leave Americans who are fighting the disease in West Africa to die there if they got the disease. And that's the person who's in charge, right? And so I think, you know, I think the leadership problem is at both levels. You need a community. mandarin chief, who really can lean forward, who can be trusted, whose word is good, who's willing to make the hard decisions and put science over politics. And then you need a structure inside the

White House to implement those policies. And we really have neither of those two things right now. Ron, how concern are you that the Chinese government is being straight with the World Health Organization or the international community about the scope of this outbreak? So, Tommy, I think there's no question the Chinese government has not been completely straight and has either been slow or just unwilling to disclose things. They finally allowed a team from WHO in on the ground in the past 24 hours. They still have not allowed a team from the U.S. government, from the Centers for Disease Control, to be on the ground.

We actually have CDC people who work in China. They are in China. They are not allowed to go to any of the relevant places because the Chinese government is banning them. I think some of that is the inevitable confusion and disorganization that you have with a crisis like this inside China, but some of it is in question with the Chinese government's tendency towards non-transparency towards keeping things secrets and things like that.

And so I think this is a big gap in our visibility. I think having the WHO on the ground will help, but the WHO is subject to pressures from countries like China. And so I think until we have American scientists, American doctors, American experts on the ground in China, We're still going to be a little bit blind as to what's going on. Well, in the other side of that, of course, is the U.S. government, Ron. And, you know, I remember at the height of the panic, like the only thing you had to hold on to was, you know,

that you would hope that the American people would trust the information that was given to them by their own government. You know, that essentially the U.S. government had to communicate to people, you know, here's what you have to worry about and here's what you don't have to worry about. there's a lot of misinformation out there. We talked about whether or not people should, you know, trust the Chinese government. But how do you think about responding to this type of disease in a situation where, one, the U.S. government barely communicates. There's not like a daily White House press briefing where we do a lot of this. Two, the U.S. government habitually lies about everything. And so you're not sure that you can trust that information. I mean, how do you imagine responding to something, having lost that?

that trust that people used to, you know, defer to generally when it came to government statements. And also, if people out there are wondering about this, like, where should they be going? You know, should they be looking at the World Health Organization? Where should they look to for trusted information? So look, I think, you know, we have to be honest. There are some things we said, particularly in the early parts of the Ebola response that turned out to be wrong. But we never lied to people.

We sometimes were mistaken, but we never lied. Trump has already lied about this on three separate occasions. First, he said it's all under control. No one has anything to worry about. It isn't under control. Second, he said that we had sealed our borders airtight. We haven't sealed our borders airtight. And third, he repeated this thing today, the other day where he said that, you know,

it's going to be April and it's going to get warm and the virus is going to go away. Right. There's no scientific basis for that. So we have a problem that the president is trying to, as he always does, on things he's doing, you know, talk them up and boast about their success, whether that's true or not. And so that's a big problem because we know from the track record of Donald Trump, we can't trust anything. He says, we know on this specific issue, we can't trust anything he says. Now, what I'll say is we're very fortunate to have career people and still

in key places, people you and I worked with, people like Dr. Tony Fauci at NIH and Dr. Ann Shuket and her team at CDC. And these are people who serve Democrats and Republicans alike. They're still in key roles. And I think I would look very closely to what they say and what they're telling us in their official communications, because I have a lot of confidence in them, a lot of confidence to them to be straight and honest with us. Now, look, the challenge is not whether or not we should listen to those people, but whether President Trump will listen to those people. We know that the President doesn't like experts. He doesn't like medicine. He doesn't like science. and he doesn't like listening to people who tell him things he doesn't want to hear.

And so I think when you look at these long-serving, you know, heroic Americans who've given their whole careers to the government to keep us safe, I trust them. I trust what they say. But I sure hope President Trump's listening to what they have to say. So there's like a long-term approach to all these challenges, right, which is investment in global public health. What do you think Congress or the administration should be doing? And how does that compare to what they are doing? So there's short-term and long-term answers on that. And as you said, Tommy, part of this is the long-term thing.

