Pod Save the World - Samantha Power’s point

Episode Date: January 13, 2021

Tommy and Ben discuss last week’s violent coup attempt and the call for new domestic terrorism laws, how world leaders are reacting to Trump’s Twitter ban, Netanyahu’s announcement of new Israeli settlements and how Biden should handle it, and all the things Mike Pompeo is trying to screw up for the incoming Biden administration. Then former US ambassador to the UN Samantha Power joins to talk about how to restore American credibility at international organizations, Bill Burns as CIA director, last week’s mass arrests in Hong Kong and refugee policy.

Welcome back to POTSave the World. I'm Tommy Ditor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, I don't know about you, man. My day just got really, really good. We just had a great conversation with former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power. Her book has come out and paperback. And we had talked about a whole bunch of stuff that I think you will all want to hear. But also, we just saw a tweet come through that said Mitch McConnell might support impeachment. So I did not see that coming. And that is really good news for, I think, the entire planet. Yeah. With Mitch McConnell, I I always wait until I have the receipts. Yeah, me say it publicly. But just hearing it makes me feel better. Just the possibility of, and I thought Sam power is good on why it's still important to show accountability, you know. Yeah, that's right. We have a great show today.

So we got the interview with Sam at the end. We're going to start with the attack on the Capitol last week by a fascist mob incited by Donald Trump. And the call that has ensued for new laws to deal with domestic terrorism. We're also going to get into the need to quickly confirm Biden's national security team and why his team has actually started putting pressure on Republican senators like Rob Portman. We're going to get into the international reaction to social media companies banning Donald Trump kicking him off Twitter, banning him from Facebook. We're going to talk about Mike Pompeo's like pathetic MAGA rage tour to end his tenure as the worst Secretary of State in history. Ben, I just saw that Hugh Hewitt interviewed Mike Pompeo and Hew.

attacked both of us by name during the interview. So we're apparently renting some space and old Hughes head for nothing. So that is exciting. But a lot to cover today. So why don't we start with last week's events? So there was this fascist attack on the Capitol. And, you know, there's been a debate in the media about how to describe it and how the government should respond. I think those two are linked. So I would argue that, you know, just describing what we saw, it was clearly an act of domestic terrorism. These were, you know, violent criminals. They were trying to intimidate or coerce Congress in furtherance of an ideological goal, which in this case was Trumpism, I guess. There are some people now who argue that Congress needs to create new laws, new authorities to treat domestic terrorism as a new crime and give law enforcement more authority to prosecute it.

So this gets a little confusing because in practice, foreign terrorism and domestic terrorism are the same thing. But it's easier for the government to collect intelligence on foreign terrorists. There's more laws on the books that prosecutors can use to charge foreign terrorists than there are to charge domestic ones. Specifically, we're talking about laws against providing material support to terrorists or they're a charge of conspiracy to commit terrorism. So, for example, if I Tommy Vitor American citizen gave money to Hezbollah, I could be arrested. but the FBI couldn't necessarily arrest or charge me if I gave money to the proud boys to help them travel to D.C. to commit a terrorist act. So it's probably constitutionally protected activity. So it's complicated. Congressman Adam Schiff has a bill that would create

a new domestic terrorism statute, give law enforcement more, you know, to clear legal statutes to prosecute these cases. Stepping back a little bit here, Ben, like, I don't know. I'm not a prosecutor. I don't know enough about charging these cases. to know whether this is necessary from their point of view. Some prosecutors say they felt hamstrung in these domestic terrorism cases. Other experts argue that there are just more than enough terrorism authorities on the books. I'm not really sure. My instinct is that new rushed counterterrorism laws are a bad idea.

This is probably more about prioritization. I want to see DOJ refocus his attention on these far right white nationalist extremist groups who are just living in the U.S. with lots of guns. But Ben, did I leave out anything from your experience about the challenges of dealing with domestic terrorism? And what do you make of this debate about whether Congress should pass a law or whether there's insufficient authorities or statutes available? Like, what's the right path forward?

Yeah. I mean, here's what I'd say. And I did work on this a lot in the eight years in the Obama administration because we were focused on domestic radicalization and frankly got a lot of shit from Republicans for including white supremacists along. with, quote unquote, radical Islam in their terminology. I think the first thing we should say, though, Tommy, is that the answer to that fascist mob is not going to be even the law enforcement efforts that you undertake against certain groups.

We have to change something inside of America. And this is a longer conversation, so I'm not going to belabor it here. But, I mean, you know, the Republican Party stopping being a toxic far-right party that relentlessly lies to those people, regulation of social media platforms. so they're not just toxic waste dumps of conspiracy theory. There's overhauls of American, like, society that need to happen because of that mob that are less about laws and more about, like, just like, what are we as a country and how do we drain the toxicity out of what led to that mob?

But that's a whole set of issues to talk about. I think for the incoming team, here's how I'd think about this. Number one, analytically, they have to do a lot of work in understanding the, who are the violent, potentially violent actors here, right? Because, you know, you've got tens of millions of Americans who believe crazy shit right now, who believe that the electron was stolen, who believe maybe that, you know, Q and on, that there's a cabal of child sex traffickers. That's the broad brush that you definitely don't want to paint, obviously. No, yeah.

But we also know they're like militia groups, right? Like the groups in Michigan that wanted to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer were like these kind of weird right-wing militias. Some of these dudes who showed up. Proud boys, oathkeepers, three percenters, yeah. Yeah, some of these fascists who were more heavily armed who might have been planting pipe bombs may be an organization that are literally terrorist organizations that you have to treat as such. And so analytically, because the Trump team probably hasn't been doing this, the incoming group, right, through DHS and DOJ, just needs to try to figure out what is the challenge? Like, what is the breadth of organized violent white supremacy in this country?

And then have a conversation about authority. So I agree with you, don't just pass a bill right now, you know? There needs to be, like, identify the challenge. Like, who are we talking about? How widespread is this? What is necessary to deal with this challenge? And then ask the question, is there some. legal authority that we need that we don't currently have. And there may be, but make it prescriptive

to what the new team identifies. And then, because I also agree, like, some of this is prioritization. And then the last point here is that in this radicalization challenge, you know, sometimes it's not like the, you know, the Patriot Act authority that allows you to spy on X place in the United States that matters. It's just like, how do you build relationships with, you know, the Patriot Act authority. state and local, particularly local governments, right? Like, you know, local law enforcement, local city governments in places where there might be one of these militia threats. And how are you just like providing a space for community members to come forward and just say like, hey, I'm a little worried about my neighbor. You know, he's been stockpiling fucking weapons and

like the Nashville guy was building a fucking bomb in his trailer and his, you know, I think, his fiance or somebody who he had been in relation with, I think tried to alert the authorities of this, you know, and they kind of went, knocked on his door and then left. So some of this is just, it's not like you need new authorities. It's just that you need to, you know, reach into relationships with, you know, local law enforcement so that if they see something weird, they can bring it to the federal government say like, hey, this guy seems like he's a part of some militia group that's been meeting in the back and, like, building explosives, you might want to take a look at this, you know? So some of this is just about, yeah, like you said, prioritization, but understanding, I can't underscore

this enough, understanding what the actual threat is, right? Yes, we know the threat is that tens of millions of Americans may believe in fucking Q&N, but that's not who those people are not all committing crimes and plotting the violent overthrow of the government. You have to separate those folks out and then figure out, okay, what do we need priority-wise, resource-wise, and maybe, legal authority-wise, to deal with this threat. Man, the totally different treatment of the Christmas Day bomber this year in Nashville versus Umar Farouk Abdul Matalov during our administration blew my mind. Yeah. So yeah, an example to me of a broad brush approach that would be damaging would be a renewed call to force tech companies to

build back doors into encrypted apps, right? That's something that would mess up all of our privacy and not necessarily get the bad guys. A few thoughts in no order, Ben. One, it's just unbelievable. to me that DOJ's first briefing on this incident was today, nearly a week after it happened, especially since we know that they're still investigating like pipe bombs that were left on the scene, and the Huffington Post reported that members of Congress have been briefed on all these other very serious additional plots on Congress and in state capitals. It doesn't seem like this was an intelligence failure in that information about these plots happening online wasn't collected. it seems like it wasn't taken seriously.

