Pod Save the World - Iran and the lies we told along the way

Episode Date: January 15, 2020

Tommy and Ben cover the latest developments in the Iran crisis, including why the intelligence and legal case for assassinating Soleimani keeps changing, the horrific shootdown of a commercial airliner, and Iran resuming uranium enrichment. Then they discuss Attorney General Barr’s fight with Apple over encryption, and why Obama also got this issue wrong. Finally, they explain why Taiwan’s recent election was good for democracy, the latest on the China trade war, how the Russians are STILL trying to dig up dirt on Joe Biden, and why 2020 Democrats are fighting about Iraq. Also Megxit. Then the Washington Post’s Jason Rezaian joins to discuss protests in Iran and what we actually know about what the Iranian people think.

Welcome back to POTA of the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, we're still talking about Iran. Yes, although I think, you know, we have other subjects today, but yeah, we've other subjects today. My blood pressure is down significantly, but still elevated, which I guess is par for the course in the Trump era. On today's show, we'll do a bunch of updates on the Iran story after the Soleimani strike, but we'll also talk about all these vacancies among national security jobs in government. It's pretty shocking when you see them all totaled up. We'll talk about Taiwan's elections, which will count as some good news for democracy. There's a big fight brewing between the Department of Justice and Apple over encryption,

and we'll dig into that because it's not a new fight. China Trade Update, which Ben just pulled out a stack of paper because he did homework. Now I feel like an asshole. The Russians are still hacking us with the goal of interfering in our 2020 elections. Democrats are still fighting about the Iraq War. And then we are joined by Jason Rezaian, who's the former Tehran Bureau Chief of the Washington Post, to talk about how the Soleimani strike is being received by the Iranian people. Two quick housekeeping items.

We're going back on tour. Pots of America is out again in 2020. Come see us live when we're in your town. The pre-sale is live today, January 15th through January 17th. Go to crooked.com slash events. Use the code Crooked 2020 to get tickets. And then tickets go on sale to the public on Saturday, January 18th. So get in there, get them while they're hot.

Also, the wilderness is back for season two. John is looking at the path to victory in 2020. He's talking to voters, strategists, organizers, candidates, and battleground states. It is really an unbelievable collection of like the best and the brightest people that John got to talk to. Also, he will take you inside focus groups with swing voters in four different areas of the country, which I don't know.

Like, I've listened to the first two episodes only, but it taught me so much about what voters actually care about and think about and the potential path to victory versus the Twitter bubble that I live in. So cannot recommend it highly enough. Go to crooked.com slash the wilderness or just subscribe on the same phone you're listening to this show on now. Okay, so let's go to Iran. So Ben, we're going to talk more later in the show with Jason about the protest movement and the reaction from the Iranian people.

But let's do a quick update on what's happened since we last spoke. The administration continues to make different and competing claims about their rationale for the Soleimani strike and the underlying legal basis. Over the weekend, Trump tried to say that four embassies were a risk of being attacked by, I assume, Shia militia groups, and thus he blamed Kwasma Soleimani for that. He was then contradicted by his own Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, who said he had not seen that intelligence, which is another way of saying that intelligence doesn't exist, because the Secretary of Defense would see it.

Then Trump did what he so often does, which is just fully exposed to lie himself by tweeting, it doesn't really matter. So that's a quote, by the way. If there was an imminent threat because of Soleimani's, quote, horrible. past. It's worth noting that it took him two tweets to get that one right, because he initially confused the words imminent and eminent. So I love having an illiterate president. Also, Iran admitted to shooting down a Ukrainian international airline's flight last Wednesday that killed 176 innocent people, mostly Iranian and Canadian citizens. That horrifying tragedy has led to protests of the regime,

and Jason's going to dig into that with us more, though you should know that initially Iran denied responsibility, but I think intelligence and video evidence made it untenable and pretty clear what happened. Lastly, the UK, Germany, and France have called out Iran for violating the terms of the nuclear deal, you know, started the process of going to the UN, possibly to resume sanctions if Iran doesn't come back into compliance. So a lot going on still. So, Ben, let's just start with the shifting argument about imminence in the legal case, because what I think people should know about the legality question around the strike is it's complicated. There's a lot of ways you could try to justify it, and those arguments tend to differ when you're talking about international or domestic law.

So let's just narrow this and talk about domestic law because that's what the Trump people are doing. So I'm confident the word imminence entered into this discussion because some Trump administration lawyer after the fact was tasked with constructing a legal argument. That argument is basically the president under Article 2 of the Constitution has the right to defend our forces, even preemptively to prevent an attack on them. Thus, they took the strike against Soleimani. The problem with us vetting that claim or really anyone vetting that claim is that it entirely hinges on the under. lying intelligence itself. And the Trump administration refuses to declassify, disclose that information to the public, or even a really brief Congress in a meaningful way. The other challenge is that there's just there's no way to then adjudicate the claim if they are lying, right? It's just

us, the voters who get to vote them out and say, we don't like your foreign policy. So, frustrating. But Ben, what did you make of Trump's, it doesn't really matter, tweet? How much do you think that Democrats should be focusing on these legal questions? Well, look, I think there's the legal questions and then there's kind of the political questions. On the legal question, look, if there's not an imminent threat from Soleimani, it's almost impossible to figure out like a justification for this. And to break it down for people, essentially, you know, an imminent threat is you're forced to take an action in self-defense, which is, you know, at the heart of the law of war. And frankly, just how people look at just war, whether an act is justified. I've heard some people compare this to Obama strikes against al-Qaeda targets, where we did claim an imminent threat.

The key distinction I draw here is we are at war with al-Qaeda. There's congressional authorization, whether you like that authorization or not, it exists. It's kind of recognized that the United States is at war with this organization al-Qaeda. We are not at war with Iran. There's no legal authorization for it. The country hasn't been told war at war with Iran. So essentially to commit an act of war against an official of the Iranian government, no matter how bad. It's not legal just because he's bad.

You know, you do need a justification. And clearly, they don't have one, right? And clearly this intelligence doesn't exist. They couldn't present it to Congress. Even by the way, if that individual is part of a designated terrorist organization, this is a big point of confusion, I think, because I think there's like 50 or 60 groups on the federally designated terrorist list. That doesn't mean you can kill all of them. You expressly cannot.

Yeah. So that's a separate issue. I think another important point here is that we are establishing a precedent, you know, essentially, if the United States says it's okay for us to just go kill the officials of foreign governments, worry about how that precedent could be used by a Russia or a China. And don't think that doesn't happen. They watch what we do and they use it to justify things that they do. And I think that shows you that there are other potential consequences to these actions that can play out over many years. I think the, and so we're in this position where Trump took this incredibly reckless act that has already had terrible consequences, the nuclear deal dead, you know, the Iranians saying they're going to not abide by its limits, the efforts to kick us out of Iraq, the counter-right submission suspended. And frankly, we averted a war just because these ballistic missiles didn't hit a particular target. So that's all very worrying. And the only other point I want to make, Tommy, is that what's really frustrating to me is even as this all played out, it was pretty clear, pretty early that they didn't. have their story straight and that they were lying about this. And yet the media still gave Trump the benefit of the doubt. I mean, the headlines, you know, Trump claims imminent threat or Pompeo says multiple, you know, hundreds of Americans were at risk. If you go back and look at the

headlines at the height of this fever, they very much gave Trump the benefit of the doubt. Now, yeah, subsequently, there's been media scrutiny and correction, but if a guy will lie about a hurricane with a Sharpie, like there's no reason to think he won't lie about war and peace. And I think that we still haven't figured out a way to frame Trump's claims in the media. And it seems like the more serious the issue, the more inclined people are to give him the benefit of the doubt. Because it's like, well, on this one, he won't lie. Yeah. Well, one of the things we learned is no, no, he'll lie about anything, including life or death issues.

