Pod Save the World - Kim Jong Un and Putin’s Budding Bromance

Episode Date: September 6, 2023

Ben and guest host Max Fisher talk about the latest headlines on the Russia/Ukraine war, including Putin’s refusal to sign a new grain deal with Turkey’s Erdogan, a rumored visit by Kim Jong Un, more drones in Russian airspace, and a rise in pro-Russian disinformation in Europe. They also discuss the rise in military coups in Africa, the G20 in India, including calls for India to change its name, tensions with China, Biden’s potential meeting with MBS, and upcoming trip to Vietnam. Then, they dig into China’s economic slowdown. Finally, Ben is joined by Janti Soeripto, President and CEO of Save the Children, to discuss the organization’s work in Ukraine and how children in the country are gearing up to go back to school despite the conflict. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Open to Pod Save the World. I'm Max Fisher, sitting in for Tommy. I'm Ben Rhodes, sitting in my normal seat. So, Ben, listeners might not know this, but you are a lifelong adherent of Burning Man. And it was a last ditch after a helicopter you out in time for the recording. Can you talk about the rescue mission at all? I've actually never been to Burning Man, but I've heard so much and been lobbied so hard to attend Burning Man. And it's never really jumped to the top of my list. It just the allure of the desert in heavy psychedelic drugs in the wilderness and elaborate camp setups, you know, pulled a little bit.

But I'm now not regretting my choice to avoid Burning Man. This year is not selling you on wanting to go try it out. It's also one of those funny things, Max, you'll get this as a media elite former Vox, New York Times guy. Like, I feel like this is getting a lot of coverage because everybody in the circle of people that write for these publications has either been. been to Burning Man or knows people who have. And so it's what should be kind of a rather obscure niche story is now like national news for multi-days as if it's like the Maui wildfires or something when in fact it's just like a bunch of people like stuck in the desert.

Yeah, I think people would be surprised how many famous media elite figures go to Burning Man. Yes, they do. I would never one of them. Yes, yeah, they certainly do. So this week, huge week, we are going to talk about why military coups are suddenly way more frequent in Africa and whether there's some French, Russian, like, geopolitical competition playing a role there. We're going to talk about Biden planning some big and maybe risky moves around the upcoming G20 summit, India. I'm really excited to get into China's spiraling economic crisis, whether

you know, this is the big one, maybe the most important story of like this year or decade. And we'll also have the latest turns in Russia and Ukraine. But who did you talk to this week? So I talked to Yanti Saripto, who's been on before. She's the head of Save the Children, a wonderful international organization. Yanti was in Ukraine when I spoke to her. So she offers a kind of on the ground perspective of what it's like for the Ukrainian people, particularly Ukrainian children. We talked a bit about what is the role of an NGO like Save the Children?

How does it fit into the broader ecosystem of governments trying to provide support in Ukraine? What are the humanitarian needs? How do you prioritize assistance when there's so many needs? But I think most powerfully, and the reason I hope people stick around listening to the interview, like she gives some very potent vignettes of what it's like in Ukraine right now, what it's like for children going back to school, you know, as a parent, you know, hearing the contrast to, you know, bombed out schools and the rush to create any sense of normalcy for Ukrainian children as against, you know, our experience.

here of Instagramming our children going with the grades. You know, it just put it, I think every now and then we talk, and we'll talk a lot about the war today, but we sometimes take the camera off the people that are in the middle of it. And so that's what hopefully this interview provides. Yeah. And I know language education for Ukrainian kids in Russian occupied areas has been a huge issue in just one of many ways that kids are being treated as a front line in this conflict. They are.

And even on the Ukrainian side, and you can see why, one of the things I didn't realize, is that a lot of the Ukrainian refugee children, they're trying to figure out ways to allow them to zoom back into their Ukrainian school so that they don't lose their Ukrainian identity, you know, integrating into European schools. So there's a, you know, the future of Ukrainian identity is very much for better and worse and often for horrific ends playing out among Ukrainian children. Interesting. Okay, well, let's hit the headlines from Russian Ukraine this week.

A lot of headlines. Oh, yeah. Big week, yeah. Putin has spurned the big diplomatic push to revive what is known as the Black Sea grain deal as a refresher. Russian Ukraine two of the world's top grain exporters. They reached a deal early in the war last year that allowed both of them to continue exporting. Putin backed out in July and has even been attacking Ukrainian grain and shipping facilities. Turkish president, Recep Erdogan, who helped broker the original deal, met with Putin to try to get him back on. but Putin said, no, unless the West meets all sorts of new demands. Ben, this sure looks to me like Putin taking the world's food supply hostage, but what do you make of it?

No, I think that's right. And a lot of people thought that he might, you know, in a desire to have improved relations with Erdogan, try to come up with some even a half measure here. But the reality is he clearly didn't feel that much pressure to do so. And it didn't feel like Erdogan was probably. him that hard either. I mean, we don't know what happened behind closed doors. Putin is on this kind of diplomatic offensive to show, I think, that he's not totally isolated, you know, zooming into the BRIC summit, having this meeting with Erdogan in Sochi, which is kind of one Putin's, you know, basis of operations, recently hosted an African summit. We'll talk about Kim Jong-un in a second. So, you know, I think Putin's purpose in that meeting was not to reach any resolution, but just to show, you know, I can meet with the NATO leader like Erdogan. And Erdogan, by the way, is not going along with Samoan.

in the same way that other European countries are. And so for the foreseeable future, I think global food prices, global food supply, continue to be at the mercy of Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine. Yeah, that's a great point. It resolves a mystery for me, which I was like with the Russian economy doing as poorly as it is, I was really surprised that he would sacrifice any major export. But I think that you're right that he needs this sense of like being legitimate on the world stage. Yeah, that seems to be as usual, much more important to him than.

than human conditions in other places, unfortunately. And Erdogan, you know, I think Erdogan, after kind of a pivot to the West and allowing Sweden to enter NATO and doing a number of things that the US had asked, you know, he likes to tack back and forth. And that's what he just did. Right. So you mentioned this as part of the big Putin global diplomatic push.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-moon might be planning to visit, according to American officials, the nearby Russian city of Vladivostok to meet with Putin and discuss selling him North Korean artillery shells and ammunition in exchange for Russian help with advanced systems like satellites and submarines. Meanwhile, in the sector of the Russian government making friends, Cuba's foreign ministry put out a statement saying some of its citizens living in Russia and even some of them living in Cuba are being coerced into joining the Russian military to fight on Ukraine. So really looks like another big success for Putin that he's now leaning on two of the world's smallest, poorest countries for

helping his war. Well, I think the North Korean one to me is a fairly big event, assuming this happens, for a couple reasons in both directions. The first is that the Russians could get something quite tangible out of this. Like North Korea, because the war that has been envisioned for the last several decades on the Korean Peninsula, would involve a lot of artillery, a lot of small arms, you know, a lot of munitions. North Korea really could be a consequential supplier to Russia. They have huge stock. So there's something pretty tangible that he could get out of this. But I think even more, Kim Jong-un can get something out of this significantly. You know, Russia has always been kind of North Korea curious or North Korea adjacent.

They obviously have a legacy of relationships stating back to the Soviet days. But the big butt, you know, Russia, even under Putin, has always kind of managed to walk this line where on some things they kind of played ball as a stakeholder in the international system. And so they actually kind of did half go along with some of the sanctions on North Korea. They went through the UN Security Council. Was it four-party talks where there's the big North Korea talks? Yeah, they went through the, well, there's six-party talks. So many parties.

Yeah, so many parties. They were part of diplomatic efforts. They kind of, they didn't take the U.S. position exactly, but they did try to, I think, be somewhat of a restraining force on the kind of weirder aspects of Kim Jong-un. Sure. And if he's now saying, you know what, like, we're going to start giving them advanced technology for their submarine and missile programs, that is potentially like a, we don't know exactly what they'd share. It's potentially like a pretty substantial escalation in terms of Russian support for North Korea. North Korea has already consolidated their nuclear missile programs, already, you know, approaching what people once a thought would be, you know, an unacceptable outcome of being able to hit the United States with a nuclear-tipped ICBM. And obviously, you know, there's a Tinderbox there in Northeast Asia with Taiwan and North Korea, with U.S. allies, Japan, South Korea. And Max, we're going to do World War Watch, which we haven't done on this podcast in a little bit. But this is yet another one of those places where when there's one big war, as there's in Ukraine, like stuff starts to happen on other fault lines.

