Pod Save the World - Putin's Power Plays

Episode Date: April 21, 2021

Tommy and Ben discuss the president of Chad’s mysterious death, Vladimir Putin's imprisonment of Alexei Navalny, the devastating coronavirus outbreak in India, updates on what actually happened at the Natanz nuclear facility, SPACE HELICOPTERS!!, a not so super idea for a soccer league and more. Then Deputy National Security Advisor Jon Finer joins Tommy for a conversation on the Biden administration's Russia policy and the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsavetheworld. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome back to POT Save the World. I'm Tommy Ditor. I'm Ben Rhodes. We have a great show today. We're a lot to talk about. We're going to talk about the president of Chad's mysterious death, how COVID is still ravaging countries like India, while others have seemingly returned to normal. We'll talk a quick update on the attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, some very different nuclear news out of Japan. Well, there was an article we read about maybe the world's worst museum that we'll cover some really cool news about Mars. and then European Super Leagues, Ben, I'm excited to hear your take on the Americanification of European soccer. Then we're joined by Joe Biden's Deputy National Security Advisor, John Feiner.

We talk about what it's like working in the NSC these days, a lot of U.S.-Russia conversation, the refugees decision, and then we talked through how Joe Biden made the decision on Afghanistan. So stick around for that. Two quick things, Ben. And so if you want to stop that wave of voter suppression laws that are just like getting passed in states across the country. I'd like to stop that. Yeah. Yeah, we got to get rid of the filibuster.

We need the pass the For the People Act. So if you want to help out, go to Votesaveamerica.com slash for the people. You can join that effort. You can see a whip count. You can get involved. You can call your senator. It's really important stuff. And then if you missed it, Pod Save the People this week.

Co-host, Kai Henderson sat down with Oscar nominated director, Shaka King, to talk about his. his new film, Judas and the Black Messiah. It's a great interview, great episode. So check out the episode. Pat yourself on the back from Pod Save the People on Apple Podcasts or on your favorite app. And then, Ben, do you have some book news for us? Yeah. So I've resisted beating people over the head about the book. But I'll start doing that again now as we lead up to publication on June 1st. But this is exciting news on my, I'll put this out on my Twitter account. They're giving away 40 galleys, 40 copies of the book electronically. All you have to do is click on the form that I'll tweet, put your name in, you know, email,

and maybe you'll get a free copy of the book. And I have to imagine, I don't know how many people sign up for these sweetsakes, but, you know, you world those out there, I'll have a good shot at this thing. Sign up. The book is swamped. And so you sign up, try to get a free copy, read it if you like it, say something nice about it. I'd love that. I appreciate it.

And I'll talk more to you guys about the book. Tommy, I'd say too, Worldose while you're at it, Missing America got nominated for a Webby. Nice. Congrats. Yeah, vote. You know, smash that vote button. If you're voting in the Webbies, that's the best of the Internet Awards. I was pleased my first Webby nomination, Tommy.

Yeah. You're almost on your way to We Gotting, which is, you know, four more to go, I guess. Yeah. You're like, fuck you, man. That's very exciting. Also, everyone should read the book. Pre-order the book. It will be great.

I can't wait to read it. So check it out. Okay, let's turn to Chad, a place. I don't know if we've ever talked about Chad on the show. But Idris Debbie, the president of Chad, has died from injuries that he reportedly sustained while visiting troops on the front lines who are fighting against rebel forces. The details of the story, Ben, are, like, murky at best. It seems like maybe President Debbie was, like, visiting some troops who got overrun by rebel

forces. He got wounded in the process, later died. I don't really know. Either way, you know, it's a big deal. I mean, President Debbie's been in power for 30 years. He just won a sixth term, albeit in a disputed election. A transitional military council led by President Debbie's son said it will take charge for 18 months. Seems like a pretty long transition to me. But, you know, Chad has been involved in some, like, pretty intense fighting against Boko Haram. It's dealt with a lot of regional instability with his neighbors in Sudan and Libya. Ben, there's a lot we don't know about what happened here. But what did you, what do you? What do you? you make of the story. Can you think of another head of state that got killed in a military conflict in modern history or any other thoughts about what it would mean for the region?

So interestingly, I was thinking about exactly that question, Tommy. And also interestingly, the person I thought of was Gaddafi, right? Yeah, good call. Now, Gaddafi wasn't like fighting, but he was in an armed conflict. He was in his hometown of CERT, traveling in a convoy seeking to kind of escape from the collapse of his rule all around him, gets hit by a drone strike, tries to hide in a drain pipe, is dragged out of that drain pipe, essentially by a mob and killed. And what's interesting about that is, you know, the Libyan conflict kind of spilled over into places like Chad. You know, so part of the instability in that part of the world is, you know, fighters or militants

or, you know, gun runners and all the kind of instability that arises from, you know, a civil war and a kind of sense of chaos after. So, you know, it just shows you that I'm not saying there's a direct correlation between those two deaths, but in a way, that part of North Africa has been something of a conflict zone. And Chad has been this kind of, you know, he was the kind of leader who, because he was a counter-terrorism partner in part to the U.S., but largely the French, I think the French who've had a force in Mali of a few thousand troops working closely with Chad, the French, the former colonial power in Chad, were very close to this guy. And so, you know, I think it just is a reminder, right, that that part of the world, Chad, Niger,

obviously Libya, there remains a lot of instability, Mali. And, you know, you'd like to see some democratic process of succession. I would imagine that the combination of the way in which this guy died and the way in which politics works there were less likely to see that. But what you don't want to see is a dissent into all-out civil war, right, which would have a humanitarian cost. You know, obviously risk of terrorism goes up when you have a situation like that. So the thing to watch here is whether there can be some stability that leads to some kind of democratic process rather than this leading as a triggering event into, you know, more. widespread civil war in the country. Yeah, and look, again, I know nothing.

I only know what I read. But when you read about, you know, a president mysteriously dying on the front lines and then an announcement from a military spokesman about how this sort of military council is taking over, you know, my sort of my coup suspicion radar went up. But then the person taking over was his son, right? So I'm like, I don't know how to read this at all. Yeah. I mean, you know, and the fact that matter is that, you know, more may not come out.

You know, I mean, this could be, you know, we may never exactly know what happened. But yeah, it's an unusual thing that head of state dies in actual conflict. Yes, very unusual thing. Okay, let's turn to just to rush it for a minute, Ben, because, you know, we talked at some length in the interview today with John Feiner about, you know, Biden's views on, You know, the Russians amassing troops on the border of Ukraine and about Alexei Navalny and, you know, sort of the general trajectory. But I really wanted to just, you know, give you a chance, too, to sort of offer your thoughts. And in watching what's happening to Navalny, who's the opposition leader, who anti-corruption activists that we've talked about a number of times on the show, who by a lot of reports is on this hunger strike and is like inching closer and closer to death. It doesn't sound like, you know, he's getting the medical attention.

