Pod Save the World - NATO’s “brain death”

Episode Date: December 4, 2019

Tommy and Ben talk about Trump’s trip to London for the NATO summit, including his dustup with the French President and the health of NATO in 2019. Then they discuss the Iranian government’s crackdown on protestors, Trump’s visit to Afghanistan, Ben’s trip to Hong Kong, the expanding trade war, amazing reporting about India’s Prime Minister, and why US foreign aid keeps getting mysteriously frozen. Then The Intercept’s Mehdi Hasan joins to talk about the upcoming British parliamentary elections, the London Bridge attack, and Brexit.

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Ditor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben. Great to see you, man. I imagine you're still completely jet lag. A little bit. When you're completely flipped over like that in Asia, it's like an extreme body challenge. Yeah. Take the world to the world, though.

Yeah, yeah. It's good for the show. So we're going to talk about a bunch of great stuff today. President Trump is in London for the NATO summit. So we'll check in on how that trip's going. I'm sure it's going great. Yeah, the Iran protests that we've talked about previously have turned ugly. I also want to get into Trump's visit to have.

Afghanistan and the policy questions swirling around about our presence there. I want to hear all about your trip to Hong Kong. There's an amazing piece in the New Yorker about India's Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, that we should dig into a bit. More foreign aid is being mysteriously frozen, Ben, so we're going to try to unpack why. And then our guest today is the intercepts Medi Hassan, who joins to talk about the madness that is British politics as they steam towards a parliamentary election. You will not want to skip the guest today.

Medi is very good at explaining what's going on in an interesting way. So that's what we got. Yeah, Medi crushes it. He really does. So why don't we start with this NATO summit? So President Trump is in London for the NATO summit, and things got dicey pretty quickly. It's NATO's 70th anniversary, which would make it a relatively young Democratic presidential candidate. Trump has been tough on NATO in the past. He's called it obsolete. He's used these meetings to scold NATO countries and to shove the Prime Minister of Montenegro, but mostly... Who could forget? He's scolding them for not spending more in defense. It's clear that Trump doesn't really value the alliance or understand the value of the alliance or how NATO spending targets work, but that's another topic. So he's going to meet with the heads of Germany, Denmark, and Italy while in London. It's not clear if he's going to meet with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who's focused on his election and wants to steer clear of Trump. More on that later. But his meeting this morning with French President Emmanuel Macron was quite contentious and is making some news. So the lead-up to this

was that Macron said NATO is experiencing brain death, which was interesting, in part because the alliance hasn't dealt with increasingly alarming behavior by Turkey as a NATO member, and he was also referencing Trump's attacks on the alliance. Trump called Macron's comments very insulting. Boohoo for Donald. The two leaders also argued about Syria, especially the Turkish attacks on our Kurdish allies and trade. It was interesting to see Trump on the side of defending the value of NATO when he's called

it obsolete in the past. But Ben, this was a very different approach to handling Trump from Macron. Long gone are the days of their bromance. Macron staged a military parade for Trump. They had a romantic couple's dinner at the Eiffel Tower. What did you make of Macron's approach? And do you think we're at a point where European leaders might start to think like, hey, there's no downside to pushing back on this guy.

It's good politics? Yeah. I mean, my headline is that they're just moving on. You know, they're kind of riding off the U.S. That's dark. No, it is dark. but essentially if you look at it, Macron is a great bellwether for this, right, because he comes in in 2017. And yeah, he makes this kind of concerted effort to be Trump's buddy, right? And they have this kind of exchange of state visits.

And Macron's wish list, though, was to keep the U.S. and the Iran nuclear deal. Right. To avoid tariffs on the French, to try to persuade Trump of the value of NATO and some of these multilateral approaches. And basically on the Paris Climate Accord. And on every single issue that Macron cared about, he got nothing, you know, And so I think he learned, and the other leaders learned, like, flattery's not going to get you anywhere. Then I think these leaders were, you know, waiting to see just how bad the Trump redirection of American foreign policy is, and it's really bad. All the things they care about, he's moving the opposite direction.

Like, he doesn't care about standing up to Russia's aggression. He doesn't care about climate change. He's hanging them out to dry on the Iran nuclear agreement. He's picking terror fights with them. And so, you know, I've gone over to France quite regularly, and I speak to the Macron's. government on one of these recent trips, I was actually at a conference organized by Macron and his government, the Paris Peace Forum, that is on the future of multilateralism. And what that's about is I think Emmanuel Macron trying to position himself as actually the leader of the liberal

world order. And I don't say that in a dismissive way because the President of the United States is not the leader of the liberal world order. It's kind of anglo-americal and Emmanuel Macron. And I do think there's this sense in Europe that I get very cutely when I'm there, that going to wait and see what happens in the 2020 election. But if Trump is reelected, they're just going to move on. And NATO becomes obsolete to them because they don't think Trump is actually invested in it. I think they might start having a much more independent foreign policy in terms of how they deal with Middle Eastern conflicts, how they deal with China. Normally, they've either followed our lead or we've worked together to forge something. So what I see at this summit is, you know,

the beginning of Europe moving in a direction away from the United States in anticipation of a potential Trump re-election. I think if a Democrat wins, there's an opportunity to kind of come back together on all these things. But NATO is kind of the ultimate, you know, example or exemplar of transatlantic U.S. European cooperation. And so it's no coincidence that this is the forum where these leaders are butting heads. Yeah. Also notable that it deals with a common threat called Russia. Yeah. Before we get to the NATO health question. So before Trump left, he was very upset that the House intelligence, committee is going to put forward its impeachment findings while he is abroad. And, you know, look, there's this old trope about how politics is supposed to stop at the water's edge when a president

is abroad. I feel like the body politic has moved away from it substantially over the past several decades. And probably more than almost anything else, it's been used as a way for presidents to attack critics when they're overseas. I don't know. What did you make of that claim? Well, well, look, it's complete and utter bullshit because the people who torch that. that norm are the Republicans, right? You know, Barack Obama, on his first long foreign trip as president, you know, they dubbed it the apology tour and just trashed him the whole trip. There was never any, let's go back and check Donald Trump's Twitter feed while Barack Obama was traveling overseas and see if he abided by politics at the water edge. By the way, it's the same thing with the-

apology tour. That's so dumb. Yeah, as a co-author of that, you know, it was a lot of fun. But, you know, it's like him saying that Emmanuel Macron was mean to NATO. Right. When he, Trump has just, you know, shot on NATO for three years, right? And part of what you're seeing is that Trump can't seem to exist when he has to be in a reality where Fox and his media bubble doesn't follow him around, right? So in Europe, like, nobody thinks that, like, that Trump is a viable president, that he's, like, at the temperament to lead. They all think this impeachment case is an open and shut case, right? Like, Trump can't seem to interact with reality when he doesn't have his alternative, you know, online and Fox News media to sustain him, right? And one of the ways in which

that's the case is that nobody is going to believe Donald Trump saying that he wants us all to abide by some norm of how we talk about presidents overseas. Yeah, ridiculous. Let's talk about the strength, just the NATO alliance generally for a minute. So the question about the amount of defense spending happening by NATO members has been a big hobby horse for Trump. And there's some justification there. When we were in the White House, Bob Gates used to press NATO countries on spending more. So currently, seven of the 29 NATO members meet the target of spending 2% of GDP on defense. So that means they're supposed to spend 2% of defense on their own militaries, not on some collective military that doesn't exist. Trump seems confused by that. That number seven is up from

four countries the year before. Critics might say, well, you know, these are very small countries with low GDPs, but whatever, it's target to target. The Wall Street. Journal pointed out that even critics of NATO think that it's pretty healthy right now, due in large part because of an increased U.S. military presence in Europe. Other allies have pledged to increase spending over the next several years, including Germany, which is like the big economy in the region, and they forecast hitting the 2% of GDP target by 2030. So, you know, it's an upper trajectory. But there are some pretty big problems within the alliance, not that far under the surface.