Insecurity is contagious. Yeah, he's consolidated this access of like Russians. I'm not going to call it nexus of anything. I'm just saying that there's pretty intense coordination between China, Russia, North Korea, Iran. You know, whether that leads to escalating tensions in the Korean Peninsula and Northeast Asia, I think it very well might. So this is not just kind of a weird, you know, pageantry of, you know, Kim Jong-un taking the railroad cars to Vladivostok for a photo op. I think there's real substance here that could be quite alarming. That's a good point.

And I, in favor of taking this very seriously in years of writing about North Korea's missile and nuclear developments, something that I was always really struggling to get people to accept is that we think of this as a like joke weird backwards country. But they're a really formidable military power. And it, you know, has come at the expense of their people and it's still an enormously impoverished country. but their systems are pretty sophisticated for even a much larger and wealthier country. So I think you're right that their military participation is significant. And you've covered this too. Like, you know, a lot of their technology, they've stolen or they've kind of got on some illicit market. Sure.

Via Pakistan or, you know, a lot of it's indigenous. Significant high-quality technology transfer from China and Russia, you know, I think those countries have been pretty restrained. And if Russia opens up that aperture, they obviously have a lot of know-how that could help elevate the North Korean program. So it bears watching. Yeah. And the potential for a North Korean nuclear submarine or missile-armed submarine is serious. Yeah. It's like we have Ocus, the nuclear sub-programmed with the United States, UK and Australia.

Now we may be dealing with, I don't know what the acronym won't be. Runk. Yeah, Runk. Exactly. Yeah, there you do. Okay. So there's been a new wave of Ukrainian drone strikes within Russia, including. including in Moscow. The attacks tend to be pretty small. Some analysts think that a lot or maybe

even most of them get shot down, but they're getting noticed. Over the weekend, Russian state TV aired, I was surprised by this, a guest expert decrying that Russia had moved so many of its air defense systems to the front line of Ukraine that it was struggling to defend its cities. Ben, what do you make as the kind of goal of these drone attacks that Ukraine is launching and do you think they are working? I think the goal is to make, Russians feel like the war is coming home to them that that to try to elevate the political cost on Putin by creating insecurity in places like Moscow. I think the goal, frankly, is also in talking to Ukrainians myself, like it's a morale boost. Yeah. It's a little uncomfortable of the center

of civilian targeting, although they've been generally focused on military targets. But I think, you know, there's a desire to hit the Russians in the same way that we've been hit. And it's a way to kind of boost morale. I also just think that as the war grinds on and there's a slow moving front line and there's huge casualties, that there's going to be more efforts to have kind of asymmetrical attacks, probably in both directions. And we've seen the Russians do this on all manner of Ukrainian targets, but the Ukrainians clearly want to blow up the bridge that connects Crimea to Russia. They clearly want to strike Russian military targets deeper into Russia. They may undertake other efforts that sabotage. We've seen plenty of reports about the Ukrainians being responsible for

potentially an assassination of a Russian ideologue or a blowing up of Nord Stream 2 pipeline. So I think this is, you know, this is going to be probably an increasing factor in the war. I'm really glad that you raise the psychological boost for Ukrainians, which I think people are hesitant to mention. We kind of take for granted that like, of course, the Ukrainians will want to fight under Zelensky forever. But, you know, this war is getting really costly and he needs to do things to keep people enthusiastic and on the front lines. I will say that I agree that I think an intended goal is to undermine support for Putin, or at least to make him fear that he could potentially lose support. But I don't think it's going to be effective at that.

I just think that Russian citizens have been through a lot worse than the last 20 years. And when we've seen, you know, terrorist attacks within Russia, it tends to lead to a big rallying of support for. Putin and for, you know, Putin's particular methods. And a lot of Russians still think this war is defensive. I think you're right. I mean, that's a risk for the Ukrainians is that it fosters that. The only other thing I'd say about this max, it's interesting is that this war on the, has been both a throwback and a war of the future.

The throwback is this front line with all this artillery and trenches. And yet this is the first kind of major, you know, certainly in Europe, conventional war that has this drone element that is, you know, hugely impactful. It's both a tool that's being used to cross the front line. These kamikaze drones that the Russians have used against Ukrainian targets. And now you see this. So the war is weirdly bridging the past and the future of warfare. Yeah, that's a good point.

Speaking of the future of warfare in Ukraine and Russia, the European Union issued a big report on Russian online disinformation, which it says is growing in real. and scope in Europe and it lays a lot of the blame on American social media companies, which the report says have failed to police what the industry calls coordinated in authentic behavior. It says Kremlin-backed campaigns still have the biggest reach on Facebook-owned platforms, which has been true for years, but that Moscow's activity is growing on Telegram, TikTok, YouTube,

and especially on Twitter, which the report spends a lot of time hitting because Elon Musk has fired or dismantled most of the teams responsible for squashing government influence campaigns. There have been a lot of suspicions for a while about Elon Musk and Russia. Do you see this as playing into that in any way? I do. And look, I don't know what Elon Musk's motivation is. It's hard to, you know, when someone's a megalomaniac, it's hard to kind of. And on that much, I mean.

Yeah, exactly. It's hard to kind of get inside that brain. What is clear, though, is that there has, look, as a Twitter, user, an ex-user, whatever it's called, much less of a user than I used to be. And I love the word user because it does attribute it as a drug. But I've noticed a lot more Russian-adjacent narratives in my feed. I imagine what it's like if you're sitting in Germany and you're kind of curious about that. And so I do think that there has clearly been, as Twitter has kind of opened up the aperture

under Elon, this stuff is traveling farther and wider. an impact. We've been talking a lot recently about public opinion eroding and kind of Russian narratives taking hold and this stuff really matters. And this is a platform that is even in its degraded state, a kind of first portal for news for a lot of people, including a lot of elites. So I think this matters. Yeah, I agree. And I think that we have seen pretty much across the board on social platforms, not just Twitter, a big rise in misinformation, disinformation, extremist campaigns. And this is like, it's a pattern that we've seen over and over where the further we are from an American election, the less stringent the rules are on the platforms where they just, they tighten it up before an election so that they don't get too much heat and they loosen them as soon as the elections off. And I have to suspect that this report, and looking especially the way it's written, is written really with a mind towards bolstering EU regulations against the social media companies, which they've been on the warpath for years and they've been tightening a lot of them.

So to me, I think this is laying the groundwork for getting even stricter on the companies. Well, that, yeah, that would be the big, you know, play to make from a policy perspective to deal with this. I will say from a societal and political perspective, what's interesting to me is how much this kind of Russian narratives and misinformation has kind of completely merged, like as if it's two entities with the kind of American right-wing free speech. conspiracy theory world. That's kind of become one ecosystem, you know, from like Elon and the Joe Rogans of the world to Putin. And that's interesting. You know, like I'll just leave it that.

I mean, I don't think it's because those guys are signing up to Russian agents. Sure. Maybe Tucker Carlson to some extent. But like, they are, they're swimming in the exact same stew, you know. Well, this is something that social media does. I mean, the way that it drives people together. Right. And it uses its algorithms to like blur these communities again. I mean, that was how we got QAnon.

Yeah. Was there all of these weird niche extremist communities that the like Facebook algorithm figured out that it could route people through? But that's a good point that the kind of pro-Russian like anti-liberal establishment thing is really getting wrapped into a lot of this. Yeah, which again is globalizing the born Ukraine in a strange way. Right. Okay. Let's talk about the big rising trend of military coups in Africa. coups are actually pretty rare in Africa from 2000 to 2020,

and they had been declining for quite a while before that. But then suddenly in 2021, there were four just in one year, which is a lot. Then two more in 2022, both in Burkina Faso, plus three failed attempted coups. And this year, so far, there have been two, the first in Niger, which you and Tommy, of course, have talked a lot about. And now last week in Gabon. And a lot of these places in the same geographic neighborhood, in parts of West Africa in a region called the Sahel.

So it's not an Africa-wide problem. Some people have emphasized that a lot of these are former French colonies and also that Russian influence operations conducted by the Wagner Group are present in a bunch of them. Ben, what do you make of this trend? Do you have a kind of theory for why now, what might be driving this? I mean, an important thing I would note is, like, you know, I remember, you know, being in government,

And even at during a, you know, the Obama years coincided with like, like the, the, the period of democratic backsliding, which is obviously accelerated dramatically. And, but even, you know, the democratic backsliding we confronted in a kind of like Africa was usually of the variety of like a leader amending the Constitution try to stick around. Electoral populism. Yeah, Paul Kagami. So not like a military coup. Right.