And I think that's been something we've seen through the duration of the Trump administration. I mean, I think a whistleblower came out and said he was told to play up the threat from Mantifa. He was told to play down the threat of white nationalism. So this is a consistent thing. I imagine you probably have this thought as well. I can't help but think of all the times that Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham would yell at Obama and say he won't even say radical Islamic terrorism. If you can't say what their threat is, how can you defeat it? Like to your broader point, it is time for those guys to step up, call out the radicals in their own party, name what's happening here. And then we can proceed. And then the last thing that I think really concerns me is there were off duty cops, firefighters, former members of the military in that mob. The Secret Service put an officer under investigation for posting on Facebook that lawmakers who support Biden's win or treasonous. All those institutions need to do an internal scrub.

ASAP because there is clearly a problem of radical white nationalism, sort of fascism within law enforcement and military entities and something that, you know, you can get browbeaten out of talking about that happened to us during the Obama years. But we need to just start speaking the truth about this stuff. Yeah. I mean, like you called out like fucking Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and these guys. I mean, you know, Lindsay Graham, happy to demagogue. I mean, if a single Muslim had tried to, you know, break a vase in the Capitol, you know, during the Obama administration. It would have, you know, he would have tried to turn it into a, you know, six-month story and send the guy to Gitmo. And, I mean, it just exposes the rank hypocrisy that, that the United

States Capitol was overtaken by a violent mob that looted the place, you know, that threatened people, that led to the deaths of people, killed people. And these guys, are still hedging how they describe what happened. In addition to everything else, it exposes the hypocrisy of their kind of securitized view of terrorism. It's not about security. It's about us versus them. It's about demonizing an other. If they truly cared about national security, they would care about the capital being overrun by a violent fascist mom. But it suggests what they've all they've cared about the last 20 years is demagoguing the issue of terrorism or demagoguing Muslims for their political purpose.

Did you say that Susan Collins said that she thought they were under attack from Iran? Talk about getting high on your own supply. What are you talking about? I mean, if you're that big of an idiot, you know, that you think that the Iranians somehow did this. I mean, number one, that the Iranians would have the capacity to unleash a mob of white people on the Westchist white army. Yeah. But number two, that you haven't even been paying attention to the news that these people were

gathering on the mall. Like, what, just the failure of, not even imagination, just basic intellect. But look, we raised the issue of radicalization and the military on the show in the past. I mean, this is a big problem with law enforcement, you know, and in the military that has to be addressed in terms of like, you know, we saw the images of Capitol Police kind of letting people in. And we should be very clear, we're not painting a broad brush because some Capitol Police were heroic, right? And some of them risked their lies.

But others were clearly aiding and abetting this. It's like a selfie. Yeah. And if you want to understand the danger, like look at Michael Flynn. Like Michael Flynn was a three-star general who ran the defense intelligence agency. He's clearly insane. Like he was standing in the middle of mall spouting the craziest conspiracy theories proposing that martial law be invoked in the United States.

That is the mindset we're talking about. And it's clearly deep. And if it's in institutions that are meant to protect the equal administrative. of justice in this country, it has to be dealt with. So there's so many dimensions of what we saw the other day that we're going to be talking about for years because, you know, there's social media dimension, there's a security dimension, there's a politics from Republican Party dimension, all these things. But I think we have identified a few here that bear close scrutiny. And that certainly includes, you know, from a national security perspective. Now that Democrats, you know, are

running DHS and the Justice Department within a matter of days, thinking through how to deal with radicalization in those ranks is going to be very difficult but necessary thing to do. Well, so to your point, I mean, this is now Biden's problem. And Trump's acting Secretary of Homeland Security, frat-Pattle, Chad Wolf resigned today, leaving the FEMA administrator in place. I'm not sure that person is particularly well qualified to run all of the things that DHS does, but whatever. So, you know, thanks for that Chad way to, like, leave your country in the lurch. But before he left, uh, acting frat Chad instructed the Secret Service to move up its planning for inauguration. So that's good at least. It means they'll have more authorities to like

get things in motion to protect the capital. But, you know, the Biden team has started calling on Republicans to move faster to confirm his national security team so that they're in place on day The Senate has traditionally confirmed national security officials on inauguration day and had the hearings leading up to them so that they're in place immediately. You know, Tony Blinken, Alejandro Mayorkas, they've been confirmed by the Senate before. I think Mayorkas was confirmed three times by the Senate before. So he's completely not controversial. So, you know, I think the Biden folks would also like to see defense and intelligence choices moved quickly. So, Ben, I mean, one of the risks of impeachment.

seems to be that the trial could take time away from the confirmation hearings and votes on some of these officials. How do you balance that? And like, how pissed off are you at Rob Portman for not scheduling a hearing to confirm the Secretary of Homeland Security, knowing what we know happened last week at the Capitol? I mean, it's just staggering that Rob Portman, who's supposed to be allegedly one of the more serious Republicans would be doing this. There is a cavernous failure of leadership at all these agencies right now. Like nobody is running the Department of Homeland Security. A bunch of fanatical ideologues are running the Department of Defense.

The State Department has been hollowed out. The intelligence community has been massively politicized. We need adults in charge of these agencies on January 20th, the first second that they can be, you know, to plug huge risks and dangerous. Look, we haven't even talked about the Russian hack, you know, like, who's cleaning that up? Who's in charge? Where's the leadership necessary to deal with that? So, yes, I think it's absolutely imperative that these people get in place.

It's always the case, but it's much more so now. Because in past transitions, you know, the civilian workforce would be operating normally, which it's not now. The people leaving would not have been insane like they are now. Like, we are in a very dangerous moment as a country and have been for a while now in this transition. Like, this has to end. And the only way it ends is with new leadership at all these agencies from day one. I do think I saw that Biden talked to McConnell about parallel tracking.

So could you basically schedule the votes and rack and stack and confirm these national security nominees, even if the parliamentarian has to do a bunch of stuff around a potential impeachment trial? Like if Mitch McConnell, you know, this new Mitch McConnell that we saw the other day, like if he has any semblance of interest in the United States government just functioning, it's not an ideological question. he would let Joe Biden do that. Yeah. So the other sort of big fallout from last week was social media platforms, including Twitter and Facebook, banning Trump or suspending him. Ben, I didn't think about the international component to that at the time, but it's been interesting to see the international reaction.

So Angela Merkel's spokesperson said she considers it problematic that Trump, his accounts were permanently suspended and that governments, not private citizens, should decide on limitations to freedom of speech. Amlo, the president of Mexico criticized the move as well, saying, here's a long quote from Amelow, this is great. How can you censor someone? Let's see, I as the judge of the Holy Inquisition will punish you because I think what you're saying is harmful. Where is the law? Where is the regulation? Where are the norms? This is an issue of government. This is not an issue for private companies. So he really hammered them for this. You know, Ben, Twitter, let's take, you know, make them the strong man here. They're an American company.