Yeah. And also, the guy tweeted out a photo of like a failed Iranian missile lunch that was clearly just a picture of his PDB that morning. Yeah. Like, we should be able to ask him to classify stuff. Yeah. Well, let's talk about this Obama comparison because. One of Trump's spokespeople really stepped in it on this guy named Hogan Gidley. He tweeted that Obama said that Osama bin Laden and Alaki were imminent threats.

And then he suggested that the Obama administration had killed Omar Gaddafi and something. Which that is just wrong. But what is right is that Obama, I think critics would say, expanded the definition of imminence. And actually was laid out in a speech by Eric Holder where he talks about the consideration of like a relevant window of opportunity to act, the possible harm that could come from missing that window to civilians. And then, you know, he talked about how Al Qaeda leaders are continually planning attacks against the U.S. They don't behave like a traditional military.

They're not wearing uniforms. They're not amassing on a border. So, like, you have to strike when you can. And I think that was somewhat controversial at the time. But to your point, I mean, we are in a declared armed conflict with al-Qaeda. If you want to say, well, maybe Soleimani meets some of those descriptions as well, sure that's fine, but there's a whole other step there of getting authorization from Congress before you can then take a strike. That's right. And look, there's a very interesting debate to be

had about Obama's use of imminence. There were kind of two categories of it. The first is, you know, here's an individual, say, in Alaki, who was actively plotting against the United States. Nick, we had intelligence that this guy was aiming to direct attacks to kill Americans. He told the Christmas Day bomber blow up a jet over American soil. Yeah. It's all in that complaint. He'd done it and he was continuing to do it. And so I think people can probably be most comfortable with the idea of like,

okay, if there's someone out there, he's plotting an attack and you have a window to take him out, that that is something that could be legally justified. People could find it morally or ethically wrong and that's a whole other debate. Then there was a second category that I think was more controversial, which is that if there are people who show indications of, preparing for attacks, you know, it looks like a camp, you know, or we have some threat reporting that ties back to a location. You know, I was personally at times uncomfortable with those strikes. But, and there's a very big butt here, for this debate, again, whether you think we were

that Obama acted too broadly, it was still an entity al-Qaeda that we were at war with. there was a legal basis for it domestically and internationally. Soleimani, again, it doesn't matter if we think he was a really bad guy for this question. And again, I think we slotted him, you know, appropriately in some ways as a guy who supported terrorism, but he was also the official of a government that we are not technically at war with. And that's just a very hard thing to square. And, you know, either we're at war with Iran or not. And that's why I would actually argue that we are in a kind of state of war.

It's not, you know, playing out in the same way that, like, the Iraq War did. But, you know, we're firing rockets at each other. We're engaged in other asymmetric actions against one another to undermine one another. So I think one way to think about this is that we're in this kind of de facto, low-boil state of conflict with Iran. And the American people have not been told exactly why that is. Yeah. Not every war is shockina, as we saw in Iraq. Well, so, I mean, as often happens with any war, things got tragic and awful for civilians very quickly. I mean, the downing of this Ukrainian Airlines flight is just horrific. And we're going to talk again with Jason later about how people are responding to that. But I do want to talk with you about this weird discussion that sort of popped up in Twitter in a lot of places about who's at fault. The administration's position seems to be, how dare you blame us for this tragedy, but also we deserve credit for the subsequent protests. Um, like obviously the Iranians are to blame for firing the missile at this plane, but it's also true that those missile defense systems were on high alert because they just responded to the Soleimani assassination. I think it's pretty obvious, you know, you can point to an escalatory chain of events that get us to this tragedy. The conversation though, like it gets so stilted because people will say, how dare you blame America for this? I'm going to pick this arbitrary point in time and say the conflict started here.

And thus we are responding and not the aggressor. And I just think that's so risky because when you're always the victim, you're always just responding and off we go, you know, up the escalatory ladder. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you put it well. I mean, this is a hard thing to play out on Twitter. But this entire Iran debate over the last week or two ignores the reality that sometimes more than one thing can be true at once.

So it is, I believe, undeniably true that Trump started a cycle of escalation. that included the shootdown of that plane. Like that that would not have happened. Right. If Trump had not killed Qasem Soleimani. That seems like a fair point. Yeah. Now, on the other hand, it's the Iranian's fault for shooting down the plane.

And the fact that they were so incompetent on such hair trigger and maybe so careless about the loss of potential civilian life that they did that, that's entirely their fault, too. Like, both of those things are true. Just like it can be entirely true that the Islamic Republic, is a repressive, corrupt regime, and it's good that people are demonstrating and trying to assert their rights inside of Iran, but also true that, you know, from my perspective, Trump's policies are not helping those people. So this is, you know, you have to be able to hold more than one thought in your head at once. And for whatever reason, whenever we start

talking about Iran, that becomes more difficult to do. Yeah, God help you if you try to be reasonable. Okay, last question for you on Iran. So obviously the elephant in the room here is Ron's nuclear program or if they restart one. They said after the Soleimani assassination that they're not going to honor restrictions on uranium enrichment. That actually got our allies in Europe nervous enough. I think today they came out and they criticized Iran, whereas before they've been mostly trying to work with the Iranians to try to pull them back into the deal, give them sanctions relief through like black market efforts that avoid American sanctions, et cetera. Now they're, actually threatening to go back to the UN and maybe reimpose some sanctions. Can you just give

listeners a sense of how worried you are personally about what they've announced about their enrichment activity? And what should people who don't understand what an IR1 is and all this, you know, talk of centrifuges and complicated shit? Like, what are the big things to look for before this actually becomes a crisis? So one way to look at this is to go back and say what was in the Iran deal? There are a couple ways in which you can build a nuclear bomb or get enough material to build a nuclear bomb. One is through the development of plutonium, right? And the Iranians had a reactor that was coming online and was going to be capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium for a bomb. The Iran deal destroyed the

core of that reactor, so it just solved that problem. But the other way is to enrich enough uranium to produce the material for a nuclear bomb. And you do that by using centrifuges, centrifuges spin, enriched uranium, and you try to get enough for a bomb. And what the nuclear deal did is it took two-thirds of the Iranian centrifuges offline, stored them under lock and key in international inspection, prevented them from using more advanced centrifuges that could produce that uranium faster, forced them to ship their stockpile of enriched uranium out of the country. And I think they had a stockpile that was potentially large enough to have to have material for several bombs. And so you're just preventing them from being able to acquire enough

of the material necessary for a weapon. The worrying steps that they've announced, they've announced that they're going to start to reacquire that stockpile so that they will keep it on Iranian soil. And now the question is, will they essentially turn these centrifuges back on, reinstall more? And the thing to look for is if they do that, they start to shrink the amount of time it would take them to acquire enough material for a bomb if they chose to do that, right? And so that that clock shrinks to really a matter of just potentially just a month or so, right? So if they reinstall these centrifuges and if they start to use some of the more advanced centrifuges that can enrich uranium faster, what that does is indicate that they could get to having enough material for a bomb