Turkey is increasingly erratic. Erdogan just invaded northern Syria. he just bought a sophisticated missile defense system from the Russians over major U.S. and NATO objections. There's also the question of whether NATO is keeping up with the threats we're facing like terrorism or cyber attacks. And, you know, again, it doesn't help when we have a U.S. president who jokes about sending ISIS fighters back into Europe and denies that Russia interfered in our elections. But I digress. Ben, what's your sense of NATO's health and relevance in 2019? Well, look, first of all, you know, these targets on the defense spending questions, question. We're actually set, you know, Obama set these targets at a NATO summit in the U.K. Around, I think, 2014. Did they not exist before that?

It wasn't adapted by the whole alliance as a collective time. So it was kind of a more ad hoc thing. In part because, yeah, we wanted to catalyze defense spending across Europe. The U.S. does have a much higher share of just defense spending in our budget versus theirs. Part of that's because of the, you know, peculiarity of our military complex, I should say. Yeah, for sure. But the idea was, okay, want to uptick in spending, want to focus on new capabilities, cyber and how to deter cyber attacks, how to deal with terrorism. But then increasingly late in the Obama administration, the threat from Russia when they invaded Ukraine, we initiated some deployments to Eastern Europe to kind of revitalize a sense that were committed to the collective defense of Europe. So where does it

leave NATO? I think the relevance is more than ever, right? Because this is an alliance that was founded in the Cold War to be essentially the assortment of democracy stand. up to the Soviet bloc and to defend Europe against Soviet invasion. At a time when you have real risks of Russian aggression and intervention into Europe, as we're seeing in Ukraine, you would think that an alliance that was founded to guard against that kind of thing would be very relevant. It's also got a capacity to mobilize collective action, you know, if we're defending against terrorist threats emanating from the Middle East and North Africa, that's important. The biggest threats to NATO are political. And what are they? They are Donald Trump,

attacking NATO. They are Vladimir Putin seeking to sow disunity among NATO allies, and they're Taip Erdogan, who's transformed that country from a democracy into an autocracy and works across purposes with some of our foreign policy goals, like attacking the Kurds. The irony also of the defense spending increases. Not only is Trump wrong, he makes it sound like everybody pays into some fund when it's actually no percentage of your own GDP on defense spending. But the irony is, I think, the reason why a lot of these European countries are spending more on NATO defense spending is to hedge against Trump. It's because they think they may not be able to rely on the United States and NATO, so Germany better to start increasing their spending. That's definitely the vibe I guess.

I'm glad we've incentivized the Germans to do more defense spending. We finally figured out the way to get this is where we want to get paid. And look, actually, to be fair to Trump, that may be his America first argument, right? Like, you pay for it, not us. So there's some logic to you if I don't agree with it, I think we're stronger if we're collective. I will say, though, that if I were revitalizing NATO, I'd look at this tricky question. I agree with Macron. like this should be an alliance of democracies. They're not democracy. They don't have to be in NATO.

I mean, this is like a third rail that it used to be, at least. And there's a lot of complexities with that, as we've talked about on this podcast, there's, you know, insert like an air base there, their nuclear weapons. So I'm not suggesting this is easy. But I do think that if Turkey continues to be an autocratic country, NATO is supposed to be an alliance of democracies. It should be a country, an alliance of shared interest and shared values. And I think that that may need to be addressed.

And I also think that NATO has to look at new capabilities around cyber, around information war coming in from Russia, you know, around the different threats that are emerging. But I would much rather live in a world with a strong NATO than without it. Yeah. That's for sure. Someday we should geek out on whether NATO expansion happened too rapidly and was sort of set off a chain of events that might have gotten to us to the, you know, problems with Ukraine and Russia right now. I think it's a very interesting debate to have. You know, on the one hand, you will hear, you know, from my Poland or the Baltic countries, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, NATO is our guarantee of our existence.

It's a guarantee of our sovereignty. It's what we didn't have before World War I and World War II, which led to, you know, Hitler and Stalin carving up those countries. On the other hand, you know, Bush extended NATO membership action plan, so not NATO membership, but essentially the beginning of a process for Ukraine and Iran. Georgia to come into NATO. And clearly that did set triple wire for Russia because every focus in Ukraine, they invaded Georgia in 2008 when George Bush was president and are currently occupying two provinces of Georgia. Clearly, Russia did feel like NATO enlargement came too far too fast and came into, you know, former Soviet republics that they saw as part of their, you know, near abroad. So I think that's a debate

that is worth, it is definitely worth having. Yeah, it might be forced on us because I think Sweden and Finland are likely to be part of NATO in a half decade or a decade or so. Yeah, no, and I think where the rubber hits the road, though, is definitely on, you know, Ukraine and Georgia, you know, for NATO to mean something, we have to internalize it. We really will go to war with Russia to defend this country. And I think the reality is how many Americans would say they would go to war to defend Georgia with Russia. And when Russia rolled in there in 2008, I think we saw the answer that question. Now, you could ask a similar question about Estonia, but I would argue that, you know, they're consolidated into NATO. And so once you define it as a collective block,

it means something. Yeah, an interesting discussion. I'm not landing on kicking people out of NATO. No, no, no, they're my. No, no, they're my. Absolutely not. Let's turn to Iran. So there's some really awful news coming out of Iran. We talked a couple times, I think, about the recent protests in Iran. they started in response to an increase in gas prices, but quickly ballooned into a broader set of grievances like corruption. They also became overtly anti-government, anti-the-supreme leader. In response, the Iranian government basically shut down the internet, presumably to make it harder for protesters to coordinate, but it also prevented news from getting out to the world about what was happening for literally weeks. Unfortunately, the reality that has seeped out since

is just a horrific crackdown on protesters by security forces. The New York Times estimates the death toll to be between 180 to 450 people. There's thousands more wounded, thousands more arrested. There's reports of groups of protesters being rounded up and gunned down with machine guns. Ben, so the Trump administration is openly saying that they're happy about these protests. They're owning the fact that U.S. sanctions are leading to a lot of economic pain that is seen as driving some of these protests. Again, we don't really know if the protests are still happening or not.

But I'm curious what you make of the White House. policy, their response, and just stepping back, like, given that the most likely outcome here seems to be that President Rouhani, who is not a moderate in any way we describe in this country, but relatively moderate compared to like a bunch of goons in the IRGC, he seems to be being weakened politically, which seems to leave a lot of space for hardline factions in Iran to crack down harder and rise up. Yeah, I mean, so first of all, we should just say that this is exposing yet again the completely brutal nature of this regime. And frankly, far beyond 2009. I mean, the scale of death is much higher. And unfortunately, I would guess that the high end of those estimates is probably

more accurate. It's probably a lot we don't know. I would say, though, like, the Trump, this is not about us. Like, all the, this is about these people in Iran who just wanted to. Us, the U.S. Us, the U.S. And the Trump people constantly try to make this about them. Like, they are protesting because of our policies. Like, no, they're protesting because they don't like their corrupt government, right? And is there some bang shot that the sanctions have made economic conditions? Sure, there have been sanctions on Iran for a long time, right? I think it's a mistake for us to insert ourselves, and this is suddenly like a PR exercise for Mike Pompeo.