They have a nearly global reach. What did you make some of these international criticisms from Amlo Merkel, and even I saw some lower level officials in the UK and European Union officials criticizing Twitter. Well, I don't agree. I don't agree with Angela Merkel, which is rare. And here's why. Yes, it would be better if governments regulated social media. It would be better if social media companies weren't just given total free reign to write their algorithms, however they want to spread conspiracy theory and hate, as fast as possible to generate revenue. I'm looking at you, Facebook.

You know, the Twitter wouldn't be in these positions of, like, scrutinizing its own terms of service and figuring out what applies to this. But the fact is, they're not regulated right now. And in this vacuum that we're in, in this period that we're in, if I'm Twitter, you know, and I'm looking at what I'm seeing on my platform, if I'm seeing that Donald Trump, every time that Donald Trump tweets, that a whole bunch of lunatic fringe people are starting to plot like, we're going to come to the capital on X date and bring our guns.

Like, you know what? No, like Twitter has every right to pull that down. Twitter, like, it's in their terms of service. So, you know what, no, I don't want to hear it. Like, yes, I agree it's not the long-term solution. The long-term solution should not be Twitter or any social media company having to play God and select who and this and that and the other. But in the absence of government regulation,

in the absence of any meaningful effort to provide direction to these social media companies, like they're going to have to make judgment calls. And how can you argue with the judgment that Twitter made? I mean, maybe you can argue with the permanency of the ban. But the idea that, of course, they have a public safety requirement to turn this off. You know, it was getting people killed. So just because it's not the ideal solution, you know, regulation, clear guidance, established international norms around disinformation and hate speech is the is the answer in the long

term. But I think that it's a little unfair to, you know, if they left Trump's account up and he continued to say crazy shit and then more people got killed than D.C., everyone would be yelling at Twitter for leaving that up. And after what they saw, I don't know why you wouldn't think that the proper thing was the action they took. Yeah. Maybe you could make an argument about the permanence of the Twitter ban. But my God, there's a crisis for the next two weeks until the Biden administration is in place. We have a fascist president who enjoyed watching a horde of people nearly kill members of Congress. Yeah, it's like, I can't really question that decision either. So staying on Biden for a minute, listeners of the show will know that one area where you and I

pretty openly disagreed with the Biden campaign was their handling of the discussion around Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu's threats to annex the West Bank, which would just take that territory, kill off any chance of a Palestinian state. A bunch of candidates in the primary, including Bernie Sanders, and they repeat, argued for conditioning or cutting USA to Israel if they just utilaterally took that territory. At the time, the Biden campaign basically said, we will not conditionate Israel, period. But then, so fast forward to Monday, then, Netanyahu just approved the construction of 800 new settlements in the West Bank, which is an incredibly provocative act. And really, frankly, it's a

middle finger to Biden and everybody who wants to see a two-state solution. And this is not the first time that Biden has been surprised by a settlement's announcement. In 2010, Biden took a trip to Israel. And as he got there, the government announced 1,600 new settlements in East Jerusalem, which is the most sensitive area of them all. At the time, Netanyahu claimed to be surprised by the announcement. I think he still says that was the case. But this time, around, he posted about these 800 settlements on Facebook, so there's no surprise here. The conversation about full annexation is on hold for now, but continued settlement construction would lead to de facto annexation. So, Ben, in a few months, Israel is going to hold its fourth,

fourth national election in two years. You think we're sick of these elections. Imagine meeting them. Netanyahu is trying to fend off an attack from his right. How do you interpret this settlement announcement from BB. Is this just, you know, fending off his right flank? Do you anticipate any response from the Biden folks, or do you think they kind of have to wait until the election happens? Well, look, I think you've seen this settlement announcement. You've seen all these kind of stories in the press about them gearing up to oppose Biden coming back into the Iran nuclear agreement, which he said he wants to do. You know, they're going to dispatch envoys. And like, if you think for a second that that B.B. is not going to run the against Biden that he ran against Obama, you just haven't been paying attention for the last

15 years. Like, of course he is. And he's trying to lay down markers that we're going to do whatever we want with respect to the Palestinians with these settlements. And we still feel, even after the insanity of the last five years, even after, you know, the Lakud Party basically merging with the Republican Party of the United States, we still feel like we can tell the United States government not to reenter a diplomatic agreement like the Iran nuclear deal.

that's how he's thinking. And yeah, sure, there's a political incentive with the election to move right, but it's not like Netanyahu's ever moved anywhere except to the right. You know, like I think this is just, this is what he is. So for the Biden team, though, the question is, whoever these Israeli prime ministers, but like if this happens, are you not going to, are there any consequences whatsoever to the relationship? Because, okay, we put forward the idea that if there's annexation, then there should be condition of certain assistance. the Biden team doesn't like that, but there's kind of a menu of things that you can do, right? You can look at assistance, you can look at diplomatic support to Israel, like in the sense of do we allow, you know, UN resolutions that are critical of Israeli settlements to go forward,

as we did at the end of the Obama administration. The idea, though, that matters the most is, are there any consequences whatsoever for Israel to continue taking Palestinian land that everybody thinks, would be in a Palestinian state in the West Bank, are there consequences? If they're none, well, then you, what are you doing? Like, how can you say, we're for a two-state solution and put out these statements and then do nothing? And I say that, knowing full well, people say, well, you guys did that in the Obama administration. Yeah, that was wrong. You know, like, so I think that they don't need to settle on the same answer of conditioning assistance per se, but they do need to have in

their heads, what is the consequence if Israel annexes the West Bank? Because if they're not willing to put any consequence on the table, well, then why wouldn't a right-wing Israeli government annex a West Bank? Right. Right. Yeah. No, I agree. It's frustrating, predictable, going to continue to be a problem. I do worry about, like, hopefully this election goes well and leads to a more progressive government, but it just seems like every time they vote, they end up further to the right. So, yeah. I don't know, man. I don't know. Okay.

This final section of the show is entirely dedicated to the worst Secretary of State in history, the utterly feckless Mike Pompeo. Hopefully we can play that graduation song, Friends Forever, under a bit of this, whatever, keep those from having to get pay them any money. But so he is rolling out a bunch of stuff that is going to be as hawkish as possible. There are these unilateral actions that will get him right-wing donor money and applause at CPAC when he runs for president. So the buckets of issues he's working on are Cuba, China, and Iran.

So we're going to go through one by one. Yeah. So start with Cuba. So this week, the Trump administration re-designated Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism, and they put in place a bunch of new sanctions on Cuba. Just so folks know, the countries on the state sponsor of terrorism list are North Korea, Iran, Syria, and now Cuba. One of those things is not like the other's been.

I assume you think this decision was dumb, was hoping you could just give the quick and dirty why. And then the thing that really bothered me was I've seen experts say it's going to take at least a year for the Biden team to take off this designation. Do you think that's true and why? Well, the reason why is there's supposed to be a process. So I actually negotiated, when I negotiated the normalization with the Cubans, they asked to be taken out the state sponsor of terrorism list as a part of that agreement. And even though Cuba wasn't a state sponsor of terror, all I could tell them is we will. initiate the process. We will go to the State Department and ask them to do the review, and presuming the review finds you're not a state sponsor terrorism, you'll come off the list.