very quickly. And so I think what people have to watch are number one, are they keeping a stockpile of enriched uranium on Iranian soil? Number two, are they turning on their centrifuges and using more advanced centrifuges? And then most worrying, the worst step would be if they kick out all the inspectors so we can't see what they're doing. And those are the steps to watch. And that's the real risk to American national security, you know, is an Iran with a nuclear weapon. Because again, that, you know, one, you don't want a country that supports terrorism to have nuclear weapon. They could pass that weapon terrorists. It could start a nuclear arms race in that region. The Saudis could get a bomb. So imagine Mahmohan Sama on with a bomb. Oh, that'd be great. Yeah, I mean, so this is really

bad. This is why we did the nuclear deal. And Trump now owns whatever happens. Like any, any, you know, he pulled out of the nuclear deal. Any, any, uh, increase in the Iranian program, this is on him. And they've already begun to take those steps. So as of right now, it sounds like your anxiety level one to ten is like three, three, you know, no, I think it was like a three pre-Solmani assassination. I'd probably dial it up to like a five or six because they've announced that they're not going to abide by any of these limits. And then if they start, you know, again, turning on centrifuges and, you know, then it goes up to an eight, they kick the inspectors out at the 10. And a nine, we're moving to Canada. Okay. That's good. That's helpful.

Like Harry and Megan. Yeah. Well, we should have talked about that today. Well, I guess we still have time. Yeah. So, okay, in a kind of related story that's not about Iran, the Washington Post published this interesting piece about all the vacancies in national security positions in government. And it's just, it's stunning to me. Here are the few of the bigger positions. the director and the deputy director of national intelligence. Big job. By the way, let's talk about the real quick. We just went through like a two-week debate about intelligence and it never really got noted that there was no director of national intelligence who's usually the person who would, you know, speak to that. Who's briefing at this thing? Yeah, exactly. Gina Haspel, the CIA, but come on.

The secretary of the Navy seems important. The top three jobs at the Department of Homeland Security. So secretary, under secretary, deputy secretary, like pretty big jobs. And then there's just a bunch of assistant secretaries and deputy assistant secretary positions at DOD and state. I think they said there's 88 of them. And some of them would have a hand in Iran policy. So here's an example. The assistant secretary for special operations in low intensity conflict. Now, that's the most weird anodyne sounding title you've ever heard.

But that person is probably former special forces, vast experience in planning military. operation, but also charged with understanding the diplomacy that would happen around it and sort of overseeing the whole thing and making sure it works. Kind of a version of what costum Soleimani's job. Yeah, right. So anyway, like these, a lot of these positions, like, so there's not empty chairs and empty offices per se. A lot of these folks are just, you know, acting leaders in spots, and that lets Trump get around the vetting that happens in the Senate with an appointed position. But, like, ultimately he's just depriving himself of consistent, stable, senior leadership at all his agencies. And I don't get why because those people do so much work for

you. Well, yeah, I mean, and it explains like the little glimpses we get at the process speak to why this is a problem, right? If you have a fully staffed and functioning government, you don't send draft letters to the Iraqi government withdrawing your troops. Good point. You don't necessarily give Trump the option to assassinate an officially reigning government just because you want to develop some options and you think it's crazy and then you're surprised that he says yes to it, which is what the reporting said happened. You can't kind of deal with crises. You can't stay on top of multiple issues. You know, part of it is also like while everybody's looking at Iran, like who's thinking about everything else in the world? Good point. And that's kind of absent. But then an underappreciated

piece of this is Senate confirmation. Like the reason the Constitution set it up this way is that you know, the officials with a certain degree of responsibility in our government should be accountable to somebody other than just a president. And so right now, the person who's in charge of our intelligence community was not confirmed by the Senate. The person who's in charge of the Navy, not confirmed by the Senate, person in charge of, you know, DHS. DHS, not confirmed by the Senate. Like, that shows, again, a complete disregard for Congress. And it's like, fuck you, I want to just be able to stick, you know, wherever I want. there and not have them be accountable to anybody but me. And that's new. That that hasn't happened

before. And that's, again, part of Trump kind of trying to shut Congress out of any role in these decisions. One last of Trump administration thing, but this story is a very big deal, in my opinion. So on Monday, the Attorney General Bill Barr held a press conference to demand that Apple, like the phone company, help the administration crack encryption on iPhones used by the Saudi Air Force cadet trainee who murdered three Americans in December in Pensacola. More on that terrible training program in a minute. So the administration understandably wants to know who this guy was communicating with, if there's other plots out there, et cetera. But in practice, what they're saying to Apple is we want you to break your own encryption. We want you to set a precedent that you are willing to provide the

government essentially unfettered backdoor access to these devices. And President Obama made a similar asked to Apple back in 2014 when the administration wanted access to the San Bernardino Shooter's phone after, I think there were two of them went on this horrible rampage and killed 14 people in a terrorist attack. That issue got punted at the time because some private company was able to crack the phone. But this has been coming to a head since a lot of these companies, including, you know, WhatsApp, Facebook, others, have been rolling out stronger and stronger end-to-end encryption that is believed to be unbreakable. So, Ben, I remember thinking about this issue at the time, thinking that Obama was wrong about this in 2014,

in part because one day you could have a president like Donald Trump and God help us all. But, I mean, you were in the White House still at this time. You were involved in this debate. Can you talk us through? What's the good faith debate that was happening then? What are the stakes for everybody involved today? Well, look, I'll start by saying I actually also believe that was the wrong position for reasons I'll get to. but first I make the good faith argument on why to break the encryption.

You know, you have something like the San Bernardito shooter. You want to see, like, is he in touch with anybody else? I mean, that's basically what you want. You want to get in his phone because you have every good reason to want to know, was this guy texting with ISIS leaders? Is there a cell in California? And he posted something about that made it sound like this was the beginning of a bunch of attacks. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Will you learn about other attacks? so you can see the law enforcement interest in it. The reason that I have gotten increasingly uncomfortable with it is that we've seen, again, it comes back to like what do we do and how does it relate to other countries. And, you know, if you're in China, you're in Russia or you're in an authoritarian system, like that encryption is like your only hope for having any privacy whatsoever. And I don't like the idea of the United States. setting a precedent that like governments can come in and break encryption that will surely be

used by every, you know, thuggish or corrupt or authoritarian government in the world. And it also kind of sends a message that U.S. tech companies are at the end of the day, you know, like indistinguishable from the NSA and our intelligence collection, which, by the way, is ultimately not good for U.S. tech companies and their global, you know, market share. So on balance, to me, look, there are other ways of getting intelligence or even other ways of cracking phones, right? Then just, you know, once a guy like Bill Barr can start to say, well, I want to get in somebody's iPhone, you know, the reasoning for it might slide. It might start with a very compelling case like San Bernardino or this Saudi guy. But then it might morph into him wanting other people's phones.

And I'd rather just draw the line and say, no, we have to respect certain degrees of privacy around technology. Yeah, I mean, the really maximalist cynical response I would have. is like, isn't the NSA's job to figure out how to do this shit? Go do it. Like, don't, like, demand that Apple, like, fix your failure. But also, I mean, I remember Obama saying at the time that we can't fetishize our phone and that if there was a safe in someone's office, you would find a way to break into it. But I just fundamentally reject that analogy because in, like, recorded human history, every utterance you make doesn't end up logged somewhere.