And it was still, you know, it's still, there were these kind of antibodies. against things like coups or just kind of outright, you know, stealing of elections where, you know, if you did, there were cases where we did the play that they tried in Niger, for instance, where like the regional organization, ECOWAS condemns it, the U.S. sanctioned some people, everybody puts out statements, and then somebody backs down. And that actually happened in places like Cote d'Ivoire and to some extent, Senegal. And part of what I think has just been the speed. Once you break the taboo, you know, once a one or two, once this happened in Mali and Burkina Faso,

and it's like the playbook book was ran, right? Like they did the coups. They were condemned, you know, echoas put out statements and nothing happened. Right. I think that then everybody who's thinking about doing this is like, well, wait a second, like, I can go for it. So I do think that part of what accounts for the rapid nature in succession is that the guardrails have just broken.

The dam is broken. The water is flowing everywhere. the coup waters are rising. I think underneath that, why this region now, I mean, I just think that the, you know, longstanding poor governance, longstanding frustrations at these relationships with the French, but also the United States are overly securitized, longstanding presence of, you know, extremist jihadist groups that have kind of worn down security forces. And yes, like the Wagner influence operations and the Russian influence, it's not like enormous. But in these countries where the governance is so brittle, like in a, you know, in a Niger or Burkina Faso,

it doesn't take a lot. Like a really effective influence operation targeted around elites, coupled with like a little bit of, you know, people whispering in your ear. That can make a difference. You're talking about a few hundred people determining whether a coup works or not. So you don't need to kind of mobilize the whole country. Yeah. I think that's right.

And I think that the, to the extent, the Russian influence operas. are playing a role, I think it tends to be pushing on an open door. Yeah. I'm a little skeptical of the arguments that this is a backlash to, you know, Macron's kind of growing effort to build influence there. And I think you're absolutely right that, I mean, coups are normative. Everybody who I've ever talked to who studies coup says that it's all about norms, not just because it's like, do people in their heart respect the ideas of democracy,

but because coups are a coordination problem. Any country with a military can theoretically pull off a coup and whether or not, it happens turns on whether the people who would theoretically leave a coup believe they can get the other people in military to organize, believe they can get the rest of the government and, you know, key allies to go along and then believe they will be accepted once they're in power. And that is why the people who studies always say is that there is a real contagion effect in coup. And we saw two right before this trend, one in Sudan in 2019 and one in Mali in 2020, both for kind of reasons very particular to those two countries, but they were both successful. And I really

think that that more than anything else, more than an international factor, is what set this like, you know, whatever random jackass colonel in whatever country thinking like, I can do this, I can pull this off and I'll be accepted if I do it, which also makes it hard to unwind because when you've got so many like this going, it makes it so much more tempting for other coup leaders, especially in the targeted countries is why you so often see these cycles of coups and counter-coups. Yeah, I think that's right.

And on the French thing, I think you're right, too, that they don't, you know, people are not sitting in all these countries thinking, like, you know, I reject Emmanuel Macron's speech that he gave about this. I think where the resentment builds is like the long-standing resentment of colonialism,

but also like there have been these pretty high-profile French interventions in places like Molly that, you know, the classic Western mistake and the U.S. makes the same mistake in these same countries, You know, we see a threat of, you know, Al-Qaeda in the Sahel or ISIS in the Sahel. And so we surge a bunch of resources down there.

And sure, do the populations in those countries not like violent extremism? Sure, they don't. But that's actually not the kind of core problem of the complete breakdown in governance. And so I think the frustration is more even among the militaries, right? Because it's the military in the coups. Like, we keep being dragged out to fight these jihadists in the desert. when, you know, like our people are getting more and more pissed about other stuff. Sure.

And it's pretty easy for a coup leader to demagogue that. Right. So here we are. Well, in this question of French involvement is a live one right now because Gabon, which just had the coup, France has 1,500 troops there, which is not, you know, a full invasion course. But a country that small, it's enough to, like, bring back a democratic leader or not, or if, you know, if someone is trying to come back to help nudge them. And they're facing this question of, do they withdraw as the new coup? leader has demanded they do, or do they stay, which, you know, looks kind of neo-imperial and neo-colonial.

Yeah. And I know that Mali is really hanging over this because on the one hand, they had a number of interventions in Mali and like, look at how it's doing now, not so good. But on the other hand, I know there are people who take the position that, well, the French left at some point. And once you lost that kind of stabilizing outside force, it was much easier for the Mali military to stage a coup. So I don't envy the, you know, the, you know, you know, the, you know, you know, you

dilemma they're facing, which seems like a real lose-lose. Yeah. I mean, I think they're just going to have to kind of reboot their entire Africa policy because this is, you know, it's broken completely. Right. Okay. Well, speaking of military coups, the military junta that had ruled Thailand. Yes. Directly or indirectly since 2014, finally handed over power to an elected civilian government a couple of weeks ago. Democracy is back in Thailand, but with a big asterisk. As you and I have talked about in the elections back in May, the first place winner was this new progressive party called Move Forward, led by a young energetic guy named Pita Limja Ronrat.

This is a really big deal because usually Thai voters polarize between these two traditionally dominant parties, and instead they'd gone for this progressive outsider who ran on restoring liberal democracy to what has traditionally been a very democratic country. But I guess he was seen as too big of a threat to the Thai political establishment, which is dominated by the military and especially by the monarchy, and which, barred him from taking power. And instead, after months of negotiations a couple weeks ago, Thailand swore in a prime minister from the party that came in second in elections.

And it's ironic because that party that is now in power called Futai has also traditionally challenged the country's pro-military, pro-monarchy establishment. And that just led to like crisis after crisis. But I guess they were seen as less of a threat than our guy Pita. So, Ben, is this like two steps forward, one step backward for Thai democracy or the other way around? I think it's two steps back. I mean, there's a lot going on here. I mean, first of all, just to pick up on the coup contagion, I've always thought, you know, that an underappreciated aspect of the brutal coup in Myanmar that took place in 2021 is that essentially, you know, Thailand is a U.S. treaty ally.

Like, people always forget that. This is like a U.S. ally. And they have a massive border with Myanmar. And frankly, they've traditionally kind of been, you know, supportive in some ways of our Myanmar policy. And they've hosted a lot of refugees, including, you know, political exiles from Myanmar, Burma. And I think once the military, you know, regime kind of consolidated in Thailand and, you know, in the past they'd done coups and then had elections and handed it back. This time they didn't really do that. I do think that that informed the decision-making of the Myanmar junta.

And actually, you even see today that efforts to kind of isolate the military regime in Myanmar through the Southeast Asian Organization ASEAN, the ties are actually on the wrong side of that, which is the opposite side of where they would have been a decade ago. So this matters and matters across Southeast Asia. Thaksin, who's kind of the leader, the kind of, I think, billionaire leader of this populist party. The one that just take power in his future. Yeah. He had been prime minister.

He'd been ousted. Then his sister was prime minister in the Obama years. Then she was ousted. And so he'd been seen as kind of the populist challenger to the military. And when he goes back and, you know, after a long period of exile goes back, he cut this deal. Right. Where essentially the royalist military establishment allowed him to not be imprisoned and come back. allowed his party to come in in exchange for him essentially, you know, selling his soul,

you know, and throwing this move forward party into the bus. I think that's a big step back because it kind of grinds people down that like, oh, there's something kind of immovable about the entrenched elites. Even a guy like Thaksin who's been an opponent of this establishment is now in Kahutsu, that it kind of has a demoralizing impact. My hope is, though, that over time, more and more people, just rally to move forward and the pressure builds once again. Right.

And I think that's probably what will happen. It's going to be a long road. I mean, there's this kind of core tension in not just tie democracy, but like arguably all democracies where they exist as this kind of unspoken pact among the ruling elites and institutions to set the bounds of who can participate and who can't participate. Yeah. Like in the U.S.

traditionally, this was the party system and the party nominating system. In Europe, they call it the court and sanitaire. And it like people hate it when they see. that and they hate it when they see someone who is genuinely popular, whether they're like Argypita, who is a real progressive champion for democracy or in Europe, if it's extremists, getting left out of the system. And I think that there was a way for the Thai pro-monarchy military establishment to navigate this crisis in a way that would have, you know, ease their concerns about PETA's opposition to the monarchy, but preserved some of the legitimacy of the Democratic

order and I think I think they just screwed it up because I think they're just like you know they were it was under quasi military rule for nine years so they kind of forgot how to do it they were a lot savvier in the past there's a new king who I can say this because we don't have an office in Thailand yeah is not very good he's not doing a good job and the old king was like I don't like that it was this like weird quasi monarchy quasi democracy but he was a lot savier about navigating this in a way that kept the system stable and I think that as long as this new guy is in power as the king, who is like, doesn't seem that interested, seems really disengaged, is maybe being used a little bit as a puppet by kind of pro-monarchy elites. I think we're going to see recurring cycles of instability in this really important country that has been this kind of beacon of democracy in the region for a long time. I couldn't agree more. Like in this, the old king was, you know, there's some eccentricity around the Thai monarchy, but he was really a revered figure of national unity.

