Pod Save the World - Send Rudy Giuliani to Syria

Episode Date: October 16, 2019

Tommy and Ben talk about disaster unfolding in Syria, fact check Trump’s claim that he’s ending wars, explain who the Kurds are and why they’re US allies, survey the international reaction to Turkey’s offensive in Syria and explain why nuclear weapons make everything more complicated. Then they talk through the latest on impeachment and the corruption of US foreign policy, evaluate the détente in the trade war with China, highlight some good news out of Ethiopia, and talk about the latest in the dispute between the NBA and China. They end with a discussion of soccer diplomacy and how Senator Lindsey Graham got prank called. Then Vice News’s Isobel Yeung joins to talk about her reporting on the ground in Syria, Hong Kong and Xinjiang, China.

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Bedrudes. Ben, I'm kind of pissed today. Good. So am I. That's kind of a steady state for me. Yeah, I mean, you and I have this mantra before we record these shows that it's better to pod happy than I agree. But like last week when we were talking, I just didn't think that this Syria operation was going to happen. And it's pretty awful. Yeah, it's hard to think of a worse week for American firm policy, for kind of a window into the consequences of the Trump presidency, the state of the world. Yeah. It's pretty dark. It's pretty dark.

Okay. Well, with that wonderful intro, we're going to start with Syria. So what we're going to do is we're going to update you guys on what we know about the situation in the ground. We're going to evaluate Trump's claim that he is ending wars and bringing troops home. We'll see if that's true. We're going to talk about who the Kurds are, what the international reaction has been to this Turkish operation.

and explain why the presence of nuclear weapons makes everything much more complicated. Then we'll do an update on impeachment and the corruption of foreign policy. And we'll evaluate the China trade war detente. Some cool news out of Ethiopia updates on China's fight with the NBA. A little bit of soccer news because we're now a sports podcast. And then we'll talk about Lindsey Graham getting prank called. Then Vice News is Isabel Young will join to talk about her reporting from the ground in Syria, Hong Kong, and Xinjiang province. she's a very excellent reporter, so stick around for that.

Before we go to the news, though, Ben and I are very excited to join our friends at J Street for a live podcast at their national conference on October 26th in Washington, D.C. We're going to talk to some of the candidates. We're going to talk to activists. We're going to talk to policy leaders about what's going on in Israel, the elections, the two-state solution, everything you want to hear about. So if you want to come, go to jstreet.org slash pod save to get a ticket. That's jstreet.org slash pod save.

All right, Ben. So again, we're starting with Syria. Like last week we talked about how Trump was on this phone call with President Erdogan late on Sunday night. And he got rolled. And then he announced that the U.S. was basically greenlighting this Turkish military operation. It's in northeastern Syria and an assault on our allies. Again, like, I didn't think this was going to happen. But it did.

And so here's where things stand. Let's start with the latest in Syria. So Trump withdrew U.S. troops from northeastern Syria. and he just abandoned these Kurdish military forces that, you know, days before were our allies in the fight against ISIS. His message to them was basically, you're on your own. Best of luck with the Turkish military, which, by the way, is the second biggest military in the NATO alliance after the United States. So the Kurds, because they're smart, quickly cut a deal with the Syrians and the Russians to bring Syrian regime forces back into northeastern Syria to prevent the Turkish military from taking all that territory from, you know, allowing them to get slaughtered. So far, the UN reports that 160,000 people, including 70,000 children, have been displaced in just one week.

Meanwhile, in Washington, Trump called President Erdogan on the phone again this week on Monday and demanded to implement a ceasefire in Syria and announced some sanctions against Turkey despite a week before giving him the opposite message. So odds are that one won't stick. He also is going to dispatch Mike Pence to lead a delegation to the region because that'll solve everything. saying he's getting criticized from Republican Democrats, everybody. In response, Trump is increasingly tweeting callous and saying things about the Kurds, including that the Kurds didn't help us in the Second World War. They didn't help us with Normandy. You later tweeted, anyone who wants to assist Syria in protecting the Kurds is good with me,

whether it's Russia, China, or Napoleon Bonaparte. I hope they all do great. We are 7,000 miles away. Wow, that is just some cold shit. So I guess let's just pause there. we have all lost count of the number of horrible things that Donald Trump has done or said over the last few years. I do think, though, that this is going to go down as one of the most infamous parts of his legacy. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that's so remarkable is that every single thing that has happened, everybody predicted.

Yeah. So a lot of time, you know, you and I have talked about a lot of issues where it's a tough call, it's a 5149 call, or you could do things with the best of intentions and then it turns out wrong. No, everybody told him if we withdraw our support and let the Turks come in, their Kurds will be massacred, it'll be a boon for the Russians. And, you know, he ignores that. And that's exactly what happened. It's almost impossible to remember any time in recent American history, at least, where there was such a clear set of conditions that were going to transpire that he was being warned about and he just ignored it. I think it is worth pausing on just how inhumane these tweets are. because the man seems completely incapable of seeing the human beings on the other end of his decisions. You know, everything is like a kind of reality cable TV show debate or Twitter debate. There are 70,000 children who are displaced.

There are people who've been killed because of what Donald Trump did. And he just, no part of him indicates that he cares at all. There's something kind of chilling about the degree of sociopolit. pathy that could lead someone to just be completely divorced from any human consequences of their decisions. And then the geopolitics of this are a complete mess because this was our kind of foothold into some capacity to be a negotiating partner in the future of Syria, some capacity to help the Kurds get their just reward, you know, whether that's autonomy, de facto autonomy in their own region. That's just all gone now. And it's literally.

actually Russia, Iran, and ISIS, who were the beneficiaries. You couldn't, like, find three more, you know, adversarial entities to the United States. And again, that, to me, puts this on the Republicans because they rant and rave about Iran, about ISIS, about, you know, what they used to about Russia. And literally their president just handed this off to them. And now all these discussions will be happening without us. And it also shows that these leaders are, they ignore Trump. I mean, he's a non-entity. It's like, okay, you could see Putin Erdogan talking, let's just get him out of the way. Right. And we'll figure this out.

And so we're seeing what it's like when the rest of the world has just no respect or even regard for the views of the president of the United States. Yeah, I think your point about how quickly the result of this showed up is an important one, right? Because like, we've been talking about how the North Korea diplomacy has been a disaster for years, but that's not going to show up until it shows up. Yeah. It's been a while. In very short order, we know that thousands of ISIS or ISIS-linked prisoners have escaped. gate from camps in prison in northern Syria because the Kurdish soldiers guarding them had to turn their attention to Turkey. I mean, that's something that was predicted. There's also a report

from the Daily Beast that said the U.S. has had to refocus all our surveillance assets in the region, like IRSR assets, like drones, planes, helicopters, satellites maybe on our troops as they evacuate Syria, which means those eyes in the sky are not watching ISIS as these guys are marauding, you know, out of prisons and maybe into Europe. Eight organizations are. are pulling out of the region, which is making everything worse for civilians. So, like, horrible things happened immediately, as everyone predicted, as Erdogan told him what happened. And Trump just ignored it.

Yeah. And, I mean, if you look at a map of Syria, this whole eastern part of Syria, Assad was not there. Right. So this is a huge deal to basically give him the last, you know, one of the last remaining pieces of the country. The ISIS people escaping, you know, we've seen ISIS, you know, be able to regenerate itself. into different forms. And Trump just saying, like, well, they'll go to Europe.

So it's not a problem here. I mean, bear in mind, if we start to see terrorist attacks in Europe from ISIS, like, you're going to be able to draw a line back to this. You know, we don't yet know how this might kind of end up destabilizing or changing the picture in Iraq, where the U.S. still does have some forces present, but Iran has a lot of influence. And now, you know, Russia is going to be bearing down. The Iraqi Kurds are going to feel a little bit more squeezed.

So this will continue to play out. and it will play out in a way that benefits ISIS, that benefits Putin and Iran and the type of Middle East that they've been seeking to build. And so it just the fact that he doesn't seem to care at all. And it also, you know, his talking which used to be, the only thing he had to talk about on foreign policy is that he defeated ISIS and he was putting maximum pressure on Iran. Well, he just opened the door back to ISIS and gave Iran, you know, a significant victory here. I don't even know what he can say. And to watch him now pivot to like talking about sanctioning Turkey, which we can talk about now, is like, but even if you think that's correct, and I think it's merited, it's totally bizarre to sanction a country for something you told them they could do a week before. Never mind that now we're sanctioning a NATO ally with nuclear weapons.