he needs, like, what else are you hearing and what do you think the West should be doing to try to, you know, fight to make sure this guy isn't slowly murdered in prison? So I heard, you know, I did hear from some people, you know, who were close to Navalny, who told me this is really serious. Could you tweet about this? Could you lift this up? You know, we need attention on this. And, you know, I believe it, you know, like the, there's a pattern in, um, in, these cases where, you know, the Russians, they poison people, they weaken people, they put them in prison, they deny their care in prison, the conditions in the prisons are horrible, and people die, you know, and it's, you know, they've tried to kill Navalny a couple

times, a couple of other ways. And I was really, you know, found it chilling. I was reading my audiobook, and I'm not saying this to plug my book. I'm saying this to kind of get across how much a guy like Navalny knew what he was signing up for in a way in that I was reading the audiobook yesterday including kind of quoting Navalny so I'm like reading these quotes in his voice which is a very chilling thing to do given the reports and and one of the things he said to me was you know of course I get afraid and I get afraid because when you are put in a Russian prison the moment when you hear the door the cell door clang shut you realize that they can do anything to you. Like they are totally in charge and you don't know what you're eating,

you don't know what you're drinking. And it was really, you know, harrowing to just kind of read his quote, you know, and think about, well, that's where that's where he's at. And he's got a kid, he's got kids, he's got a wife, you know, he's, this is a human being, right? And it just, it's hard to describe how sadistic and fucked up it is that Vladimir Putin feels such impunity that he's just, you know, slowly potentially killing the most prominent opposition figure in the country. And, you know, the previous most prominent opposition figure was probably Boris and Msov, who was shot and killed right in front of the Kremlin. So this is, you know, this is, this is some next level stuff. I mean, this is not normal, you know. I don't know, Tommy. I mean,

what do you think? I have some more thoughts, but, I mean, I have some more thoughts, but, I mean, How have you been feeling watching this? It's horrifying. You feel like you're watching someone get starved to death in front of your eyes. We can't see him, but you're seeing these reports day by day. And then when you just, when you step back and think about sort of the U.S. Russian relationship in a series of events that have happened since really 2012 when Putin came back into power and took over from Miedvedev, like it just kind of feels like the trajectory of U.S.

Russian relations is just steadily downhill. You know, there's election interference. is Crimea. There's hack after hack. At some point I'm just kind of wondering whether we have failed to find like a set of tools that really feels like it exacts a cost on Putin and might actually deter him. Like maybe I'm wrong. Maybe he's ripshit pissed about this latest series of solar wind sanctions. I'm not questioning their judgment here, but it's like, you know, a couple weeks ago, right, there were 40,000 troops on the eastern Ukraine border. This morning there's reports that it might be up to 120,000 soon, that seems like Putin's preparing to do something.

So here's what I've been thinking about. And first of all, you know, I've said this before, but, you know, the one thing we haven't done, right, is what Navalny was doing, right, which is if you take the full resources of the U.S. intelligence community and say, we are going to paint the most detailed, comprehensive picture of just how corrupt Vladimir Putin and his cronies are, and we're just going to start putting that out, you know? you know, that I think might, I think that might have an impact. It's a good idea. Because you see how nervous he is just about Navalny's videos, right?

But here's what I was thinking. I was thinking of just kind of sharing this today. It's like not that I know the answer. There are two scenarios to consider here because I'm not even sure what the U.S. can do at this point. Because we've tried resets, we've tried pressure. I don't think you can say, well, because we sanctioned him or because Biden sanctioned him. He's doing this in response. No, he's, he's done things bad, like invade other countries when we weren't sanctioning him. You know, it's... Right. Blaming Biden for the killer's comment.

So ridiculous. Exactly. I think he does it for his own reasons. And here's what I was thinking about. There's kind of two ways to think about Vladimir Putin. Here's the worst case scenario. Is I was thinking that, you know, Russia lost the Cold War. And this is, I'm not saying this is what I think is going to happen or is happening. But I want to paint the worst scenario and then I'm paying a difference in her. Russia lost the Cold War, and that was a hugely psychologically humiliating event to the Putin's psyche for sure. And, you know, we're only about 30 years after that. And we've seen this kind of radicalization of Russian nationalism, really Putin nationalism,

that has led to, you know, military actions like the occupation of a part of Georgia, the annexation of Crimea, the invasion of Ukraine. that is tied to them losing the Cold War, right? He's trying to take pieces of the Soviet Union back. He's started to get more and more brazen at home, killing opponents. The worst case in error, right, is like Germany lost World War I, you know, and it was 20 years later you get World War II, right? I'm not saying we're going to have World War II, but the worst case scenario is that this vein of humiliation and this kind of radicalization of Putinism, leading to invading other countries, they could just invade Ukraine. And I'm not saying it's going to be full on World War III, but this could be a leader who gets worse and worse and worse, you know, and starts killing people more brazenly in his own country, starts, you know, after Ukraine, maybe is there another former Soviet Republic he has his eye on? And there's a

situation where we're just in an incredibly dangerous position here for as long as Vladimir Putin is there. And that's the worst case scenario. I think the other scenario, which most of us, including myself, have thought, is this is a really corrupt guy who needs to remain in power so long as he's in power, he was rich and he's alive. If he loses power, he may no longer be either of those things, right? Because, you know, what is how many people has, right? Has he pissed off over the years? And that all he really cares about is sticking around. And that even some of this stuff like annexing Crimea is a way of him, you know, generating support at home and buttressing his legitimacy.

and he's a strong man and oh, it distracts the public from his corruption and these other things. That's actually the best case scenario is that he's just a corrupt guy who wants to stay in power and he does this kind of nationalist fluxing from time to time because it helps distract the public and give him legitimacy. And what's so frustrating about this is we don't know, you know, which end of the spectrum he is on. And it's just an incredibly dangerous situation because are we dealing with someone who wants to conquer Ukraine and is going to invade that country at some point to do that, and that could be a very bloody war, or we're just dealing with someone who's like a troll who jinns up, you know, troops on the border when he needs a distraction or something.

And I'm very sympathetic to the Biden administration. We just don't know, you know. We're not in this guy's head. But you have to assume the worst sometimes, you know. You have to assume the worst. And also I think he just engineered himself the ability to run for two more terms, right? So he's not going anywhere unless he passes away for some reason. Well, and even the running is kind of incidental because like if Alexei Navalny could run against him, I think Alexei Navalny might have beaten him, right? But if he's going to kill anybody who poses a credible challenge to him, he's just, he's there no matter what the rules say, you know?