Exactly. And, like, the notion that my text messages have to be some sort of public record, I think is ridiculous. No, it's a much bigger issue, but we have to set up. some limits around privacy because everything is on your phone, whether you like or not. That's why I also disagree with that statement because it's like there's no safe that could contain, you know, every like and dislike and message you've sent and, you know, literally millions of pieces of information about you. Yeah, especially with the administration that loves to weaponize them when released.

I mean, look at poor Lisa Page and Peter's truck and all these people. Yeah, what could Bill Barr do with that precedent of getting Apple to just give them the keys to any phone? Also worth noting that this week, 20 of the Saudi students in that training program were sent back home. I can't believe we're not talking about it. I know. I know. Some of them were involved in extremist chat rooms.

Others apparently had child pornography. None of them were prosecuted. How do you not prosecute someone who possesses child pornography? Probably because we didn't want to piss off Muhammad bin Salman. And Jared won't get that contract down the road. But like, here's an idea. Instead of giving the government back door access to every American's cell phone, what if we vet young fucking Saudi men? before teaching them how to fly fighter jets.

Yeah, yeah. Isn't that a better solution? It's a remarkable to me how little scrutiny this has gotten this entire episode, right? Because what was this training program, like for an administration that talks about extreme vetting in terms of refugees, like they can even vet people on military bases? Once again, they apologizing for the Saudis, you know, totally bizarre out of this administration. and frankly the debates, the dumb debates we used to have in the Obama administration about like whether you call something terror or not.

Like what happened here? Like it seems like something really bad was happening at this military base that involved more than just this one guy who committed the attack. But we've never really got this full story about this. Yeah, this is one of those times where there's just an imbalance in the way Democrats and Republicans treated on national security. And this would have been demagogued if it were any Democrat forever. This would be Benghazi if we were the Democrats.

Yep, yep. Okay, let's talk about some good. news for democracy. So voters in Taiwan came out in force over the weekend to reelect president, Sai In Wen, with 57% of the vote in a three-way race, that result is seen as, one, exciting and good for the planet, two, as a big middle finger to China and in particular their recent treatment of Hong Kong. So, Ben, you have been saying since day one of the Hong Kong story that everyone needs to watch Taiwan and see how things play out there after those events. What did you make of these results?

What does it say about China's influence? Like, give us the whole story. So there are a couple of, like, really interesting things about this. One, President Sai was not at all popular, like a year or two go. Interesting. Like, her approval rating was tanking. I mean, way, way under 50%. And so the uptick clearly seems to be tied to the protest in Hong Kong, right?

So that's the first point. Second point, China has an enormous disinformation effort in Taiwan. So they tried hard to affect the outcome of this election. And there were antibodies to that disinformation, like people in Taiwan were attuned to it. I think the most important thing here is there are only two places in the world today where people have a choice, essentially, about whether they want to opt into kind of Chinese Communist Party governance, right? Like if you're a Uyghur in Jingjiang province, like you don't have a choice.

That was taken away from you a long time ago, Tibetan people, the same thing. But Hong Kong has this one country, two systems model where they're part of China, but they're supposed to have some autonomy. And then Taiwan, you know, the Chinese government recognizes a one China policy. They see no distinction between Taiwan and mainland China. And frankly, the U.S. government has, you know, long recognized that, but kind of punted on how that's supposed to happen. So the Taiwanese people or the people of Hong Kong, theoretically, if this model of Chinese communism and authoritarianism was so attractive could easily just opt in tomorrow. And instead, we see them moving in a different direction.

And the reason I think that's so important is that at a time when everybody's talking about democratic backsliding and Chinese models ascended and the American model is collapsing, and I think we shouldn't just frame it as an American model. I think it should be universal in terms of human rights. what we see is in the two places where people have it, you know, have some choice. They are choosing that they want to have democracy. They want to have civil liberties. They want to have human rights.

And so there have been two elections. There was the election in Hong Kong in December and now the election in Taiwan. And both were like overwhelming results in favor of protecting their own civil liberties and their own agency here. And so I think that's about the future of Hong Kong and Taiwan. it's also about where people around the world stand on this question of do they want to live under these increasing kind of authoritarian, even totalitarian models, or do they still want to have their freedom and civil liberties?

Yeah, really good news. The backlash to the backlash. I like it. Yeah, I mean, there's a backlash to kind of the American-led order, right? The Iraq War, the financial crisis, you know, let's try on some different ways of governance here around the world, nationalism, authoritarianism. And now I think what you see is, again, not because of any of the United States is doing, you see people in these places saying, no, no, wait, we want to hit a pause button on this.

We want to figure out how we can protect our rights and liberties. Also a testament to the power of good old-fashioned protests, even when it leads to horrifying, violent responses from a government. I mean, just look at our civil rights. Yeah, and it's not for lack of trying on China's part to kind of wipe Taiwan off the map. So they've been on this offensive to try to get countries to sever any relations with Taiwan. But they take it to an extent. When I was in Hong Kong, someone was saying that they've noticed how the Chinese will bully like airlines into saying on their websites.

Like if you're flying to Taiwan, you have to say China. It's like Taiwan, right? But to show you how far China goes with it, Top Gun 2. Somebody in Hong Kong pointed out to me that in Top Gun 2, the Taiwanese flag is no longer. on the jacket of Tom Cruise, right? But in that, that's because, you know, the movie studio wants to make money in the Chinese market and the Chinese say, you got to erase Taiwan, literally. It just shows you how obsessive they are about trying to blur any distinction between the identity of someone from Taiwan and the rest of China. There's a longer conversation. We

should have some time about all the ways Hollywood is caves to the Chinese. But before we do that, let's talk about the trade war. So on Wednesday, the day this comes out, the Trump is supposed to meet with the Chinese Vice-Fremere, and they're going to sign a partial trade deal that will pause but not stop or in any way resolve the U.S.-China trade war. So they're calling it phase one. The so-called phase one deal says Trump is going to suspend some tariffs and reduce some others. But according to The Washington Post, an estimated two-thirds of all the stuff we buy from China

will still be tariffed, meaning it will still be taxed, meaning we all will pay more for it. In exchange, the Chinese have committed to bomb. I think $200 billion worth of American stuff. I think a lot of ag products. Again, like none of the core underlying problems are resolved. The Chinese government is still pumping tons of money into their businesses and propping them up. There's still concerns about intellectual property theft.

But Trump is going to sell this as a win or at least try. And, you know, unfortunately, I've seen some polling that suggests that a lot of people actually give him credit for trying. And it's actually equate fighting in action with success. So, Ben, I'm curious what you think about the interim deal that they're going to put forward this week. And how do you think Democrats should message our position on this fight knowing that, you know, voters actually like standing up to China, right? So it's an old talking point. Well, I think we've long expected this. And this is of a pattern

with Trump where he creates a crisis that makes things much, much worse. And then he stops the escalation of the crisis without solving any of the problems and declares the greatest victory in the world. And so that's what he did with North Korea. That's what we did with Iran. Like the situation has got objectively worse. And just when the escalation stopped, he said he got a big win. And that's what this is. Because we have to remember how much the trade war has made things worse. And it's had a huge impact on American farmers. So much so that the bailout that went to largely kind of corporate ag, but also, you know, in ways that hit farmers, he had to give a bailout that was twice as big as Obama's bailout of the auto.

industry, right? Just to kind of keep a lifeline to our ag sector, there are estimates that 300,000 American jobs were killed by this trade war. There are estimates that American consumers have had to pay roughly $100 billion annually because of these tariffs. So it's killing jobs, it's costing consumers, it's really hurt the ag sector, and now he's going to declare victory. This Chinese number, first of all, they throw out these huge numbers. We have no idea if they're actually going to buy that much stuff. He doesn't care. until November 2020. He just wants a number to sell.