So Donald Trump has put us in a position where we're kind of forced by circumstance to do this. But you know what? Putting sanctions on a country that has 50 U.S. nuclear weapons and that is in NATO is a big deal. And we didn't have to be there. We're not for Donald Trump getting rolled by Erdogan on that call and now trying to do cleanup with Lindsey Graham on all three. I mean, it's a staggering window into the incompetence in inquiry. that we have in the White House. Yeah, those sanctions are not going to work.

I mean, everyone's going to do what he has to do until he's done. Yeah. And then maybe he'll stop. Yeah, and then, yeah, that's exactly what's going to happen here. So the other talking point, you mentioned Trump's talking about. The other talking point is that he wants to end these wars. He says, I was elected to end wars. So I think we should just point out that what he says and what he's done are very different, right?

So talked about this before. He has sent more troops to Afghanistan. Just this week, he deployed nearly 2,000 U.S. servicemen and women to Saudi Arabia to stick them in the middle of a potential conflict between the Saudis and Iran. And the U.S. mission in Syria itself has actually expanded under Trump. So we've been talking a lot just now about the operations to fight ISIS with the Kurds in northern Syria and Trump has just ended that mission. But, you know, the U.S. military is not abandoning a base called Al-Tanof in southern Syria, which has been fighting against Iranian-backed rebel

groups in the south. So this is complicated stuff because, you know, I'm sure the geography is unfamiliar to most people. But the key point here is that we're not actually getting out of Syria altogether. And Trump just decided to abandon the part of the mission that was about ISIS, abandoned our closest allies in their region. But we're still going to have a bunch of folks down in the southern part of the country, I guess, to hold off some sort of Iranian presence that just increased because we coughed up the north. Yeah.

No, and it's complete bullshit for him to hide behind this. I'm ending wars. and I'm not listening to the people who got us into the Iraq war thing. If he really meant that, he wouldn't have surged troops in Afghanistan, right? I mean, that's where we're actually really fighting a war, taking on casualties, have more than 10,000 troops. You know, what he did here was a kind of callous, nihilistic decision that affected, like, 500 U.S. troops. Like, that's not ending the wars.

That's just doing something really stupid. The other thing that's important here is that, you know, there's ending the wars in terms of, like, can we bring the troops out of Afghanistan? But then there's also ending the mindset that kind of gets you into wars. And that is most prevalent with his Iran policy, where all the people who've been making his Iran policy are exactly the same people he says on Twitter he's not listening to about Syria. And so you see these almost 2,000 U.S. troops going to Saudi Arabia

as part of this kind of maximum pressure on Iran, support Saudi Arabia and its proxy war against Iran. Like the risk of the conflict with Iran is real. That's the ultimate test of whether you're ending the endless wars is not getting into more of them. He justifies that by saying Saudi is paying us cash for these troops. What a gross thing to say about U.S. troops. They're not mercenaries for hired by Saudi Arabia, like some Praetorian Guard for Maham bin Salman. Like these are people who are supposed to represent a set of values in the world, right,

in a kind of core professionalism. I should add, like, I just don't know how the U.S. military can stomach all this. He throws under the bus in reverse. and runs over with the bus our closest allies in the fight against ISIS, the Kurds. He's treating them like mercenary and Saudi Arabia.

I mean, this is not a commander chief who's showing any respect for the U.S. military. He just sees him as kind of a political prop. So if you really wanted to end the endless wars, you would be already out of Afghanistan. You would not be risking

another war with Iran. You'd be changing the legal authorities under which our troops are fighting in these places. And you'd have really aggressive diplomacy to try to manage these conflicts. And you wouldn't necessarily remove those thousand or 1500 special forces from Syria. You'd have diplomats actively working to resolve differences with the Turks and to try to figure out a political conclusion to the Syrian civil war. Tommy, can you imagine being a U.S. diplomat who has to go into meetings on Syria or Iraq now?

Like, what do you even say? No. I would say send Rudy Giuliani to Syria and sort this shit out. To your point about, you know, the U.S. troops who have been involved in these fights, I mean, you're seeing lots of articles, you know, with background quotes from, you know, members of the military up and down the chain of command who are, like, despondent over what's happened. Because I'm sure they were their friends. I mean, they were working hand in glove with these Kurdish forces, like, very recently. But, I mean, I want to talk about the international reaction in a minute. But before we get into how the world is reacting, we should talk for a minute about who the Kurds are and why we've been fighting with them. So here's some basic facts. So I was reading a BBC article that said there's about 25 to 35 million Kurds in Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, before the Syrian civil war started. And we had actually accurate demographic information from Syria. The Kurds made up about 5 to 10 percent of this Syrian population.

So it's a significant number of people. They're all different religions, but I believe the majority of them are Sunni Muslims. And ISIS has been targeting them since about 2013. And that's why they've been engaged in some of this really brutal fighting. with us, with the Peshmerga forces that came over from Iraq. So, Ben, like, what else do you think we should know about the Kurds and why they've been such a close American ally? Well, first of all, there is this kind of history of betrayal, right?

So the quick version of it is, you know, after World War I, when the world was essentially being divided up and different people were being given nations for their homelands, the U.S. went to the peace conference after World War I trying to get the Kurds of homeland, a nation of their own, and didn't. They essentially traded that away at some point. And so there was this kind of original mythology of being sold out. Then after the Gulf War, people will remember that George H.W. Bush didn't go all the way into Baghdad to dispose Saddam Hussein. He then urged the Iraqi people to rise up against Saddam Hussein. The Kurds did.

They were slaughtered horrifically. Ultimately, we did put in a no-fly zone to protect them, that was also seen as a level of betrayal. Then they obviously fought with us in the Iraq war. Our critics, the Obama administration's critics, will say the failure of the Obama administration to leave 10,000 U.S. troops in Iraq at the end of 2011 was a further betrayal of the Kurds. Obviously, we've talked about this. We didn't have any approval from the Iraqi government to do that, which was a deciding factor for us.

but at the same time, what then ended up happening is when ISIS came back into Iraq in 2014, we had to initiate our operations against ISIS because they were about to slaughter this population called the Yazidis, this kind of distinct religious minority in northern Iraq, not even Kurds. And we intervened to essentially save the Yazidis and went to the Kurds. and went to the Kurds to be the ground force. They had to save themselves too, but they were also helping us save these other people. And from then on, we started supporting the Kurds first in Iraq.

And then what was interesting is we'd never really worked with these Kurds in Syria before, but obviously we had to follow ISIS into Syria. And they were tenacious fighters. I think people should also know in a region that has all kinds of problems with respect to women. The Kurds in northern Syria have a very aggressive. egalitarian view of the role of women in society. So you see women integrated into their security forces, into their politics. It's just a very different and distinct ethnic identity that they have that manifests

itself in different politics. But as a kind of besieged minority in places like Iraq and Syria, they've turned to us, the United States, as a partner, as people can protect them and help them. And now this is kind of the final betrayal to just leave them there at the risk of massacre. And I've talked to some former colleagues of mine in recent days who'd worked with them been to Northern Syria who were literally saying to me, people that I sat across the table from could be dead right now or certainly have been displaced. And what that must mean psychologically to the Americans who've worked with them, you know, what a weight. I can't even imagine. I mean, anyone who served in the military in northern Syria, Brett McGurk, who was the lead for Obama and then Trump on counter ISIS policy. see. I mean, you can tell by his tweets that he is just despondent, you know. I mean,

yeah. The other thing to note is, you know, this may be the Turks will roll in and the Syrian forces roll in and this will be a fast, brutal campaign. This could turn into a long-term insurgency where there's just more fighting for months and months and months in northern Syria, which will just make the lives of average people living in the area worse. Or Assad could come in and round up a whole bunch to these Kurds and torture and kill them. You know, I mean, this is really, you know, it's really ugly. It's one of these things you can't put any, there's just no way to avoid how starkly bad this is.