And that took a while, right? And so that's the normal process. The normal process is you look at these matters and you try to find, well, you know, is there any basis for this designation? The reason that the Cubans were on that list was entirely political. And so when we looked at it, you know, the reasons the Cuba were on the list was like, you know, again, there was like some aging Basque terrorists who lived in Cuba. Well, actually, Actually, he had been exiled there. The Spanish government wanted him to be in Cuba, right? So there was no basis for it.

Cuba should not be on this list. And it matters because it'll hurt the Cuban people. It'll be, you know, drive more revenue that can reach the Cuban people. It frankly ends up hurting more like we would rather Europe be investing in Cuba than say Russia, right, who is not going to pay any attention to our designations. Everything about it has no positive impact, right? It'll only hurt Cubans. It won't help American farm policy interest. And it certainly won't cause it Cuban government to become a democracy, right? All that said, the Biden people, I think, should just reverse this designation. This was not done on the level. Any process of results in Cuba being put on a list with 10 days before, you know, you don't need to abide by like some scrupulous norm to reverse something that was so clearly political and done by the seat of the. pants, right? And so that's the bottom line here. The Biden team, you know, it's a good to early test. Like, they shouldn't feel bound by these 11th hour insane things Trump is doing

to conduct a year-long review of the stupid thing they just did. They should just reverse it. Yeah, do them all at once, rip the band-ed off. Just a quick aside, Ben, Liz Cheney apparently just came out in favor of impeachment. Like, history is happening in real time as we record this show, man, and it feels good. I still don't know if we have enough to convict, but that is crazy. Okay, bucket number two, China. So Pompeo also announced that he wants to lift self-imposed restrictions on contacts between U.S. government officials and Taiwanese government officials. Can you explain the context here?

Why do these restrictions exist? And do you agree with some analysts who said this is basically going to roll a grenade into the middle of the U.S.-China relationship and then, you know, set the timer to go off as soon as Biden takes over? Like, what did you make of this decision? Well, I mean, the quick and dirty, right, is that we recognized when we basically normalized relations with the People's Republic of China, we recognize one China. We recognize it one China policy. So we de-recognize Taiwan as the independent China, and we recognize the People's Republic of China. And so since then, the United States has had diplomatic representation to Taiwan that looks different than our representation to, you know, independent states. We have not an embassy. We have like an American Institute there. and we tend to send, you know, we engage Taiwan, but we don't do it at like the cabinet level with visits to Taipei, that kind of thing. And so that's what Pompeo is beginning to change,

is that we would essentially engage Taiwan like a country, right? It doesn't mean that we're, you know, recognizing their independence or anything like that, but I think it just means that the contacts that our diplomats have with Taiwan can be normalized. It's a huge step to take and doing it, it's China's most sensitive nerve. Like, you could not touch a more sensitive nerve than Taiwan, right? Because it's existential. This goes back to the founding of the Communist Party

and all the rest of it. That said, so the way it was done totally wrong to lead this to the next crowd. This should be done or addressed through careful thought. And I frankly, you know, I don't know the answer. it's worth a look for for one reason. Someone would say, well, you know, U.S. has an agreement with China, one China policy. And I don't in any way, by the way, suggest, you know, going to independence or things like that.

The only thing I want to raise is the one country two systems agreement on Hong Kong was an agreement that China made with Great Britain. Like they are in an agreement that suggests that they're supposed to respect Hong Kong's autonomy until 2047. So China is no longer abiding by its own commitments in this type of space, right? So the idea that we should be looking at these types of issues is valid. I think Pompeo doing it to make himself a China hawk with less than two weeks left in administration is incredibly dangerous and throws like a hand grenade with a pulled pin into the middle of the U.S.-China relationship just as you walk out the door. That's totally irresponsible.

I personally have to take a culture look at what this would mean in practice to even have a more informed view of whether some version of this might make sense. I do think, though, that China should know, like, you can't violate your own agreements like the one country two systems thing and not assume that other countries you can do the same. Yeah, yeah. You can think this is sort of a capricious rush decision, but then ultimately study it and think there might be some merit to elevating those contacts. That's a really good point about their China's agreement with the UK over Hong Kong. They have absolutely strangled that democracy

to death and they don't seem to care. Yeah. Yeah, they don't. So the last piece of this is Iran. And there are now two parts to the piece. So the first is Pompeo give a big speech today, claiming that Iran had given Al-Qaeda a new home base. And he also decided to announce, in air quotes, the death of Abu Mahabid al-Mazri, who was the former al-Qaeda number two operative, who was assassinated in Iran, I think back in August. We talked about it on the show at the time. So I put announcing quotes here because this was widely reported. This is really him just trying to like take credit for it. Right. And he's also- He killed this guy. Yeah, like he pulled the trigger himself. He's also, I think,

clearly creating a pretext for war with Iran, which is very troubling because the authorization for the use of military force after 9-11 allows you to target. al-Qaeda and associated forces, and he's now saying their home bases in Iran. So, scary. The second decision, I think, is even more sadistic. So Pompeo designated the Houthi rebels as a foreign terrorist organization. So the Houthis are a rebel group. They control big swaths of territory in Yemen. They've been fighting the other side of the civil war against that Saudi-led coalition that was backed by the United States, starting during the Obama years, but doubled down by Trump. The Trump folks like to argue that the Houthis are basically

just a proxy militia for Iran. Here's the problem with this broader policy. Yemen is experiencing a historic, horrific famine. 80% of the population doesn't have access to food or clean water. Millions of people could die if they are denied aid. And this designation makes it exponentially more difficult for aid groups to help the Yemeni people because of the legal risk that it causes. So David Miliband was quoted. He's the head of the International Rescue Committee. He called a diplomatic vandalism. And he said it'll make his work impossible. 70% of Yemen's population lives in areas controlled by the Houthis. These aid groups need to sort of work with them in some former fashion to get this assistance in there. This designation basically makes that

coordination illegal. So, Ben, this is another one. I mean, I'm curious what you make of Pompey. speech. And then, you know, I guess more importantly on this question of naming the Houthis as an FTO, like, can you unwind that easily in the same way you think you can, the Cuba designation? First of all, this whole use of terrorism designations has been so utterly politicized by these guys, right? So Sudan got off the list because they normalized relations with Israel, like pretty obvious that that's for domestic political benefit, even if you think it's a good thing that they did that. And then, you know, Cuba is for the Miami voters who, you know, support the Republican Party. And the Houthi thing is part of their anti-Iran politics. This totally

discredits the use of this really powerful sanction, right? Because, you know, terrorist designation suggests that if you support them in any way, you're basically aiding and abetting terrorism, right? So number one is just the politicization of this terrorism designation is crazy. But it suggests we might to take a look at the process of designating whether it's done too casually and liberally for political reasons. I think with respect to the Houthis, it does make any sense on the merits. This is a civil war.

The Houthis aren't sitting there plotting like terrorist attacks in other countries. They may do some very bad things inside of Yemen. So does Saudi Arabia that just bomb innocent civilians, right? They may not be the people that, you know, that I would want to see run Yemen, but they live there. This is not like some group of people who came

and set up a base, Yemen. Like, this is a tribe that lives in Yemen and is going to live in Yemen. So the designation itself is just wrong. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't solve any problem again, right? Pompeo couldn't even really say what it did other than send a message. Well, what message? These people, the Houthis are already fighting a civil war. They're not going to stop fighting a civil war because Mike Pompeo called them terrorists, right? No. So the only consequences are, yeah, It's going to get harder to get assistance into people who are dying in that war. Like, it's a cruel and inhumane and insane thing to have done.