We need to have a consistent strategy on pandemic preparedness. And I'll give you one really good example, which is one thing we built in 2014 as a part of the Ebola response that did not exist before then was a three-tiered system of medical facilities in the U.S. to intake, triage, identify, isolate, and ultimately treat people with dangerous, infectious diseases. We had nothing like that before Ebola. built it from scratch during the Ebola response. We have 60 kind of, we have 10 super high in hospitals, 60 hospitals, one in every major city that can treat patients. And the funding for that program is set to run out in May of this year. Now, you know, will Congress renew it because of the

coronavirus threat, hopefully so. But absent that, we probably would have let that program lapse. And we would be back at square one like we were in Ebola. So I think, you know, for the long run, the point is consistent investments, consistent investments in our health security here at home and around the world, and a globalist perspective. I mean, look, fighting these viruses, some ways no different than fighting terrorists in this sense, which is we kind of understand the fact that we have to fight the bad guys overseas if we don't want to see them here in our own country. And the same thing is true for these viruses.

We have to help other countries in the same kind of thing. and alliances fighting these diseases overseas to keep them from coming here. President Obama, for example, really helped get the African CDC off the ground so that the continent of Africa would have the kind of resources to identify and respond to novel new infections and diseases. So we wouldn't have to send 400 CDC people to Africa like we did in 2014. So those kinds of consistent investments and global preparedness is important. It's an argument against isolationism against the American First mindset. In the short term, what the administration should be doing right now

is what President Obama did do in 2014. And again, in 2016, for Zika, which is put together an emergency spending package. It goes to the hill that funds these investments at home, that funds what we need to do overseas, that funds the state and local functions of dealing with all the people who might have the disease, tracking them, monitoring them. You know, that helps fund some international relief. I think we will need to give help to poor countries where this virus spreads.

and that package needs to get to Capitol Hill, and of course, Congress needs to pass it. Ron, and what are you most concerned about here? I mean, I guess if the best case scenarios that the virus proves to be not that lethal and that world health resources can be mobilized to kind of make it another treatable disease, it is brought under control, like in what you're observing here is at the risk that it's much more widespread in China than we even know now, that it is potentially lethal, that it'll have secondary effects on the global economy, you know, given the centrality of China, the global economy?

Like, what are the scenarios that you think might be underappreciated in the way this is being approached right now? Well, I think there are a couple things that on the unknown list are worrisome. Might it be spreading more rapidly in China than we appreciate? Again, we don't really have great visibility into that. might it spread more widely throughout Asia. You know, it might. We don't really have great knowledge on that yet.

Might there be more people walking around this virus in other countries? Perhaps so. You know, Trump has painted this picture that somehow he's already cut off travel from China. That's not true. That's not possible in the modern interconnected world. Thousands of people are still coming here every day from China. And so, you know, I think that we need to. to be realistic about the fact that this virus is going to spread. And it's a question how much

we can kind of contain it, how much we can make its impact on the health care system level, how much we can be hopeful that it's not as severe. I think the things people should be looking for is, first of all, what is the impact on health care systems? How many health care workers in China are infected? How many health care workers in China wind up dying? That's where these things really kind of get out of control when they get into the health care system, when they get into hospitals, because, you know, it hits the health care workers. This virus, we know, is more impactful on people who are already sick and compromised. They're all put together one place in a hospital to target-rich environment for viruses.

So we want to watch that in their health care system and other health care systems. And I think, though, in some ways, the global wildcard here is Africa. Africa is the continent, even not to see my earlier comments, that is least prepared to deal with something like this, more prepared than it was five years ago, but still least prepared. So we know there's a lot of commerce and aid and movement of people between China and Africa, a big Chinese presence in Africa, and the possibility that some of that commerce trade exchange of people is going to bring this virus to the continent of Africa. You know, it's just a big, big unknown factor. Ron Clayne, thank you so much for helping us understand this thing.

We appreciate it, and we will continue to monitor it because I remain pretty terrified. Yeah. Thanks again, Ron. Well, thanks for having me, guys. Have we going. Potsie of the World is a product of crooked media. The senior producer is Michael Martinez. Our assistant producer is Jordan Waller.

It's mixed and edited by Chris Basil. Kyle Segglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Malconian, and Milo Kim, who film and share these interviews on video each week.