And again, like, just to watch like a Lindsey Graham pivot from being mad at Trump for 24 hours to like, I'm now working with Donald Trump on these sanctions against Turkey, it's like, my God, like, how can you stomach this? How can you not want to hold this guy to account? And I frankly think it does connect to the impeachment piece because it's like it's about a president who is literally betraying any sense of national interest in his foreign policy. How these guys can stand by him after this. You know, as we've talked about, Republicans have long had an affinity for the Kurds for a lot of reasons,

including that in Syria they protected these ancient Christian populations. I mean, this should go to the core of what I thought people like Lindsay Graham believed in. But it's like almost like as long as he has his talking point of like, I'm working hard with Trump, you know, to sanction the Turks. He'll just let go of his criticism. Yeah. I mean, you guys know we're not Trump fans. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone should just be clear.

Like, Obama made a lot of mistakes in Syria. You can blame decisions he made in Iraq. Those were brutally tough policy choices. We fucked up a lot of things. Trump, in this case, made a choice to tell Erdogan to conduct a military operation that everyone knew was going to end the way it is ended so far. and he owns that forever. Yeah. I mean, and look, I do think there's one thing Trump says that has some germ of truth,

which he stumbles on, which is the thing that opened up this entire Pandora's box was the Iraq war, right? You invade a country in the heart of the Middle East and break it into pieces. You are going to be dealing with consequences for many years to come. I frankly think that a big part of the Syrian Civil War was tied to that war in Iraq, the kind of sectarian dynamic in Iraq, manifests itself in its own way in Syria, al-Qaeda and Iraq, the insurgent group that emerged,

terrorist group that emerged after the Iraq invasion, morphs into ISIS in the during civil war, can go on on. Then you have Obama. All kinds of decisions that I can look back on and say that could have been right, that could have been wrong. Frankly, sometimes I question

whether we should have called for Assad to go in the first place without the strategy to go, which is kind of a doveish view. sometimes I can think, should we have intervened militarily? I can tell you, though, we were trying to do the right thing. You know, our motivation was always, you know, even the famous, you know, not bombing Syria after the Red Line incident, sincere belief that congressional authorization would be the right thing for military force and that a diplomatic agreement to destroy chemical weapons could be useful.

This is just different. The people trying to both sides this, it's a bullshit tactic because, There was never any case where, like, Obama had a decision where it's like, literally, everybody's telling him to do the opposite. And he knows that if he makes this decision, some U.S. ally will be massacred. And U.S. geopolitical adversaries will immediately be the winners of this. Forget Obama. I can't think of any U.S. president that's made a decision like that, you know, because of one phone call from Erdogan. So, yeah, I know we beat up on Trump.

this one is kind of different because some of the other things like, you know, are we have a point of view about the North Korea talks or about the Iran policy. This is kind of a hundred to zero percent call. I mean, there's no justification for what Trump did. I hope part of the takeaway from the show is that most of these are tough choices. Yeah. And they're not easy calls. But it was not a tough call to tell Erdog one, stand down.

Yeah. Don't massacre our allies. But another story of the Trump administration is, you know, isolation from traditional allies. So let's do a quick sweep of how the international community has reacted to what's happening in Syria. So on Monday, foreign ministers in 28 European Union states agree to stop selling arms to Turkey. That's the first time that's happened with the NATO ally. They also released a joint statement condemning Turkey's military action, a top Saudi Arabian diplomat criticized Trump's Syria policy, calling it, quote, a disaster for their region. This was from

Prince Khalid bin bin Sultan, who is, I think the ambassador to that. the UK who said the decision, quote, does not give one incredible confidence, end quote, in Trump's reliability as an ally. So that's, that's a shot from the Saudis who just got 1800 U.S. Service members sent over their country. Bebe Netanyahu and Israel has condemned the Turkish operation. You're seeing lots of Israelis wondering, like, if Trump can abandon the Kurds, could we be next? And you alluded to this earlier, Ben, I mean, last, but no means least, the Russian state media has just been hammering home the idea that the U.S. is an unreliable ally. So stick with us.

Russia because, you know, they're going to let you hang. Yeah. And the reliability of alliances, again, this doesn't happen in a vacuum. Trump has been taking aim at U.S. allies diplomatically, trade wars, you know, in his politics for three years, right? So that Russian narrative is more powerful because it's built on three years of Trump trashing European allies, questioning Asian alliances, and now abandoning the Kurds. So it's of a peace. Yeah, it really is. So there's one last thing we should touch on before we move on, which is the enormous elephant in the room here, which is the fact that the U.S. has up to 50 nuclear weapons stored in Turkey. So you might hear that and wonder what the fuck.

Fair question. So this dates back to the Cold War. It's part of the NATO nuclear sharing agreement policy. The idea was to deter a large-scale attack from the Soviet Union by forward deploying a bunch of U.S. nuclear weapons in several European countries. I think there are nukes in Germany, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands. So they're not just like sitting in Erdogan's house. The U.S. has a big Air Force contingent in Turkey. There's a base where the weapons are under our control.

But, I mean, look, they probably should have been removed a long time ago, especially given the coup in 2016 in Turkey and given how erratic Erdogan has been. The New York Times reported that over the weekend, U.S. officials were reviewing ways to evacuate those weapons. It's worth noting that while Turkey has signed the NPT, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which means they can't have or detonate nuclear weapons. Last month, Erdogan was complaining that it's unacceptable for nuclear armed states

to forbid him from getting nuclear weapons of its own. So that's a big deal. That would be a huge proliferation problem for the whole world. So, I don't know, Ben, too big but sort of divergent questions for you to close this. How worried are you about the status of these nukes? One, given all that we just talked about, all the concerns about Turkey, do you think they're still an ally and should still be in NATO? Well, on the first one, you know, I think everybody should be kind of worried about this because, you know, we were working hard to keep the dam of nuclear proliferation from breaking, right?

So the idea was this diplomatic deal prevents Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. That stops not just that domino from falling, but if Iran got a nuclear weapon, then the Saudis probably would. And suddenly this volatile region is full of nuclear weapon states. And yeah, if you've got the U.S. president abandoning as we've – this is where all these people – as we talk about on the show fit together, Tommy. He's abandoned all these nuclear arms control treaties with the Russians. He's scrapped the Iran deal. He's basically walked away from any sense of kind of international law.

And so, yeah, that puts you in a world where someone like Erdogan's like, yeah, why can I get a nuclear weapon? Well, if Erdogan gets one, then the Saudis, the Iranians, the very scenario we won, of all these different countries getting them starts to be real. And we have no diplomatic capacity to stop that. Normally what you do is you go to Russia, China, be like, hey, we better. do something here to stop this from happening. The U.S. is in no position to do that.

So one is this proliferation risk. These 50 nuclear weapons, yeah, I'd be, I mean, the person in charge of solving this problem would presumably be, in part, Rick Perry, former Dancing with the Stars contestant, right, who couldn't even remember the number of cabinet agencies he wanted to get rid of a debate once. Like, maybe you shouldn't put Rick Perry in charge of the nuclear weapons. Maybe you shouldn't have a hack like Mike Pompeer in charge of State Department. I mean, we're living at a time when,

The foreign policy that Trump has built and the administration that he has built is running into some very complicated problems in the world. And it's like, who's going to solve these problems? Hey, I got a little good news for you. Rick Perry resigned. Well, yeah. So there's some fucking person you never heard of dealing with this. Yeah, that's, you know, Rick Perry feeling the cloud of impeachment is going to step down. We had what, Ernie Moniz who would like, you know.

We had a Nobel Prize winning physicist, right? And so that, the concern is it like there's always, again, I've said this on this podcast, but it takes time for the consequences of foreign policy and clear. Like right now, like the seams are popping off the world order, right? Really are. And it's kind of like who's going to try to put that back together again. It's not going to be Trump. I think we could manage contingencies with those nuclear weapons.