Yeah, yeah. It's not an easy one in an issue I talked about with John Feiner at some length. So stick around for that interview. And I imagine we'll come back to it again, Ben, because it's not easy. Well, and I think at the end of the day, right? the only way this is going to get better, truly better, is if there's a different leadership in Russia, which, again, we are not going to impose nor should we. I'm saying if, like, the Russian people make some changes. In the meantime, all you can try to do is contain, put some guardrails

around how bad this thing could get. And even when we put all the sanctions on around the invasion of eastern Ukraine, we didn't necessarily think that was going to get him out of Crimea, but we thought that might be a deterrent against him going further, like, because we're showing, like if you keep doing this, it's just going to keep getting worse for you. And that may be the most you can do is just try to deter even worse actions by Putin. Yeah, absolutely. All right, well, let's start to some COVID news, because, you know, we've talked a lot about, you know, positive developments here in the U.S., positive developments of vaccinations, but that's, you know, that positive trajectory is not really the case globally. One country that's really struggling right now

is India, where there are well over 200,000 new COVID cases being reported. per day. I think I saw 200,000 is now like the seven-day average, and it's spiked as high as 275,000. And that's probably a massive undercount because the country's testing capacity is pretty overwhelmed. Hospitals have run out of oxygen. They're overcapacity. Doctors are contending with the new strain of the virus. They're calling the double mutant, which combines a mutation that makes it more transmissible with one that helps it evade the immune system, which sounds wonderful. A year ago, India locked down pretty early when there were just 500 cases. But that kind of of, you know, nationwide government intervention doesn't seem likely. In January, Prime Minister

Modi basically declared victory over COVID. But now major religious festivals are carrying on as usual. There's cricket matches. He's having political rallies. India has developed a vaccine of its own. They have a lot of manufacturing capacity. And so far, they've distributed over 100 million doses domestically. I think they exported 65 million doses to other countries, which has been absolutely crucial for a lot of other countries that don't have the ability to mania. manufacturer vaccines on their own. But now it seems like India is going to reduce its exports of vaccine because obviously, you know, they have to vaccinate a billion people. And that's a huge logistical challenge and it's getting more urgent. So, Ben, this is like kind of the worst case scenario. I think

that everyone's been dreaming of, you know, you have variants, you have overwhelmed health care systems, you have government officials that not only won't put restrictions in place, but are actually hosting like big political rallies. A lot of people are understandably saying like the U.S. needs to do something, the U.S. needs to help. I'm not totally sure what the range of options are. I'm just, you know, your thoughts on what we're seeing here, and if there's anything the U.S. can or should be doing. Well, I think, you know, first of all, you worry about India already because, you know, it's such a densely populated country in certain areas, right? And so it was always a place where a particular variant that gets out of control would be very worrisome.

And, you know, Modi's the brand of leader we've talked about a lot, right, where he wants to avoid this. He wants, is not what he wants to be talking about or focused on. You know, he's got a lot in common with Bolsonaro and Brazil where, you know, the other place where we have these kinds of variants. And he wants to create a kind of illusion of success around everything that he does. And COVID doesn't cooperate with leaders who want to create illusions of success, you know, because it's only going to respond to the science.

I think that they, they, if they're not going to be moving to lockdowns, there are only so much they're going to be able to do with vaccines in a country with a billion people. I mean, they have to move that as fast as they can. But I think what the U.S. can do in part is some of the vaccine that was being exported from India was, you know, being expressly developed and exported from there to this kind of pool of developing countries. And it seems like what is likely going to be the case in India is that they're not going to be able to sustain a situation politically where they're shipping huge amounts of vaccine to other developing countries while they're getting ravaged by these COVID variants. And so frankly, part of what the U.S. needs to do is figure out a way to make up the difference around the dissemination of vaccine to the developing world that then takes some of the pressure off India to keep some of that vaccine in the country and just get shots in arm.

faster, right? So it just shows you how this is all connected. This is all one big equation here, because if the U.S. working with other countries can dramatically ramp up the pool of vaccines that are available to, say, sub-Saharan African countries, then those sub-Saharan African countries won't rely on the vaccine that's being produced in India and it can stay there and the Indians can hopefully bend the curve quicker with their vaccination policy, you know? So, yeah, you'd like to see Modi move more to lockdowns. You'd like to see the Indian government take the more seriously in terms of, you know, it's social policies. But if it's a vaccine equation, then what the rest of the world could do is try to make up the difference from the Indian

vaccine that's not going to be going into the global pool here. Yes, that's exactly right. There's just a global vaccine capacity problem. There's probably, you know, sort of precursor chemicals that go into the making of the vaccines. You're hearing about shortages of those. Like, I do think that, like, you know, the Biden team is going to have to just turbocharge our ability to help everyone get that they need. Also, I don't know if we're still sitting on a bunch of AstraZeneca vaccine, but it seems like that ship has sailed and we should get that stuff to whoever needs it, whoever will take it as soon as possible. Yeah. Yeah, and I still think that this intellectual property idea needs to be pursued as well. I do too. Potentially. I just don't

I just don't understand why you wouldn't do it. But hey, you know, I'm not a pharma executive, so. Well, we play one on Twitter when we can. Speaking of Twitter, Ben, we're recording this Tuesday afternoon. I just saw come across the Twitter tranceom that Derek Chauvin was found guilty on all three charges. Derek Chauvin is the piece of shit who murdered George Floyd and sparked months of protests because of his just callous actions. So that is obviously an enormous relief, some justice for George Floyd's family, for people, you know, around the world watching America and wondering if people of color are, you know, allowed to be just murdered with impunity by police or if there's some accountability here and this is a good step forward. Yeah, I mean, if that we were talking before, if it had been

a not guilty verdict, not only would that have set off protests here, but I'm sure that would have set off protest internationally, just like, you know, people should remember that the murder of George Floyd was a global event, you know, that sparked protests all over the world. And we've had guests on the show from France and the UK where they had significant movements tied to this. I mean, the only thing I'd say, like, is when I saw the verdict come through, I kind of figured he'd be guilty just because it was so fast, you know, to get a verdict down. Yeah. And then I was like, every other case in my life that I remember like this, that the cop was found not guilty, which was kind of a crazy thing to realize, you know,

but hopefully this is a sign that maybe that's changing. I don't know. I hope. I hope it's a good sign, but, you know, a little tiny bit of good news, obviously a horrific situation. Yeah. But one we've all been watching closely. So some other very different COVID news, Ben, I saw that resident of New Zealand and Australia now have built a bubble. You can travel freely between the two countries for the first time in over a year. They're calling it a travel bubble. It's possible because both of them have basically eradicated COVID.

And I was trying to think, is there a better two-country bubble to get stuck in for a while while a pandemic passes than New Zealand and Australia. I'm not sure I could think of one. Well, you've got a wide open space there, you know, and like beautiful country and like some cool cities they're tucked in, right? So I don't know. That's pretty high in the list. I mean, unless your bubble is like a, the kind of bubble you're into is like a couple

Pacific Islands or something, you know, which probably don't have COVID anyway, right? Yeah. Other than that, yeah, I don't know. Like, what would you throw on your bubble? You know, like, I sort of think of does my bubble need to be adjacent, you know, like a France-Spain situation? I don't know how well they're dealing with COVID, but that's not a bad place to kill some time. But yeah, no, I think New Zealand, Australia, that might be about as good as it gets.

It's pretty sweet being on an island in a pandemic where you can completely seal it off from new cases. Yeah, but a very large island. Very large island. A lot to do that. probably, you know, maybe the Pacific Islands might turn into like a castaway, you know, talking to a volleyball type situation, you know, if you're, like, if you don't get the Tom Hanks reference. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you, like, but what's interesting to me about the COVID lockdown is as someone who's like travels a lot and likes to travel, if I could go anywhere right now, I'd like, I'd love to go to like a teeming Southeast Asian, you know, city. I would too. You know what I mean? Like go to like Vietnam and something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. and like eat some street food and like just be around masses of humanity, you know,

because I've been isolated, right? So that may be where I zag a little bit from you in that like, well, the bubble would be good on an island, but like I can't wait to get back out there and just be around human beings, you know? It's all I want. It's all I want. It's good like a big packed, you know, New York restaurant or something. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. All right. One update or sort of correction on something we talked about last week. So we talked about this incident in Iran that it targeted the entire. Han's nuclear facility and damage the big chunk of the centrifuges that Iran uses to enrich nuclear material. I think there have been some early reports that I had seen or, I don't know, somewhere that described it as a cyber attack of some sort.