Sure. And so the deal that there's this kind of, you know, Wizard of Oz behind the credit. Right, right, right, right. And the military accepts in every now and then. Not exactly the deal I'd construct, but there was something, you know, there's something that people had kind of bought into there. Now, a couple of things have happened. One, this military government that's been around for almost a decade has been terrible

governing. They're clearly, like, hugely corrupt. They're not very efficient. They're not very technocratic. They're not really responsive to public opinion. The New King is this crazy. you know, Playboy, who spent most of his life in Europe, who once appointed his dog to be like a general in the Air Force, I think, of Thailand.

It sounds like a crooked media guy, obviously. And these is like multi-billionaires and money all over the place, you know. And so I think that where does that lead? It leads to the fact that, like, Thailand is like a pretty open society, pretty well-connected to the world, very young. Like, this place could blow at some point. I mean, I've heard this for years and I don't know what exactly that looks like. But we've seen kind of Occupy movements there.

We've seen occasional street violence. Like this is not this idea of just like, you know, keeping this sclerotic, corrupt, monarchical establishment stealing from the people. I think at some point it's just not going to be sustainable. Yeah. I'm not quite there, I think, yet just because. Yeah, it's long time. I'm taking long term. Okay.

Yeah. Well, I mean, and we also like saw the Thai voters really come out for democracy and really push for it. And we've seen them protest over and over again. There's a really strong middle class with strong democratic values. So I'm rooting for Thailand. I'm rooting for Thailand. Let's talk G20. So the summit comprising the world's 20 biggest economies is meeting in India this coming weekend.

Already just a drama fest. Xi Jinping is not going. This is the only time he has missed the G20 in 10 years. And he's sending his deputy Lee Chang instead. Ben, is this about snubbing Modi, do you think? I think, yes. I don't know that that's like, you know, Xi Jinping just went to South Africa for this Brick Summit, right? Right.

So, you know, that sends a message. I'll show up at the Brick Summit in South Africa, but I'm not going to go in a much shorter trip to what is a very big deal for the Indians. They see this as, you know, them taking a role in the world stage and one of, if not the most high-profile organization in the world these days, the G20. they just had this meeting where we talked about last week, they tried to signal some progress in resolving their territorial disputes in the north. And then right after that meeting, the Chinese decided to release their annual map of China that includes literally a chunk of India.

And look, they do that all the time and people get pissed, but the timing was pretty conspicuous. It's like we just met, and you're just about to host this G20, and we're going to release this map. Now, I think that Xi Jinping seems to not like to travel that much anymore. there's kind of an empire emperor quality. People come to Beijing. You come to him.

But he's slotting Modi and the people that he won't go see and that have to come see him, you know, or have to see him in third countries. And that he knows, you know, even if it's that he's kind of tired and jet lagged, well, he knows it is going to be received as a snub by Modi. So I think it is a signal that she is not all in on any kind of rapprochement between him and Modi. Yeah, I agree. The only thing that is like tickling my radar in this a little bit is the fact that, they haven't leaned too much. The Chinese have not leaned too much into messaging on it. So if they're going to make a point, like they're not making the point that much. And that, you know, as we're going to talk about, like huge economic problems in China, they're just these reports that are coming out that, you know,

take it with a grain of salt, but that at the annual meeting a couple of months ago of former Chinese leaders, they have this annual retreat they go to, their rumors coming out that she got really chastised by the other former leaders because they don't like the direction that he's taking the country. There's been kind of turmoil in the top ranks of the military. And I think China's like about to collapse or in crisis, but it's possible that part of the calculation was just he's got some problems at home. What's really interesting to me about that, though, is I think the high watermark of the G20, and I'm not just saying this because it was in the Obama years, but I think it's because of the nature of the times was in the aftermath of the financial crisis. And in 2009, 2010, 2011, the G20 was the venue where people basically tried to kind of breathe life and did. breed life back into the global economy. And what did that mean? It meant like the Chinese

coordinating with us, the steps that they were taking to stimulate demand in their economy, you know, how are we going to kind of cobble together the resources to keep the Eurozone afloat? And so Chinese and American and other economic problems were dealt with jointly. And it's kind of interesting to me that at a time of Chinese economic crisis, rather than trying to figure out some, you know, sit around the table where you're supposed to work with other countries to prevent contagion and things like that, he's doing the opposite. It's a sign of the times that the international cooperation is not in vogue in the same way that it once was. It's a great point, and it's not something that I had ever thought of as one of the many risks that's come with this

era of great power competition that on economic matters, you really need heavy international cooperation and not clear we're going to be able to. And that used to be set apart from other geopolitical tensions. You could be fighting out one thing, but you all had an interest in not seeing the global economy tank, but it feels like now the nationalism is such a fever pitch and the rivalry, Great Power rivalry is such a fever pitch, that they're not likely to use the G20 in that way. And so much conflict is economic now, especially among U.S. Russia and China. Yes. So Modi has his own little power play going on at G20. Some official or semi-official G20 invitations refer to him as the prime minister of Barat rather than

the prime minister of India. This is seen as a nod to hardline. Hindu nationalist within Modi's party, the BJP, who have been agitating to officially change the country's name from India to Barat, which is a Sanskrit word, comes from Anthem mythology. This fight actually dates back to independence in 1947 when there was a big debate over whether to call it India or Barat. India was the colonial name, and most former British colonies got rid of their colonial name. Nationalists wanted to switch to Barat as a way to break from that, and also as a way to enshrine a name associated with the Hindu religion and also. with the Hindi language, which is spoken by just under half of India's population, or natively spoken.

But the independence leaders chose to keep India in part because it was religiously and ethnically neutral. So, Ben, are we going to start relabling our globes with Barra one day? Or do you think we can ignore this as a little stunt? No, I think this is something to watch. I mean, you know, ironically, we just talked about Myanmar, which was Burma. Sure. And obviously, you know, Calcutta and Bombay have gone by the wayside. You know, it's, it, at core, Modi is a Hindu nationalist who prizes a symbol.

And, you know, going to Bahraat would be, you know, kind of treating the Muslim dynasties in India as kind of a similar to British colonialism. You know, it's like, it's winding back the clock all the way, you know, to like a time in which, you know, it was, you know, basically just a Hindu nation. And that's a huge, huge piece of business. I mean, Nehru and Gandhi and the founders of modern India, like, avowedly wanted it to be a secular democracy, you know, and the BJP never truly accepted that. Now, it's kind of like Xi Jinping, it's not quite as dramatic, but like when we think, like, will Xi Jinping want to leave power without taking Taiwan back? You wonder how far Modi wants to go and kind of turning India into a Hindu national state, and this is a good barometer of that, you know? Right, right.

Yeah, I know I think all the time about this kind of wave of revisionist movement back to like old style, hardline ethnic nationalism that kind of started with Israel like 20 years ago and has been moving and this kind of these shock waves around the world. And like, you know, five, six, seven years ago, I thought that the ultimate test of that was going to be what happened in the United States. But more and more, I actually think it's more important what happens in India and whether India like fully goes down that path. The biggest country in the world, you know. Yeah, right. So Biden's little ploys for G20, the reports that he might meet with Saudi leader Bahamad bin Salman, according to Axios, to discuss the deal to normalize Saudi-Israeli relations. It's been in the works for a while. Sorry. I know that side. Yeah, I'm right there with you.

State Department's special envoy, Brett McGurk is in Saudi Arabia this week. Ben You and Tommy have talked a lot about this deal, whether it's a good idea or not. I'm curious what you think about the wisdom of Biden. of elevating it to the kind of presidential head of state level and Biden potentially meeting for a second time. I think it would be a second meeting with MBS in person. Yeah. I mean, look, I obviously don't like meeting an MBS as a general matter. Are we not having him on the show?