I wouldn't like to have to see U.S. troops, like, you know, trying to get nuclear weapons out of Turkey. But it's so core to our national security and the Turks have to know that. It'd be hard to see them, like, seeking to take custody of them. I read somewhere there's five. thousand or so Air Force men and women at that base. So that's significant contingent. And every, I mean, with that, this doesn't reveal anything, but like every place that the

U.S. has deployed nuclear weapons, we've got all kinds of break glass options. I do think we have to be questioning whether Turkey's a NATO ally. I think we should have been doing that anyway based on them not being a democracy increasingly. Good point. Good point. And when people talk about sanctions, I've been more intrigued by the idea of stopping arm sales to them, right? Because the sanctions feel like we overuse sanctions.

sanctions and, you know, we just slap sanctions on countries to make some political point at home and then don't bear in mind like what it does to people. But, I mean, at a minimum, I don't know why we have to provide all these arms to them. And look, there is a place, I'm sure, for sanctions and this response, but why not look at the arms relationship? Then we have leveraged on them with NATO because their whole military is going to build the plug at the NATO. So it's not like it's going to be the easiest thing in the world for them to reorient towards Russia. But, yeah, I think that kind of thing needs to be on the table. because again in a world in which like autocrats like Erdogan who are you know who are nationalists and at times impulsive pose the greatest risk us having those people in our alliances is problematic and kind of diminishes the value of the alliance generally right and like trump seems to see a lot of these relations we have other countries as like arms sale first or financial first you know so we should just say like the germans are going to take a big financial hit with this decision not to sell arms to Turkey. And they deserve some credit for that.

Yeah. They probably won't get any. Yeah, not from Trump. All right, let's talk about impeachment for a bit because this is a story about the corruption of U.S. foreign policy, as you basically said. I mean, so last week we did a deep dive into Gordon Sondland, who is Trump's U.S. ambassador to the European Union. We talked about why it was so bizarre to have him in Ukraine policy at all, since Ukraine isn't part of the European Union. It seems like an important point. Initially, it seemed like the White House was going to prevent Gordon Sondland from testifying before.

Congress. Since then, he's reversed course and like, the dam is really broken in terms of officials coming forward. So this week, Congress is going to hear from the following people. Fiona Hill, who was the Russia and Europe policy expert and leader on the National Security Council. George Kent, who's a deputy assistant secretary of state, Michael McKinley, who's a top Pompeo-Aid career person, someone who was seemingly involved in like all the big decisions that Pompeo made. Gordon Sondland, we mentioned earlier, and then Laura Cooper, who's a defense official overseeing Ukraine. The testimony that's already leaking out is very damning. Fiona Hill reportedly said that John Bolton, Trump's former national security advisor, was so alarmed about Giuliani's shadow

diplomacy in Ukraine that he told her to notify a bunch of White House lawyers. Ben, I mean, some choice Bolton quotes here include Giuliani's a hand grenade is going to blow everybody up. And the other one was, I'm not part of whatever drug deal Rudy and Mulvaney are cooking up. Those are good quotes. So, Ben, like, I'm just trying to imagine what it took to freak out John Bolton this badly because he is a guy who is primarily known for browbeating staff, manipulating intelligence, and, like, fighting brutal internal battles with his colleagues. Yeah. Well, and he's also a lawyer who's been around U.S. foreign policy and around, you know, the scandal turn. and yeah if he looked at this and was like I got to get distance and I got to probably create some record

that says I was not a part of this right that's why you go to a lawyer like I just wanted to be known that I'm not a part of the crimes then there are crimes happening yeah so and it's it doesn't make John Bolton a hero right in his own ass covering though he was confirming that the crimes were taking place he didn't call the FBI yeah he didn't blow the whistle himself yeah we know of but but so so that that tells me that that this sufficiently alarmed a Washington survivor, that that Washington survivor is like, oh, this is the thing that's going to take everybody down.

And so I'm going to go tell a lawyer that I'm not a part of it so that I'm covered, right? So it's further indication that people knew that this was criminal, right? I mean, that's how I look at this. Then all these career people, you know, it's interesting how one of the key events in this whole scheme that is emerging is the firing of the U.S. ambassador Ukraine, because you can't just fire an ambassador without a lot of people learning about why that's happening.

And so all these kind of career people who have titles that even our world those are like, well, what's the deputy assistant secretary of X or, you know, this Ukraine desk officer? What does I mean? That basically means these are kind of civil servant types who come to work every day and they're just working on the Ukraine account and like working on getting the military systems there and supporting the ambassador from Washington. And so when, lo and behold, they're starting to see a whole bunch of stuff about this ambassador getting shit canned because she won't,

cooperate with Rudy Giuliani, like, that's something they've never seen. These people know a ton. And what's kind of humorous to me and, you know, makes Adam Schiff look like a fucking genius, is at the same time that the White House is like, we're not going to cooperate with your impeachment inquiry and you're not getting our White House documents. And Mike Pompeo is saying the same thing. All these other people who are actually down in the working level of the government and saw all the crimes are like, fuck you, we're going to go up there and testify, you know? And we're going to get Adam Schiff and the Democrats all the information they need because we know that this was criminal. And we know that these were crimes.

And we don't want to go down with this Titanic, you know. And the fact that all these people are testifying, even though their bosses don't want them to, it shows you that people think that this is going to bring them down, you know, and that they don't want to be a part of that. And they would know all this stuff. They would know what Gordon Sondland was doing. Right. Because I'm sure that the water cooler talk in the State Department a few months ago is, why do you? the hell is Gordon Sondland involved in our Ukraine policy anyway? Right. Yeah. And these people are just like, the policy decisions are going to get made in the White House Situation room by the president,

by the cabinet, by the deputy secretaries, these agencies. These folks are just trying to execute on U.S. foreign policy at the local level, if you're an ambassador, you know, in the bowels of the State Department. And all of a sudden, the policy is being upended. Their ambassadors getting back for no cause. Like, of course it was sounding alarms within the department. That's not the deep state thing. That's like a, any business would be thrown, you know, upside down by something like that happening. And I have to say like two things. One, again, what's so different from the Russia scandal, which was a situation where a bunch of underlings in the Trump organization were either colluding with the Russians or trying to have meetings with them to get

dirt. This is Trump. Like every piece of information we get is like Trump himself personally directing this whole scheme. Trump himself talked to the president of Ukraine. Trump's personal lawyer at his behest going to fly around Ukraine while he's getting paid by a bunch of criminals back home. So Trump is square in the middle of the second thing is the number two villain in this whole story, in my view, is Mike Pompeo. Because he's running this department that is supposed to be apolitical that is supposed to represent the interest of the United States. And clearly he himself is completely going along with this Trump scheme. You know, he's even sitting in there on the phone call where Trump is trashing the former ambassador to the president.

of Ukraine and hanging all these other people out to dry. You know, all these people work under him. And now you see them resigning, right? You see some of these people just resigning because they'd rather resign and just go talk to the House committee than to carry Mike Pompeo's water. But this guy presided over the utter corruption of U.S. foreign policy and to what end? Because they're not even like, it's not like they're accomplishing great things.

And that's the other thing is you could rationalize it of like, well, you know, I really believe that this broader cause I'm working for is trying to do the right thing. if some ugliness happens along the way, that's fine. Like, what broader cause are you working for other than Donald Trump's own corruption? Nothing. That's the cause. The cause is Trump's corruption. Yeah, I mean, so you have this brave whistleblower who starts off this chain of events.

These career people, like, you can tell Corey Lewandowski that he's got to clam up and, like, you know, go with the mob program, but some career person's not, which in turn means that these NSC staffers are going to see their colleagues testifying and then they're going to go, which means I think John Bolton will then. go. But in the very near term, to your point, I mean, Gordon Sondland, who is Trump's guy who bought his ambassadorship to the EU, is now going to testify. And so what we've learned already from that decision is that he's going to say that the famous, like, there is no quid pro quo text message that he wrote back to Bill Taylor, who was a career ambassador who was confused by why we were suddenly leveraging military assistance to get dirt on Joe Biden and his son. Sondland is now going to say, well, that text message was actually dictated to him by Donald Trump himself. Donald Trump is calling his U.S. ambassador to the European Union to mess around with Ukraine policy.

And so Sondland will say, Trump told me to say that. I don't know that it's true. So it's a huge problem for all the Republicans who are pointing at that message to some sort of like get out of jail free card. Solland's also going to say that Trump told him that any in-person meeting with Trump and President Zelensky of the Ukraine was going to have to be approved by Rudy Giuliani. So that's weird. And lastly, we know that federal prosecutors are looking at Rudy Giuliani's business dealings in Ukraine. Two of his co-conspirators in this mess, a guy named Lev Parnas, another one named Igor Fruman, were arrested at Dulles Airport. Charming a little guy.