No, this should be about the Iranian people. And by the way, also, it should be about consistency in supporting all these protests that are happening around the world if they are motivated. I'm not saying if it's a protest that's good, but protests that are genuinely motivated by a desire for democratic governance or to combat corruption. The U.S. would have a lot more credibility if we were able to be consistent. So when Trump is silent on a whole bunch of democratic protest movements, like has been the case in Hong Kong, and then suddenly he's beating his chest and saying it's all because of us. And Pompeo's tweeting out requests for, like, videos from Iranians, I don't think that rings particularly true to the Iranian ear.

It looks more like their own domestic politics unless about Iran. So this should be about the Iranians. Yeah, agreed. I want to get to Hong Kong in a minute. But first, let's just touch on Afghanistan. President Trump made an unannounced visit to Afghanistan over Thanksgiving. And first, we should just say that it is, this is a great thing to do. Yeah.

Presidents often make these unannounced trips to visit war zones over the holidays. Obama did it. Bush did it. Trump visited Iraq last year. But this was his first trip to Afghanistan. Afghanistan, it's clearly meaningful for the men and women serving. They're away from their families and to be personally served food or thanked by the president. Like, that's a big deal.

And, you know, you've been a part of planning these things. It is some squirly shit. You can't, basically they turn off like the signature of the plane. There's no emails coming in and out. I mean, I remember the news kind of leaked one time. And I remember running down to the situation room panicking, being like, you have to tell them. News of this trip has gotten out. And they're like, actually, kid, we know how to deal with this.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, well, and they cut all the lights on the plane. So first of all, you have to kind of drive yourself out to Andrews Air Force Base in the middle of night. You get an Air Force One, they somehow fly all the way to Afghanistan. It's like the longest flood I've been on. I think they must do mid-air refueling. And then when you're coming in, they turn all the lights off on the plane. So it's totally dark on Air Force One, super eerie.

And then you land at Bogram Air Base. And the press is barely told, like they're told last minute. Press is kind of hustled out there at the last minute. And look, it's a great thing for Trump to do. I mean, you know, the troops are out there, you know, Boggham Air Base or... No, yeah. And they, you know, they could be forgiven for thinking that people have kind of forgotten about them. Afghanistan's, you know, in a deep end of the second decade, as we've talked about.

So definitely a good thing for him to do it and do it around the holidays. Yeah. Well, so let's get to the complexity. So Trump blurted out some policy demands that seemed to catch everyone by surprise and could make negotiating a peace deal even harder. So you guys might remember how Trump was planning to fly the Taliban to camp David right around the 9-11 anniversary to announce a peace agreement. I can't believe we've almost forgotten that. But then he blew up those talks because, you know, the Taliban, he had some pretext,

but basically the reality was the Taliban wouldn't let him stage manage some dramatic peace agreement moment that he wanted for the cameras. So when Trump got to Afghanistan over Thanksgiving, he said that the peace talks would restart, but there needs to be a ceasefire first. And that's pretty significant because the Afghan government really wants a ceasefire, but the Taliban view it as a major concession, in part because they're worried that if their guys stop fighting, they're not going to restart. And so they're not going to do that without something very big in return. So if Trump views that as a precondition to these talks happening, it seems like things are going nowhere. You know, Ben, as you said, Afghanistan's been really off the radar since September. There's a ton of men and

women serving there still. It's an extremely dangerous place. Interestingly, you know, there's prisoner swaps going on. The troop level seems to be consistently going down. But, you know, basically my question is, what did you make of the trip? And, you know, what should we be thinking about when we're talking about our war effort there? I mean, look, this is not the first time that Trump has opened his mouth about a complex negotiation and probably screwed something up. I mean, you know, you get the sense on the North Korea side, too, when he had that last summit, that the negotiating team had a whole track and then Trump kind of came in. That's right. That's right. You know, so less than one, is he should just shut his mouth about sensitive negotiations.

And I say that with all due respect to the office of the presidency, but like if you've got people in these multidimensional, whether it's a sensitive series of nuclear steps in North Korea or, you know, sensitive sequence of events, you know, one presidential word wrong can kind of blow up a negotiation and send everybody back to their corners. And that was, forgive me for not believing that Donald Trump is closely following the intricacies of the negotiations.

the Taliban or where his, you know, envoy, Zal Mike Khalilzad is in terms of sequencing ceasefires. But, you know, the less said, the better here. And which leads me to the, you know, the other point, which is that honestly, like, this is another one of those areas where, you know, I would hope that you could just kind of, if Trump wants to set a broad objective of bringing the troops home and winding on the war, which she keeps saying he wants, that's good. But then let diplomats do their job. And unfortunately, he's consistently undermined diplomats, not just by what he said, but how he's treated the whole foreign service.

Because what I would like to see is, you know, a very methodical effort to negotiate how we wind down our involvement, how we engage other countries in playing a more constructive role in Afghanistan, and how we can have a long-term role in supporting the Afghan people who too often are kind of forgotten in our efforts. And those types of approaches, let's face it, are not going to emanate from Trump himself. they'd be better left to the State Department. Totally agree. Let's turn to Hong Kong. So a couple things. Last week, Kelly Magsman and I talked about Trump threatening to veto the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which is a bill that authorizes sanctions on Chinese and Hong Kong officials who are involved in human rights abuses.

And it requires the State Department to conduct an annual review of Hong Kong's political situation so that they can keep a favorable trade deal with the U.S. I think it also prevented the sale of rubber bullets, to your guests and things. Trump ended up signing the bill, undoubtedly, because literally only one member of Congress voted against the bill. Navita would have been overridden. In response, China said they would sanction human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, and suspend port visits to Hong Kong by U.S. Navy ships, which is interesting because that's a pretty measured response, right? I mean, he was all worried about blowing up a trade deal, but, you know, these human rights groups don't even operate in mainland China anyway. So, you know, I believe the bill's passage was cheered in Hong Kong. Ben, you just visited Hong Kong.

Can you talk about the trip, what you saw and what you made of the election that they just had? Well, the first thing I'd say, I was there when this bill passed, and it got a lot of attention there. And I think people's sense was that, boy, the U.S. cares about this. I mean, you know, people should take comfort in the fact that there are people out there who still care what the other things. But it was seen as Congress, not Trump, because Trump has been kind of silent on this. and I think everybody was worried about what the Chinese response is. And I think it was kind of measured. I should add, you know, Trump announced the signing and a paper statement with a bunch of bills the night before Thanksgiving.

Yeah, he buried. It was with a signing statement, you know, so it was about as buried as it could be in our politics. In terms of, look, I'll talk more about this. I'm working on a couple projects that relate to Hong Kong, which, you know, I'll have more news later for the world those. So stay tuned for 2020. Yes. But, you know, I talk to people involved in the protest. I talked to people, you know, who were kind of more moderate observers, but sympathetic to the

protest. I talked to people in different sectors of society. And a bunch of things jumped out to me beyond kind of what we've covered on this show. First, in terms of the cause of the protest. Yes, obviously there's been this encroachment, and we've talked about this bill that would allow people to be extradited to mainland China. The other thing I heard is, you know, yes, there's been the sense of China encroaching in Hong Kong's political space, choosing who can serve in key roles in Hong Kong government. But the other thing I was really struck by is a lot of people said to me, a growing sense of Hong Kong identity has led to these protests. One of the reasons people have been surprised in watching this is how young the protesters are, high school age and university age.