A lot of this stuff is stuff that they would be buying anyway if there hadn't been a trade war in the first place. And so Trump is just going to go be touting a huge number that is not, most of it is not new. It's like they'd be buying this anyway if there weren't tariffs and they may not even reach that level. Then the other piece of this is so important is I do believe that we have to get tough with China. And I think Democrats shouldn't shy away from that. but all the core issues, the structural issues that would lead you to have a trade war of China, none of those are resolved. The trade war is not about whether China buys more soybeans.

It's about whether they steal intellectual property. It's about whether they juice their companies in unfair ways. You know, it's about whether they abide by any labor or environmental standards that American companies have to. Basically, it's about whether there's a level playing field. And Trump has done nothing to level the playing field. He's wreaked havoc so that he can then celebrate some agricultural purchases. We're probably going to happen anyway. And so I think Democrats have to say, like, look, yeah, we do need to get tough on China, but we have to do it in a smart way.

That means we do it with other countries, not all by ourselves. That way we do it without harming ourselves in the way that we impose these tariffs and risking damage to the global economy. It's, by the way, bringing in a whole range of issues like human rights that Trump doesn't prioritize so that we have a smart, coordinated, multilateral strategy for how to pressure China on these core issues about whether there's a level playing field, not about these kind of symbolic. quote unquote wins that are more about Trump you know salesmanship at home yeah agreed and you know uh kaira's all over in marketplace has done a really good job yeah he's in a show like they routinely profile businesses that they're just been like decimated by this trade war and like those are important stories that we should be listening to one because it's humane and and the decent thing to do but also surfacing as part of the response to trump on this and american manufacturing is at its

lowest point since the great recession wow so this is hurt manufacturing as well as the ag sector brutal. A couple more quick things. We're a story in the Times that I think we're going to be hearing about for a long while. So Burisma, everyone remembers Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company that had Hunter Biden on its board was hacked by the Russian military. According to a report in New York Times, this happened back in November. The same GRU hackers, that was just a military intelligence unit. The same GRU hackers that targeted Podesta, John Podesta and the DNC server used the same techniques to get access to Burisma and some of their subsidiary servers. Apparently, the Russians were also using spies in Ukraine, just like work sources and try to get similar information on the Biden's.

Basically, there is a very high probability that the Russian government or one of their carve-outs is going to start publishing things they think might be embarrassing to Hunter Biden or Joe Biden in the near future. They also, there's a good chance that they will put fake documents into that cash of things or fake news articles as part of that release and that the morally bankrupt right wing media will report on it. Trump will retweet it. A bunch of fucking mainstream reporters will decide that well now it's a story and we will rinse repeat the same bullshit from 2016. So that's something to look forward to. Yeah. I mean, first of all, you have to ask yourself, why is it that the Russian government is going to such lengths to help Donald Trump? I mean,

like you can't get away from the fact that they feel such a powerful motivation to help Donald Trump that they are breaking into Burisma and trying to dig up dirt on the Biden family, right? The other thing that really caught my attention on this story, Tommy, is that Chuck Schumer once again said that, like, you know, he learned about this from the New York Times. Like, this intelligence is in the U.S. government and not being shared with Democratic leaders in Congress. That is some chilling shit. I mean, because it basically means that, like, the Trump administration, I mean, look,

I've always wondered, we saw how Trump, you know, benefited from Russian help when he was not an incumbent and had clear, you know, clearly had some contacts between his campaign and the Russians, what, whatever you can call it, collusion, coordination, that was happening. But the power of incumbency, you know, you've now got a President of United States who has an intelligence community that reports to him that is uncovering efforts by Russia to help him win re-election, and he's not providing that information to Congress. man, just that's a dark scenario to contemplate. Yeah, that they may know through their own intelligence collection. The Trump people may know through their intelligence collection that there's going to be releases of Biden emails. So they may actually, you know, I'm not trying to be a conspiracy there's here, but like you don't need collusion if you're getting the reporting that, oh, great, they're into Burisma. And, oh, great, you know, they might be releasing some Biden info. And we just can sit back and wait and plan around that, right?

And we're not going to share that with Nancy Pelosi or Adam Schiff. The good news here is that Jared Kushner doesn't have to commute all the way to the Russian embassy to use their commsules anymore. You know, you can just go to the situation room and connect directly with Vladimir. Anyway, everyone feels as dark as we do because we're pissed. Okay. But the only antibody is to be aware of it. Yeah, exactly. That's right.

When you see it, you know, it's bullshit. And that's what we have to do. Don't retweet garbage fake news. So amazingly, the Iraq war continues to be a huge. huge point of contention in the Democratic primary. I guess it's not amazing at all. It was the most disastrous foreign policy decision in our lifetime. But it's interesting to us that, you know, Biden continues to get attacked by Bernie Sanders on this issue. The oppo is starting to fly. The opposition research is flying. Someone tried to excerpt some part of a speech from Bernie Sanders from

1998 where it seemed like he was supporting regime change in Iraq when in fact he was at when the fact he was actually criticizing the Clinton administration for launching missiles into that country. He did talk about how, you know, we need to support democratic forces within the country to rise up and topple Saddam Hussein. But, I mean, I think that's pretty different than waging a regime change war. So I guess, Ben, I mean, I'm curious, like, how salient do you think this issue still is at this point? And then, you know, is there anything bigger that we can learn not from, like, who is for

and against Iraq, but, like, philosophically? right? Because Biden's now characterizing as a rock war vote as giving Bush military force, the authorization of military force as a stick to help enable diplomacy. And I do think that leads to a conversation of whether that's a good way that could tuck diplomacy or not and how Bernie might be different. Yeah, I mean, I think this does matter. And I don't want to tread over the same ground we have in the past. I mean, obviously, I don't buy this argument that that was a vote for tough diplomacy. We didn't buy when Hillary Clinton, you know, used it against Barack Obama in 2008. I don't buy it today. That debate was about whether or not to authorize a war, even if you

would have preferred that the war not happened. If you take that vote, you gave Bush that authorization. I think the reason it matters in a bigger sense, first of all, if you take what Biden said at face value. If he actually did believe that you needed to give George Bush the authorization to wage war in order to have diplomacy, first of all, like, so does that hold? Like, do we have to authorize, you know, we want to have a nuclear deal with Iran, now that Trump has pulled out of this one, does Biden think we should authorize the use of military force against Iran as a part of that negotiation? Right. Like, take him at face, if you take it at face value, and by the way, I don't think Joe Biden thinks that. So that's why I wish you would just kind of get off this and say like the,

you know what, the vote was wrong, you know, I mean, even Hillary did last time she ran. The vote was wrong. And because it speaks to the bigger issue of like, have you, how have you internalized the lessons of Iraq? And this question of essentially, are you not credible, you know, unless you're willing to go to war, you know, and are Democrats kind of reflexively? defensive about the case that they can make for diplomacy. That to be credible as a candidate or a president, you have to be constantly putting forward your willingness to go to war. And I think that's wrong.

