Pod Save the World - Stopping domestic terrorism

Episode Date: August 7, 2019

First, Tommy and Ben talk about the threat from domestic terrorism, the escalating trade war with China, the protests in Hong Kong, tensions with Iran, and the war in Afghanistan. Then they discuss changes to Trump’s national security team, why tensions are increasing between Japan and South Korea, a major announcement from India about Kashmir, more sanctions on Venezuela, why arms control treaties are dying, and what the hell Lindsay Lohan is doing with the Saudi Crown Prince. Then former National Counterterrorism Center Director Nicholas Rasmussen joins to discuss what policy changes are needed to stop rightwing domestic terrorists. 

Welcome back to Pottae of the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rote. Ben, today we got a lot of stuff. Yeah. I'll always say that. So let's start with some right-wing domestic terrorist threats, because that's a blast. Then I think we should get into the escalating trade war between the U.S. and China. There have been some updates on the protests in Hong Kong, updates on Iran, updates on Afghanistan. Some new national security personnel will update you on some of the things we talked about last week at the DNI. why tensions are increasing between Japan and South Korea. Also in the Kashmir region, the Trump administration made another move of against Venezuela. There is some concern that arms control treaties are dying. And then finally, Lindsay Lohan. Yeah, it's not going well.

No, not for Lindsay Lohan, not for arms control. Our guest is former National Counterterrorism Center director, Nick Resumucin, who has worked with Republicans and Democrats to disrupt ISIS plots, al-Qaeda plots, and unfortunately now domestic terrorist plots. So he's a great guy, worked, you know, in a bipartisan way and a real expert on this stuff. Two quick housekeeping things. Our August Cricket miniseries is coming out on Wednesday. It's hosted by Crooked Media's very own Shinika McClendon.

It's called Ringing North Carolina. It follows a story of a political consultant accused of fraud in the subsequent trial in North Carolina's 9th District. First episode is dropping on Wednesday. It's going to go through the scandal. It's a really great story. Check it out. One other thing, Ben, you have a major piece on Burma coming out. the Atlantic on Thursday this week?

Yeah, so it'll be online on Thursday. It's in the next print edition, you know, a long piece about Aung San Suu Kyi, what happened to Ang Sang Suu Kyi, the Rohingya crisis, aiming to draw my own experience, but also some reporting I did, traveling to Burma earlier this year to try to understand what is going on there. You know, hopefully people can read it again online on Thursday, and then, you know, we can talk about it next week. And I should add our friend Samantha Power, her book is coming out September 10th.

Yes. If you want to check that out. Susan Rice also has a book coming out of October. So, you know, we'll have, you know, a double header there. The book game is strong. I have read your Burma piece. It is not a just the defense of the Obama administration policy. It's a really tough look at what the hell happened.

Because it's something I think all of us have been wondering. Like, Aung San Suu Kyi was this Nobel Prize winning, like, human rights icon. Hero, yeah. Now, you know, as part of a government that has been engaged in ethnic cleansing. I just wanted to answer this basic question. And what happened to this person? What were we wrong? Is she the same person?

Was she never that person? And so I hope people check it out. Yeah, it's an awesome piece. Okay, let's start with this week's just horrible domestic terror news. Nick's going to dig into some of the more policy details later, I think. But we were talking over the weekend about how in some ways what happened with these white supremacists is really the worst case scenario we always feared with al-Qaeda. These individuals shooting up malls are in the country already. It is painfully easy to get a weapon of war.

they figured out that you don't need to do some hardened target, like shoot up the Pentagon or the White House, you just go to a movie theater and you can terrorize an entire nation. I'm curious, I mean, you and I, you know, experienced discussions of these policies in the White House starting back in 2009. But why do you think the response has been so slow? And how do you think the government should better approach the threat from domestic terrorism? Well, first of all, I think, you know, there is an eerie comparison to ISIS here. ISIS kind of figured out, right? You know, Al-Qaeda had guys in training camps

and they were constantly trying to plan these spectacular attacks and hijacking aircraft or putting explosive printing cartridges on cargo planes. ISIS figured out that all you have to do to terrorize people is to go walk in a crowd and shoot people. ISIS also had a phenomenon where individuals were radicalized online

and essentially they didn't need to be a part of a terrorist group. They just went out and acted on that ideology. And it feels like the white nationalist movement has mimicked ISIS. The radicalization happens online. You don't necessarily have to be in person recruited. You can just self-radicalize and you commit these acts of violence. You know, part of what happened here, Tommy, you know, I remember we had a summit at the White House laid in the Obama administration, for instance, on countering violent extremism. And that was the name of the summit.