What it, so again, the Biden team should reverse it immediately, day one. Like, no process. Just flip the switch on this thing. You don't need to go through some BS process. It's going to take up time that puts people's lives at risk. And just to put additional context there. I think people hear the word famine and they think there was no rain, so the crops failed. That's not what this is in Yemen.

This is a conflict-driven war caused this famine. That's why people don't have food. Yeah. And the war is happening because of this mindset that the Saudis had and the people like Pompeo had that the Houthis are somehow like part of the Iranian, you know, Revolutionary Guard or something. The Houthis have been fighting inside of Yemen for a very long time for very distinct reasons. You have to solve the Yemen conflict in Yemen, right?

not through this kind of proxy war mindset, these guys have. And I think the one thing I'd say, Tommy, is that if Pompeo is nothing else, he's a roadmap to what we're going to hear for the next four years, right? The hyperbolic criticisms of Joe Biden are going to be on the same, you know, it's going to be on Iran, from the Iran Hawks, the China Hawks, and the Cuba Hawks. And there's no surprise in that. But just seeing Pompeo do this, I think, reminds you, these are going to be the lines of attack against Biden in much the same way that they were against us, perhaps with China now being a more prominent feature. Yeah, it reminds you just how cynical a lot of these charges have always been and will continue to be how cynical these people are. And the fact that,

you know, the matter is Mike Pompeo is the problem. He's the common thread here. The good news is that he is about to be a former failed Secretary of State. And he is so toxic that he just had to cancel his last hurrah, like, mini vacation to Europe because European officials refused to even meet with him. That is, no Secretary of State in the history of this country has been that thoroughly humiliated on the international stage. And it's come out now that all these senior diplomats in the department are calling on him to invoke the 25th Amendment. So he has lost respect to the broad. He's lost control of the building. He is just a bully asshole who soon will not have.

have a microphone. Yeah, let us not forget that this is a guy who said he was going to like restore the swagger of the State Department and make America, you know, more respected around the world than it was in of Barack Obama. And this guy can't even get a meeting with the fucking farm minister of Luxembourg, okay? Like that's who Mike Pompeo is. Nobody was swagger jacked by the Luxembourg guy. Yeah. Nobody other than Hugh Hewitt respects you, right? I mean, that's, I don't even think Republicans, like voters should not be respect this guy. And, and, and, and, you know, and, on the al-Qaeda point, since I should have addressed it, he is such a liar. Like, Mike Pompeo is a man who could point at a deer and tell you that it's a horse, right? Like, I don't, you know what,

I make no judgment on anything he said, because I assume that it's all lies. If the Biden team wants to tell me about Iran-tized al-Qaeda, I'll listen to those and evaluate those. I won't even waste my time trying to assess the likely truth, you know, of anything Mike Pompeo says. Yeah, me either. All right, that's all for us. When we come back, we are going to have the former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Samantha Power. We're going to talk about the state of her idealism after watching a fascist, you know, marauding horde of monsters at the capital last week. We're talking about damage to the U.N. We're going to talk about Biden's pick for the CIA, Bill Burns, and what that means. We're talking about Hong Kong. And we'll talk about refugees. So lots of great wonky stuff from one of the, smartest people we know. So stick around for that. We are so excited to welcome on the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, the author of the fantastic book, The Education of an Idealist, which comes out in paperback on January 26th, I believe, our friend Samantha Power. Sam, it's great to see you. Great to see you, Tommy and Ben. Thrilling. So we have had you want to

talk about the book before. For folks who didn't listen to that interview, you should go back and do so because I think it is a must read for anyone. who wants to go into government. It's a must read for anyone who wants to understand what it's like when ideas and idealism and principles crash into the complexity of governing and tackling like historically difficult challenges like Syria. So first question for you, how is your idealism holding up after seeing a fascist mob crash into the U.S. Capitol and ransack it last week? Like, how is that making you feel about government in our role in this country at the moment? Well, it does feel like just as on the international stage, as you all talk about so often,

there's a battle between the authoritarian and the Democrats or the people in some places and the state. There's a battle that some version of that dualism is at play in our own society. and the very kinds of acts of incitement, acts of repression, the creation of enemy lists, which President Trump did from the beginning of his presidency, including, of course, the media as a whole, that is going to bear consequences at some point. And in some ways, it's a miracle it took this long, right? Yeah, I agree. I mean, and, you know, as many people have said, you know, I'm, you know, I'm, you know,

You can be shocked, but not be surprised at the same time. I'm still trying to explain that to my son as to how you can be shocked and not surprised, but you can. And yet in Michigan, we saw a chronicle foretold. We saw exactly this. It just was neutralized. It wasn't in the Capitol. It wasn't our elected officials who have enabled, some of whom have enabled President

Trump for so long themselves having to cower, you know, for fear for their lives. But as someone, as I write in Education of an Idealist who started her career in Bosnia, a place that had just hosted the Olympics eight years before the war started, a place where intermarriage was one in three in Sarajevo. This was a place where no one thought that violence could be fermented on ethnic or religious grounds. And I also, of course, originally am from Ireland and such an incredibly cosmopolitan civil. educated place, and yet we had the troubles in the early part of my childhood and well beyond. And so this idea that we are immune, I think, has always been a dangerous illusion, a kind of subcomponent maybe of American exceptionalism, this idea that our virtue will inherently kind of protect us from some of these darker forces.

It won't. What will protect us will be our citizens, their activation, our law. and whether people are willing to respect it and enforce it. And our institutions, which have bent to their breaking point in so many domains over the course of this four years, but did not break insofar as, you know, if we had talked before the election, I don't know that we would have guessed, or at least I'd speak for myself and not protect onto my friends here. But, you know, it is quite remarkable, not that Trump lost. in court, it was obviously he was going to lose in court because he was making stuff up,

but that he lost before every judge, right? That even those judges whose, you know, track records or whose CVs made them to the American Bar Association unqualified maybe to become judges, and I'm, you know, I'm not saying that that was among the 50-plus judges who heard cases in this domain. But just in general, there hasn't been exactly a great premium placed on track records and expertise and so forth. And yet those, the courts just did say, look, you need a legal predicate.

You need evidence. Like, we're kind of old-fashioned that way. In courtrooms, you need evidence. And so I think all of us have said, oh, gosh, what if the election had been Florida? What if it had been Florida 2000? Then would the courts have held up? Then would the institutions have held?

I think we can all be relieved that that proposition was not tested and that there were Biden established, a number of paths to victory. But I think all of us just last week, it just was this dualism at work. You had Georgia, which was brought about 100% by the faith that citizens who had seen their votes suppressed, who had seen the most creative tactics to keep them away from the polls and to disenfranchise them, refusing to take no for an answer and organizing. and getting out the vote and registering voters who hadn't even voted in November to be part of this very slim margin, but nonetheless,

incredibly joyful and essential for the Biden presidency outcome. And then you had that other force storming the Capitol, egged on by the president, and showing just how far this has gone and how that toxicity has now gotten to the point of just being a dangerous criminal element in our society. And so that joy and that kind of terror and foreboding, I haven't in my life, I don't think, experienced anything quite like that. You know, both of those forces kind of surfacing.