Yeah. Yeah, like we probably never walk out of the room. I think that the, you know, the thing about the Saudis is when Biden had the trip there, you know, the Saudis did a bunch of stuff and the run up to that, including. you know, telling us to take a hike on helping out with energy supplies. And they seem to, you know, when you're courting them, bad things happen. You know, the point is that the atmosphere around this meeting would be we've just seen, and we've talked to last couple weeks, all these reports of Saudi units like just opening fire on migrants potentially with U.S. supplied equipment. They just went to the BRICS summit in South Africa and like, we're welcome to future members

bricks. So they're not like, they're not trying to create a positive, you know, all the onus seems to be on the U.S. to create some positive environment around a deal that is basically a huge giveaway to the Saudis. And so I'm never again, like at the end of the day, I understand you have to meet with leaders and deal with leaders. And so while I don't like the optics of it, and I certainly didn't like going to Saudi Arabia. I think meeting a G20 is, you know, far less kind of inflammatory than kind of going there and, you know, it's like a paying respect. I do just think that there's not a ton of indication that the Saudis are going to make this, you know, normalization deal seem like it's a ripe opportunity.

Like it just, it's going to have to be on their terms. And I, you know, I'm yet to see, you know, that those terms tilt in that direction, you know. Yeah, the only case that I have heard, and I'm not sure I buy this, the case that I've heard for keeping an American driven is that that is a way to push things onto the agenda on both sides that we would like to see there for the good of humanity in general and Palestinian specifically. I'm not sure I believe that this Israeli government would honor anything that it didn't want to honor anyway in the first place, though. Yeah, I think the two things that the U.S. could quote unquote get remain significant concessions on the Palestinian issue mainly from Israel and supported by Saudi. And I don't,

for the same reasons I'm so skeptical there. And then some significant and truly kind of almost permanent Saudi commitment around China and the dollars reserve currency and technology controls and investment. And that, you know, that's a murky space. But that's, I think, where, you know, where there could be at least something that is more U.S. centric in the deal. Right. Let's talk Vietnam, which I think is a pretty cool one. Biden will separately visit Vietnam is part of the trip. The plan is to boost trade American arms experts and semiconductor supplying jade development that runs primarily through Vietnam rather than through China. Vietnam is elevating ties with Washington to a special highest level tier. It calls

comprehensive strategic partnership. And I like to think we have a comprehensive strategic partnership. The only other countries in that category are China, Russia, India, and South Korea. Such a communist. I know. I know we're not even pretending anymore. You were obviously in the White House when Obama set out to build this kind of historic new relationship with Vietnam. How important did you consider these kind of official diplomatic tiers? And did you think it was just a matter of time until the U.S. got to this highest tier? Or do you think that was considered a long shot at the time? No, I think it's, I think it does matter.

I think it was inevitable because the Vietnamese have an interest in it. You know, the Vietnamese talk about pushing on an open door. Like they have like a recent bad history with us. They have a thousand years of rather with the Chinese who claim the entire body of water bordering their country, the South China Sea. And so they want a closer relationship with the United States. And, you know, I remember the Obama visit to Vietnam in 2016 as being one of the most emotional impactful things. I mean, they were that I was a part of. There were two million people lying in the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, Saigon, as Obama drove in.

And so the visits matter, the symbolism matters, even the kind of jargon of the partnership matters. Because underneath that, that means in their system, you know, there's certain categories of, you know, military contacts and, you know, potential port visits by the U.S. Navy and, you know, things that could follow on from that kind of thing. I think the step back that happened was, you know, they were part of this trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific partnership between the U.S. and 12 economies in Asia Pacific. Whoops. The Trump pulled out of that and the rest of the country's moved on. I think this is a sign that you could still have this comprehensive strategic partnership without that as a part of it. But I think figuring out a way to deepen economic ties is critical because what you've

heard a lot and we'll get in the Chinese economy is that as there's been more risk in the Chinese economy, both because it's in bad shape, but also because of national security concerns, export controls, restrictions on investments in China. I think the U.S. is kind of winking at a lot of money and business who's saying, hey, for our supply chains, we'd rather you build stuff in Vietnam, India, Mexico. Those are three countries you hear the most. The kind of manufacturing that used to be done in China, like, let's move it here, you know. And that could be a huge deal. I mean, it could trans, you know, Vietnam already has a rapidly growing economy, but, you know, Vietnam could really become a pretty central node in global supply chains and technology supply chains

as an alternative, low-cost alternative to China. And that to me, that's a real trend to watch because I think it's going to happen. Yeah. And it's also, I mean, Vietnam hugely important for Southeast Asia generally because it's a big country that's getting bigger, a big economy that's getting bigger. It's a big military power in the region. So the idea that they would be a more of an independent player, especially at a time when, like, I think generally the Southeast Asian countries seem like they all want to move away from China, but there's always some wavering and there's always some like, you know, China wants to pull them back in with some deal, they're not sure how trustworthy of the U.S. is, which I get.

The Chinese corruption and some of their officials. Right, right. China's really good at playing in corruption. So China or Vietnam is this kind of like decisive, big, boy, I really hesitate to refer to it as a domino. No, I think it's like, I use, in government, I used to think of it as like a swing state. you know like uh which is an american political reference but like you know which way they might break on any given issue right is a huge deal okay so let's talk the big economic slowdown in china this is to me probably quietly like the most important story in the world right now i'm going to try to do a quick primer on it because i think it's like it feels complicated i don't get it but if you

see it then it starts to like i think really click why it's so scary okay so it's this kind of Omnic Crisis where you have four or five problems that are all coming to a head at once. Many of them is really disastrous on its own, but kind of like with the 2008 financial crisis in the U.S., they all touch on these load-bearing pillars of the wider economy in China. So if they all fall, it could get really, really bad, and they're all intertwined with each other. Problem number one, you have a major slowdown in housing. Maybe this will sound familiar. Yes.

China has a really tight set of banking restrictions that bars. citizens from a lot of financial services like loans or investments. So as their economy grew, and this huge new Chinese middle class was rising, had all this wealth, they had very few places to put it. So a lot of households put their money in housing. And at the same time, the Chinese government also poured a ton of its cash that it was getting from this big export-driven economic boom into infrastructure and especially these supersized mega housing developments in cities. And as of last year, housing made up an estimated 25% of China's economy, which is a huge number. In the United States, which has an extremely housing-reliant economy, it's 15%, which is already, like, super high.

And we're in the middle of a housing crunch, obviously. So now the Chinese housing bubble. And I think everybody, including the leadership in Beijing, knows that it was a bubble, is, if not bursting, then at least deflating. There's been a wave of defaults. Housing prices are collapsing. and that is obviously even scarier for China than it was for the U.S. because there's so much personal wealth tight up in that. And then you have problem number two, which is that local governments are also looking very wobbly. Cities and provinces have been borrowing

billions for these huge development projects, this kind of like endless borrow-to-spend treadmill that they've been on. They assume the economy would always keep growing. So they went deeper and deeper into debt to cover the interest on the initial loans, new projects, even to pay for daily expenses. A lot of them even set up these special government banks that existed solely to lend more money back to them. Complicated financial instruments that don't make any sense. Again, maybe sounding familiar.

One estimate says that local Chinese governments collectively owe equivalent of 30% of GDP with those special banks owing another 40 to 50. Total debt in China is now equivalent to 282% of GDP. A lot of these loans to cities and cities provinces are coming due and local governments cannot pay them so it's having to restructure them. Problem number three, consumer confidence in China is way, way down. People are hoarding their money rather than spending it because they think things are about to get worse. Savings rate is like 30%.

In the U.S. it's 6%. Ironically, this makes it likely that things actually will get worse because China really relies on consumers to keep its economy afloat. The U.S. and Europe obviously got around this problem through all the stimulus spending, direct payments to households that boosted consumer confidence. But Xi Jinping, you would not think this in a communist country, extremely ideologically opposed to any kind of government handout supposedly, so has been blocking this. Problem number four, and this could be the really dangerous one, there is growing instability in a sector of the Chinese financial system called shadow banking, a name that does not and should not give you any confidence. shadow banking grew out of those really tight restrictions on banking that I mentioned as a way for

Chinese individuals and companies to make investments and take out loans even though they're not supposed to. The shadow banking center is now worth an estimated $3 trillion, but it's very designed, very opaque, underregulated. A lot of these complex loans and financial instruments itself are all intertwined with one another, which is, of course, exactly what made the U.S. market for credit default swaps in 08, so dangerous. One estimate says that 30% of shadow banking capital is tied up directly in housing, which, like we said, is collapsing. So that's an incredibly dangerous level of exposure.