And we were mocked widely for not calling it the summit on radical Islam. And people... Let's just pause on that for one second. That was the single talking point out of Republicans over and over and over again. And the reason we didn't call it that is because we said at the time, actually, there's a threat from white supremacist extremists in this country, too, and we had to view the totality of this threat. And yes, their talking point was to minimize the white nationalist threat and say it's all about radical Islam. And that they kind of browbeat the administration, you know, in Congress. this idea that if you talked about anything but radical Islam, you were selling out America and

you weren't taking the threat seriously. I also think, you know, right now there's an uncomfortable reality, which is that if you were trying to deal this as a national security challenge and saying, what is the threat to the most American people and how do we put resources against that, you would have the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security spending a lot of money and a lot of time trying to unravel where do the sources of white nationalist content? What are the sources of this radicalization? How do we get deeper into community so that someone who spots this behavior can alert the authorities? And the uncomfortable reality is for them to do that, they'd be essentially pulling a thread

on Trump's political base. And I have to think that the political pressure of having a president who embraces some of the same narratives as these white nationalists, that kind of makes me. people think twice about moving in that direction. Yeah, it is a huge, huge challenge. Let's get these goddamn guns off the street and then go from there. Okay, let's talk about China for a minute because this trade war is continuing and it's rapidly escalating. So late last week, Trump said he was going to slap 10% tariffs on basically all Chinese imports. So those new tariffs take effect on September 1st. They will cover $300 billion worth of stuff, including a whole bunch of things you might want to buy

around the holidays, like phones or video games or toys or whatever. So then on Monday, the Chinese government devalued its currency for the first time, and I believe a decade, and the stock market just collapsed. It went down, like the Dow went down, I think, 800 points. Later that afternoon, the Treasury Department in the U.S. responded by labeling China currency manipulator. China has announced that they're going to halt the purchase of American agricultural goods. So, like, the tit for tat just escalated within one day. So, Ben, can we just start with the basics? What does it mean when you devalue your currency?

and why do you think China wanted to do it? And what does it mean when you get labeled a currency manipulator by the Treasury? Well, so first of all, China was responding to Trump escalating the trade war by imposing these new tariffs. And as we said before, these tariffs are not just a penalty on China. They're a tax on the American people. Every single American. Every single American is paying a tax because essentially you're going to pay more, you know,

when you buy any goods made in China, the price is going to go up because the companies that sell those are going to factor in the tariffs, right? So you are paying for this. That's the first point. Second point, it's been 10 years since it was seven R&B, that's the Chinese currency to the dollar, right? So that means that the Chinese acted to make their currency essentially weaker against the dollar. That's a very logical reaction to tariffs because if your currency is weaker, it is cheaper for you to export goods. The price of the goods you're exporting becomes cheaper. And so what they're trying to do is they're trying to make up for the increase in price for the goods from the tariffs by making the currency weaker so that Chinese exporters won't be hurt as much. And frankly also hurts them a bit too because it begins to drain their foreign currency reserves.

The prices for goods are going up in China as well. But Trump takes this step of labeling China a currency manipulator. What is the effect of that? Nothing. I think this is like a really important point. And by the way, Pox on Chuck Schumer too. He's been yelling about this for years. But the reality is what happens?

You're labeling it. It just means you're declaring that we think that they're manipulating their currency. All that means and practices, we go to the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, and we essentially complain and say, we think the Chinese are manipulating their currency. Interestingly, under the current level of the Chinese currency, the IMF does not even believe that the Chinese are manipulating their currency to the point that they should face a penalty. So this is purely symbolic. And less ever anyone think that it's just a bunch of liberals complaining about Trump who said this, basically the chief economists that deal with China at City and Goldman Sachs said the same thing.