And what I heard from a lot of people is that's because the Chinese have been introducing in recent years a lot of Chinese Communist Party curriculum into the Hong Kong schools. So not enough to, you know, kind of choose your leaders. We're going to make you sing the Chinese national anthem. them we're going to make you learn about the history of the great Chinese Communist Party. And there was a huge reaction against this, you know, that this is literally trying to change, you know, brainwash us. I heard the word brainwash many times. And so this sense of Hong Kong identity has really exploded. And some people told me, you know, during the handover to Chinese authority, I felt Chinese, and now I feel like a Hong Konger. And so that's been the trend

in recent years. Then talking to people involved in the protests has been kind of fascinating. and to just revisit some things we talked about in the podcast. First of all, there was this kind of overwhelming groundswell of peaceful protests. That's dissipated, but what people made the point to me that they almost imploring me as a Westerners, like, look, the reason you don't see giant protest marches is the government doesn't allow them anymore. Right. So you can't get a permit to march, or they'll start arresting people, right? So the reason it's a group of more hardcore kind of flash mob type protests is because you literally can't have like a giant march as easily as you, you

once could. It could be disrupted, interrupted, people could be arrested. The other things that jumped out to me about these protests, we also talked about in July when this started to get violent. And there was an incident in the kind of subway system where a group of people and, you know, and white shirts attacked a group of protesters. Everybody had talked to seemed to believe that this was kind of organized crime elements with ties to the government. Interesting. So kind of like, we'll do this if you, you know, you leave us alone in our organized crime rackets. Oh, man. It was kind of super interesting, right?

Yeah, it's dark. And with the idea of, like, let's try to make these protesters look violent when they fight back. And then I just heard all kinds of interesting stuff about the tactics these protesters use. It really is a leaderless movement. And, you know, there'll be these giant telegram threads that are like Reddit threads, where literally there'll be like consensus-based decisions about where to protest. Like, let's all go to this location today. And they'll debate the location.

And then as soon as they choose a location, the group explodes. And there's like, someone showed me his phone. There were 260,000 people in the television group. Yeah. And it's like flash mob, you know. Yeah. And that's how they stay one step ahead of the authorities. And then you hear about these frontline protesters that we see at the universities.

These people are all in. And a number of them, I heard, carry suicide notes in their backpacks to explaining why they did what they did. The five demands that the protesters have, the origin of those are from one of these suicides. notes, for instance. I mean, these are people who think that this is existential. It's their whole way of life that's at stake. But then it's interesting. I also heard that people, and this, I'll wrap up here because it leads to the election. You know, there'll be people in the society who aren't that jazzed about protests disrupting their daily life, people who own shops, who've seen big drop in retail because there's not as many tourists. But I heard a great anecdote

about during one of these protests where everybody's in the black masks and black clothes, and they kind of get chased and cornered by the authorities. And everybody started going into these stores where the shop owners are not, they're not in the protest. But they still feel solidarity as Hong Kongers. And so they let people change their clothes, change out of their black clothes, put the black clothes in the backpack and kind of bleed out back in the street. There's that kind of spirit. And that was clearly the case in the election where, you know, some of the more stylish people I say, oh, don't believe what you see. The protesters are a minority.

well, I saw like giant turnout for these votes. I walked around. I saw these polling stations. I talked to people in polling lines, lines around the block. And the pro-democracy groups have never had a majority in this Hong Kong City Council, which is the only democratically elected body. And they won almost every election, basically. And so that shows you that the silent majority in Hong Kong is on the side of the protesters,

even if they don't always agree with some of the more violent tactics or, you know, some of the more hardline protesters. That's an amazing update. And the story's not going away. No, no. Look forward to hearing more. A couple more quick things we'll push through. So I just want to note for folks that President Trump is open to Western Front in his trade war. On Monday, he announced tariffs on metals from Brazil and Argentina and you threaten more tariffs on French products.

This, of course, is in addition to the trade war with China, which I believe he said today might not be resolved before the election. So just to dig into the details for a minute. Trump accused Brazil and Argentina of devaluing their currencies. Most economists say that's just not. remotely true. They've had to adjust interest rates and take various steps to deal with like big time economic downturns, but it doesn't seem close to currency manipulation. I don't know what I'm talking about here, but I'm just, that's what I understand. The proposed tariffs on French wine, cheese, other goods that all of us like is in response to a 3% French tax on internet companies

like Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook. So interesting timing, again, to drop these tariffs, fly off the NATO and piss everybody off. Ben, this is the part I really just wanted to tell you. So Trump has set aside $28 billion, $28 billion in tariff revenue to bailout farmers hurt by his trade war. That is twice two times the 2009 U.S. auto industry bailout figure. So that made my head explode. I'm mostly just when I read this news, I'm so beaten down by this White House that I was more than anything surprised that he'd put tariffs on Brazil because she loves Jaya Bussonaro, the fascist buddy down there. But I'm not sure if you had any deep thoughts here. Well, no, that jumped out of me that basically, like, you can't get out of jail of these tariffs just by being a fascist, you know?

Right, right. So a lesson to all the authoritarians out there, like, don't think that you're immune from this. I do, again, what I think this is going to, I share your madness about the lack of scrutiny on this. The China trade wars cost us hundreds of thousands of jobs. We know Trump lies relentlessly about what tariffs are. He lies about the impact this has had on the Chinese economy. And then meanwhile, the redistribution of wealth to these farmers. Because Trump's basically like, my trade war is devastating people whose votes I need.

And by the way, it's going to agro business. Yeah, so I'm just going to bail out this agro business is grotesque, given the criticisms they used to make against Obama for redistributing wealth because he had a social safety net plan for health care. I do think the world is just going to get beaten into exhaustion by this and really just start trading around the United States. And so there could be long-term negative repercussions where other countries are just sick of our sanctions, sick of our tariffs and doing trade deals around us. And that's not in our interest. A quick shout out to great journalism. So there's an amazing piece by Dexter Filkins in this week's New Yorker that we just wanted to mention. It's very long.

It's worth reading the whole thing. The title is blood and soil in Narendra Modi's India. So it details Modi's political roots and how the BJP, his political party, and Modi personally, came to power through sectarianism and really fomenting violence against Muslims, or at least looking the other way. Filkin's interviews a prominent Indian intellectual named Ashiz Nandi, who met and interviewed Modi decades ago and came away believing he was a fascist in training. It talks about how Modi did nothing to stop these horrific anti-Muslim riots when he was a regional governor. and it suggests that he and his allies might have actually promoted the violence. It details corruption allegations and the way critics have been silenced or disappeared. But, you know, nevertheless, Modi's been embraced by a business community that is desperate for access to Indian markets.

He was welcomed at the White House by Obama. He buddies with Trump. This past August, Modi suspended Article 370 of the Constitution that grants autonomy to the disputed Kashmir region between India and Pakistan. and they just annexed it and basically no one seems to care. So, Ben, it's just bothered me, and I know you too for a while that you don't really hear about the Kashmir annexation at all. But, you know, frankly, this piece, hopefully it'll start a reckoning in the U.S. It already's happened in India.