But the subsequent reporting I've read has described what happened as like an explosion, basically, that cut off power to the centrifuges. That caused them to spin out of control and be damaged. So sorry for getting that wrong. But, you know, in some ways, for me, Ben, that if that's how it all went down, It makes the whole incident even more surprising because whoever pulled this off was able to gain physical access to this incredibly sensitive and presumably well-guarded nuclear facility. The New York Times had an interesting analysis piece today about how, you know, if you look over the last sort of year or two, Israeli intelligence seemingly has been able to pull off lots of these kinds of operations deep inside Iran. There was the al-Qaeda guy who was shot up in the street by some assassin.

And there's even suspicion now that the former deputy commander of the Kud's force, which is the elite Iranian military force that does a lot of their external operations abroad, he might have been assassinated. There were reports that he died of like, you know, a heart attack basically. Now people are wondering if that was true. So fascinating piece, highly recommend it. It is remarkable to me that, you know, these sensitive sites are just blowing up over and over again. I just, it's amazing. Well, I mean, it is pretty remarkable. And look, like we said at the time, the Israelis kind of seemed to one people to know they did it if you looked at the comments from the IDF in the Israeli government.

And so kind of being that up front about basically being responsible for making something blow up in another country, I mean, it reinforces that like a cyber war or conventional attack are really the same thing these days, right? But we tend to think of cyber as something. somehow less aggressive, but this is showing you, like you said, there have been assassinations, there have been acts of violence inside of Iran. And the Iranians, of course, have carried out proxy attacks and, you know, in all kinds of places, although not that many that I'm aware of in Israel recently. It shows you that there's basically this kind of low-grade war between Israel and Iran. And like, that's how we have to think of it. It's not as if there's peace and

there's war. We're somewhere in between here where they're hitting each other, they're kind of circling around each other. And obviously the danger is always that that can escalate. I will say that, you know, that the risk, right, from the Israeli perspective, and again, this is why we favored a nuclear deal, is that, you know, that the Iranians, you know, we discovered, you know, the Gohm facility, which they dug into a mountain. You know, so the Natanz is one, their main nuclear facility. Their other one is called Fordo, and it's in the city of Gohm. And it's like inside a mountain, you're definitely incentivizing them to take the whatever nuclear program they're pursuing secret, you know.

And I guess the Israeli bet is that between American and Israeli intelligence, we're so monitoring this space of Iranian nuclear. But I don't know. That's, you know, that is tricky because you kind of want to know where all the stuff is and to have an eye on it. And I do worry a little bit as someone who doesn't want Iran to get a nuclear weapon that these kinds of sabotage attacks are going to incentivize just pushing it all underground. But I guess that's a risk that the Israelis feel like if they're that deep inside of Iran,

maybe they feel like that they're going to spot it because it's not that easy to hide, you know, all the different components that have to go into a nuclear facility. Yeah, yeah. No, it's a good point, though, about pushing it into the secret world. Yeah. Some very, very different nuclear news here, Ben. Last week, the Japanese government announced that they're planning to start releasing radioactive water left over from the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster into the Pacific Ocean in about two years. The Fukushima plant was damaged in 2011 when a massive earthquake and then tsunami hit the region.

The water that we're talking about them releasing was used to cool that melted nuclear material in the facility. it was then treated and pumped into these storage tanks that are just sort of littered around the plant. This treatment process, which I don't even pretend to understand, supposedly reduces the amount of radioactive material down to levels that are safe to release. Not surprisingly, environmental groups and local fishermen aren't thrilled with the idea about releasing over a million tons of this treated water into the ocean. Plant officials say they have to get rid of it because they have all these storage tanks around the facility. taking all the space up and it's preventing them from conducting the rest of the cleanup activities. So Ben, reading all this stuff and digging back into the Fukushima disaster, it brought me back to that time in early 2011 when, like, the Arab Spring had been going for a couple months.

And like the world just felt like it was being upended for a whole bunch of reasons. But I think meetings about this were some of the scariest because there were definitely times where I wondered, like, I don't know that anyone is going to get a handle on this. I don't sure that this is fixable, but wonder what your memories of that time was and like where these conversations kind of ranked for you in terms of, you know, existential dread. Yeah, when I think about like Potsie the World Bread and Butter, right, we don't get Jared Rance as much anymore, but stories wise, like this is a good one in the sense, a scary one. I remember being in these video conferences, right, where first of all, like our ambassadors on the VTC,

when we didn't quite know just how bad this was, but it looked really bad in terms of this nuclear leak. And it did end up killing a lot of people in the area. But it was close enough to Tokyo that there was discussion of evacuating Americans from Tokyo. And so the scariest scenario of people have to keep in mind is if the U.S. Embassy starts evacuating Americans from Tokyo, this whole city of over like 10 million people

is going to freak the fuck out. And you're going to have mass chaos of people trying to get out of there and stuff. And it was such a hard decision because on the one end, you don't want to put Americans in any risk, but on the other end, you know, if you say, hey, we're advising you to leave, that, and because there were a lot of Americans in Tokyo, tens of thousands of Americans worked there. Not only are those people going to try to get out, but a lot of other people are. And so that, I remember being about the hardest thing. I think in the end, you know, we did advise, like, pregnant women and certain vulnerable populations to take extra precaution, but that the science

kind of ultimately pointed to the less alarmist scenario. But we were close. And it did make me consider what would that look like? And then the other thing is there was some concern about this stuff drifting over the Pacific Ocean, like contaminated toxic air, literally coming to the west coast of the United States. And look, I know people think that nuclear power obviously needs to be part of the solution for climate change. But man, you you live through something like that and you do think that like, you know, maybe there's, you know, there's safer ways of getting energy. I know we get dunked on by the nuclear power stands out there, but that scared the shit out of me. Oh, God, scared the shit of me. Yeah, you're just, you're okay with

catastrophic risk. You know, maybe it won't happen. Maybe it's a tiny, tiny low level of it. But that was horrifying. I also think that that debris and garbage from, uh, the tsunami is like still drifting around the Pacific Ocean, like massive piles of debris and stuff from, from just that one incident. And there's going to be more, you know, I mean, that's the thing is, um, the one thing you can count on as natural disasters and climate change is going to precipitate more natural disasters here. So, um, I think, you know, people should not, you have to take into account, um, as you're making decisions about things like nuclear energy, like what the risks are as well as the benefits. Yeah, absolutely.