I think that Bernie represents a more wholesale rejection of that mindset. And what's disappointing but redeemable is I think Joe Biden has a great argument to make that he learned these lessons. Joe Biden opposed the Afghan surge. and that took a lot of guts in the Obama administration. He opposed the intervention in Libya, right? Which has created a lot of unintended consequences. And so I actually think Joe Biden has learned these lessons and can stand up and say,

I have experience and my experience has demonstrated to me that the lesson we had to take from Iraq is to really think twice before getting into war and to not be reflexively defensive about prioritizing diplomacy over war. And I think he's a good candidate to do that. I like Joe Biden's, you know, worldview as it comes to diplomacy and international cooperation. And so I think there's a hopefully out of this, there can be a more, you know, more of a consensus established. If something good can come out, that's beyond just one candidate's going some points. Maybe we can establish a new benchmark in the Democratic Party as we head into having a nominally.

that we want to end these wars and we don't want to get into them and we're willing to unabashedly support and promote diplomacy, that there may be extreme circumstances where military forces needed, but we're no longer in this post-9-11 period, right? Maybe that can come out and emerge from these debates after we get over the kind of painful relitigation of 2002. Yeah, and we've got to get past this post-9-11 period. But also, I mean, Bernie and Rokana had an op-ed, and I think CNN.com today that was about their effort to block offensive operations against Iran. And in the piece, they talked about how

both Vietnam and Iraq were bipartisan wars, right? I mean, in 1968, Vietnam, like, split the party in half. You know, LBJ was for it. We couldn't, the party was unable to nominate someone who would just come out against the war. And that history, it does help explain why activists are so angry about this issue and rightly so. And, you know, I don't know what it will take for us as a party to do a better job making the case because there's so many fallacies here, like supporting the troop means going to war or the sunk cost fallacy of like, well, we've sacrificed so much we can't give up now. I mean, that is just a recipe for a quagmine.

It's a recipe from going to 25,000 U.S. casualties in Vietnam to 50, you know, and that is something we just can't ever do again. And there'd be 50 in Iraq if the medical technology wasn't saving lives on the battlefield that weren't savable tragically in Vietnam. Right. Or MRAPs. It means that people have much more catastrophic wounds that they're living with from Iraq. I mean, I think that the thing that frustrates progressives, you know, there was this thing

when I kind of started working in think tanks and kind of left of center foreign policy in the early, you know, 2000s, you know, Vietnam syndrome was a phrase that was often used. And it was meant as a negative to say. say that people because of Vietnam were reluctant to use military force. And that was Vietnam syndrome. And that was a bad thing. And it's like, I want to have a fucking case of Vietnam syndrome. Like, please sign me up for Vietnam syndrome. And then under Obama, when we were reluctant to use force in certain cases, it was like, oh, there's an Iraq war syndrome. Please, like, can we please get an Iraq war syndrome as a country? Like, we have to learn these lessons. We've seen in

both Vietnam and Iraq, that you only have to make the mistake once of getting into the war, and you can be stuck there for 10, 20 years, you know, and thousands of Americans can die, but, you know, hundreds of thousands of people in these countries die. And so I think we have to get beyond this mindset that, like, if you are reflexively suspicious of war, you're somehow not like a serious person on foreign policy, which has been, like, the default too much in not just the Republican Party, but in parts of the Democratic foreign policy establishment too. And by the way, to also recognize that there's some voices to like the far left that I don't agree with about a lot of stuff, but they should be at the table.

You know, there's been this idea that if you're not, you're not serious. You're not serious. If you have certain views that are too far out to the left. No, we are a big tent party. And I think we should have everybody's views represent the table from the more conventional establishment types. But let's bring in some more activist voices and progressive voices in. to these debates. I think that's all that people want and that's what we should be open to as a party rather than saying there's a certain class of people who are willing people who are allowed to talk about national security and they're the people who don't have Vietnam syndrome. Yeah, yeah. This is a big conversation that we should continue to have. But last thing,

you are Pod Save the World's Royal correspondent, Royal Watcher. So Megan and Harry, are they really going to move to Canada? I kind of thought North America was code for L.A. Yeah, it looks that way. Well, yeah, I mean, they bought this. Walk me through it.

I don't have to pay any attention. Did you see the pictures of the house in Western Canada? No, is it nice? Have you guys seen the pictures of us? Oh, come on. Ben's gesturing to the team here. You guys don't have a me exit.

Fantastic producers. You're not, I have a exit, Google order anything. No, they have this kind of island home. Oh, that's cool. In Canada. And apparently, if the sourcing is correct, their dogs have moved to this property. Oh, cool.

As a sure sign that they're laying down some... And let me just say one thing, first of all, big win for Canada. Oh, huge. Like, you know, the Commonwealth, you know, junior partner to the UK, suddenly they've got, like, the highest star power royals in Canada.

That's a huge win. In the Commonwealth power rankings, like Canada kind of vaults up to the top. That's the best thing to happen to them since hockey. It's huge. It's huge. I think, you know, the other thing that's interesting to see here from a world

perspective, right? Is actually that if you're looking at the future of the world family, like the queen isn't doing a lot of travel, you know, she's deserved her, you know,

she's old as thought. Yeah, she's old. These are the, Harry was supposed to be the guy who was kind of travel around the world and be Mr. Commonwealth and be the kind of star power for the future of the world family.

That is a lot for that family to lose. It puts a lot on Will and Kate, you know. And it does, it actually does call on the question, where is this rural family going? If, like, a guy like Harry is saying, like, I don't really want to carry that water, you know. Is Megan going to act, do we think? That's what I thought that this was a Hollywood play. I mean, I literally know nothing. I mean, I assume so.

I'm going to go out and admit that I didn't watch, like, whatever that show was. Did you watch that? Suisse was great. Was it good? Okay. Don't, don't you dare talk shit about suits in this room. I did click on a BuzzFeed piece that compared Kate Middleton headlines to Megan Markle headlines about like nearly identical things and they were so profoundly different.

One was like Kate's secret against morning sickness is avocado and then Megan had one that was like Megan's beloved avocado leads to like, you know, third world communities being ravaged by corporations. It was just like wildly racist bullshit. Yeah. So I understand how much they must despise the press, especially given the history for Harry. Totally fair. Like if you're Harry and you're like this. the press hounded my mom to her death, and now they're hounding my wife. I mean, look, I think

as with the Iranian protest, one can have, multiple things can be true here, right? Like, I think it is clear that Harry has some legit- Did you say they're enriching themselves? Well, sorry. They have some legit reasons. An imminent threat of moving? This is like an Axirotian-esque pun. Sorry. But like, they have some legit reasons for opting out here, right? On the one end, On the other hand, like, the queen can legit be like, well, wait a second. Like, we're paying for all this stuff. Yeah. And it usually comes at the set of duties here.