Yeah, it's a political response. But why does it matter? It matters because both Trump and Xi Jinping have signaled that they're not looking for the off ramp, that the trade war will escalate. You know, so it looked like there was going to be agreement in the spring and set an agreement. We got new terrorists from Trump and the Chinese currency crossing this. threshold of seven R&B to the dollar. And Chinese, if you look at Chinese state media, they're gearing up for the fight. You know, they, just like Trump has been attacking China, they're now attacking Trump. They're saying it's patriotic. We have to dig in. We have to

fight this out. And so the reason the markets, I think, plunged. And the reason we're in for very rocky waters is neither China or the U.S. seems to have an endgame for this trade war we're in. And the consequence could be ever increasing tariffs and responses from China. China saying they're not going to buy any U.S. agricultural products. That's a big deal. Huge hit on American farmers. And it's introducing all this uncertainty of the global economy. It's going to make it harder for consumers to buy things, right? Because prices are going up in both the U.S. and China. When consumers aren't buying as many things, the economy inevitably slows down. So what Trump is doing with this trade war without any kind of logical goal that he's shooting at is putting at risk the stability of the global

economy and American farmers and American consumers without any sense. sense of like where this plane is going to land. That's exactly right. I mean, so this latest little Twitter tariff tantrum happened because negotiations haven't been going well. Despite the fact that I think Minookin said three months ago that they almost had an agreement, there was another meeting at a high level in Shanghai and it like ended after one dinner in a quick meeting the next day. Nothing got accomplished. So Trump freaked out and said that, you know, the China has to follow through on commitments to buy these agricultural products or stop fentanyl sales. So I don't really know what he thinks was agreed to, but you're right, he's completely backed himself into a corner. He's scared of

looking soft domestically, but at the same time, the Chinese know exactly where to squeeze him to hurt us economically and politically. So like, to your point, who wants an off, like, do the the Chinese even want an off ramp or are they just going to wait him out and see if they can get a new person to negotiate with? Yeah, no, I think that's why the currency thing matters and the Chinese state media posture matters is what the Chinese are signaling is we're not going to be bullied by you. And China is not Mexico and Canada, which frankly didn't even make that big concessions to Trump at the end of the day anyway. But, you know, we're the second biggest economy in the world and we can dig in and we can hurt you. And, you know, the important thing to remember here

is, yeah, Xi has some politics, but he's not worried about his next election. Right. Right. So if there's a trade war and some constituencies in China are hurting, it's not like Xi's worried that he's going to be ousted. What he can do is. he can squeeze really hard in electorally important areas, and farmers are in the Midwest. Farmers are in electorally important areas in the United States. So Trump thus far has tried to patch that by shoveling money at farmers, right? Paying them off. Paying them off, I think, $15 billion in assistance, which, you know, is real money that we're paying too, right?

So we're paying this tax through the additional tariffs. We're paying to bail out these farmers, which is, let's face it, wealth redistribution. It's just redistribution to people that Trump likes. Yeah, called Joe the plumb. Yeah, exactly. Spreading the wealth around here. And meanwhile, I think the Chinese have every reason to say, well, let's at least wait and see what happens a year and a half from now in the election, rather than make kind of fundamental systemic concessions here to Trump and reward his behavior. And, you know, this could precipitate. I mean, everybody filed this away because if the economic downturn happens, if there's a recession or a global financial crisis, it's very likely that Trump's actions in this trade war will be a precipitating. factor for that. Yeah, that Joe the Plummer joke was the Obama 08 deep cut and credit to you if you get it out there. Google Joe the Plummer. Spread the wealth around. Okay, let's stay with China. So the protests in Hong Kong are getting more intense. According to New York Times, on Monday protesters disrupted about 200 flights and they blocked roads and railways and they're calling for a general strike.