But, you know, Modi should probably be categorized with people like Bolsonaro or Victor Orban or Erdogan of Turkey. But, you know, that's pretty scary to say out loud when you're talking about a nuclear-armed economic superpower. Yeah, over a billion people. I mean, I, you know, I think that the article was particularly riveting and confirming what some of us have feared about Kashmir, which is it's really a place under kind of police state martial law, a lot of more violence and has been seen and kind of lingering fears of what they're going to do is kind of what the Chinese have done in the West, which is try to kind of repopulate Kashmir with more Hindus, you know, and change the character of it over time, kind of slow motion, ethnic, not cleansing, but alteration of list. Well, I mean, it feels like partition all over again, right? Yeah, it does.

I mean, yeah. Force migration. Yeah. And look, I do think we should have a longer conversation somewhere about the Obama relationship. I mean, you know, at the time, we're well aware of the anti-Muslim past. And I remember having some, you know, real debates in the administration about how much to forge a relationship with Modi. And the first time he came, Obama went with him to the Martin Luther King Memorial. Modi was kind of seeking to put on a good face and wanted to do that.

And honestly, I think the one thing I would. say about this is the main tradeoff or consideration is that last year of 2015, we were really eager to get India in the Paris Agreement. Moti was going to have to really push his system to go far beyond what they were comfortable doing on clean energy and climate change. And so the theory was Obama needs to build this personal relationship with Modi. And I think, frankly, that was essential to getting the Paris Agreement done. But at the same time, you think about, well, did that in some ways kind of legitimize Modi's global standing. And I'm sure it did to some extent. And I think people can look back at that as a test case of like, well, what are these tradeoffs? Like how do you balance

an interest in fighting climate change, which is a progressive interest? Right. With promoting tolerance and standing up to this kind of any Muslim bigotry. Welcome to governing. Very hard. Yeah, it's hard. And I will also say that, you know, Modi's very deft player. Like, you know, you, the modi that presents to the West is not the modi you read about in this article. You know, he's good at, you know, he's always kind of two identities, the kind of populist, anti-Muslim, you know, strains of fascism in that political party. But then also, he's a reformer and he wants to modernize and, you know, some of the same buzzwords you're associated with people like MBS, right? And I do think that Westerners sometimes look at Indian, it's so big and so complicated that they also get a little daunted. And they're like, well, maybe I don't understand this.

And I think the lesson is, well, let's get smarter about this. And a good place to start is this Dexter Filkins piece because it's enough that we've got Putin and Trump and Xi Jinping and Bolsonaro. But, you know, Modi is definitely in that category these days. Yeah. And to his credit, Filkins talks about a lot of Indian journalists who have done incredibly brave work, tracking Modi, rooting out corruption that are worth following in the piece. So it's a good entryway into the broader examination you talked about.

And in these places that are not yet all the way authoritarian, civil society and media is so important. Because that's the difference between an India and places, you know, like China, where you don't have any civil society. A journalist like the one who's with Filkins in this piece is unthinkable in China, right? And so we do have another way is to support those people and to pay attention to those people because their voices are so important. Yeah. And Modi's cracking down on journalists who are not kind to him too. So last thing we just wanted to put a pin in, which is this strange story about Lebanon. So for months, the White House has frozen $105 million worth of military aid to Lebanon with no explanation, nothing to the public, nothing to Congress.

That money was finally unfurzen on Monday. And, you know, on timing, like on policy grounds, the timing is weird. And it seems like a very bad policy decision because the Lebanese military, while imperfect, has been a source of relative stability in Lebanon. It's been a counterweight to Hezbollah, which is a Sunni extremist group in the area. it's obviously especially weird in the wake of Trump's freezing of military aid to Ukraine as part of his efforts to extort them into manufacturing dirt under Biden. So I don't know what the hell of the deal is. I've read what you've read.

Interestingly, Senator Chris Murphy has been, you know, at the forefront of the Ukraine aid issue and this because he took trips about these countries. But she thought it was worth flagging given the context. No, and one reason also is that there's like total bipartisan support for military to Lebanon. Yeah, interesting. The Lebanese Armed Forces is like one of the only, you know, non-sectarian kind of stabilizing institutions in the country. So it's peculiar to say at least that this, this aid that is, you know, mandated by Congress would get held up like this. Yeah, and the Prime Minister just had to resign. Well, and I also think that we all know that, look, Lebanon

connects, remember the Prime Minister of Lebanon has taken hostage by Jared's buddy, Maham and Salman for a few days in Riyadh. There's a lot of money swashing through Lebanon. There's a lot of Saudi interest and other Middle Eastern interests, you know, this is in the Jared account, you know, which doesn't mean that I know anything, but it does, you know, it's interesting. Aid is being held up for no explained reason to a country where everybody agrees that we should be providing this aid in a part of the world that has a lot of corrupt money floating around where Jared Kushner is a point person, like, you know, you'd like an explanation. If there's an obvious grifting explanation for what happened, it usually is the right one with

this way. Yeah. I mean, because if there's another explanation, they should tell us. Yeah, yeah. And maybe there is. And maybe they should, but if there is, they should just say that we had this concern about X. Yeah. Well, keep an eye on this one.

Yeah. Okay. When we come back from the break, we're going to be joined by Intercept columnist Medi Hassan. We are thrilled to be joined by the Intercept's senior columnist and the host of a fantastic podcast called Deconstructed. And Al Jazeera's up front, Medi Hassan. How you doing, Madi? I'm good. Tommy, Ben.

Thanks for having me on. It's wonderful to have you. Yeah, Medi, you've deconstructed me on that podcast. That was a fun show. Yeah, that was a fun show. That was awesome. That's awesome. to finish off. Finish off some of our unfinished conversation.

Yeah. Required listening right there. Okay, Maddie, first question for you. So there's a general election in the UK on December 12th. Can you just remind listeners first why Prime Minister Boris Johnson called this election now? And how do you think it's looking for him at the moment? So Boris Johnson became Prime Minister, the third British Prime Minister in the space of, what is it, four years, three years since the Brexit, since the Brexit referendum took place in the summer of 2016, a few months before the presidential election here. There was that shock result. David Cameron, the Conservative Prime Minister at the time, held that referendum, didn't think he would lose that referendum, lost the referendum, stood down.

Theresa May took over. She was Prime Minister, a comically bad Prime Minister. She held an election in 2017 and thinking that she could increase the Conservative majority. In fact, she lost a Conservative majority to the Labour Party leader, a democratic socialist named Jeremy Corbyn. The British media did not expect Corbyn to do so well at the time. So there was this hung parliament with no majority for the last two years or more. She tried again and again to get a Brexit deal through Parliament, a deal that would satisfy all the various different factions in British politics.

She failed three times. She tried to get a deal through three times she failed. In the end, she said, I can't do this anymore. I'm out. I'm gone. See you later. Boris Johnson, who led the Brexit campaign, flamboyant, colourful, controversial, many would argue, and many includes me, a racist politician, Trumpian in many ways, won the Conservative leadership election, became Prime Minister this summer, but without his own mandate, without having won a general election. He thought about trying to get Brexit done on time. He promised, he said, I would die in a ditch. Those were his words.