Now some shadow banks are already starting to fail, and there is fear that that could lead to contagion into the kind of mainstream financial system. Chinese authorities are flying into action, but urban youth unemployment has already spiked to 21%. Ben, we've been through a lot of Chinese economic crises over the last 10 or 15 years. They seem to pop up every 18 months. Every time they land a plane, do you think this time is different? Feels different. It feels like a lot of things are happening at the same time. I mean, there's so much you could say.

I'm just going to focus on a couple of things here. I mean, first of all, part of what's happened is there have been these problems underneath the hood of the Chinese economy for a while. but the kind of rapid growth kind of papered over it. You know, wealth is being created. Like, you know, there's kind of a market confidence that, you know, gives them a margin for error. And growth is slowed at the same time that they're dealing with all of these potential financial contagion. And I'd highlight a few aspects to this. And really, some of these do go back to Xi Jinping.

One point is, frankly, also just I don't think anybody. entirely trust the data that comes out of the Chinese government. And so the nature of their totalitarian system makes it a little harder to just figure out how bad it is. Another is that, you know, the Chinese, when you would meet with them in 2009, 2010, and we were trying to get them to do a lot to stimulate demand and create a consumer class in China, they would explain, you know, I think quite competently about where they were in their phase of development.

They had a lot more growth to do to pull a lot more people out of poverty. to support pensions and mortgages and things like that. And there was a limit to some of the steps that we wanted them to take. You know, Xi Jinping came in in 2013 and he basically began to shift the model before they were done with the growth, you know? And what I mean about that?

The state got a lot more involved in the economy. Like we went backwards on market reforms to kind of a much more Marxist-Leninist approach of ultimately everybody works for the state. The state has a seat on every corporate board. the state, you know, is picking winners again. We've seen efforts that have, you know, overtly stifled innovation. Like, Xi basically beating back the private tech sector, taking on, you know, aunt the successor to Alibaba, punishing tech leaders, you know, to kind of bring them

to heal. And also just in general, moving away from any kind of support for the kind of private innovation that could stimulate growth. This is happening at the same time that there's new limits on foreign capital moving into China. Some of the holes in the Chinese balance sheets were made up by just massive infusion of foreign investment. Well, in addition to kind of just U.S. export controls and sanctions and limits on technology and investment, certain sectors of the Chinese economy, you know, I think markets and even big asset managers are beginning to look at this and think, well, because of a lot of reasons from the health of the Chinese economy, but also geopolitical tension and the threat of more U.S. sanctions, suddenly they're pulling back a little

bit. Like we were just saying, like maybe I'll build the factory in Vietnam, you know, I mean, Apple's building the eyewatch in Vietnam now that they probably would have built in China 10 years ago, you know, and so the kinds of stuff that would have propped this up, you know, the growth, the investment, that's beginning to dry up. It also doesn't help, by the way, that Xi is like, the Chinese police are like rating foreign consultant firms. And like, you know, like, it's just a lot of happening and it's chilling things. And then when you, so I'd focus on the Chinese decision making more than the, some of the particular aspects of the bubble, bubbles that you highlighted, but didn't just to take a step back to a real layman's view here. Like when in the history of the

world, Max, is there like growth as rapid as we've seen in China that doesn't have like a pretty big crash at the end of it, you know? There's always going to be a bubble. And when people are making a lot of money, they put a lot of it into real estate. And then that becomes not, as worth as much as people hoped it would be, you know, as the economy slows. And so to me, the question is, what is this going to look like? Is it going to be, like you said, every 18 months or some story about a bubble in China and somehow it gets papered over and we all move on? Is it going to be, is there going to be like a bigger crash? Like a bubble bursts in a way where there's huge contagion inside of China that then filters out and, you know, potentially like a rapid

negative trajectory for not just Chinese economy, but like an undertow that's pulling in the global economy. And then the other scenario is like a Japan scenario, right, where, you know, Japan is the superstar of the 80s and everybody's talking about how, you know, the Cold War is over and the Japanese won and they're going to, I think there were some projections that they, you know, their economy could almost catch up to the U.S. And they basically, you know, they had some their own bubbles and they went into like a 20-year decline economically that they're still kind of shaking off. It seems like a mixture of two and three is quite possible here, like a crash followed by like a diminution in Chinese economic influence, which would have huge repercussions for everything for the nature of the global economy, for the U.S.-China rivalry,

potentially fueling a more nationalist and aggressive Xi Jinping seeking to kind of make up for his loss in economic clot with military power. And so I think that the warning signs are everywhere here. And there's not a lot of indications that the Chinese government under Xi Jinping is willing to take the steps necessary to address it or even be honest about it. Yeah, I think the question of political will to look at this squarely is a really important. I think in years past, the things you highlighted that are particular about the Chinese political system, I think we're actually a strength in getting through a lot of the past bubbles. Like she's takeover of a lot of the like big private industries and the state-owned industries when I first started writing about the Chinese economy in like

2013, 2014. It was actually really crucial for them because they had this problem where they were trying to switch from export-led growth to domestic consumption. And the biggest barrier to that were all of the like state-owned steel conglomerates that were hugely politically powerful, that were driving the economy and that we're basically telling Beijing to buzz off and saying, we're going to keep exporting steel at below market rates because that's good for us, even if it's bad for the overall Chinese economy. And he did this kind of like purge where he like really brought a lot of these SOEs under heel in a way that like, you know, we only wish we could do with our big financial institutions. I think part of that there was about getting rid of opponents as much as it was.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, I'm not, you know, I'm not, I'm not an ancillary benefit. You're right. You're right. But the question. is now, I think, can he still look at the economy clearly enough? I mean, something that he has really done just in the last couple of years that is really different, I think, from his first eight or nine years in office. He's really gutted a lot of the big institutions in the Chinese state that were really competent, really technocratic, that like really guided them through this. And this is a very old story that we've seen many times where you have a leader in authoritarian system who starts to dismantle what works in that political system to elevate themselves. And that system, becomes a lot less effective. And I think that we are already seeing indications that the kind of technocratic muscles in China that got them through so many previous housing bubbles look like it could be really bad are just really weakened because what the state is good at now is, you know, ideological indoctrination, it's policing, the fact that their first instinct when youth unemployment hit 21% was to say we'll stop publishing the statistic. You know, that's not super encouraging.

is also this question of political vulnerability. I mean, that youth unemployment number, especially that's youth unemployment in cities. I mean, that's the most dangerous destabilizing political thing you can have in, I mean, dangerous foreign authoritarian government is a lot of young people who have nothing to lose, and especially if they're educated, because then they want things more than just food and substance. They want kind of identity and a place in society they can feel good about. and having millions or tens of millions of young Chinese people who don't have a job, we know they feel pessimistic about the future because we see it and the staggering drop in consumer confidence. That's really bad for a system that has driven itself ever since Tiananmen and then, you know, Deng Xiaoping's southern tour in the early 90s for 30 years on you can feel good about the future

because we're going to have cool technology. You get to feel really good about being Chinese. you're going to live in these shining, gleaming glass cities. And if people feel bad about what this government is going to bring them in the future, I'm not saying that it's going to lead to another revolution, but it's definitely very bad for this system. Yeah. I mean, to pick up on just a couple of those things quickly,

in terms of like the totalitarian steps that sometimes helped, but also I think papered over some stuff. The example I always loved is, do you remember once there was a couple times, actually, there were like these massive sell-offs happening in the Chinese stock market and then they just like shut it down. They're just like there's a, you know, like in a way, you know, like and we stopped trading. Yeah, we stopped trading at the New York Stock Exchange stopped trading sometimes that there's, you know, but like this is more like nobody knew what happened in there. Nobody knew how long it was shut down for a few days later it opens. And on the one hand, yeah, that they were able to stop some stuff and consolidate some stuff and move some pieces around.