So a government spokesman went on the record and told the times that 420 people have been arrested and a thousand cans of tear gas have been fired. odd thing to go on the record to say. We're a couple months, I think nearly two months into the protests, which isn't as long as the protest in 2014, but they're getting pretty intense. Hong Kong's chief executive spoke for the first time in two weeks on Monday. She's openly siding with China. A Chinese government spokesman for their Hong Kong office

has been putting out some very ominous statements today. He said demonstrators have, quote, exceeded the scope of free assembly. You warn them not to take restraint for weakness, called the protesters who attacked one of their offices there, rampant and deranged and said a blow from the sword is waiting for them in the future. Yikes, I think you have to wonder if we're going to see the Chinese military, which has a big contingent stationed in Hong Kong move in soon. It's also notable that Trump has offered no solidarity.

In fact, he is basically signaled that he doesn't care. He doesn't think it's our business and he wouldn't do anything to step in if there is a Chinese crackdown. Yeah. And, you know, thus far, the Chinese have not used the military directly. We talked about some of the these thugs who showed up in confront of the protesters. I think the more we learn about that, the more it does become apparent that the Chinese government was probably at least giving a wink to people, if not encouraging people, if not paying people to essentially go out and confront the protesters and make this look violent. There's even some reports that they might be leveraging organized crime in Hong Kong to play this role. So they're playing kind of subterranean hardball.

if they roll the PLA, the People's Liberation Army, the Chinese Army into Hong Kong and try to kind of restore order that way, the problem for them is it puts any lie to this idea that there are two systems, that there's, you know, it's supposed to be one country, two systems. So one country, China, but there's a system in Hong Kong that is freer and more open than the system in mainland China. Once you cross the threshold of putting the military, you're kind of putting the lie to that. And frankly, that ends up hurting them in other places like Taiwan, where they'd like to see Taiwan essentially come into this similar arrangement of Hong Kong. The Taiwanese are looking to us and thinking like, is this what we want? Do we want, you know, we have a democracy in a

pretty open country. Do we want essentially be swallowed up by China and have the PLA here in 10 years? The protesters seem to be escalating in response by showing them, okay, look, if you mess with us like this, we're going to mess with the Hong Kong economy. And this is one of the most important financial centers in the world. If flights aren't getting in and out, if there's kind of perceived chaos in the streets, it's going to have an impact on the Hong Kong economy. They're willing to take that risk to send a message to China that, you know, we don't want to live under your thumb. So I think this is going to continue to be a real flashpoint, and the Chinese are clearly pivoting in the direction of zero tolerance here. Yeah, man, one to watch. Let's stay in

Asia for a minute. Things have gotten very bad. You flagged the story for me between Japan and South Korea. Japan apparently was so pissed off that they threatened to stop exporting certain materials. that are key to South Korean manufacturing. A bunch of protesters took to their streets in response in Seoul. South Korea apparently threatened to withdraw from an intelligence sharing agreement that allows us to monitor North Korea with the Japanese and with the rocks. This is all coming as North Korea is just repeatedly firing missiles into the ocean. And building new nuclear weapons.

Yeah, while Trump literally pretends everything is fine in tweets about his good friend in North Korea. When asked if Trump would mediate between Japan and South Korea, he said that no, it would be a full-time job, so I guess he wants to keep, like, tweeting at the TV. Yeah. So, anyway, this is an old dispute. It dates back to World War II and bubbles up periodically. Can you just, like, give us a quick overview of that history and what's happening here?

So, you know, the Japanese were longtime colonizers of the Korean Peninsula. Then in World War II, they committed a series of atrocities against Koreans. Most emotionally for the Republic of Korea, thousands of Korean women, so-called comfort women, were essentially enlisted into sexual slavery by the Japanese. You can see why this is a searing wound for the Korean people. And there, over the decades, been a series of efforts to kind of mediate this history, to have the Japanese pay compensation for these women, have the Japanese apologize for this history. But it flurred up occasionally. It flared up under Obama in a very serious way, in part because some of the

last of these comfort women are dying. So we brokered an agreement between Japan and South Korea in 2015 that involved, you know, a mix of Japanese expression of apology and regret, also involved things like, you know, building monuments to the comfort women, you know, setting up foundations that deal with commemorating this issue. and essentially we're able to get them back to working together. I should add, the reason this is important is those are our two closest allies in Northeast Asia. And if you're dealing with North Korea as a united front, the three of us, we all share intelligence, our militaries all cooperate.