This is the fight, right? It's between the organizers and the citizens who made Georgia happen and then those who don't want to respect the will of the majority, who don't want to respect the rule of law and our institutions, and who are increasingly prepared to take matters into their own hands. That's the fight. Yeah. Well, Sam, I want to actually ask you a question about the UN, which connects to this. But, you know, the Trump administration, because the reason it connects, obviously, is that the world saw that. And the world has seen the Trump years. And the world knows that just voting Trump out isn't going to change the threat of authoritarianism and the threat of this kind of extrajudicial mob that we saw. But I wanted to focus on the UN because you do such a great job in your book. One reason to pick it up in laying out how you approach the job of being UN ambassador and how you approached being the person who sat behind that placard that said United States. That is the way in which a lot of the rest of the world interacts with the U.S. through what our UN ambassadors saying, the Trump people have completely, you know, other than being a springboard

for Nikki Haley's future political ambitions, we don't even hear about the UN. They don't even demagogue it. It's just totally absent. Like I couldn't even tell you the name of the donor person who's the perm rep right now. And because of our audience cares about this issue, and we haven't talked about the UN much on the show, what is the task for the United States now, the Biden administration, at the UN. How do we reassert our engagement there? How do we take whatever has atrophied at the UN and try to make it work better? If you were, as you described so well in your book, meeting with every ambassador from other countries and organizing a team, how should we be thinking about if the Biden administration is rejoining the world in all these different forms,

what does that look like at the United Nations? What would you most like to see happen there? It's such a great question and it's an exciting one. And I think in Linda Thomas Greenfield, we have somebody who's going to, you know, be a very, very popular American diplomat just because of her own sort of inherent humility, her background and her dedication to addressing poverty and conflict in her prior, in the prior parts of her career, maybe her gumbo, which keeps coming up, that she apparently makes a mean gumbo. But I think that there are two dimensions. And the first is the place that now all of us who've worked in national security our whole careers where we're forced to start, which is what is happening at home. To what extent is the president-elect, then President Biden and Vice President Harris, to what extent are they now, especially that they have the Senate, able to deliver, for example, stimulus to our economy? paychecks to people who have been lining up at food banks and whose savings have been devastated over the course of the last year. To what extent, perhaps in the wake of the ghastly events last

week, can there be some semblance of a show of bipartisanship, at least in certain domains, maybe on COVID domestically? I mean, again, recognizing there are some who've implanted themselves, in the science denial camp, but there are many responsible Republican governors and local officials and other state officials who are trying to kick the pandemic to the curb. And now in Biden, they'll have a president who will be a great partner. I think that show bipartisanship is incredibly important alongside the show of competence and the show of Democratic renewal in embracing press conferences, transparency, ethics, real questions, of course, and I'm sure the world will be very interested in how past transgressions or alleged crimes are addressed. What happens

in the look back, as it were. You know, remember President Obama, we all were part of an administration that made the judgment that was better to move forward because of how divisive it would have been to go back and, and, you know, look at torture through the lens of legal accountability and so forth. So we moved in a forward-looking direction. Biden has some really challenging decisions ahead of him in that domain, but those are the kinds of things that people abroad are going to be looking to us. So I think that that even though you asked me about the UN and I'm talking about things you always talk about, that's what you, that's what the UN, the people from other countries at the UN are going to be most interested by it. And I'll just give you

one anecdote to this respect. And our friend Susan Rice, Ambassador Rice, of course, was my predecessor at the UN. And she said this to me before I went in the job. And I didn't quite believe it until I experienced it myself. But she said when President Obama was trying to negotiate the ACA. And you remember just the slim margins on the votes and the torturous negotiations and the fear that, you know, with the passing of the great Senator Kennedy that maybe it wouldn't go through. and she said her colleagues in New York at the UN were tracking that as closely as any Security Council resolution related to their country.

In other words, the question of whether America would be able to realize the right to health in its population and for its uninsured was so important to other countries because it really is about creating a model and an example. Not that the catching up with some of our Western Democratic friends was going to put us in the forefront on health care, but nonetheless it was something they were tracking like crazy. I would attend the State of the Union, and you would be busy with Fabra writing the State of the Union and the foreign policy section, the way the ambassadors from other countries kind of hung on every word.

Our domestic debates really, really matter. And our recovery, not only recovering from last week, But also, given how many other countries are dealing with some of these same dark and xenophobic and bigoted forces, if we could crack the code, if we can show that our rule of law is strong and that our institutions will hold up, that's actually going. We have something that we never wish to have in common with countries that are racked by similar problems, but maybe we'll be able to also brainstorm with them and offer lessons about what doesn't work and what does. That's in the, what happens in America bucket. Then there's, I think, where your question more naturally leads, which is, okay, what matters right now to other countries? And I think the way President-elect Biden has talked about his own priorities as president,

you know, it's almost like priority one is COVID in the economy, priority two is COVID in the economy, priority three is COVID in the economy. And, of course, the climate crisis and the racial injustice and all of that needs to be embedded and addressing those issues needs to be embedded in how we recover economically and how we address inequality and take this as an opportunity to, you know, borrow a phrase to build back better. There's all of that, but where's everybody else in the world? COVID in the economy. Yeah, yeah.

So I think part of what Ambassador Thomas Greenfield will be doing at the UN is trying, as we did during the Ebola crisis to catalyze the kind of global conversation, global contributions that are going to be needed to meet people where they are, which is, as you know, right now, developing countries are not on track to get significant shares of the vaccine. The pool of money and the sort of fundraising that has been attempted by the World Health Organization and COVAX, this vaccine initiative, has not. produce the resources that are needed. And of course, rich countries like our own are much higher up in the queue. And we're having a hard enough time ourselves getting vaccines into arms. So in the

first bucket, we will show that we can vaccinate our own people and get America back to work. But because, and this is where I hope Republicans will come on board, because our ability to not only restart our economy, but to have our economy war back to life in a way that will benefit all Americans, we need the economy in Bangladesh where our supply chains extend into and in India and in sub-Saharan Africa, we need the economic engine of the world to come back to life. And that is going to require serious investments in the global response to COVID. And the form that takes, again, I think people are still trying to work through. China has stepped into that void, as you know, after we left the WHO, but also in providing

PPE and in meeting people in this great hour of need. But there's plenty of need to go around. And that is one domain where one could imagine a division of labor that would actually be in the interest of all of us. You know, we've talked so much about Trump over the last four years. It's been really fun and exciting to talk about, think about the Biden administration. And it started with, you know, seeing a lot of our friends and former colleagues going back into government, a lot of brilliant, great people. Early on, I would say there weren't a lot of surprises. One surprising choice that was announced this week was Bill Burns was tapped to run the CIA. So for listeners, Bill Burns is the former Deputy Secretary of State. He is a lifetime career diplomat. I think he was ambassador to

Russia to Jordan. He negotiated the Iran nuclear agreement. The guy speaks like eight languages. He's just a super interesting, outside the box, exciting pick in my opinion, because he is this career diplomat, who I think will be someone who thinks about intelligence as a way to help his work, diplomatic work, help policymakers and not necessarily like the Department of Defense Jr. Sam, I'm curious, you know, what message you think it sends to the world to the administration to select a career diplomat like Bill to run the CIA? Well, I think one of the things that the president-elect has really emphasized in part because of his. sense that we're so over-militarized, right? And that the wars have gone on too long and that

military families have borne such unimaginable burdens over these last two decades since 9-11. I think he's wanted to right-size the toolbox. And, you know, there's the metaphor that people in Washington sometimes use of the stool where you have the defense leg, the diplomacy leg, and the development leg. And we go, the one leg of the stool, you know, is, you know, much, you know, much much longer than the other two. And I think Biden is trying to remedy that. And so one of his mantras, I think in these last weeks, has been we're going to lead with diplomacy. So even on COVID, right, we're going to lead with diplomacy, get a sense of what other countries are doing, how we can chip in or catalyze, getting back to the Iran nuclear deal, hopefully we're going to lead with diplomacy

and rebuilding the diplomatic corps, rebuilding and revitalizing. the Development Corps. And so putting a diplomat, not just any diplomat, in one of the profiles of Bill that I saw in the last couple days, someone referred to him as a titan of the foreign policy world, right? I don't know that if you say the word diplomat and then just say, who comes to mind? I think anybody who has worked in close proximity to the State Department over the last four decades, pretty much everybody would say Bill Burns, right? He's just...