But they weren't, it seems like they weren't using that time that they were buying them. to fix this stuff. You know, and I'm not, I don't claim to be enough of an expert to have all the answers to how they would do that. But then that interacts with your, I think, the most important point, which is that they were at the same time gutting this technocratic class. And if you look at the last, you know, Pollittboro they had out there, the party conference, they were elevating all these like Xi Jinping flunkies, including our foreign minister went missing, you know? And they used, you know, their technocratic class was quite smart. And they're kind of not now that's not how you get chosen for jobs. And look, what might that look like? I don't know

that it'll look like, you know, Tiananmen and Beijing. Sure. However, it might look like a lot of, you know, giant cities out in Chinese provinces where there is political violence. There are protests. We saw a huge protest against zero COVID, and that was a little more middle-classy in big cities. Big nationwide protest. But I think you could begin to see, you know, in city after city in China, this doesn't, you know, this goes real south, like, you know, some real political instability. Not that regime threatening, but stuff that will make China very inward focus. Yeah. I mean, I feel like something I always try to remember when I am talking, thinking about what's going to happen in the future in China is there's never really been a country

like this that is this big, that has grown this fast, that has this kind of system. And so I am always tempted to kind of extrapolate, you know, thinking about any country extrapolate, What happened in other countries that look similar? But, I mean, China is always surprising me, and it makes it very hard to predict what's going to happen there. Since the U.S. in the late 19th century, I can't think of rapid economic transformation. And we were a lot smaller. And that was the gilded age, and we had some serious panics. And we didn't have Twitter.

Yeah. Panic of 1893 was not pleasant. Right. Yeah. I can't believe I just said that out loud. There's a reason for it. You'll see when I tease my next book. But yeah.

Wow. Okay. A little teaser there. I love that. For those panic of 1893 heads out there. Oh my God. I'm one of them. Yeah, I know.

You're like a target audience. Okay, well, let's close that with a couple little fun guys before we kick it to your interview. German chancellor Olaf Schultz is temporarily wearing an eye patch after he tripped during a jog. He encouraged Germans to meme him up and they've been complying with photoshopps of him as a pirate or a Marvel villain. Fortunately, his party's poll numbers are not as funny, putting him third. behind the center-right and far-right parties. Yeah, my hot take on this is actually maybe he should own the eye patch

because it gives him kind of a bit of like a charisma that, like, you know, so check it out if you haven't because it's hilarious, but like, I think it's a decent look for the guy. He does look cool, and especially with the bald head. Yeah, I feel like it's really a look. It's an accessory, you know? Would you consider an eye patch? I do a pirate Halloween costume, so once a year I'll consider it.

Only when you're a burning man. Yes. Yeah, yeah, right. Okay, in Japan, a bunch of government ministers made a big show of eating sushi from fish caught off the coast of Fukushima. Japan has been gradually discharging very small amounts of irradiated wastewater from the nuclear plant that melted down there in 2011. The IAEA says it's perfectly safe, but understandably, people are a little nervous about it. Ben, would you eat the Fukushima sushi? I think there's some, as long as there's some other options, I'd probably hold out.

Like Fukushima sushi, but I'm glad, like, you know, I'm glad they've done such a good job at clean up at what was a scary thing. But, yeah, I mean, it's probably less scary than that sushi you eat in like the, you know, cheap place in the mall that where it's probably been out of the water for a very long time. That's kind of what I was thinking. So it's probably, I'd actually probably eat it before that. I was, I heard about this and I was on vacation and Montana and I was walking past a sushi restaurant. And I thought, I would rather have the Fukushima sushi than the Montana sushi. Yeah, it's not do that. Okay, should we go to your chat with Yanti, Surroto, say the children?

So I actually spoke to Yanty last week, September 1st, which timed with her travel to Ukraine, so she could give that on the ground view. Also timed back to school for a lot of Ukrainian children. So I think people should definitely check this out. So we obviously talk a lot about Ukraine on the show and it focused a lot on military issues, political issues. We also try to stay centered in the experience that the Ukrainian people are having. And one thing that doesn't get enough attention is the experience of Ukrainian children.

I just want to lead in this in a statistic from Save the Children that right now, 7.5 million children in Ukraine are in grave danger of physical harm, severe emotional distress, and displacement. But thankfully, there are organizations and obviously governments trying to help address those issues. and today we're very pleased to welcome back to the podcast, Yanti Saripto, the president and CEO of Save the Children, who is currently joining us from Ukraine. So thank you so much, Yanti, for joining us. It's good to see you. No, thank you, Ben, for having me back. So first of all, just to situate our listeners, you know, tell us a little bit about where you are and what the nature of this visit to Ukraine is for you. Yeah, I thought it was important for me to go to Ukraine.

and to also really travel within the country as much as possible to see the situation, because the situation now in Ukraine is very different. It differs greatly from province to province, as you can imagine. So we started off in Kiev conversations also with the government and, of course, with our staff there and partners. We are working in and around Kiev in a number of more remote, remote. towns. And we also traveled to Chernihive, which is sort of two to three hours north of Kiev, where there had been substantive damage also to schools and to homes. Then we went to Boucha, which was certainly quite infamous for killings that happened there. We met the mayor. We were

helping them rehabilitate a school there as well. And then yesterday we jumped on the train. It's a long overnight train down south and I'm now in the city of Mika Life. It's very close to what we could now call the front line of active conflict. The city of Gershon is 70 kilometers from here. We were there this morning, talking to the governor of Gerson as well, seeing how we can help them more, what needs. We're topping his list. I mean, clearly he has a long, long list,

but we were trying to see if we can help them. It's very basic. It is sometimes building materials. It's water. It's helping them rebuild shelters for schools because if there are no shelters in schools, schools cannot reopen. So a number of these issues we discussed. And then we also had the opportunity to visit some of the surrounding villages

where we do some more outreach with communities, both people who are displaced from the cities as well as people who live there for a long time. You spend a lot of time on trains in Ukraine. Yeah, no. Well, but I mean, I think people powerfully point out that, you know, that that's the experience of being a war, that, you know, air travel is not an option. Exactly, exactly. It's just one small aspect of the experience that they're going through. So in terms of Save the Children's work, you know, I imagine in a place like Ukraine, and you obviously, Save the Children operates in all manner of conflict zones and difficult places, but just to focus on Ukraine, there's so many needs.

How do you make determinations about what your role is, where to focus resources, what save the children's role is vis-vis versus, you know, international aid donors and other organizations? Like, what is that process and what have you chosen to focus on in Ukraine? Yeah, and it is a really a moving target too, right? I mean, the first phase of the response, of course, was very different from where we're in now. So we're definitely, I feel that we're really shifting into that next phase. First and foremost, we were here since 2014.

So we had about a small, small team, 25 people here who were still, I think, almost without exception with us. And we were focused actually mainly in the east, in the southeast, where the previous incursion happened. But of course, all of a sudden on 24th of February last year, we had to scale that up and we now have a team of almost 400 people across the country. country and we work with a lot of local partners. And I've met many, many of them over these past couple of days.

The first phase is very basic. You just start to, you know, immediate relief for people. Well, it came in a form of cash. The good thing about a country like Ukraine, of course, everybody has a bank account or most people have. That was functioning. It's a digitally, very, you know, educated, you know, and well-functioning infrastructure. So actually getting cash to people was one of the fastest, most efficient, effective ways of reaching the population, particularly in those first couple of months, or when there's a next, you know, displacement happening in a city,

when it's either taken over, taken back, depending on the nature of the conflict. So that was a large part of what we did. Another bit which sometimes feels a bit invisible for people would say, well, you work with children. But if there is no functioning water infrastructure, nothing else. can happen. There can be no health clinic. There can be no, certainly no school. And by and large, of course, the danger of waterborne diseases is huge. So we did actually a lot of repairs of water systems. Again, there was a pretty good water infrastructure, but if it gets damaged, you know, you need to repair it. So we focused on that. We immediately started actually doing

mental health and psychosocial support for children, even online when they were still in shelters. You know, I met people over these past couple of days who spent sometimes two months, almost exclusively in shelters. Maybe they had a little bit of time to go out when it was quiet for a couple of hours, then they went back in. And we were able to do so online. Again, digitally, you know,

established infrastructure, connectivity, pretty reasonable, actually, pretty good everywhere. So that allowed us to do some of those things that you don't always get to do in other responses. But our work, most importantly for all of those choices, you have to, and we do, work with the government, the various line ministries, education, health, social protection, to really understand and make sure there's also coordination between who does what. Where can they use the most help?

Where are we superfluous and should stay out of the way? Who else is there that can do things? Where are the local partners? We work a lot with the Red Cross here. We just visited an amazing child-friendly space that they're running here. They're using Save the Children techniques and particularly child-centered programming, but we got to use their amazing space that they already had, the amazing operational capacity that the Red Cross has in Ukraine.

So that's how we make those decisions along the way. And our team here is actually beyond fantastic. Because of course some of these decisions you do have to make in a split second because you can't fully predict how this situation evolves. So even if we decide to be in a specific place for a while, you have to be ready to pack up and move out or be ready to move in. It was interesting. I was talking to the team here and they said we had a long debate about should we move into Mekalive when it was freed.