You're in a much stronger position. If we're all split, if Japan and South Korea aren't working together and the U.S. is isolated from them, that's a giant opening for the Chinese and the North Koreans to take advantage. while we're over here fighting, North Koreans, or basically what's happening. Yeah, what's happening. Is what the risk is, which is North Koreans are building nuclear weapons. They're firing off missiles. The Chinese are essentially trying to make up for the breakdown in Japan Republic of Korea relations

by moving in as a trading partner. And over time, the alliance falls apart. China gains influence. The North Koreans are emboldened, right? That's the risk. Now, what's happened is Japan has a pretty nationalist government under Shenzhou Abe. and members of his party have essentially made inflammatory statements at times or, you know, have not kind of sufficiently been willing to atone for the past.

There are textbooks in Japan that suggest that it's an open question as to whether the Japanese forced these comfort women into sexual slavery or not. The Koreans respond to that by complaining, by, you know, threatening to stop buying certain products. And what's needed is the U.S. to play a really aggressive mediation role and to keep them talking to each other. Trump clearly doesn't want to do that. Mike Pompeo, clearly despite his quote-unquote swagger, has been unable to do that. They basically insulted Pompeo by saying they weren't going to have this meeting with the three of them and try to reach an agreement. So the U.S. looks weak in Asia and our allies are fighting with each other. And if it leads to the South

Green's suspending this intelligence relationship, that's a direct. problem for our national security because intelligence sharing on North Korean threats is essential. You know, what are they up to? What is their military doing? What are these missiles doing? When there is a North Korean launch or test, the way in which we know what happened is usually because lots of information is shared among the three of us. So this will have real national security implications. Yeah. And we got 28,500 U.S. service members sitting in Korea and a whole bunch more in Japan. So yeah, hopefully Pompeo can find a way to help this out. It's a sign that this nationalism that Trump represents is infecting everybody.

You know, because the Koreans and the Japanese are acting in a very nationalist way. You know, we're fighting about history, not looking forward. I think it's, you know, yet another consequence of this nationalist trend we see everywhere. Yes. We'll have a little more of that later when we talk about Kashmir. Yes. Do a couple of personnel updates. So in a win for common sense, Trump's pick for Director of National Intelligence, Congressman John Ratcliffe withdrew.

It became clear that he had lied on his resume. about like any relevant national security experience he might have had before getting to Congress. And then he has essentially no interest in the Intelligence Committee's work. He didn't go to the reading room to look at intelligence. He didn't go on trips. He did nothing. So great pick. Let's hope this one doesn't sit vacant for too long.

The Senate did confirm Kelly Knight Craft to be Trump's ambassador to the United Nations. She actually got five yes votes from Democrats. Mystified. It's mystified. But the way she got it was she finally had to state that humans contribute to global climate change. So that's a bravestand. Which she obviously doesn't believe. I know.

I mean, people should know that this is the wife of like a coal magnate. Yep. So her primary qualification to be ambassador to Canada, which was before, is she's married to a rich coal guy. Yeah. And she gave an interview in Canada and saying that there are two sides of climate science, right? This, to quote Trump, like, we're not sending our best here, you know? Yeah, that shit does not fly in Canada.

I mean, just a reminder that Nikki Haley was confirmed 96 to 4. So, like, bipartisan votes can exist if you put up a qualified. nominee. Like someone who believes in climate change. Yeah. So the last person Trump had put up for this position, Heather Naurit, former Fox News host, becomes a State Department spokesperson. She washed out over vetting concerns. You mentioned how Kraft was ambassador to Canada. She was criticized for spending seven months out of two years at her homes in the U.S. So apparently she wasn't the best ambassador. It's an important position. She shouldn't have been confirmed. It's hard for me to muster the outrage because I'm just generally out of it, but damn it, this sucks.