Yeah, funn place to be arrested on charges that they funneled foreign money to former Congressman Pete Sessions as part of their scheme to mess with U.S. Ukraine relations and fire the ambassador. So, oh, by the way, Rudy was paid 500 grand by their company, which is called Fraud Guaranteed, which is just two people. perfect. So again, Ben, like, this is a bizarre scheme. And let me ask you a question, like, because we're in the drip, drip, drip phase of this. Can you see any of the information that's come out in any way being good for Trump? I can't because we've all read that transcript. And like, how do you fix that? So to me, like, this is the first time, I mean, I may regret saying this, but like, and I still think it's a long shot, but like I'd always operate under the presumption, you know, there'll be impeachment and then he'll be acquitted. Like, I don't know, man. Like,

this is the first time I was like, this is really bad and it's just getting worse. It's growing. And it's growing. And if there are more crimes, like actual crimes, like people being prosecuted for stuff and the dominoes start falling and everybody, you know, already we see more more people testifying. Like on what basis are the Republicans going to vote to acquit? You know? Like I, I, you know. To your point, right?

So, I mean, these two guys who are Giuliani's associates. Seems like they figured out a way to funnel some foreign money into the U.S. And then what they did is they paid Giuliani. And then they paid off a congressman named Pete Sessions to write a letter attacking our former ambassador as part of the scheme to get her kicked up. Which is, first of all, like, it's just really weird to me. Like, I can't, since when does the State Department care about some backbencher congressman's views about an ambassador? I'm wondering how this scheme got cooked up. Yeah.

And to your point about. other questions. Yeah, so your point about an actual crime or foreign interference in elections or in our politics, like, there it is. I mean, again, I don't want to possibly underestimate the capacity of Senate Republicans to be venal and narrow-minded, but like, this is like a growing, you know, title wave of shit about just the utter corruption and criminality of the President of the United States as relates to a critical relationship, as relates to our capacity to have a free and fair election in this country in 2020. And it's just getting worse.

And this serious story that we led with, colliding with that, does just kind of convey the sense of a U.S. government that is completely out of control, you know, that just can't govern, that people aren't in charge, people are just doing crimes like Rudy Giuliani's in charge of important foreign policy accounts, the Kurds are being sold out, like this stuff all kind of does come together and lo and behold, the beneficiary is consistently Putin. I mean, I think this story has like more and more turns to it that are just going to get worse for them. Yeah, it's weird. Because think about it.

It's been what, like, not even a month. Yeah. And think of what we've learned. A lot. And we're learning stuff every day. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about some other issues here.

So as all this all-consuming impeachment news happens, we've had a detente in the China trade war. Late last week, Trump decided to hit pause on the trade war with China. The Wall Street Journal described the results as follows. Quote, China is emerging with wins in this week's trade talks with the U.S. shelving new tariffs against Beijing, while leaving many demands to be worked out later in return for an assurance of increased agricultural purchases. So basically, the U.S. is calling off a planned tariff increase in exchange for China buying $40 to $50 billion in ag products. That would be if it happened significantly more than the $21 billion they bought in 2017. but the commitment seems less than firm,

something that this may be an aspirational target, not a commitment, we're not sure about the time frame. So the key thing to know is that all the big issues were pushed down the road. Yeah, intellectual property thefts, like the big irritants were pushed down the road. The U.S. still has more tariffs planned in December, and it's worth noting that as this has been happening, Trump has really towed the Chinese line on the Hong Kong protest

by saying that the numbers are decreasing and sort of poo-pooing the protests. So the Chinese love that. But over in Hong Kong, there's like tens of thousands of protesters waving U.S. flags and playing the star-spangled banner to call on the U.S. Congress to pass the Hong Kong Human Rights and Accountability Act, which would require the Secretary of State to certify Hong Kong's autonomy every year for them to receive some special treatment from us that helps them economically. So interesting, like Ted Cruz is over there in Hong Kong over the weekend. So anyway, Ben, like, again, there's a lot of Trump on the show lately. We've been critical, but like evaluating what we know of this trade war and what we got out of. it. It doesn't seem like there's much to be happy about. No, and I think this kind of came and went because people did look at this.

And for a long time, analysts, you know, who I talked to in Asian stuff, thought this was the most likely thing, which is that the U.S. and China cannot resolve these core issues on intellectual property, on tech, on supply chains, on trade deficit. And so if Trump got worried enough that the speed of escalation in the trade war risked a global recession before his election, he might look for a partial off ramp so that he could calm the markets down a bit, you know, put off some new rounds of tariffs that could make things worse, get some easy concessions in the Chinese. Because for the Chinese to say they're going to buy a bunch of more agricultural products is easy and just put off all these issues. So I think the way people should look at this, I think, is this is just Trump getting a little spooked that the pace at which he was going with the trade war was going to tank the whole economy. Having a partial deal, which doesn't get rid of the terror, does not end the trade war, right? No.

Still tariffs, still confrontation, but kind of de-escalates it for the moment. I think all this is is Trump seeking to mitigate the risk of a recession happening before the election. Yeah. Yeah, and he can do this knowing that Fox News and the right-wing media will trumpet it as a win. No, because it's not going to even make up for the economic damage. He's already done. So one way to think about it, even if there's some benefit from the Chinese buying more goods, it's not going to be enough to make up for the hit that the agricultural sector has already taken in the U.S.

The jobs have already been lost. Like he's just trying to climb back up to the status quo before he started this trade war, which, you know, speaks to how kind of pointless those whole approach has been. Yeah. All right. This is a cool story out of Ethiopia. So the prime minister of Ethiopia won the Nobel Peace Prize for work promoting peace talks. Ben, can you talk about who he is and what he did to get awarded the Nobel Prize at only 43 years old?

Yeah, I mean, this is such a good story because, first of all, you know, we don't always talk about Africa enough. And when we do, it's usually kind of terrorism, you know, kind of a security lens. But, you know, Ethiopia has been, you know, something of a success story economically in Africa for some time. But there generally been a kind of one-party state, very repressive human rights record and constantly in conflict with their neighbor erotria, right? So, you know, a pretty spotty picture. And, you know, lo and behold, this new prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, becomes the prime minister of Ethiopia. this young guy, he immediately sets about reforming some of the political challenges in the country, releasing, you know, bloggers and journalists, reaching out to some of the opposition

groups and ethnic minority groups who've been persecuted there. He initiates a peace process with Eritrea. What to me is so hopeful about this is this guy's like totally swimming against the current. Like it's not obvious that he would do these things. You know, it's a one-party state that's pretty firmly in control. And he's saying, you know what, I actually think for us to move to the next stage of development as a country, we do need to make peace with our internal opponents. We do need to create some more space for independent journalism and political speech in this country. And we need, because this is tied to the fact that we're in a conflict, you know, we need to reach out and make peace with our tree as well. And so this guy's not only creating positive outcomes

in his country and his region, but he's like literally, there's not many people like that in the world today. And the fact, it just shows you that you don't have to go the road of an Erdogan or a Trump or Modi. He's showing a different way of doing things in a kind of a middle income country. That's some personal risk, too. That's some personal risk. And I should be, you know, it's not a perfect place yet. It's not a vibrant, you know, democracy with full civil liberties yet, but it's certainly much better than when he took over, right? And again, he didn't necessarily have to do that. He wasn't responding to some massive pressure from a, from a brook. or some massive protest movement from within.

And so I think it's so important for the international community to celebrate and spotlight when people do that, when people do the right thing, even when they don't obviously have to. And that's why I think that the Nobel Committee really got this one right. Yeah, it's a very cool story. Check it out. So let's talk about the NBA in China again. So last week we walked through the controversy. The short version is that the Houston Rockets GM tweeted, quote,

fight for freedom, staying with Hong Kong. The Chinese government decided to make a huge deal out of that tweet because they were about to host a bunch of NBA games in China. The NBA, the league initially kind of backed down and looked cowardly before Adam Silver cleaned it up and improved their positioning. But the issue itself has not gone away because of all these games in China and because a lot of players and individuals are getting asked about it now. So ESPN is taking some heat for airing the 9-dash line map in its coverage, Ben.