And, like, they're going to have to work this through. But I have to say, like, Megxit on top of Brexit. I mean, you know, we may need to, I mean, the UK is going to have to figure out, like, how to write the ship here. What if they just, like, end up with a reality show and, like, true TV or something? Yeah, it'd be dark. And you're just watching NCAA tournament games and, like, reruns of the Markles. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, when we come back from this commercial break, we're going to talk to Jason Rezion about the ongoing protests in Iran.

On the line, we have Jason Rezion. He's a writer for the Washington Post Global Opinion section. He served as the Washington Post correspondent, bureau chief, rather, in Tehran from 2012-2016. He's a CNN contributor and the author of a fantastic book called Prisoner, which is the story of his 544 days. being unjustly imprisoned by the Iranian authorities. Jason, great to have you back on the show. So good to be here. Nice talking about you. Well, listen, man, I mean, there's no one we'd rather talk to because you might have noticed that a lot of people have been Googling Iran and Soleimani and now have very strong opinions. But you actually lived in Iran for a while. You've reported there. You've had up close and personal dealings with regime officials, much to your chagrin at times. So I'm really grateful for you doing this. The first question I think we wanted to ask is, you know, there was this horrific, tragic shootdown of this civilian airliner that killed 176 people.

Were you surprised that the Iranian officials eventually came clean about what happened and he took credit for, you know, owned the shootdown and didn't just blame the U.S.? And what do you make of the subsequent protests that we've seen over the last several days? I think them taking responsibility was curious to me at first, especially since they were so adamant in their denials for the first 36 hours or so. But I think ultimately in the world that we live in, especially when Iranian authorities understand as well as everybody else does that the U.S. and other countries have the technology to figure these things out, they had to come clean. And I think that the sooner they did it, the better it would be for them in the long run. Whether or not they anticipated the backlash in the form of the protest that they've been seeing over the past few days, I'm not so sure. And, you know, I think that it's a real indication of how fed up people are with official lies. And that's something that, you know, we talk about here in the U.S.

especially these days, but it's something that people in Iran have been living with for a very long time. And, you know, as as much as I'm not in favor of the Trump administration's Iran policies, I think that they've done more

than any other actor to sort of deepen the wounds within Iranian society because of sanctions and the effects that that's had, that's not to say that the Islamic Republic public has been a good actor all these years. And I think we can all sort of hold those two opposing

thoughts in our mind, you know, at one time be, you know, opposed to the idea of a theocracy running a country of really educated and deeply civilized people and at the same time be opposed to an U.S. administration that is fundamentally made the lives of people in that country much more difficult over the past few years. Jason is Ben and one of the, you know, fascinating things to watch as the last two or three weeks have played out is, you know, if you're an American, you're just kind of watching this on TV, you see after Soleimani's death, these massive crowds turn out around his, you know, funeral and burial. Sure, some of that was probably initiated by the IRGC, but, you know, some of it clearly was a response that was legitimate. and represented some outrage at his killing and pride and who he was from the Iranian perspective. And then, you know, just over a week later, we see massive protest of the Iranian government

to the Islamic Republic's government calls for the Supreme Leader to step down, which, you know, is very rare. And I think we forget that, you know, as the case in America, no country is a monolith. But how do you explain and how should we think about? those two reactions. You know, the people in the streets after Soleimani's killed, people in the streets protesting a corrupt and repressive government. Who is protesting? You know, we've had in the past, you know, the Green Movement, very middle class, then the protests in recent years more working class. Help us understand kind of the complexity and diversity in Iranian public opinion and how we've

seen that on display. I think at the moment, then, there is a general sense of dissatisfying. satisfaction, a malaise that's been brewing in Iranian society for the past several years. When you guys initiated the negotiations over the JCPOA, and ultimately in 2015, when that deal was signed and then implemented in 2016, there was this sense of hope that I hadn't experienced in Iran since the presidency of Muhammad Khatami. the reformer in the late 90s and early 2000s. And, you know, the hopes were much higher at that point because the idea was that we're kind of stepping over a hurdle with America.

And, you know, that sense was felt throughout the society, not just at the official levels, a lot of younger people believe that they would have economic, educational opportunities, and opportunities to really open their country up to. to a relationship with the rest of the world. And, you know, that sort of defies class. It defies religion or whether they consider themselves more conservative or more moderate in nature. But ultimately, I think where we're at right now is everybody's pissed off. Different groups are showing it in different ways.

But the question about Soleimani's funeral, that was whoever you were in Iran, wherever you fall on the question. of your support for the regime or the IRGC, that was a shocking thing to have happened. This is somebody who has had a cult of personality built around him, you know, not only in the Iranian state media, but in our media as well. And as you know, you know, he's not the only guy in the IRGC, not the only guy in the Quds Force.

But, you know, he was the face. And I think that there was a real reaction from people who want Iran's territorial, integrity to be respected. Even though this happened in the third country, I think it's been our policy for at least several decades not to actively try and

assassinate political or military leaders from other governments. Am I wrong about that? Yeah, we haven't done it since the 80s, yeah. That was something that we should have maybe thought about a little bit more. And I think for most Iranians, the reaction that we saw was one of, really, you think you can do that,

that feeling of the world is maybe a little less safe than we think it is, is something that I think all of us share right now. Yeah. I mean, so you're seeing some people who I think support the Soleimani strike arguing now that maybe the U.S. has more leverage and that this is some great opportunity for diplomacy with Iran. Maybe we can cut a new nuclear deal or come to some understanding because of our increased position.

You know, look, I personally, as a human being, it sometimes negotiates with other human beings. I worry that it's tough to start a dialogue with someone once you just killed their colleague or when you very recently didn't hold up your end of another bargain like we didn't do with the sanctions relief that should have been provided as part of the JCPOA. But I'm curious what you think about the prospect for negotiations or dealmaking in this post-Solomani strike political climate. I worry that we're coming on to a moment that a lot of the hawkish folks on Iran have been salivating for for a long time, which is that, you know, with every fresh escalation, the idea of negotiations to get out of it become harder and harder and harder.

That's not to say that I think that, you know, the Islamic Republic has a lot of legitimacy right now. I think that they're dealing with a huge credibility problem and the way that they've handled the aftermath of the killing of Soleimani resulting in at least a couple hundred deaths of innocent Iranians goes to show you the regard with which they consider their own citizens' lives. But ultimately, as somebody who wants to see stability, I think a stable Middle East would translate into stable other parts of the world as well. I think we have to have some kind of dialogue.

But you're right. I just don't see that we're doing anything to want to get to that point. So, you know, my concern is that we're moving towards a moment where there's no other option besides, you know, a fight to the death, whatever that looks like. Yeah, that wouldn't be great. I mean, one other, we talk about engagement with the government. And, and whether negotiations can happen. I think a separate question is, you know, a lot of Americans like to invoke the name of the Iranian people, you know, particularly hawks who seek to, you know, separate the Islamic Republic from the people. Although I'd say, like in the Obama administration, we at times tried to do that as well to speak directly to Iranian people.