Yeah, I mean, the UN ambassador is often like the first form of response to something happening around the world. Like there's a Russian invasion of Crimea or there's a crisis in the Middle East or there's a North Korean nuclear test and all tension turns to the UN and the UN Security Council. And the first person giving the view of the United States is your UN ambassador, the person who has to literally mobilize the world behind, say, like a sanctions regime. through the UN Security Council is this person. What is her qualification to do that?

Like, I mean, this is absolutely insane. Like, we care so little about the rest of the world. We care so little about the United Nations that the wife of some Trump donor who doesn't believe in climate change, who couldn't even, like, Canada is not a hardship post where you have to be home seven months out of two years. Like, it's also right across the border.

You can hang out in Canada. You can hang out in Canada. Like, it's not like that. Montreal is nice. It's not a tough place to be, right? And this, what kind of message is this end of the world? It's a middle finger. That this is the person we think should represent, sit behind a placard that says United States of America and represent our country.

Some big, big names have been in that seat. Let's see. George H.W. Bush. So the height of the Cuban missile crisis, Adelae Stevenson, convincing the world that the Russians had moved nuclear missiles to Cuba. George H.W. Bush. Susan Rice and Samantha Power under us. You know, Richard Holbrook. You know, John Bolton, unfortunately, under Bush 1.

Some Bush 2. Some good ones, a couple bad apples. A couple conkers in there, you know. It's also just worth flagging that John Huntsman has resigned his post as U.S. ambassador to Russia. He's going to run for governor of Utah. I know that some people like Huntsman, they think he's moderate. They think they wish the Republican Party were more like him. To be honest, I just see a guy who is like so nakedly full of ambition that he'll work for Trump,

he'll work for Obama, he'll do whatever, he's just kind of a hack. So in 2009, Huntsman was our ambassador in Beijing for Obama. And we were there, and I was, it was in a room, it was just me and Huntsman and Obama and David Oxerot. I don't even remember why that group of people was talking to them. We did it on a weird, like, Saturday, announcement or something. And Huntsman was talking about the health care debate, and he said, you know, I don't know what's happened to the Republican Party.

You know, in 2009, right? pre like kind of losing its mind. And, you know, in private, I think the reason why, like, a lot of people say nice things about John Huntsman is in private. He's like, yeah, the Republican Party has gone off the rails. He was saying that to us back in 2009. And yet, he agreed to serve as Trump's ambassador in Moscow at a time when Trump is doing the Helsinki summit closing up to Putin. Trump is running down our intelligence community. Trump is kind of doing nothing to stand up to Russian aggression. You know, he's consistently kind of compromised what people surmise he thinks about things to be in these jobs. And, you know, now history will record that he was the U.S.

ambassador to Russia when the American president stood in Helsinki and essentially agreed with Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence community. That was a fun day. Yeah. Good legacy. Yeah. Congrats, John. A couple Afghanistan updates. So last week we talked about how Trump told Mike Pompeii that he wants to withdraw troops from Afghanistan by the election, not all of them, but a big chunk. So like clockwork here, Lindy Graham went to the press to lobby Trump to keep them there. So not surprising. But there were two articles that I read recently, two recent data points that I wanted to flag that make a national security argument for why I think we should probably get out.

The first is a UN report that says Afghan security forces and coalition forces have killed more civilians in Afghanistan than the Taliban. So the UN says that in the first six months of this year, 1400 civilians have been killed. killed and 2,400 wounded, they believe that Afghan and allied coalition forces are responsible for 52% of those civilian deaths. So I obviously can't verify those numbers. I'm not pointing the blame at U.S. service members here, but it's impossible to win hearts and minds if that data is accurate, if we're more of a threat to the people who live in the country than the Taliban. The second report was the Times reported that there's a split between the military and the intel community over whether