I'll let you explain what that is in more detail because it doesn't often come up in, you know, NBA coverage. But it's basically one of the ways China tries to stake its claim on Taiwan and a bunch of disputed territory in the South China Sea. Then LeBron James was asked about Darry, the Houston GM's tweet. And at first, LeBron seemed to suggest a Mori quote, like he wasn't educated on the situation at hand. He later sort of clarified that he wasn't trying to comment on the substance of what Mori tweeted. but the problem was really the timing in his view and I guess the impact it had on the players who were in China at the time or on the league.

So I should just say before we get into this. Like I'm a LeBron fan, but I was very disappointed by the comments, not because I expect LeBron to be an expert on Hong Kong or flashpoints in China. But I mean, you know, and also look, look, again, I don't expect him to go out there and blast the Chinese government, right?

Like I don't think that's a fair expectation either. but I do think criticizing Mori will be taken by the Chinese and promoted by the Chinese as a de facto endorsement of their position. And that's probably not the place LeBron wants to be in. If you didn't want to talk about this controversy, there's ways to just decline in comment, but it did seem like he was siding against Mori. Yeah. Well, first of all, the nine dash line, because that one is. I love it. So what people, the nine dash line is literally a Chinese rendering.

of their maritime border, their border at sea. And if you look at it, it's totally insane. Because essentially, the South China Sea borders Vietnam and the Philippines, snakes around, you know, Southeast Asian countries. And the Chinese claim all of it. So if you look at the border, they're claiming like territory, maritime territory and islands that are like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles from China, but like right up against the Philippines. I mean, it's an illogical border, right? Imagine if the Chinese drew their territory the way Donald Trump draws on hurricane weather maps with a Sharpie.

Or imagine if the United States drew its maritime border in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of France. Like that's basically what this is. And first of all, let's just step back. Who the fuck puts their maritime border on a map? Right? So what was so crazy about that graphic from ESPN is like, why would you show a maritime border? Like, it's a dotted line.

And like I think viewers at home be like, why is there some dotted line on the screen? Is that like a typo? So that's that's that, but it shows you, frankly, well, step back and talk about Chinese for a second. This is not like, seem like a confident country. You know, like if you're so kind of belligerent and defensive that you're like bullying ESPN into showing your maritime boundary and graphics and they've done the same thing to a lot of U.S. businesses and, you know, you're piling on Daryl's tweets. Like it doesn't, to me that. doesn't show confidence in self-assuredness. It shows some degree of paranoia and weakness in that regard. And on LeBron, yeah, I mean, I think that there's a certain point here where, like, why,

if you watch his comments, like, you know, he basically has the initial, like, I don't really know much about this. And then he could have stopped. And then it's just like he kept going and going and going and making it worse. And it's like I think that when we were, look, we were in government and we often had to deal with awkward situations of the Chinese where what you can do is just pivot to what you know and what you do believe, right? Which is you can say, look, I don't have a strong view about this, but I believe in free speech, you know, and like that's it.

That's the end of the story. And because once you start looking like, you know, you're kind of, you're kind of. either embracing a Chinese narrative or you're, you know, saying, you know, you're criticizing the timing at which someone used their free speech because, you know, he said, well, you know, you should have sat on the tweet for a while or something. Like, then you're just going down that slippery slope, which is where the Chinese want all these U.S. businesses to go. And, you know, either just stick to the core value, you know, or if you don't know about it,

then you don't have to validate the Chinese view of it, right? Look, I'm sure the timing sucked. I'm sure it was not fun. If you're LeBron, it probably sucked because he had to fly over there for the exhibition game. And he thought it was going to be this great tour of China. Instead, he's probably like basically imprisoned in some luxury hotel in Shanghai. It's probably a really weird, shitty week. And just wanted to get the hell out of there.

I get that. But at the same time, like, we have to bear in mind, like, there are people in Hong Kong who are going through a lot of shit right now every day. And, you know, there are these questions that all these U.S. companies, I mean, are going to face about whether or not they're, how far are they willing to go in, in terms of the Chinese narrative versus just having a baseline of your own value. Yeah, I talk about this more with Isabel Young later because she sort of dealt with this advice. But yeah, I mean, I think what kind of bummed me out about a lot of the coverage of Mory's

tweet and the discussion around how the NBA has dealt with this is, is they missed the point that you made last week, which was that the Chinese found this tweet. Twitter's blocked in China. A manufactured outrage. And now we're all blaming the victim for tweeting something so anodyne. That's the important point here is that like they gin this up. Like the Chinese people weren't consuming that tweet. They wanted to send this message, right? And it's a bully. A bully wants to force you to do what they want you to do. And you saw the same thing with Apple. You know, they had an app that the protesters were using that identified kind of where police were. So pretty useful if you're protesting. And, you know, they pulled this down. Well, you know what? Like in 2016 or 2015, Tim Cook got on this big high horse about not letting the FBI get into the phone of the San Bernardino killer as a matter of principle, right? Which, you know what?

I think he was probably right about that. I think he was right to. William Barr is now trying to browbeat U.S. companies into getting rid of end-to-end encryption. And thank God they will not. I think Tim Cook was right about that. However, if you're willing to stand for the U.S. government, then you should be willing to be. instead of the Chinese government. Like basic principle here, whatever courageous risk you're willing to take in America,

you should be willing to take in other places. Yeah, that's a good point. And actually, by the way, LeBron has been quite courageous in America, talking about police brutality and other issues. Yeah, he really has. Let's stick to sports, because we're a sports podcast now, and talk a little soccer. So North and South Korea played each other today in a World Cup qualifying match. So I don't know what the results are because there was no press allowed.

No South Korean fans were allowed. even if you were visiting North Korea at the time and you were an international. And there was no way to watch it unless you're physically in the stadium. So this was a little abnormal. The South Korean men's national team hasn't played North Korea since 1990. And the big question leading up to it was whether Kim Jong-un would show up. I imagine what else he has to do in the fucking North Korea. So, you know, it comes an interesting time too because the North has suspended diplomatic exchanges with the South.

The recent talks with the U.S. fell apart immediately. They tested a sub-based ICBF. So not a great trajectory, but I think some people may be hopeful because North Korea decided to take part in the 2018 Olympics in Seoul. And that ended up being part of this broader, you know, sports-led detente with the North and in the international community. So, you know, it's just an interesting thing to watch. And it's, you know, on the one hand, the NBA and sports have been pulled into politics in a terrible way. This could be an interesting geopolitical development that could, you know, skew positive.

Yeah, no, and look, I actually think the one of the difficult things with the NBA story is that I actually think in general sports should be a pretty positive thing. Like at a time when, you know, the world is rife with ugly nationalism, authoritarianism, like sports is kind of a common language. You know, people like basketball everywhere, people like soccer everywhere. So I'm generally a big proponent of sports as a bridge builder. And yeah, in this case, you know, I'm sure there are people in the north and people in the south who both love soccer and we're both like to see their. teams playing each other and it just makes them see each other as human beings and not as people with nuclear weapons or people who are part of like, you know, some American-led block against North Korea. Like, so to me, like, more of this would be good.

You know, whether Kim Jong-un turns it into like a stage for himself, I don't really care as much about. But, I mean, I think that this is one of those places where you can start to build a connection. Yeah. Last subject today, a little bit of a lighter note. So our friend Lindsay Graham, friend of the pod, mentor, he got prank called. So two Russian guys, they call themselves Lexus and Vaughan. They're often described as pranksters in the press. Others suggest that they may be like Russian intel-tied people.

So anyway, they got Lindsay Graham on the phone and they convinced him that one of them was the Turkish defense minister. And I'm talking to Lindsay for like 20 minutes and went through his office. Graham's not his... First of all, how do you do that? How do you convince someone you're the Turkish defense minister? You have a cool accent, I guess. So Graham's not their first victim. They also got Adam Schiff, right? So this is a bipartisan, you know, skill set they have. But it was very awkward. A lot of the call was actually fine. I thought Graham acquitted himself well. He's trying to talk the fake Turkish foreign minister out of buying the S-400, which is a Russian missile defense system, which we really don't want them to buy. In fact, so much so that Congress has already passed sanctions and say if they do buy, we'll sanction them immediately. So he's like pushing them there. He was trying to push them for a trade deal. which, you know, might improve ties. But it got pretty bad when Graham expressed sympathy for Turkey's, quote, Kurdish problem.