Because here we are. We don't even know what to do with this water, right? I mean. No, right, right. And yeah, these are not problems that have short half-lifes. In fact, they have very long ones often by design. So Biden's got some big climate decisions coming up. So we'll keep an eye on those and talk about this more, I'm sure, very soon. Ben, I think we both saw the story that Azerbaijan is making a run at, you know, opening the most offensive museum in existence with this new, it's called the Park of War Trophies in Baku, the capital city. So we talked a lot last year about, you know, all the intense fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. Lots of soldiers died. Lots of civilians died. Lots of people were displaced. And it ended with Azerbaijan taking a lot of territory. story. So this open-air museum that they've opened up just started taking out of visitors. It includes

these just unbelievably creepy wax mannequins of Armenian soldiers in dead or dying positions. It includes hundreds of actual helmets that were supposedly worn by Armenian soldiers. There's abandoned Armenian tanks and guns. It's like really dark stuff, especially since, you know, this is not ancient history. This happened a few months ago. There's still POWs. There's still people on accounted for. And it wasn't some fringe thing like done by a group of extremists, right? The president of Azerbaijan went to the opening of the thing. So I'm just, you know, it's like it's tempting to kind of make fun out how fucked up it is because that's what I do when things are dark. But also I do wonder what, you know, sort of like a museum that's designed to incite ethnic

tensions says about the prospects for peace and reconciliation between Armenia and Azerbaijan or just the likelihood that this will be a low-grade conflict in perpetuity. I think it says it's a low-grade conflict, right? And I think also, though, like if this is what you're doing as president of Azerbaijan, like what you're doing is not making your country, this doesn't show strength, right? I mean, it shows the opposite of what they think it. You know, they probably think it shows how tough things. they are. And if the best thing you can offer your people is some museum about a bunch of people

you killed in the neighboring country, like you're not providing your people with opportunity, you're not providing your people with education, you're not trying to plug in your country to the world, you're just trying to cling to power by being the kind of person who goes to a museum that has like the helmets of dead people. I mean, it's totally fucked up. Yeah, it's totally fucked up. Okay, let's talk about a much more uplifting, literally. story. So the coolest thing I've seen this week, or maybe ever in my life, is NASA launched a small helicopter on Mars named Ingenuity. So it's amazing because, one, obviously, like, doing anything on Mars is just unfathomable to me. But two, the atmosphere on Mars is one, one hundredth as dense as

Earths. So the helicopter had to be engineered to be super light, had to have incredibly fast rotor speeds. And then it had to do all this without being able to be, like, connected or like controlled by ground patrol. So the first flight was a success. Ingenuity hovered 10 feet off the ground for 30 seconds. It did it fully autonomously. NASA says they could attempt up to four more flights, most of which are just designed to test the thing,

like short flights. But the last flight could travel some serious distances, maybe up to 2,300 feet up in the air or like 700, 800, 800 feet away. Amazingly, Ben, like ingenuity, this thing cost $85 million out of the $2.7 billion mission. And it uses a processor that was designed, I think, by Qualcomm for a cell phone. Like, that's the amount of, you know, tech that's in this guy. So it could, it sounds like this could be the first of many future Marscopters that will give scientists the ability to just see and study so much more terrain. So I don't know, this is just the coolest thing ever to me. I, I, it,

stories like this make me want to be alive for another, like, 100 years so that I can see the 10th version of ingenuity because you just, you know it's going to be incredible. Well, it's like in a dark world, right, that we talk a lot about some of the tough stuff going on. Like, it's good to be reminded that human beings can do some amazing stuff. And then if like the next five or ten years, we won't just see like further challenges, democracy and the negatives of technology, we can see this kind of stuff. I'm going to veer out of my way to like take a shot at telling Biden is doing, though, that is connected, right? What's connected is 2.7 billion sounds like a lot of money. But I think if you look at the track record of space exploration, there are all these other benefits we get out of the science that is developed that goes into this, you know, the miniaturization of stuff. Like what, well, what we obviously will learn on Mars, it can be repurposed for other things. But, you know, the technologies used to do things like this end up having other uses. And if you look at the U.S. the Pentagon budget, like Biden is not cutting that that budget, right? And a lot of that money is, is stuff, like if

airplanes we don't need, you know, like what, we need a bunch of F-35s or are we going to be fighting, you know, dog fights in the air? Are we going to need long-range bombers? Like, there's, there's an enormous amount, I think, of cost overrun in that defense budget. And Biden has rightly talked a lot about the need for America to be at the cutting edge of research and development and innovation and, you know, China is beating us on all these technologies. So I'm all for spending money on science and R&D and even space exploration. And I think for much less money than some of these bloated defense items. Or for instance, like, we're developing a new ICBM, you know, for nuclear weapons, right? Like, I don't think we need to do that. You know, like I'd rather spend

that money on stuff like this, you know? So I do think, I hope that. I hope that. we recognize that while this sounds like a lot of money, it's a lot less than the $800 billion, which I think has a significant amount of fat on that budget for the Pentagon. So this is where I'd be channeling, you know, the cutting edge development. Not to say we won't invest in weapons too, but like maybe take a little bit off the top of the Pentagon budget, put a lot of that into kind of the domestic stuff we're talking about, but some of that into this kind of thing where there are added benefits. Yeah, you know, something I think about a lot is Obama's 2011 budget. It shut down, I think, NASA's like longer term plan to return astronauts to the moon. But like, you know, early on in the administration, you know, we were under so much pressure by the deficit hawks that seemingly no longer exists, which is incredible.

Except Larry Summers. Larry Summers is still out of walking around. So Larry, to cut all these programs to like, you know, tighten our belts, et cetera, et cetera. And Obama. ended up cutting a program. I totally agree with you. Like, you know, it was A, one, it was a tough political hit in places like Florida that we probably didn't need. But two, you know, it's just the return on these things are completely unpredictable. It's exciting. It also, I mean, think about the entire country just kind of all eagerly reading about, you know, the Mars program or another return to the moon, right? Like, it unites us in a way that is patriotic but not jingoistic. It's not nationalists in a way that's excluding others. Like, I'm excited for the, you know, the Chinese

or others who are, or putting things in orbit around Mars. Like, I think space exploration should be exciting. It should be science-based. It should be funded. So there's, there was, like, this is a theme in my, in my book, right? And so again, forgive me world those, but this has actually been in front of brain for me, which is that I thought a lot about, like, how did I think of myself as an American? Like, in the subject of my book is being American in the world we made. And part of the basic subtext of that is that growing up, like the Cold War, like your American identity was kind of tied up in this thing where you're on the one side of the Cold War and the Russians are on the other and it's freedom versus, you know, communism or capitalism versus communism. But I also

thought about like the big things. Like Obama used to say like America does big things. And I remember after the bin Laden operation, he's like, this is a big thing we did, but it was killing somebody and it wasn't like going to the moon, you know? And as a kid, part of my conception of America is we went to the moon or, you know, we, even as a New Yorker, I remember as a kid, going to see the 100th anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge. And even just like building the Brooklyn Bridge was this big thing that we did. And part of what I like about this infrastructure bill and this Mars thing is that I think you're right. I think it's worth creating a sense of national identity. What does it mean to be an American? You and I can be proud of the Mars thing. So can somebody,

you know, who's on the right wing of a bunch of stuff. Like, I think it's important that there be spaces that are not militaristic, that are not political, their sports, their science. There are those things that bring people together. There's engineering. Like, that used to be part of how you tied together a nation of people from everywhere, of immigrants from everywhere, of people of different political persuasions. And I do think it's important for us to think about getting back to doing some of those things. I know the criticisms like, you know, spend X amount of money to go to the moon when people obviously have huge needs here on Earth. That obviously has to be balanced and the prioritization should be on doing things that can help people. But, you know what,