You know, Obama taped no ruse messages and we set up a virtual embassy. We tried to find ways to communicate with the Iranians around the regime. regime. But if you were trying to, if you were the U.S. government, you were trying to develop a more effective and constructive relationship with the people of Iran, what steps do you think we could take? I mean, you know, Donald Trump is tweeting in Farsi. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that he didn't know Farsi. But what do you, what do you think, you know, if we had a different president, you know, if Trump, you know, frankly, it took better advice, like what, what What would be the steps you'd want to see an American government take to try to build a better

relationship with the people of Iran? I'm not sure Trump knows English, so I think you're right about the farcey thing. I think, you know, the obvious layup would be reversing the travel ban, which is really Iran ban more than anything else. Or better yet, you know, not doing that in the first place. I think those of us who care about Iran and have been watching this presidency closely, you know, that was really one of the first things. he announced he would do after he was elected in November 2016,

and it's one of the first things he did when he stepped into office. And I don't think that, you know, I hear all these Iranian-American, hawkish-Iranian Americans who are fully in support of this administration's policy of squeezing Iranians, saying things like, you know, that Iranians in Iran don't care about that. Well, that's really easy for you to say from, you know, Beverly Hills, you know, or, you know, Potomac Maryland.

It's easy for you to say that. It's less easy to look into the realities of the situation. I was doing an event with Brett McGirk at Stanford a few months ago and talking to somebody in the administration over there and they told me that in 2019, they didn't have a single Iranian enter the university. And in a normal year, Stanford would get several dozen to 100 graduates and undergraduate. people entering university from Iran, that's not happening right now. So we've kind of cut off cultural and educational ties with that country.

I think that's something that we need to build back up. I also think that there's ways to enable Iranian small businesses to flourish. But again, I mean, the goal here is not to enable Iranians and their democratic or capitalistic aspirations. to squeeze them so tightly that they rise up against their oppressive regime. And to me, that just, you know, has always felt wherever it is in the world, not particularly humane. And as somebody who comes from a mixed Iranian-American background, you feel it more acutely

when it's people that you know and love who are going through this. So when I hear from friends and relatives back in Iran who are unable to get certain types of medication to treat illnesses because they can't get those drugs inside of Iran or are blocked from traveling to other countries because of restrictions because of their passport. You know, it does not create the sense that America has their best interest in life. Yeah. Last question here, just sort of in the vein of, you know, Twitter foreign policy experts and humility. I mean, I think... By the way, I want to, you know, when you were going...

in the introduction, you read off a lot of nice things about me in terms of my experience in Iran. I would never call myself an Iran expert in anybody that does. I highly doubt. Well, that's kind of the question, right? I mean, like, you know, D.C. lawmakers don't always understand what people think and feel in Virginia in parts of Maryland, right, like let alone a foreign country. And then you think about a country like North Korea where we haven't had diplomatic access in decades or a country like Iran where I don't believe we've had a diplomat there since 1979. And I imagine we have relatively limited intelligence capabilities when it comes to understanding the broader sentiment of the Iranian people versus sort of burrowing into

leadership thinking and decision making through various types of collection. So I guess I'm just, I wonder how capable you think we are of correct. interpreting these kinds of movements we're seeing on the street in Iran right now, or maybe understanding how representative they are of the broader country. And if the answer is we are likely to not understand them, what that might mean in terms of like how you would formulate broader policy towards Iran. Yeah, I mean, I think anybody who's talking about what they're seeing with high levels of confidence should

I was looking for a nice way to say this but they should get into other kind of work because their prognostications somebody's guess will prove right and I think if you go back and look at our presence in Tehran in 1979 even a couple of weeks

before the embassy takeover our diplomats there did not see anything coming and here we are 40 years later and as you mentioned we haven't had a diplomat on the ground ever since. I think we're woefully underprepared to have these sorts of conversations and one argument that I make a lot of times when I'm talking to people about this or writing about it is that during the second Obama term and correct me if I'm wrong about this but you guys spent many many many hours

and days dealing with Iranians developing you know human intelligence with some of the highest most important officials in that regime. And all of that information, I'm sure, is housed somewhere. Yeah. And, you know, it seems to me that Secretary of State Pompeo and Brian Hook or over at the White House when John Bolton was there, you know, they went up to the highest levels of the building and just, you know, took a can of gasoline and a couple of matches and lit all of all of that paperwork on fire and are basically shooting in the dark.

That's the way that I see it. And I haven't experienced anything that would indicate that I'm wrong. I've been to several events that state has put on with Iranian Americans. And I'll just say that it has not felt that those gatherings were reflective of the wide array of opinions. how the U.S. should be dealing with Iran that exist in our community. Yeah, Jason, one point to just reinforce what you said. I remember when Dr. Salehi, the head of the Iranian nuclear program, joined the negotiations.

You know, I think it was in late 2014, early 2015. We assessed, you know, our analyst, so this guy's a hardliner. This is going to complicate negotiations. and then in fact actually he came in and was very pragmatic and sat down with Ernie Moniz, our Secretary of Energy, and frankly helped us kind of get to yes because he was a scientist trying to solve this, this formula. And that's one man that we were wrong about, you know? Like our assessment of this one dude was like totally off, you know, how we're going

to understand the entire country from D.C., you know, it's not to say you shouldn't try, But, you know, I do think these countries that we see as monoliths through our own prism, you know, we can often, you know, view them as we want to view them. So we think, oh, this guy runs a nuclear program. He must be a hardliner. Well, turned out he was, you know, I'm not some rosy moderate, but at least a pragmatist, you know. Well, and also, you know, with that particular example, you know, you had this shared experience that he and Ernie Mosulny's had of being MIT guys. that's right that's right and a lot of things to talk about there um i mean if you look at the the situation right now um uh tachter ravanchi the ambassador iran's ambassador of the u.n he's a graduate of the

university of kansas yeah right zareef's a graduate of the university of denver right exactly you would think that as as a as a joc he and mike pompeo might have something to talk about uh but you know, I am not saying that, you know, we should be necessarily making buddies with these people. But what I am saying is that through, and again, this is just my point of view, and it was fortified by everything that I saw that you guys did over a series of years. When you, you know, when you engage with adversaries, you understand them a lot better. If that does not equal appeasement, that does not equal green lighting of bad behavior, it just means you're going to understand the next steps better. And I just don't think we have that right now.

Yeah, agreed. Jason, thank you, as always, for joining the show. Everyone should buy and read Prisoner. It's just a fantastic book. And great talking to you, as always, man. Paperback coming out January 28. All right. Circle the calendar.

But buy the hardcover, you listeners. Thank you, Jason. Bye. Bye. That's all we got for Pots Save the World today. A Hardy Show. Yes. And Megxit.

That's a new term for me. Megxit. That's great. Yeah. We'll stay on top of Megxit here. Don't worry again. Worldos. We'll have updates.

You should check in with Harry. I know he's your buddy. You know, I've spent time with Harry a couple times and he's a really good dude. And like really down-to-earth guy, like, you know, would not think he was putting on the airs of like a prince, which he is. Really interested in, like, helping support young people around the world and civil society and environmental causes. I mean, I think that Harry was like, like, My impression was, like, legit, good dude and good person.

Michelle Balkin, who's just one of the worst people in the world. If you don't know, she has, don't look it up. Posted some dumb fucking tweet where it was, like, six photos. And it was, like, three of Harry and Cammo, and then three of him, like, behind Megan and street clothes, being, like, something about the emasculation of the male in six photos. And it was like, or maybe at one point he was in the active dude, military in war fatigues.

Yeah. And now he doesn't. You fucking moron? The dude was in Afghanistan. I don't think Michelle Malkin has been in a combat unit in Afghanistan. Anyway, show's over. Thanks for tuning in. 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 Malkonian, and Milo Kim, who film and share these interviews on video each week.