He described the Kurds as a threat, quote unquote. At the same time, he is out in the U.S. publicly denouncing the Turkish government for conducting this military operation in Syria against the Kurds. So, like, again, you know, he wasn't talking to the defense minister, or whatever, so it's okay. But it's pretty damn hypocritical, given Graham's public comment. but I guess what else should we expect from Lindsay these days? Well, and not only that, you know, he said,

I thought it was a mistake for Obama to arm the Kurds, right? Could we talk about that for a second? A lot of people are talking about the U.S. Obama alliance with the Kurds against ISIS as a mistake that long term was going to lead to a conflict with Erdogan. And maybe it was, but what other option did we have in terms of partnerships on the ground? Well, and also, like, let's remember how this started. the Kurds were about to be slaughtered by ISIS in Kobani in Syria, right? And we literally air-dropped weapons to desperate people to fight ISIS, you know?

Yeah. And so, you know, people can get into, like, the structure of the Syrian Democratic forces, the SDF, but, like, the core proposition that we had a common enemy of ISIS and the Kurds were about to be slaughtered and we could help them, we could arm them, and they could help us by conquering back this territory. Like, it was a pretty basic agreement. Yeah. And what really gets me so pissed about Lindsey Graham and this is that Lindsay Graham like acts like he's the biggest proponent of the Kurds and like somehow Obama wasn't sufficiently pro-Kurdish. And then when he's getting pranked by like these couple of Yehu Russians, he's like, well, I thought Obama made a big mistake on those Kurds.

And it's like what? What do you stand for, man? Other than you trash Obama and you kiss up to Trump. I mean, literally only two organizing principles in Lindsay Graham's life are wedging his head up Donald Trump's ass and kicking Barack Obama in the face. And, like, that's what you learn from this call is he's more than willing to sell out the Kurds. He's more than willing to say that he was against something that he said he was for, which is supporting the Kurds. You know, as long as he takes a shot at Obama, you know. Yeah, he's the worst.

But also, like, who, I try to, like, how do the Russians, I mean. It's impressive. How do they pick out who to, you know, I'm going to be the Turkish defense minister? I don't know. Pretty clever. I mean, that's pretty good. You know, then there's a columnist of the Washington Post named Jackson Deal, who has been a pretty tough critic of Obama. It's probably you and me personally over time.

He wrote a column. Not a friend of the podcast. No. He wrote a column. We'll conclude with this, that where he just pointed out that in the last month, Trump has invited the Taliban to Camp David, he tried to schedule a meeting with the president of Iran and ended up getting snubbed. The North Korea talks have fallen apart. Kim is testing these sub-based missiles.

Now this debacle in Syria. It's hard to imagine a worse foreign policy run in recent history than that. And it's all very consequential stuff, too. Yeah, it really is. Okay. When we come back, we'll have my interview with Vice News. I'm now joined by Isabel Young. She's an Emmy Award-winning correspondent at Vice News.

She's reported from all over the world, most recently, Idlib Syria. She's also been in Hong Kong and China. So Isabel, thank you so much for joining the show. This is a very well-timed interview, I believe. It is. Thanks so much for having me. You have covered literally everything I care about. So let's start with Syria.

So now that the U.S. has pulled out of northern Syria, there's obviously a lot of concern about these thousands of ISIS prisoners that were being held, or hopefully still are being held by Kurdish forces in these makeshift prisons. Trump the other day tweeted basically, don't worry, the U.S. got two of the worst guys out of Syria. They're called the Beatles. They're in our custody now. He spelled the Beatles wrong, but whatever, side point. But so you actually interviewed those guys. You traveled to the area. I mean, can you explain who the Beatles are and what you made of them in this sort of makeshift detention facility? Yeah, so the Beatles is the nickname that I think the UK media has given to four British men. who went over to join ISIS.

And so the two men that I interviewed was Alexander Cotee and El Shik, who were made up kind of half of this ISIS cell. One of the other very prominent members was Mohammed Amwelsi, commonly known as Jihadi John in the UK. And together they sound accused of, I think, up to 27 beheadings,

a number of other heinous crimes. Trump has described these guys as the worst of the worst. And, yeah, as you said, I think in the last week or so, they've been taken and transferred over to Iraq and presumably will go on to the US. We're expecting where they'll stand trial, although that is a little bit up in the end. I'm assuming that that decision is going to get pushed a little bit because El-Shake's mother here in the UK is actually asking that he stands trial in the UK, despite him and Alexander Cody having

being stripped of their UK citizenship. Yeah. I mean, everyone should watch your interview, but what jumped out of, at me is that they just have no remorse. And if that is consistent across other ISIS prisoners in these facilities, it does make me worry a lot if hundreds, if not thousands of these guys are escaping back into Syria or into Europe. Yeah, it's incredibly worrying. I mean, I remember asking them actually, you know, what happens if Trump does pull US troops from the region, which at the time seemed, you know, he was threatening it, but it didn't seem entirely likely

that it would happen anytime soon. Obviously, that is now no longer the case. And they said, you know, this is a really volatile region. These prisons could well be attacked, and those prisoners would be freed, and that would be a terrible look for the US. And, you know, they've sort of proven themselves right. I mean, yeah, they were incredibly unremorseful, defensive.

And I met a number of other jihadists accused of other heinous, ISIS crimes, who were also being held in various prisons around the Northeast, who were also very remorseless and supported Islamic law and supported the Islamic State still. And there's actually been very few, I mean, because the SDF and the Kurds have relied on US support and on their ally support, they haven't really had much funding to attempt some of their rehabilitation programs that they'd been talking about over the last couple of years. None of that has really been implemented. So they really, some of these, a lot of these prisoners really have been festering in very cramped

conditions. A lot of them complained to us about, you know, fleas and having to sleep on top of each other. And as we know, those are the kinds of conditions that really do stir up radical thought and only promote the very ideology that I think the US was trying to, and the world was trying to destroy. Yeah, prisons have historically been a breeding ground for al-Qaeda or jihadi ideologies, but something to worry about more later. So let's turn to China for a minute because over the summer you traveled to Xinjiang province to report on the Chinese government's detention of up to

two million Uyghurs in what are essentially concentration camps. They call them re-education camps. The Uyghurs, for those who don't know, are a Muslim minority group living in Western China. I want to get to what you saw there. But first, I was curious just how it's possible for a westerner to a travel essentially undercover into a place like Xinjiang province that is under just constant pervasive surveillance. Yeah, it wasn't easy. It was definitely one of my harder assignments, I think. I mean, I went in there twice this year over the space of five months.

And I went undercover. And that decision was because of the, I think, The Chinese government has been incredibly effective at limiting the amount of information that gets out of that region. And that has been very intentional. So a lot of what we've discovered about, you know, the growth of the detention camps that these Uyghurs have been placed in, 1.5 million of them over the last couple of years. A lot of that has come out of open source investigations and satellite imagery that really

incredible journalists have done from the outside of China. But actually reporting on the ground, I mean, often if you go on an official trip, you're sort of taken on a bit of a dog and pony show shown inside these camps. You're not allowed to talk freely to many Uyghurs or locals at all, and every move is tracked. So what we decided to do in the end was go in undercover as tourists. I mean, the tourism industry, weirdly enough, is kind of booming in Xinjiang among mainland Chinese people.

I've actually visited the region before, so it was relatively straightforward for me to travel around that area, pretending to be a tourist. and hoping that we could get a more insightful view of the very intense surveillance date that is taking place there, as well as talking hopefully relatively freely to some weakest themselves to get firsthand testimonies from the ground. So everybody listening should watch the full documentary, because it's truly, it's harrowing and really great reporting. It's on Vice News, on HBO or on YouTube. But Iswell, can you talk a bit about what did it feel like to be in this, like, Orwellian, police state. I mean, I was like nervous for you just watching it. And in particular, I'd like to

hear about what you learned about how young, weaker children are being treated. Yeah, I mean, as you hit the nail on the head, it is really this Orwellian dystopian fiction. You know, you go in there, it's so hard to describe. It's this really horrible feeling of just being watched the whole time. You know, facial recognition cameras everywhere, surveillance technology everywhere. You see Uyghurs being stopped and every time they go through checkpoints. Their phones are being scanned. You know, this is the most intense surveillance state in the world right now. And being in it and moving around and I have to say especially moving around undercover with a hidden camera is quite terrifying.