If we don't get Brexit done by October 31st by Halloween, he didn't get Brexit done either. He couldn't get a deal through. So in the end, he got this election that he wanted. He wanted an election done instead. It's now scheduled for next week. And yeah, is he going to win or not? We don't know.

My suspicion is it might be another hung parliament again, because British politics is so effed and so divided. Every time you think American politics is the craziest politics in the world, the Brits say, hold my beer. It's just mad. It's been mad to imagine three prime ministers and three elections in the space of four years in what was supposed to be one of the most stable democracies, oldest democracies in the Western world. Yeah, not great. So you alluded to this. I mean, recent polls show that Johnson is winning and maybe winning with a pretty big margin. Interestingly, this week, he's got to deal with Donald Trump plopping down in London for the NATO summit. Boris Johnson actually warned Trump not to talk about the election or the race. And it seems like Trump's actually adhered.

to that admonition. Why do you think he did that? And are you also worried that Boris is going to run away with this thing? So I don't think he's going to run away with this thing, because what's interesting is in 2017, I think the Tories began with, I can't remember, the Conservatives began with a 20, 30 point lead over Jeremy Corbyn's Labor, and it looked like a landslide majority. Theresa May ran a really, really bad campaign, even by her own side's reckoning. And Corbyn narrowed the gap, and it ended up being a hung parliament. Labor didn't win, but they denied the Conservatives the majority. This time round again, Boris Johnson, the Conservatives, began the race with a huge lead, massive double-digit lead. And Labour have been slowly whittling away at it, but at a much

slower pace than 2017. The election's now less than two weeks away. It does look like the toys are going to win. The question is, are they going to win with a majority in which, in which case they get the Brexit deal through that Boris Johnson wants through and they get it all done on their timetable? Or is it another hung parliament, in which case British politics will be in deadlock again. There will be lots of, you know, horse trading to see if there can be another government that does it involve the conservatives. Let's see. I, you know, I stopped doing predictions in 2016 when Brexit happened and Trump won and I didn't think either thing would happen. In terms of Donald Trump, he's a hugely unpopular figure in the UK, breaking news. He's unpopular everywhere

in the world, pretty much outside of Israel and parts of India. And yeah, Boris Johnson's not stupid. He's a lot of things he's not stupid. He doesn't need Donald Trump coming out endorsing him just days away from this close and controversial election, especially when Boris himself, as I'm sure many of your listeners aware, has been compared to Trump. He is the British Trump in many ways. It's an interesting watching this from afar because, you know, if you look at the public opinion polling in the UK, your support for Remain is usually slightly over 50%. So the portion of the electorate that has, you know, got serious reservations or doesn't want to Brexit. And also, you know, Theresa May, a terrible prime minister. Boris.

a number of missteps out of the gate, including picking that fight where he tried to essentially shut down parliament and got overruled. You know, so it feels like that the Brexit crowd should not have much momentum here. And yet the politics remains deadlocked. And I'm just curious to your view as to, is that because there's, you know, a significant enough portion of the population that may not be crazy about Brexit, but kind of feels like we just want to get this over with and move on? or is there something lacking in either Jeremy Corbyn or Joe Swinson, the leader of the liberal Democrats,

who's kind of put herself forward as the anti-Brexit candidate. Is this a lack of an ability of a leader to consolidate all this opposition to the Tories, or is this more this is a divided country and there is about half the country that just wants to get on with it? It's a great question. And Britain now is divided, not in terms of left-right conservative labor, but in terms of remain-leave. That's been the big political division. It's not just a political division. It's a cultural division in many ways, just as the kind of pro and anti-Trump forces are. It's generational. It's racial. It's regional. There is this massive split in the UK electorate on these issues. Why it hasn't translated into kind of party politics in a clean way is because British Party politics is because British Party politics is because British Party. You mentioned Joe Swinson and the Liberal Democrats. They are the ultimate pro-remain party. They're the smaller third party of British politics. But they've hoovered up a lot of Labour support by saying we will take a comprehensive. completely anti-Brexit stance.

We're not just going to, we're not even going to call for another referendum. We're just going to cancel the whole Brexit proposal. We're just going to undo it all and we're going to stay in the European Union, which has appealed to a lot of people. But to others, even Remainers, they say, well, that seems a bit undemocratic. There was a vote that was won by the leave side. And therefore, if we're going to undo that, we need to have a referendum.

The Labour Party is offering a referendum. But the leader, Jeremy Corbyn, his heart's not really in it. He's always being a bit of a lever. Yeah. But he runs a Remain party. So they have this massive existential division almost in the Labour Party where Jeremy Corbyn, deep down, isn't a big Remainer. And therefore, has always been trying to find a bit of a compromise. And their argument is by some on the Remain side, which is if he had just taken a completely pro-Romain position, he would be in a much stronger position.

I'm not sure that's necessarily true because the Labour Party itself at a grassroots level is heavily divided. Just as you have kind of quote-unquote white working class Reagan Democrats who went for Trump, you have a lot of whiteworking class. Labor voters in the north of the country who did vote for Brexit. Wrongly in my view, but they did vote for it and they would be outraged if it was just undone by Fiat. So there is this massive division on the Remain side, whereas on the Leave side, by Boris Johnson taking over this kind of hardcore lever, the guy who led the Leave campaign, a lot of the Brexit forces have rallied around him. There was a party called the Brexit party, led by Nigel Farage, a particularly odious far-right figure, who used to run the UK

Independence Party. He then set up the Brexit Party. And at the last time, Last minute now, they basically said, you know what? We're not going to stand against conservatives. There was this danger that they were going to split the conservative vote in the same way that the Lib Dems will split the Remain vote. And now they're not doing that. So they've rallied around Boris Johnson, whereas there hasn't been the same rallying on the anti-Borris. There's a lot of talk on social media about voting tactically. If you're in a seat where it's a Lib Dem versus a conservative, the Labor person should vote Lib Dem and vice versa.

I mean, people are saying that on Twitter, but in the real world, I'm not sure how much that will translate into actual on the ground anti-concerties. conservative tactical voting. So do you think, I mean, it's one way to think about this election, though, that if Johnson eaks out, you know, even if he has a very unsteady majority, you know, or not, or he has what he has now, which is not a true majority, he's relying on, you know, coalition partner from Northern Ireland. But, but that, that basically, if he is the prime minister after this election, Brexit is going to happen in one form or another because the idea of a people's vote is to, you know, a people's vote on the deal or on whether or not to perhaps revisit the question is never going to happen under Boris.

Versus, you know, if Corbyn is able to pull off a big upset, the question of Brexit itself is still in play? I mean, is that how we should be thinking about the election relation of Brexit? Because the Labour Party manifest is. It's an odd commitment. Labor basically saying we're going to have a referendum after Labor has renegotiated its own deal with the EU. And then they're going to put that to a vote. Either you vote to remain or you vote for Labor's deal. And Jeremy Corbyn says he will be neutral in this referendum campaign, which has annoyed a lot of Remainers.

They say, how can you be neutral on the biggest issue of our age? His argument is the country is so divided. You need a prime minister who's above the fray and has a vested interest in the result. Again, is that the wisest move? Not quite sure. But you know what? British politics is mad. I don't think anyone knows what a wise move is right now.