The mustache, man. Yeah, and the mustache. But so I think that's incredibly important. And you alluded to this, but just to drive at home as a diplomat, you know, as ambassador in Russia, as Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East, you know, as a speaker of Russian and Arabic somehow, he's been a consumer of intelligence. His whole career, he's been a consumer. And so to put somebody in that role who's saying, actually, you know, here's what would best inform, not tilt the policy debate, right?

Because there's no straight or shooter than Bill Burns. He'll be very aware of the risk, especially after the Trump years of the politicization of intelligence. So I would worry not at all about that. But to say this is a useful way of thinking about informing policymakers on the strategic threat. threats, you know, the things that are long-term and the crises that lie around the corner. There's been a lot of talk about, for example, elevating, and this Ben grows out of some of your work, but elevating the anti-corruption emphasis in American foreign policy, major questions about, okay, what are the implications then for the intelligence community? If we do that, if that is an

Achilles heel for autocrats and authoritarian as I think we know it is. And if civil society is, you know, very hungry all around the world to entell us that and in exposing it. What are the kinds of things that could be surfaced, right, with an emphasis on that in the information gathering space? The other part of the CIA, of course, is operations. And there to take a fresh look at, and I think because there's been so little transparency in the Trump years and probably not nearly as much congressional oversight

as we should have seen, given some of the broadened authorities that were being taken on by Trump administration officials, I think we don't even know the half of what has actually happened in the more covert space. And for a straight shooter like Bill Burns to come into the building and to catalog all of that and then to think through with the president and the rest of his team, okay, what is, this is again back to the idea of right sizing, you know, what is the appropriate posture in this domain given that the threats are real and they're out there. But, you know, the threat of COVID, you know, COVID is something that has taken 360,000 lives and devastated American families.

And yet was our intelligence community postured, was the CIA postured to be collecting on what was happening in labs in, you know, in Asia? I doubt it. And so to go back in and say, if we are broadening our conception of national security and really trying to assess and wait the various threats, because it's not as if you're not going to collect on potential terrorist threats. You need to collect on climate and the conflict that is growing out of climate all around the world. Now you have a greater emphasis and more political support for collecting on things related to pandemics and other forms of infectious diseases. Great. But how do you balance among those priorities and make sure.

that you're well-postered for the 21st century. Yeah. It's funny, too, because I love Bill and that got everything you say. He's also got kind of a spy's demeanor. He's like soft-spoken. Oh, he's a La Carre character. Yeah, he's a John La Carre character. Yeah, Tommy, you just, you got me, I got now two of the books on the Kindle after hearing you and Ben talk about La Cey last week. But, yeah, the last thing I'd say about Bill, though, just in the straight talk realm.

And I don't know if it's in the La Cari realm. But it is noteworthy that he questioned the decision to invade Iraq at a time where that could have been politically or, let's say, professionally costly for him. Career ending, yeah. Yeah, career ending. I think that that is the risk that he took on. And I think that must be a big part of why Biden finds it appealing to imagine having him in that role, somebody who's prepared to say, no, actually, Mr. President, I don't, I don't see it that way. my, you know, our community sees it differently and here, or these are the bad consequences we can expect, uh, or we predict if this is the direction that you seek to go. And so, uh,

again, getting the information you need to have, not, not the information you would wish to have. Yeah. So I wanted to ask you one question, Sam, about, about an issue that, that hasn't gotten as much tend to recently. I noticed, uh, about a week ago, you and I had the exact same reaction when there was a spate of arrest of pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong. And Tony Blinken tweeted something about it. And I was like, wait, the U.S. actually cares about these people again. But that said, like, what's, it's been really troubling to watch Hong Kong the last couple of weeks and hasn't got a lot of tension because of the coups and insurrections here.

But there's been this kind of wholesale, I mean, to catch people up on it, of course, China pushed through a national security law through the Hong Kong legislature that basically gave them full writ to do whatever they want in Hong Kong. And since then, particularly in the last couple of weeks, they've really been escalating, rolling up opposition, rolling up democracy activists, you know, dangling very scary sentences, potentially life sentences among leadership like Joshua Wong. How should we think about Hong Kong? Like what is the toolkit and what can be done? You were kind of watching the city be swallowed up. and the hopes of these millions of people who have been protesting be swallowed up.

How should we think about it? How should the U.S. and the international community think about it? What can we do to help, if anything? Well, I think one of the things that this round of arrests, all of them really, I mean, it's been such a devastating year for the brave Democrats in Hong Kong, of whom there are so many. But I do, they just again and again, Beijing shows just how terrified the Chinese Communist Party, President Xi is, how terrified the state is of freedom. I mean, you know, and it's, I say that because sometimes in the kind of, you know, the debate about the U.S. and China and the sense of China's GDP is, you know, going to, you know, over.

overtake hours and look at its growth rate and look how quickly it got COVID, you know, in check, true. But the brittleness of that system, I think, or at least their own perception of that brittleness is demonstrated every time you see something like you saw in the last week. And the fact that, I mean, in this instance, this set of raids, right, going into newsrooms invoking the most specious grounds for lining people up. And basically, you know, anybody who favors having an election, which is something that Hong Kong, you know, has had in different forms, you know, for a long time. But to see disability rights activists, you know, I mean, one of the activists, you know, got motivated to get into advocacy around disability rights because his daughter needed a wheelchair and she couldn't get around Hong Kong in a wheelchair. and he lobbied tirelessly to get, you know, ramps and things put in so that she'd be better able. She subsequently passed away. You're going to arrest him?

You feel that small, that threatened by somebody who's trying to get wheelchair ramps put in or to get bathrooms, you know, to have proper accommodations for people with disabilities. So this, and this parallels, of course, what's happened inside China, that it used to be that there was a space, you know, if you wanted to protest, environmental pollution, you know, if you want it, there were sexual harassment. There was a space for that. And, you know, over the course of the last five years, that space has vanished. And it's just been a much sort of all-encompassing crackdown. So you asked, though, the constructive question about the toolbox.

I mean, I've listened to you and the people, of course, you interviewed for your Missing America podcast addressed this question. And there's no, we all know there's no silver bullet. But I would know just on the basis of my UN background how much China invests in avoiding being criticized. And maybe this probably gets to the brittleness they have in their own sort of self-perception of the Chinese system. But, you know, if an incoming Biden administration does succeed in multilateralizing its condemnations, because in recent, over the course of the last year, since President Trump turned on President Xi, his former BFF,

of course the rhetoric and the sanctions and other things have come out of the Trump administration appropriately. But we just one-offs, right? Tweets, press statements, no effort to kind of build a coalition. And I think the broader that that coalition is, the more that it gets in the head of Chinese Communist Party officials. Will they then, you know, liberalize in Hong Kong? I don't see that happening anytime soon.

But I think our job is to increase the cost. And just by doing things unilaterally as the Trump administration has done, it just really limits the impact. If you combine our GDP, the European Union GDP and Canada, that's 2.5 times the GDP of China. Yeah. Now it's just a global economy. Yeah. Exactly.