I actually think that it is, look, better to have a national identity tied up with things like space exploration and Olympic athletics than post-9-11. Wars, you know? Because what Bush did was like, say, well, we've had this kind of gap where there's a lack of national identity and national purpose after the Cold War. So I'm going to make the entire purpose of this country vanquishing these terrorists after 9-11. And that's part of how we got Iraq. And that's part of how we got all the way into Afghanistan because it was like it wasn't just going to be enough to go kill Al-Qaeda. We had to do something bigger, you know? And that led to some dark places. So I think it's worth thinking hard about other ways of, you know,

of creating a space for national identity, national service is another one of them. It's something that is more important than I think we give it credit for, you know. I totally agree. I was just reading in this book about 1976 and the country's bicentennial, which was sort of coming off this kind of dark period, you know, with Nixon and Watergate and all these disclosures from the church committee about like CIA assassination campaigns and malfeasance, right? And there just wasn't a lot, Vietnam. There wasn't a lot to feel great about in the country. Like, people weren't exactly excited. And then there was this big bicentennial celebration that no one was

kind of anticipating or excited about necessarily. And then when it happened, people were super into it. And it brought people together. And I agree. Like, people just need, like, you want, you got to rally people around something, especially now when we're all literally isolated in our home. because of COVID or before that, we were isolated in our cell phones because, right, all of us exist in iMessage more than we like speak to people. Yeah. No, and look, it connects like Azerbaijan, right? Their national identities now tied up in like a museum with a bunch of like killed Armenians.

Like that's dark, right? You know, leaders, if you're not channeling that desire for belonging and identity into something constructive, it usually ends up getting channeled into us versus them identity based up, dark places, right? We are not those people. We're not, you know, we, it's like this caucus, you know, these nut job Anglo-Saxon caucus that the Republicans have. Like that's the other theory, right, ethno-nationalism. Like, we are the white people from this white culture, or we're not the immigrants or the brown people, or we're not the terrorists, we're not radical Islam, we're not the black president. And I really think a big piece of this is when I look back, you know,

moon, the civil rights movement, the things that make me proud to be an American, what are those next iterations of that? What are the things that can give us a positive sense of who we are as a people? And I think space exploration is one of them, it's not everything. But scientific ingenuity is something that Americans have usually gotten pretty jazzed about, you know? Yeah, absolutely. You know, this conversation, unexpectedly very interesting, have dovetails with this next conversation, which is about European soccer, which is also very much kind of with their identity. Yeah.

Yeah. So there have been these reports and soccer fans are pretty pissed, Ben, about this proposal to create a European Super League. I don't know if you've heard about this. Yeah. Oh, yeah. But so, like, I don't know how much listeners watch, you know, the Premier League or European Soccer.

I'll try to give them like a simplified version because, like, I'm not that familiar with it personally. But, you know, the way this European soccer system currently works is there's all these domestic soccer leagues, right? There's the English Premier League, Spain has a league, France, Germany, Italy. They all have leagues. And they're all, you know, the quality within the leagues ebbs and flows like any sports league, but like, you know, in most places, there's a league owned by a really rich guy who can pay lots of really good players and they kick ass, right? So on top of that

competition within these domestic leagues, there's these sort of intercontinental competitions to see which domestic league is best. So the top teams compete in the Champions League, right? So the winner of that is the best team. team in Europe. So like someone from the, a team from Spain plays against an English Premier League team to see who's the best in their crown the winner. What this new Super League proposal would do is it would take, start with the 12 best teams from Spain, Italy, and England, put them into this like new league that is a closed ecosystem where they only play each other. And then the benefit for those teams is they all split all the money that the best teams get from TV deals

and sponsorships among themselves. And the goal was, to grow the Super League to a total of 20 teams. Now, all the other leagues went nuts. Yeah, they would crush the other leagues, you know. Exactly, right. So, like, the Champions League, the body that oversees them, they're furious, the domestic leagues are furious, fans are furious because it just robs them of any chance. So Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, they've denounced it.

So, Ben, like, right as we were coming in, there was a new report that this might be unraveling. But I was just trying to imagine, like, for us, if some – and, oh, by the way, a lot of these Super League team owners are American. So I think that's especially annoying. Like, imagine if, like, some Russian oligarch came in, bought the 12 best major league baseball teams, said, now you're only going to play each other. Sorry, all the small markets.

Like, you're screwed. Well, it's fucking bullshit. And with number one, I would hope that the world audience, like, overlaps with the type of Americans who watch, like, Premier League soccer. I bet it does. But it is, it's like the worst of capital. Right? Because, you know, it is totally connected to what we're just talking about because sports is a big piece of people's identity. And in a way, Tommy, what this is, right, this is capitalism. This is why this is what the excesses of capitalism ruin everything, right? And a bunch of billionaires who want to get a little bit richer by hoarding the pot and then therefore starving the soccer teams from smaller cities in these countries. This has kind of happened in the United States in minor league baseball.

So binary league baseball has basically been getting starved too, right? And there's been consolidation and, you know, moving teams. And, and, you know, you got these cities that had like a minor league team for a while and then something's taken away. And that really robs a place of its identity, you know. And this is like we need to think about as Americans about like capitalism. Like it needs all kinds of guardrails and regulations and range. And, and this is like we need to think about as Americans about like capitalism. Like it needs all kinds of guardrails and regulations and range. And, in of excesses. And this is yet another area of that where the profit motive alone, if the profit motive is the only thing driving the sports owner, of course you do this. But by doing this, you then ruin what people love about sports, which is how much these teams are tied to places, right? And I hope this doesn't happen for that reason. I hope that national, where capitalism is out of control, national leaders should step in and prevent something from happening. I hope they prevent this from happening? Yeah. I mean, look, obviously sports is a business, but if you're like a Milwaukee Brewers fan, it sucks when, you know, teams in L.A. or Boston or New York can have like

two or three times your payroll and kick your ass all the time or go buy your best player. But it's a business that has succeeded because people could come to love athletes because those athletes played in their city for a long time. Oh, yeah. And actually, so they're going to potentially kill the allure of these sports because if basically players are for hire in smaller and smaller numbers of places, then less and less people are going to be into soccer or into whatever the other sport is, you know? And the same way that, by the way, free agencies, we're doing it in this rabbit hole, this is more for Jason and take line. But like, like, in the same way that like players just leaving cities whenever they can in

other American sports has probably undercut how much people like baseball, you know, because their team can't afford free agents anymore. Yeah, I do think you need a better salary caps. I mean, like, parity is everything. I think, you know, especially in sort of the Europe, the, like the EPL, Europe, the English Premier League, you have all these teams that are just not great, but they get some money and attention and, you know, like excitement when they get to play some of the best teams. And then, you know, some of the worst teams get relegated to a league below.

So there's all these added excitement. And yeah, it does sound like this super league idea would just like absolutely rip out and trash the entire like DNA or the backbone of the way European soccer is set up and frankly the reason why so many people love it. So it was good to read as we were just kind of walking in that this thing might be dead. Yeah. Yeah. For one thing, Boris Johnson finally doing something good. Okay. When we come back, we'll have my conversation with Deputy National Security Advisor John Feiner. So stick around for that. I am so excited to welcome John Feiner to the show. he is President Biden's Deputy National Security Advisor.