But yeah, in terms of what we were able to see, I mean, we saw a number of really chilling moments where a eight Uighur, young Uigham men were being led down the road towards a police vehicle, which then took them away in the middle of the night. We know that detentions happen and they're taken to camps in the middle of the night. We saw, we heard a number of first-hand testimonies from Uyghs who told us just how terrible the situation was for them, how everyone was being locked up. We also heard first-hand testimonies from Han Chinese people, some of which said, you know, the economy in this area has been completely destroyed. The Chinese government does need to march back what they're doing because it is just an insane scale and level of destruction to the economy themselves and having a ripple

effect on the Han Chinese people living there as well. And then, yeah, when it comes to the children, which is the most harrowing part of it, I think we just sort of saw this next level of what they're doing. You know, we knew about the 1.5 million people who were locked up in these re-education camps, but we didn't know the level of children who have become parentless because their parents are being put inside these camps many hundreds of miles away from them often. And they are being taken in as orphans often. And they're being put in these sort of state-run orphanages that they call kindergarten that have really grown over the last couple of years in a parallel timing to when the detention

camps have grown. So part of our investigation involved trying to track down. down through social media where these orphanages might be, where they were built, trying to find how many kids are inside them, and then really just going by the GPS coordinates and trying to catch glimpses of them, which hadn't been seen yet. So, yeah, and then we saw sort of mass indoctrination of children in line with what they want them to believe in, what they, you know, they want them to step in line with Chinese Communist Party thought. Yeah. You mentioned talking to some of the Han Chinese in doing interviews with them along the way. I mean, I was struck by some of the

Han Chinese citizens you interviewed who seemed like they were repeating the government's line about the threat of terrorism that comes from the Uighurs and from Muslims generally and how, you know, they were repeating this government line that Beijing is actually helping the Uighurs by re-educating them. And it was hard for me to tell if these folks were towing the party line because it's dangerous not to in China or if, you know, the government. propaganda is just that effective. I mean, maybe the answer isn't knowable, but I was curious what you made of those responses. Yeah, I mean, it's always hard to know, isn't it? When you go into an authoritarian country to know just how much people are really towing the party line versus how much

people just have to on the face of it, I think that a lot of the people, the Han Chinese people I spoke to who did say that. I mean, they really believed that. I think that the Chinese state media has been incredibly effective at getting their message across, which is that this region of Xinjiang is volatile, that it's a security threat to the rest of China and to Chinese people, that they really need to homogenize society and get everyone in line with one China. And there has been a number of terrorist attacks over the last, a very small scattering of terrorist attacks, have to say, but still, over the last decade or so, which they have really, really used to justify the massive clampdown. And I think that that really was something that kept coming up

when I spoke to Han Chinese people. They would say that this is absolutely necessary. And that, yes, these security measures did seem obscene, but it was for the greater good. Yeah. I should note that the US recently put, I think, 28 Chinese security bureaus and technology companies on a trade blacklist over at Beijing's treatment of the Uighurs. I have no idea if that will be effective or not, but I was glad to see something happen in response to this, you know, what seems like a crime against humanity. Yeah, so was I. I mean, it's been a long haul that I feel like the world has remained largely silent on this issue. I mean, there has been a long debate over how or if to punish

China. There's been a lot of talks about sanctions, but for a long time, really, there's being no action. And I mean, even the majority of Muslim countries have stayed largely silent, which is, as we're talking about before, I mean, a real sign of how China is able to manipulate and use their political and economic prowess around the world to really ensure that other countries and the world stays silent when it comes to their human rights abuses. So, I mean, yeah, in the last week, the US taking those steps to punish Beijing has been really, significant and I think a really, really important first step. Yeah. So let's get into what, how the Chinese government is intimidating basically everybody, a lot of businesses. So you were in

Hong Kong recently. You were reporting on the protest movement there and you spent some time with some of the protesters. You went to an apartment that had essentially been turned into like, I guess a staging ground for people to to live in and to prepare for the protests. My takeaway from the piece was that these men and women seemed fully committed and in this for the long haul. But like, what did you make the protesters you met? And like, what was it like out there on the streets? Yeah, I mean, it's sad. I have personal ties to Hong Kong. So it's particularly sad to see what is going on there. This has been four months of protests now. Over 2,000 people have been arrested. I think over 3,000 rounds of tear gas have been fired. But Hong Kongers are really

standing strong. I mean, especially the younger generations that we spent a lot of time with while we were over there. That, yeah, as you said, they are in it for the long haul. I think that a lot of the media coverage that we've seen obviously focuses on how they've sort of taken a more violent edge over the last few weeks. And, you know, that is true. I think a lot of people are losing patience and they're getting so frustrated and they feel like some of them have to take more radical means in which to make sure their voices are heard and they're struggling in how to do that. But on the other hand, I mean, just in the last week, we've seen thousands of people marching out very peacefully and they are still very focused on their five demands and to kind of make sure

that those are met and that is still very much their focus. On the other hand, you know, Carrie Lam, the Hong Kong leader and the Chinese government themselves do not really seem like they're making many concessions at all. In fact, they've recently enacted a emergency law, which means that they can ban face masks in public, which, as we've seen from all the images coming out of Hong Kong, are kind of crucial when you're getting fired with tear gas constantly. And Carrie Lam has also suggested, I think, in the last day or so, that she's considering, or the Hong Kong government is considering even harsher clamp dance to prevent the level of violence from spreading across the city. So I can only really see it getting bleaker,

unfortunately. Me too. So last question for you. So it has been depressing, watching the NBA, including stars like LeBron James, seemed to cave to Chinese government demands to tow the party line when it comes to Hong Kong. It was particularly ridiculous, in my opinion, for, you know, China to flip out about pretty anodyne comments about Hong Kong when, you know, this This hasn't been a traditional red line for them, right? Like, you know, if you say something about Taiwan or the Dalai Lama, they're going to crack down, but this is entirely new. And it was kind of sad to watch all these corporations and individuals just immediately cave.

But I saw you tweeted the other day. Vice China shut down last week. It's no coincidence that this was just a few months after our story on China's Uyghurs aired in our continued reporting on Hong Kong. Can you explain to listeners just how common it is for the Chinese government to threaten businesses and others who refused to parrot there? point of view? So common. I mean, we've seen it over and over again in the last few years that global companies are having to tow the Chinese Communist Party line in exchange for access to this

massive market. I mean, even, yeah, in the last few weeks, obviously we've seen the NBA come out, but we've also seen gaming companies. I think Google, we certainly had to pull a game that allow people to kind of role play as protesters in Hong Kong. We've seen Versace, Calvin Klein, Varoski, they've all been forced to issue apologies for not listing Hong Kong and Taiwan and Macau as part of China. Tiffany and Coe had to withdraw a campaign photo of a model with a hand over her eye, which has kind of become a symbol of Hong Kong protests recently. Nike had to pull a range where a designer had tweeted his support or expressed his support on social media for the Hong Kong protesters. I mean, the list just goes on and on and on. It is not unusual. And I think

that if you do have commercial interests and commercial investments in China, then it has become, you know, a moral quandary. And you do have to sort of accept that in some ways you are expected to fall in line with what the party demands. Yeah. Yeah, I'm very happy that I run a business that is just complaining about U.S. politics. That's basically what you do here. Yeah, you're safe there. Yeah, for now. Isabel, thank you so much for joining the show. Everyone should follow you on Twitter, Isabel Young, and then everything you do, advice news and everywhere else, because it's really amazing reporting from the ground in often very dangerous places that helps us better understand what the hell is going on over there. So thank you. Oh, thank you so much, Tommy. I really

appreciate it. Thanks to you, Ben. Thanks to the Russian prank callers. And thanks to Isabel Young for joining the show today. Listen, guys, we're going to try to desperately not only cover Trump topics in shows going forward. So tweeted us if there are things you really want to learn about or understand or care about the you see in the news. We'd like to talk out things on the time. Yeah, we're so sick of talking about this guy too. So, anyway, have a great week. Talk you soon. Potsie the world is a product of crooked media. The senior producer is Michael Martinez. Our assistant producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Chris Basil. Kyle Segglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nara Malconian, and Milo Kim,

who film and share these interviews on video each week.