So I think that's one dimension of it. And then, of course, one of the things that Biden has already spoken to is dramatically expanding our refugee program again, right? So there are going to be 125,000 slots for people have come into this country, down from President Trump's most recent cap of 15,000, the absolute lowest in history of the refugee program. At a time where displacement, we've never had more displaced. Since Hitler, we have not as much displacement around the world as we have now. But, you know, that's also something where I'm sure, you know, people like those who've been arrested and who really many of them have tried to

it off the island, off Hong Kong, and it's getting harder and harder for them to even get to third countries, given the crackdown. But I think we and the United Kingdom and others have made clear, you know, that there's a place for people at least to find refuge in this, in this ghastly period. Well, you know, I'm glad you brought up this issue of refugees, because it was talked about a lot in 2016 and sort of not at all since. But last week, you know, the federal appeals court blocked President Trump's policy that would have allowed state and local governments to refuse to resettle refugees or the ultimate cruel nimbie policy area. It was a rare bit of good news in an area where, as you just mentioned, me, Trump and

Stephen Miller have taken the numbers from like 110,000, 16,000 to 18,000 as a cap this year, it doesn't even mean that many people actually got resettled into the U.S. My question for you is the politics around refugees was hysterical and absurd, right? If you were a terrorist who wanted to come to the U.S. to do something bad, you would just visit, go through a travel visa. You wouldn't go through the refugee process, which entails extensive vetting. Do you have confidence or hope that we have sort of made the politics around this issue not quite as crazy and hysterical as they once were?

And if not, what more do you think needs to be done so that, like, you know, Joe Biden can actually enact the priority. that you just laid out when it comes to refugees? Well, I think what's noteworthy is how hard Trump and Stephen Miller pushed to say to the world, not only do we not want you, refugees, people with a well-founded fear of persecution, but basically we're the new Republican Party and the Republican Party doesn't want you. and really tried to speak on behalf of the GOP, as when you're the leader of the party, you're sort of entitled to do. And what's fascinating is well before the Fourth Circuit decision that you mentioned, which is itself important, which rejects this idea that Trump put forward that states had to opt in to taking refugees.

And the tradition has been that refugees can resettle anywhere. where Trump was pushing that well apart from the legal action that was being pursued by various groups on behalf of refugees. Republican governors were saying, we're not on board with what you're saying, President Trump. We want refugees. And not Republican governors in purple states, right? Like the governor of South Dakota, the governor of Tennessee, I think Oklahoma, Nebraska,

Utah with the kind of Mormon missionary tradition. and those connections. And there are a lot of different reasons. I mean, some of it is actual good old-fashioned idealism and just a sense of American identity and a real discomfort with President Trump trying to, you know, kind of blot out, you know, use an eraser to pretend

we're not a country of immigrants and a country that has provided that refuge. Some of it is historic. And, you know, often when people are, you know, kind of on their heels about contemporary refugee resettlement. You ask them, how do you feel retrospectively about how few Jews we let in during the Second World? And they say, oh, that was terrible. We should have opened our doors.

We should have let the St. Louis come to port and let those people in. And they said, okay, so what about Rohingya refugees and Syrian refugees and Venezuelan refugees, for that matter today. And then some people say, oh, actually, yeah, you're right. Like, there's a parallel there. And so, yes, you know, I take that point. It can't just be sort of retrospective in inclusiveness.

And so some people are, you know, you can kind of talk it through a little bit. But some people, Tommy, it's about the economics. It's about communities that have been revitalized by the influx of refugees. because as you know, if a Syrian community or an Iraqi community comes and settles, then sometimes their relatives will come later. And you start to build it out and the restaurants change and the people who are willing to do work

that maybe younger people who've left the town were not willing to do. I mean, when I was UN ambassador, I traveled to Buffalo, New York, having heard that this was one of these towns that was being revitalized by the flow of refugees who'd come into Buffalo. And it was amazing just to hear people who I'm pretty sure would otherwise be Trump voters, at least some of them, but the way they just said,

you know, please, Trump had already won at the point that I went up there. But, you know, keep fighting for this pipeline and this flow of such, I mean, the people who make it here, to go through our process, to get through the vetting, to find your way out of places

where the borders are often closed. I mean, the ingenuity, the, you know, the chutzpah, the desire to make money and to work long hours so as to be able to send remittances back home, you know, this is a very, very agile and able workforce. And so governors, often it's the Chamber of Commerce or the National Association manufacturers or, you know, whoever or the Rotary Club, you know, that is pushing this agenda. but the flow of refugees has been something that people have really valued as paying actual dividends for the health and vibrancy of their communities. So it's been, you know, again, well before this court decision, it's been quite heartening to see that willingness to break with the sort of Trump-led party line. And you asked the question of, is there now hope that the fever has broken? And that I don't know. I think we will see then, if it is Biden in a posture of continuing that conversation,

building on those very generous and welcoming public statements that those governors have made, will that put people on their heels and will partisanship kick in in a way that it didn't when it was an inner party debate? You know, I hope that they stay true to the values that they've expressed up to this point. And I'm hopeful. That's a very important point, well taken that you have to make. both the moral and the sort of practical case for every policy, but this one in particular. Samantha Power, so good to have you on.

The book is The Education and Idealist. It's out right now. And hardcover comes out in paperback on January 26th. As always, a pleasure to talk to you. This was the best part of my week. And go Red Tux. Can we say that? Is it too early?

Thanks, guys. Thanks again to Samantha Power. Everyone check out Education. I'm an idealist. Ben, I heard a rumor, judging by the timestamp of your text that you were up very, very late last night working on a book of your own. How's that going? It's almost done, Tommy. I was returning the copyated draft of my manuscript. And what was interesting is because I talked to a lot of people about this book, which I'll share a lot more with the world those about soon. But like I did reporting, right, so I was talking to people in Hong Kong, people in Russia, people in Hungary, you know, people around the world. And now I'm the guy who had to go back and check their quotes with them, like, make sure you know how to. And so I was doing a lot of that. So I'm very, very close.

Well, those, I got one more round of this book. And I can't wait to tell you guys more about it because it comes out of so many of the things we talk about on this show. I miss those. I miss everything about last year. But I miss those days when we be like connecting with you to do the show from like the Hong Kong airport or something. I've just been like with like some activists. I think yeah, top locations, all of which factored in the book, like I remember like some hallway in the Singapore airport at like three in the morning of Singapore time. About this time last year I was in Budapest, like holy for the book.

And then I think that was my last trip out of the United States. I obviously missed that. Yeah, no, it's, but it's it's really like, you know, going to be exciting to talk about it more on the show because it's totally in line with guests we've had and things we've been talking about. out. But I tell you, writing a book in a pandemic is not something that, well, what's frustrating to me is that the challenge is I got two small kids. So, you know, quiet space for hours of time is impossible. And so I was writing this book like in the storage space attic of my house. But at the same time, I was talking about it and he's like, yeah, but the writers who don't have kids tell me they've never been more productive than in this pandemic.

And I was like, screw the writers. I don't want to hear about the writers who don't have kids. I've got banging on my door if I try to work for more than 20 minutes straight. Dude, I'm impressed by anybody who can write more than a tweet. So, because here's credit to you, pandemic or no pandemic. All right, well, that's all we got for today. Thanks everybody for listen, and we'll talk to you next week. Pazade of 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 Segglin is our sound engineer. Special thanks to Quinn Lewis for production support. And thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Malkonian, and Milo Kim, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.