And it wasn't safe yet. And people said, let's go to Adessa. And they said, no, no, no, let's wait until we can actually get to Mekyllab. Because that is closer to where most people are with the most needs. And if you end up with an office in another city, which is two hours further away, you may be stuck in a place where it's actually suboptimal. So some of those decisions, you have to make them on the ground. And so far the team here has been making all the right calls as far as I can see. I mean, here in the United States, it's kind of back to school time.

I was mentioning to you before we started this interview that my kids are in the chaos of getting ready for school across the street. But it's a joyful time for people. What are you learning about the experience of Ukrainian children? I'm trying to think about the range of emotional and psychological needs, the trauma of being in shelters, people who've lost parents, people whose parents may be at the front in the Ukrainian military. It's hard for me to get my mind around the millions of Ukrainian children, children who, by the way, whose friends probably left as refugees to Europe.

I mean, I just, I have to imagine that almost every single Ukrainian child is touched by this war in some way, and obviously probably even more so the closer you get to the front. What are you learning about the needs and the experience of being the Ukrainian child at this time when people are usually thinking about the joy of going back to school? A new backpack, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, 100% right.

I don't think there is one single Ukrainian child or adult that is untouched by this war. And it's all of the above, right? And don't forget, before this war started, they also had two years of lockdown, right? Or a year and a half of lockdown under COVID. So in terms of this education disruption and all the social issues that come with that, they already had that. And then they had the war. And what you see is, so a lot of, you're right, September 1st is back to school for Ukraine. And as you say, it is a real marker for the Ukrainian calendar.

And every person we've met a parent, the teachers, the principals, the children were talking about September 1st. And I have to say, I've seen an unbelievable motivation and determination of people to get some of those schools open. I literally visited schools yesterday and the day before where parents and grandmothers were standing around with their paint and their cleaning rag and they were polishing their schools. literally the windows were just going, the new windows were literally just going in. And, you know, so all of that is happening. You walk into a school, it smells of fresh paint. They're still builders trying to get it ready when they can.

One of the issue is that all schools must now have, rightfully so, a shelter so that kids can go back to school safely and get in a shelter if they have to. And that is sometimes what is holding up schools reopening. So there is a school. It could function. There are teachers, but they need. to either rebuild the shelter because they didn't have it or reestablish it.

So that work is going on. So children is doing a lot of support for that, helping them rebuild those shelters, making sure they have to write materials, making sure they have construction partners. So that is helping. And then kids can go back to school, the lucky ones. Many of those kids cannot go back to school.

There's certainly over a million kids. I think there are currently, won't be in person tomorrow. A lot of them are online, and a lot of them are still online, even if they move to the west of the country where it is now relatively safe, they will dial into their old school in the east.

So the Ministry of Education is really trying to keep children with their old school system. The curriculum is the same, but they stay with their classmates and their teachers. And that is even possible for children who are outside of Ukraine. They may be in school in Poland or in Italy, but they still have the opportunity to dial back in to their Ukrainian curriculum and their culture and social activity.

But of course, as we all know as parents, who have had some experience with lockdown, it is hard online constantly. And then add to that the additional stress of air raids, shelter time, shellings, you know, literally 30 kilometers away. I was in a village where there was not one home untouched and some were completely destroyed. And yet there are still people there living in half demolished homes and they're trying to get their kids back to school even if it is online. Yeah. Well, I was going to ask you, I mean, is there a story that stands out from your travels or a person you met that just sticks with you over the last few days?

Yeah, so, so many. I mean, I literally came from the village that was half demolished. are mostly demolished and the village leader. So half of the population, some 260 people are still there, 45 kids. It used to be double that. And the community leader there, she was very adamant that tomorrow would be a festive day still because it's back to school and we're going to celebrate it. Even though we're sitting, and we're literally standing in front of the school building

where there is no roof and two of the four walls are gone, right? So there's nothing. She says, we're going to go back to school. We're going to celebrate outside and the school yard and then we're going to go online. and we need to get these other kids back too because without children in the village, the village, there is no life in the village. And it's such a true emotion for that.

And then the first day on Tuesday, I think it was, we were on Cheniv, where actually we were very close to the theater that was hit last week, around the corner. And we were in one of our child-friendly spaces, digital learning spaces, we call them where kids can come. It's in a shelter.

And they can do robotics and Lego and the usual, you know, kids play their kids. And the air raid alarm goes off. And then you see it instantly in the kids. They immediately, you know, understand what's going on and what they have to do. So we all end up in the shelter, a huge, huge shelter, which could house, you know, hundreds of people, as it turned out. With the, and we were there for an hour with the principal of the school. who told us of her time when Cherney, he was under siege,

and they spent essentially with 500 people, she was in that shelter where we were for almost two months. And there were kids there, and the teacher, she and the teachers of the school tried to maintain some sense of normalcy. They had lessons with the kids. If they could go outside for a bit, they went outside, and they went back in two months in that shelter, which is just unbelievable.

So two months, like just literally inside the shelter, like with, I mean, how many people are we talking about? In a basement. Yeah. There were 500 people in that basement. And it was a, look, it was a huge shelter, but 500 people, there were no beds, right? There were chairs and there were desks. So people were sleeping on the floor, on the desks, et cetera. It must have been unbelievable.

You know, they managed to cook out. outside sometimes using wood. And then she was explaining, she said, well, one of the first times that we could go outside for a bit, and we had a PE lesson, gymnastics, sports. And she said, normally that, of course, is rowdy, loud. We're kids playing sports. We know what that looks like. And she said, it was the quietest PA lesson I've ever heard.

You just heard the bouncing of the balls, right? But that's all the sound that that lesson did. Huh. Well, that's kind of haunting detail. Yeah, I, I've not traveled as much to these types of locations as you. I remember, though, the most haunting thing for me was once being in a place where there were explosions that had been, you know, let's just say regular. And there are these children there, and they didn't react when they heard the, you know, they were so accustomed to it. And that, for some reason, that always stuck with me, that a child, that that's normal. The bomb is going. off. Well, look, how can people help? What are ways of people that are listening to this and care about the work you guys are doing and your incredible staff and local staff? What's the best way for people to help out?

Well, as always, I would say, www. Saveschildren.org would be amazing if people can donate, want to donate. Of course, also keep the issue on the radar of people. I can imagine this war, it was massive. It is still, you know, in the media, absolutely, and you guys certainly have kept it on the radar, thank you. But I can imagine that people also get tired of it, right? They're like, oh, there's a war in Ukraine.

There's wars in a lot of other places, too. There is hunger in a lot of places. And, you know, we certainly see that even internally. We have to make sometimes these choices. But, you know, the impact here, the long-lasting impact of war on children in particular is really unbelievable. And if you look into the eyes of the kids,

yes, in a child-friendly space, they play, there is now, there's laughter, there is noise, there is, you know, all the usual stuff that's going on. But when you then talk to the parents of those children and they tell what's really going on with kids that they're having nightmares,

that they can't sleep, that they're missing their friends, you know, and then it really hits you that this is a long, long journey to, you know, even though kids, are unbelievably resilient, but it's a long road to recover here. So they need all the help they can get. Yeah, and it's going to be a lifetime of trauma. I mean, it's just going to require enormous amounts of support and resources. But thanks so much for the travel that you're doing

and the work you're doing and everybody in the Save the Children team, because we know that these are people not, you know, money and glory are not the motivating factors. So we are very grateful for your staff and your local staff. Our team here is mostly Ukrainians, of course, and they are unbelievable, they're resilient, and also still so optimistic and energetic. I mean, they keep, you know, they keep at it. And that's what they need now. Yeah. No, well, we're glad that they're there. So thanks so much, Janty, for joining us and we'll continue to follow your good work. Thank you very much, Ben. Thank you for having us. Thanks again to Yanti Sirepto for coming on the show. And thanks, Ben, for

having me fill in for Tommy. It was such a pleasure. I mean, you know, when do I get to nerd out about both Thai politics and Chinese economics? That was, that was wonderful. Right here on Pod Save the World. Yeah, that's where it all happens. So, no, I enjoyed it. A lot to watch going forward. All right. Cheers, Ben. Potsave the World is a crooked media production. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor, Ben Rhodes, and Michael Martinez. Our associate producer is Ashley Mizzou. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick, audio support by Kyle Segglin and Charlotte Landis. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn and Phoebe Bradford, who upload our episodes and videos to YouTube.com slash Pod Save the World. Thanks to Saul Rubin and Rebecca Rottenberg for production support.

Our intern is Naomi Beerenbaum.