But yes, if Boris is re-elected, this is why it matters to your audience. in the US and globally. It matters because Britain will continue down this self-destructive, almost suicidal path where it pulls out of its biggest political relationship. It pulls out of its biggest economic relationship. You're going to see billions of pounds of damage to the UK economy that will have spillover effects in the global economy, certainly in the European economy. And then economics aside, I mean, I've said this from the beginning. Brexit was never about trade or economics. It's always been about identity politics. The same, you know, it's like the same debate in the US about was Donald Trump a product of economic anxiety or racial

resentment? For me, it's always been about racial, cultural resentment. The economics was secondary. Same with Brexit. You look at the people who voted for Brexit. One of the biggest indicators of whether someone was pro-Brexit or anti-Brexit was whether they support the death penalty, which when you think about it is bonkers, has nothing to do with the EU. But it's a reflection of a certain mindset. Somebody wants to turn the clock back. Make Britain great again. Wants to live in the 1950s. So it's that mindset which which is driving a lot of this. It's little Englander.

It's xenophobic. People get very upset if you say this. Oh, are you calling Brexit voters racist? Just as we have the same debate in the US. Are you calling Trump voters racist? It's not about whether you're racist or not. It's about the fact is that Brexit is a project based on nationalism. It's aimed at a hardcore minority of the British electorate who are obsessed with immigrants,

obsessed with foreigners, obsessed with multiculturalism. And it's led to a massive spike in hate crimes, in racism. My big worry for the future of the UK is, What is UK society going to look like under a Boris Johnson premiership, which A pulls out of the European Union with all of the implications that has for migration, for minorities living in the UK? And a prime minister himself who has a long record of saying outrageous, bigoted things about minority groups from gay people to Muslims to women, etc. In a very Trumpian fashion. You know, nationalism makes people very stupid. The far right party in Spain, the Vox party, apparently their slogan is make Spain great again, which is,

is an interesting line to push when Franco was ruling the country from the 30s to the 70s and one of the most brutal authoritarian rules in modern history. Yeah, nationalism was good. I mean, you know, many, the thing that's so interesting to me is that one of the great perks I had in my old job was I got to go to the 2012 closing ceremonies in London for the Olympics. And it was presided over by the mayor of London, Boris Johnson. And it was a lavish celebration of the remarkable multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism of London. It was a diversity show of different kinds of music and dance and cultures.

It is so fascinating to watch how this man could go from being the mayor rolling out the red carpet for this celebration of London, the great multicultural city in the world along with New York, to being this kind of narrow nationalist. A bit like a certain New York businessman who was pro-abortion and pro-gun control and gave money to the Democrats and was friends with the Clintons. and ended up being a white nationalist in the White House. I mean, it is uncanny the similarities between both Boris Johnson and Donald Trump in terms of their rhetoric and in terms of their kind of con man journeys. They are what they need to be in the moment. So Boris Johnson was a right-wing journalist.

He has a, you know, lots of articles are now being discovered during the selection campaign where he says outrageous things about black people and about Muslims and about gay people. But then he reinvented himself, as you say, in order to be mayor of London, you can't be a right-wing mayor of London. you have to be a kind of centrist, you have to embrace immigration, even from a business perspective for the city of London, for the banks. You know, people want immigrants, people want multicultural. So he reinvented himself as mayor. He was, you know, when he was mayor, he attacked Donald Trump.

You know what Boris Johnson said in 2015? He said, I don't want to go to New York because I'm worried I might bump into Donald Trump. That's what he said at the time when he was mayor of London. He said Donald Trump was wrong about the Muslim ban. He said he wasn't fit to be president. Boris called Trump a recruiting sergeant for Islamic terrorism, right? That was the kind of language Mayor Johnson used. Yeah.

Then he goes into national policy. He sees which way the wind is blowing. Just a quick, interesting anecdote for your listeners. When the Brexit referendum happened, Boris Johnson, on the eve of that campaign kicking off, wrote two opeds, two different opeds. One was to remain, one was to leave to cover his ass. Yeah.

Because that's what a master politician is, is that he was able to say, look, I'll see how the wind's blowing. I might make the case for, I might make the case against. when he went for Brexit, he went all in for Brexit, and now he portrays himself as this great, you know, nationalist leader, pro-Brexit, anti-the-EU, and as you say, he's, you know, he's disowned his pro-multicism, pro-immigration past. Now it's all about bashing immigrants and fear-mongering about minorities and running this very nationalist, very xenophobic election campaign, having run a very nationalist xenophobic EU referendum campaign. I mean, his comments about

Muslims are outrageous and he gets a pass, sadly, from the British media. He's talked about Islam being the problem. He's compared veiled Muslim women to bank robbers. His party is riddled with anti-Muslim activists at a grassroots level who just get, you know, quietly suspended and then get brought back into the party. It's really scary, actually, to think about what a premiership with a majority would look like for Boris Johnson. Yeah, agreed. Medi, one scary thing that happened over the weekend was there was this tragic attack on London Bridge. It left multiple people dead. The assailant Usman Khan had ties to an al-Qaeda inspired group, but he had been released. You saw these incredibly brave British citizens, one who was a recent immigrant from Poland, I believe, fighting this guy off with

a narwhal tusk, fire extinguisher. I mean, truly like extraordinary bravery. Is that attack getting swept into the political debate that you've seen? Are people demagoguing the fact that he was an extremist-linked individual. Very much so. And the conservative party, what's so disgusting about the way that the conservatives are demagoguque this is number one, this terrorist attack happened on their watch, and yet they're putting out ad saying, vote conservative to protect you from terrorism, labor won't protect you from terrorists, which is ironic because this terrorist attack happened on the conservatives' watch. It's kind of like a reminder of how George Bush ran on anti-terrorism,

even though 9-11 happened on George Bush's watch. So there's the kind of shamelessness and the hypocrisy of that positioning. There's the whole I'm going to lock up. terrorists and throw away the key because this guy was on an early release with a tag. So they're playing into the hole. We need to lock people up and throw away the key. Number one, you've been in power for nearly 10 years. And a lot of the legislation that, you know, that led to this guy being released was legislation passed on the conservative. They're trying to blame Labor for some law in 2008, but they've been in power for a decade. So just the sheer inaccuracy and falshood of their statements. And a lot of this is to do

with the criminal justice system and the de-radicalization programs that were supposed to be in place for people like this terrorist being having their funding cut because the Conservative Party's 10 years in power has been defined by austerity. It's been defined by cuts to public services, cuts to budgets across the board, including the criminal justice budget, including the prisons budget. And therefore it's ironic. And here's the worst part of it. The father of one of the victims, the one of the victims of this attack was actually a great campaigner for refugees, for migrants, for criminal justice reform. And his father has come out and said, stop using. my son's name to try and get reelected. He would not have voted for your party. He would not want

you to use his death to demagogue in this way. But they don't care. They're just doing it anyways. Well, one more question then. You know, we all, you know, obviously can occupy the living nightmare of British and American politics. But what is, what do you think that, you know, as a Brit, like, what's the best case in error here? You know, like, what's, and it's not a prediction and maybe a long shot, but how do you get out of this box of this complete obsession with this Nationalist project. What could be the next phase in British politics that is a more inclusive and constructive approach? Wow. That is a great question and it's kind of a global question, isn't it? Because you're seeing all of these movements globally. I mean, look, one argument is,