He's a friend and a colleague for a long time. John, great to talk with you. Great to be here. Thanks a lot for having me. So, you know, we were sort of like chit-chatting offline. I'm like trying to always sort of imagine you guys in the various spaces that, you know, Ben and I used to haunt back in the day. So my first question is sort of like curiosity about how you're operating during COVID

because, you know, NSC staffers like yourself, you spend most of your waking existence in rooms called skiffs where you're allowed to look at classified information. It's hard to imagine a less COVID-friendly environment. You can't like, you know, social distance in the situation room or crack a window to improve airflow for obvious reasons. Are you guys able to have full National Security Council meetings yet? Like, are you functioning in a way that feels normal? How has that been going? I'd say we're functioning pretty close to normal in the way that you would remember the NSC. And there are a few big exceptions to that. One is everybody. is still wearing masks in all of our meetings and everywhere we go. The other is the situation

room itself. Most of the principals and the deputies and the others who would normally gather there are on the screen as opposed to live and in person. So you have the White House team in the room. You have the departments and agencies on video. And to be honest, it's worked pretty well so far. I'm not sure you'd notice a major difference other than those two things. I mean, that's kind of sweet for the cabinet because I'm sure those commutes get old pretty fast. Yeah, exactly. People still complain about too many meetings. I'm sure that's not a surprise to you to hear, but if you don't have to actually get in the car and drive over to the White House, it makes it a little easier to make demands on people's time. Yeah. So look, you've had a lot of

like serious government jobs. John Kerry's chief of staff, but you also, you know, had a job at one point where you helped prepare the Deputy National Security Advisor to be in a million NSC meetings, and now you are running them yourself. Like, how has the transition been? Like, what kind of things are you learning about the process that you didn't know before? Yeah, it's a bit scary. to think that it was, I don't know, nine or ten years ago that I was working out of the very same office when Tony Blinken now, our Secretary of State, had the job that I have, the Deputy National Security Advisor job. I would say the biggest difference is that in the meetings themselves, you know, in this role, you're the one that actually has to lead the meetings.

There's a lot more preparation that goes into sort of behind the scenes and getting ready for the actual show. But in my previous role, once you got into the meeting, you could sort of take notes, start thinking about the rest of the day, but you didn't actually necessarily have to be on at all times. The sort of exhausting thing about this job is in all the conversations, you're the one sort of calling on people, making sure the conversation stays on track. So the meetings themselves are the event. Yeah, they definitely are. Let's turn to some policy stuff. I was hoping to start with Russia, because you know, you're seeing these increasingly alarming and alarmed quotes from Ukrainian officials about Russia amassing, by some estimates, over 100,000 troops on the border of eastern Ukraine or in Crimea.

There are Russian military exercises in the Black Sea that are ongoing. I know that Tony Blinken, the Secretary of State, has met with allies in NATO to talk about this. He said that if Russia acts recklessly, there will be consequences. Can you just help listeners understand, like, what kinds of things are you watching for and what kind of Russian actions do you feel like, okay, will lead to consequences? So we've obviously seen exactly what you're talking about. significant buildup of Russian forces on the border with Ukraine. We've been quite clear that this is a concern. This is a place that Russia is already causing a lot of instability through the

separatists and the rebels that it sponsors, that it backs in eastern Ukraine who have been fighting against the government there. Now they are putting their own forces on the border. Obviously, the concern is a repeat of what we saw in 2014 when, I think, without the rest of the world really seeing it coming or knowing it was going to be coming, the Russians launched a full-on military intervention in Ukraine. So we've been pretty direct, both with the Ukrainians, that we want to have their backs in this situation. And we want to stand up for their sovereignty and their territorial integrity and directly with

the Russians, too. President Biden spoke directly with President Putin, said he was concerned about this, said the Russians should pull back their forces. We don't know exactly what their intentions are, but we've tried to be clear about what would be a big problem for us in the world. You know, I saw that Jake Sullivan recently said there will be consequences. If anything happens to Alexei Navalny, who is the Russian opposition leader, currently being unjustly imprisoned by the Russians and reportedly in very bad medical shape.

What kind of leverage do you think the international community has to help ensure Navalny's safety? And then, you know, sort of relatedly, I wonder if you guys have considered, you know, taking a page out of Navalny's playbook and publicizing corruption by Putin, and those around him because it does seem like that path or that tactic in particular has really upset Putin and caused him to react. So we came into office already having a lot of issues with the Russians. President Biden said very early in his tenure, I think it was just about the first week in office in a phone call with President Putin that we were going to hold Russia accountable for a series of things it had done, including the poisoning of Alexei Navalny, that we considered

just to be beyond the pale. That included their interference in our election, that included the intrusion in solar winds and the stealing of information related to that cyber attack. And just in the last week or two, we have actually imposed those consequences now on Russia. We took a series of steps related to Navalny, including some sanctions, including some other things,

as well as on election interference, where we decided to sanction a few Russian companies that were involved in that work. We sent some Russian operatives in the United States out of the country. And so the goal of this is not to escalate with Russia. Russia is a big country. It's got a sophisticated military. It is still a world power, even though it's maybe not on the order that it was during the Cold War.

Our goal is to put stability and predictability into this relationship and to speak to them honestly and hold them accountable. And those last two pieces are important. We don't think we've seen that the last four years of the relationship or the Trump administration. and we think too often let them off the hook for the kinds of things they were doing. Yeah, no, look, they absolutely did let them off the hook. But though, you know, when I sort of step back and think about, okay, starting in 2012, when Putin returns to the presidency, it does sort of feel like things have just gotten steadily worse, right?

I mean, there's the annexation of Crimea, the election interference, hack after hack after hack. You know, the U.S. has piled on a lot of sanctions on Russia, including the really significant sanctions that you guys announced last week as a result of solar wins. But it's just, it's never been clear to me what actually deters Putin. Like, do you have a sense of what kind of things actually, you know, get his attention and can deter these activities? So, look, our sense is that no single action that we take in this regard is going to change Russia's behavior in and of itself or change its calculus.

What this is going to take is a sustained effort over time, including speaking honestly and publicly about what we see that Russia is doing that we don't accept, including, by the way, and here's another area where we're taking a different approach from that of our predecessors, working closely with partners and allies so that it's not just our sanctions. It's actually our European partners who have much more economic activity with Russia. So their sanctions are much more consequential than ours are. So making sure that they work together with us. And so we move together so that the costs on Russia for the things it's doing are greater.

And then also, by the way, finding ways to work with Russia. You know, Russia may be a country that treats us in an adversarial way in a number of areas, but we also work with them on Iran. We work with them on North Korea. We work with them to an extent on arms control. And so we have an affirmative agenda with Russia as well that we're going to pursue even as we hold them accountable. So I want to turn to Afghanistan for a minute. So, you know, President Biden made a big decision to get all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by September 11th of this year. can you just like kind of take us inside the process for how he arrived at that decision?

Did you guys have a series of meetings where there are like international consultations? How do you come to a decision that big in the Biden administration? Sure. And look, I'm obviously now talking to someone, you who has been through an Afghanistan, a policy decision process and a review from your time in governments, you have some sense of what this must have been like. A few too many meetings. And you know, in the past, there's been some ugliness to it. There's been a lot of leaks associated with these processes.