and it's a popular argument on the left from the Corbynites, from the Bernie Sanders people here in the US, which is if you fix the economic system, if you go after the people at the top who have been screwing everyone over on playing divide and rule, if you undo it, austerity in the UK, you know, the massive austerity budgets, which Jeremy Corbyn is promising to do with a massive investment program in public services and infrastructure. Then that will help ameliorate some of the economic and social divisions, which leads to migrants being scapegoated, which leads to kind of people turning to nationalist parties. I buy that argument as someone on the left, about 60% of the way. I don't think the economic materialist argument

goes far enough to explaining what we're really seeing, because we are seeing resurgence of racism and nationalism across the board. It's not just amongst, quote, unquote, white working class voters or quote unquote poor people who are pissed off about immigrants. This is a kind of, you know, I always point this out. Donald Trump won every white demographic, old to young, right? Old to rung, rich and poor, whatever it is, right? This idea that it's just a bunch of kind of white working class people in the industrial heartlands of the UK or the United States is just a myth. So when we talk about kind of fighting back against this resurgence of racism, which is a continent-wide, globe-wide phenomenon, I think we need a much more coherent strategy about

how we talk about race, how we rebuild a case for multicultural, multi-faith societies. Too many centrist and liberal politicians for too many years have kind of endorsed right-wing talking points about immigration, about multiculturalism having quote-unquote failed when it hasn't. And I think we need a much better conversation around race, around inclusivity, around kind of what is a shared society, what are we defined by citizenship? Those conversations have been had at the fringes by some liberal politicians. you know, Obama had it at times. Gordon Brown in the UK did it on occasion,

but they've been subsumed too quickly into wider debates about how many immigrants do you want in the country? How high or low should immigration be? And I think we need to have a much broader conversation on the left, on the centre, on the centre, about what it means to be British, what it means to be American, how we define these terms. We've got to go past just to economics

because this is not just about economics. There is a massive... You know, when people say, oh, the left is obsessed with identity politics. Actually, it's the right that's actually winning everywhere thanks to white identity politics. And we need to have a much bigger conversation about that. Yeah. I mean, so, Medi, the flip side of this, you know, what we're seeing in a lot of places,

these majority groups, demagoguing minority groups as a political strategy is reality, right? I mean, there's an ongoing crime against humanity happening right now in Western China against a Muslim minority group called the Uyghurs. Prime Minister Modi of India recently, I think it's August annexed Muslim majority Kashmir. People are starting to talk more about what's happening to the Uyghurs, but you really don't hear anything about Kashmir. pretty stark how no one's standing up for these populations. I wonder why you think that is and what listeners might be able to do to sound the alarm or push lawmakers to act or do something.

So the number one reason why you're not hearing more about it is economics. India and China, two of the fastest growing biggest economies in the world. Western governments, Western multinationals have massive investments and vice versa. You know, Narendra Modi was, you know, hailed as an economic reformer when he turned up at G20 and other international summits, foreign leaders falling over another to give him a hug. Unfortunately, your former boss, Barack Obama, was one of those leaders who kind of helped legitimize Narendra Modi when he came to the U.S. When his ban was lifted, just a reminder to your listeners, there was a period of time when

Narendra Modi could not step foot in the United States. He was banned by the State Department because of his role in 2002 as Chief Minister of Gujarat overseeing massive pogroms, which led to the death of more than a thousand Muslims, the rape of pregnant women, etc., etc., horrific, gruesome crimes. He was banned from entering the UK and the US. that ban was lifted for diplomatic reasons once he became prime minister. But the legitimization of him in many ways is worse than what's happening in China. Because at least with China, unless you're Michael Bloomberg, we all accept that the Chinese leader is a dictator.

It's a dictatorship. I think we kind of all accept that China is a massive problem. With India, there is a faction of people in the U.S., in the UK, who argue, number one, they're our ally against kind of quote-unquote terrorist Pakistan. And number two, they're the world's biggest democracy. It's kind of like the argument the Israelis used to justify any crime they commit. We're the only democracy in the Middle East. India plays the democracy card. The problem is, of course, is that Indian democracy is being hollowed out from within by this Modi right-wing Hindu nationalist government, which, as you say, just tore up an article of the Constitution in August in order to basically take over Jammu and Kashmir, which was an Indian state with some self-governing principles.

They just tore that up and put the whole state under lockdown, cut people off from the internet, you know, denied freedom of movement, locked up thousands of people, including three former chief ministers of that state. who are still under house arrest. He did that in plain sight. Very little commotion from the West. Even worse than what's happening in Kashmir, you might argue, at least Kashmir has been, you know, an international story for years. The Pakistanis have made it into a binational issue.

A bigger story that isn't getting noticed, and the New York Times, credit to them, did cover it, is in Assam, a state in India. They're building detention camps to lock up what they call, quote-unquote, illegal immigrants. these are Indian, a lot of them, Indian Muslims, who can't provide ID that their grandparents or great-grandparents lived in India pre-1971, pre-the-war in Bangladesh. They're called Bengali infiltrators.

In fact, the Modi government has referred to them as vermin and infiltrators as parasites, you know, horrible dehumanizing language. And they've built camps to lock these people up. And right now, 1.9 million people in Assam have basically been declared stateless, had their citizenship stripped from them. They're being put in camps. This is happening in plain sight in quote-unquote the world's largest democracy. What are we doing about it? Not very much.

We're not even aware of what's going on. So number one, I would say to your listeners, carry on listening to shows like yours and mine so you can get educated and read, you know, as much as I have many criticisms of the New York Times and its coverage of Trump. Read the foreign coverage in mainstream papers, which is still good enough when it comes to exposing some of this shit. Look at the New Yorker's recent expose of Modi by Dexter Filkins. Read this stuff.

Fillarize yourself with what is going. on with the Uyghers in Xinjiang, what is going on in Assam and in Kashmir, and then make it clear to our leaders, you know, there was a huge groundswell last year when MBS basically ordered the murder of Jamal Khashrogji and the Saudis. There's a big backlash against Saudi Arabia in D.C. and amongst the American public at large and Western publics, which I never thought I would see in my lifetime. Now, if it can happen with Saudi Arabia, I do believe it can happen with China and India, even though they are massively powerful economic superpowers. I do believe there can be a backlash. And the Chinese and Indian governments do care about their international reputation.

What's so interesting about countries like this is, though they pretend to play that we don't give a damn what the world thinks, they do care about what the world thinks. And in India, at least, you still have a functioning opposition, a semi-free media, a thriving civil society that's trying to push back against Modi turning India from a secular republic into a kind of a Hindu-theocratic state. You're right. Well, first thing people can do right now, subscribe to Deconstructed Medi's podcast.

Check out his stuff on Al Jazeer English's up. front. Medi, it's so great to talk to you. Thank you for all that knowledge. I feel smart already. Thanks so much, guys. All right, buddy. Talk to you soon. See you. That's it. Thanks to many for joining the show. Always fun to talk to you. And Ben. Yeah, I got one more trip next week. We're going. Quallampoor with our former boss, Barack Obama. Oh, cool. And Michelle Obama. The Obama Foundation's doing a big program with young leaders. Cool. And KL. See in KL. Yeah. The tourist destination. Yeah, exactly. Thanks, guys.

Potty of the World is a product of crooked media. The senior producer is Michael Martinez. Our assistant producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Chris Basil. Kyle Segglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Malconian, and Milo Kim, who film and share these interviews on video each week.