A lot of people have strong views and understandably so after 20 years of conflict. I think one of the things we're proud of in the last few months is that we really did run an intensive process. I think 10 or 11 deputies committee meetings, three or four principals committee meetings, four or five times where the whole interagency got together with the president so that he could hear directly from his commanders in the field, from the leaders of the Pentagon and the State Department, exactly what they thought was the best way forward. So this was an intensive process. People say, you know, didn't the president know what he wanted to do, having worked on Afghanistan before. And the truth is, if you've been out of office four years, you may come in with strong views.

But you have to really dig in on an issue of such high stakes and high consequence. So you understand what's changed since your last time, you know, in these rules. And he really spent the time to do that. He asked hard questions. He engaged our partners and allies. In the end, he made the decision that he made after I think we really did do everything possible to surface honest. options for him about what the possibilities were. You know, like you're seeing a lot of people. Look, I mean, I think there are some of the usual

suspects who are coming out and saying, oh, we're cutting and running, you know, like, this should be conditioned based. I think the Lindsay Grahams of the world might as well, you know, have been saying the same thing for a decade about Iraq, Afghanistan, you name it. But there are others, you know, I think, you know, especially within Afghanistan, who have reasonable criticisms or concerns about, you know, the trajectory of the Taliban, what might happen to women's rights if they were to resume power? What kind of leverage do you think the U.S. or the international community will have to manage those concerns once U.S. and potentially NATO troops are out of there? So look, I think we expected these concerns to be raised. We certainly didn't

expect this decision to be 100 percent universally sort of received with a claim by consensus. We knew there were people who had other views. But I think two things we came to realize during the course of this process. One is that conditions-based really meant setting ourselves up with conditions that were unlikely to ever be met. So in other words, conditions-based basically meant an indefinite U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, which is, again, a credible thing for somebody to argue, but it was a President Biden's strong view that was not in the best interest of the United States. The other is that this notion that our troops gave us leverage over the future of Afghanistan, over the negotiations, may have been true at one point, although I think it's

dubious because we had 100,000 troops on the order of that in Afghanistan, weren't able to kind of produce the sort of diplomatic outcome that people want. We now have somewhere on the order of 2,500, 3,000. So that amount of quote-unquote leverage we assessed was not likely to be able to bring about the outcome that people desired. And in the end, he also just didn't really believe that our troop presence should be used in that way. In other words, should be used as a bargaining chip in what is essentially a war between two Afghan parties. So we decided to take that off the table in the diplomacy. We do think we have leverage over Afghanistan going forward. We can sanction them. We can withhold assistance that we place on them. Afghanistan, I think,

wants to not be a pariah state the way it was in the 90s under the Taliban and before that during its long civil war. I think they want a modern economy. They want to be able to trade and engage with the West. And we, to some extent, can control the extent to which that's possible for them. And so we'll use that to try to preserve some of the gains that they made. Yeah. One of my last sort of area of questions for you is, you know, there was this announcement last week that that caused a little bit of confusion about the sort of cap on refugee admissions. Initially, it seemed like the administration might keep in place a cap from the Trump era of 15,000. And then Jen, Saki clarified that, you know, that number will be officially released on May 15th. I guess just like stepping back away from, you know, like the confusion is just the question of what infrastructure needs to be in place. to actually get that done, to move that number of people to the U.S. to help them get resettled,

to make sure that, you know, it's a successful process. Because I know there's sort of been reporting and talk about how some of that infrastructure was dismantled by the Trump administration. And I'm curious, like, what is required and what it'll take to get it all back in place, because obviously, you know, you want people not just to come to the U.S., but to be successfully set up to succeed here. Yeah. So look, I spent a lot of my career. working on refugee issues inside the government and outside the government. And one of the things that I think is quite clear and that we realized from the minute that we got here, although we had some, I think, anticipation of this is that the last administration really did spend four years

doing everything possible to try to destroy the U.S. refugee admissions program. They transferred officers who were involved in processing refugees out of their jobs and into other areas. They slowed down the process of security clearances and vetting for refugees, not because they wanted to make it stronger, just because they wanted to, in a sense, make it slower so that people would move more slowly through the system and not get here as quickly. They set up a refugee determination, it's called, presidential determination. That's not just the number of refugees that the U.S. will admit every year, which has gotten a lot of attention. They set it at 15,000, which is the lowest it's ever been in the history of the program. but they also determined which countries in which regions those refugees could come from, and they picked places where there, frankly, are not refugees who are ready to travel to the United States. So under their description, it would have been impossible even to get to this very unambitious level of 15,000 refugees,

because they picked places, unlike Africa, unlike the Middle East, where there are refugees, places where there just weren't refugee populations to choose from. So we came in and now have to rebuild this program, have to put resources, and personnel back into the parts of our government that process refugees have to make other improvements, like allowing refugees to have representation, lawyers, or other personal representatives in this process. And yes, we had to redo the regional allocation so that Africans and Middle Easterners could travel here, and we'll eventually have to raise the cap as well. But right now, we've only let in thus far, most of it under the Trump administration's policy, 2,000-ish,

maybe 3,000 almost refugees. So we're not anywhere near this case. cap of 15,000, although I think we will be raising that in the near term. Got it. And is COVID slowing down this process? I mean, what added hurdles does the pandemic add? It's a good point. So the pandemic has slowed this down in a number of ways. One, migration during the height of the pandemic decreased a bit as people stayed put a bit more than they would have under normal circumstances. But second, U.S. government officials who would normally be traveling to do refugee screening interviews in parts of the world where we don't have a permanent presence in place to do that, we're restricted from traveling because of COVID protocols. So that stuff is just now ramping back

up and we expect we'll be able to process more refugees with those people back on the road. Got it. So the travel you're talking about by these U.S. officials is part of the extreme vetting process, quote unquote, that Trump would always demagogue? Yeah, I'm not sure we call it extreme vetting. I think we would call it suitable appropriating. security vetting. This is, by the way, the most heavily screened, heavily vetted part of any of the immigrant population, the refugee population. So while there is a lot of fear mongering about the risks that refugees pose to the United States, the reality is quite different. The rate of any sort of crime or violent incidents among refugees in the country is extremely low. The level of vetting and security screening they get is extremely high. And yes, the people who do this, they're called circuit rides, people from the Department of Homeland Security who go around the world and, and do these screening interviews, that slowed down a lot under COVID and we'll be picking it back up. Got it. Well, that makes whole sense. John Feiner, thank you so much for joining the show. It's great to talk to you, especially from this, whatever, this new studio and EOB.

I'm very impressed and kind of jealous of the new comms team over there. I'm just happy you invited me so I got to see this place and got out of my office for a minute or two. Yeah. How many meals, breakfast, lunch, and dinner have you not eaten at your desk since you took the job? I think if you don't count like peanuts and chips, I would say under a handful. How's the mess food these days? The same high quality you remember. Okay, good, good. John, thanks again, man. Great talk to you and keep up the good work and hope to talk to you soon.

All right. Take care of Tommy. Thanks. Thanks again to John Finner for doing the show. And we will talk to you guys next week. See you guys. Pod Save the World is a crooked media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our associate producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer.

Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Yelfreed, Nar Malkonian and Milo Kim, who film and share our episodes as videos each week.