ISIS forces in Afghanistan threaten the Western not. So apparently the military thinks that ISIS and Afghanistan could inspire or direct attacks against Western countries. The Intel guys believe that they are more likely to fight the Taliban. They're waging an internal war in Afghanistan. So I guess like you see these two, you know, data points and it's at best debatable whether there's a threat to the U.S. homeland emanating from Afghanistan anymore. The suffering for the Afghan people is unimaginable. I mean, like even if you try to set aside the politics, the history, like we were just deciding this blank slate. It's hard for me to really think of a good argument for staying

except that people think we need to prop up the government. Well, look, the tragedy, too, is that this country has been basically a war since, like, the 80s when the Soviets were fighting down there. Can you imagine your whole life? And, you know, I think that the civilian casualty number is an indictment of the Trump policy in the sense that at the end of the Obama administration,

We had drawn down to 10,000 troops, but we'd also significantly scale back the kind of support. We weren't doing air support for offensives by the Afghan security forces. We were trying to kind of restrain elements of the Afghan security forces and some of the offenses that they did. When Trump made his policy change, he essentially, you know, we're taking the gloves off. Like we're going to be back in the business of providing air support. We're going to have troops back in combat. It's not the fault of the troops. It's the directives that are being given and the rules of engagement.

if you start dropping more bombs on the country, you're going to kill more civilians. If you are supporting and encouraging the ANSF to go on more offensives, they're going to kill more civilians. And to what end? Because you cannot win this war militarily. Like the Taliban is not going to be defeated on the battlefield. If that's not clear after 20 years, like, how much longer do we need to wait before we have that evidence? And better to wind down the fighting, try to end this violence and try to play a diplomatic role to encourage these sides to essentially come to some power sharing agreement. The ISIS thing, like, of course,

like this is the justification. Like, well, if we don't leave here, maybe there'll be a threat from here. That's a recipe for never leaving. And continuing to pulverize this country that has already had decades of war. And again, it's not an indictment of our troops. It's a policy that is being given to them to carry out. And the fact is, if we leave and there's an ISIS safe haven't emerged, we could fire a missile at it. You know, we could treat it as we do ISIS safe havens other places. You don't need to be fighting a war in the country with 15 to 20,000 U.S. troops in order to take a shot at an ISIS safe haven. So even if there is a threat, like the idea that we need to be permanently fighting in this war that is not working,

that is killing civilians, that is not eliminating the Taliban because maybe if we aren't fighting that war, someday there could be an ISIS safe haven is an insane rationale. Yeah. I mean, the reason I led with that Lindy Graham anecdote is not just because I love slapping him around, and I do. I think he's a total bozo. But that conventional wisdom, you hear it from Lindsey Graham. I heard it from Ash Carter when he was sitting in that chair, Obama's Secretary of Defense, which is basically the argument that if we just show enough resolve and stick-tuitiveness and wade out the bad guys that will eventually get to a better place and negotiate a better solution and it will lead to a more peaceful outcome for the Afghan people.

I just think that 19 years have shown that that logic is faulty and that it's time to try something else. If you are a 25-year-old fighting the Taliban, you've been fighting your entire life. The idea that if the U.S. shows resolve through the form of Lindsey Graham on a Sunday talk show halfway around the world and more bombs being dropped on your country, which is part of the reason why you're fighting in the first place, like that's just a willful, ignorance of what we've learned over the last 20 years. The Taliban lives in these places. These are tribal connections in certain places in Afghanistan. It's just, it's just the reality of the makeup of

that country. It doesn't mean the Taliban don't do horrific things they do. It just means that unless the United States is willing to put in like 500,000 troops to pacify the entire country, we're not going to defeat them with 15,000 or 20,000 U.S. troops in perpetuity. We've learned that. Yeah. Let's stay in the region and talk about Kashmir. We've talked about a few times on the show. It's a potential nuclear flashpoint between India and Pakistan with a long, fraught history. On Monday, the Indian government made a major move, and they revoked Kashmir's special status and limited its autonomy. Ben, can you give us like the quick and dirty on what that means or the significance? It's a good nerding out day. Yeah, it's fun. So essentially, Kashmir is the only region in India. that has a Muslim majority in the province, right? And the Indian constitution and Indian governance has always provided a certain degree of autonomy for that region.

So it's a part of India, at least India views it that way, Pakistan sees it as contested, but there's been this degree of autonomy there. What the Indian government did is essentially eliminate that and restore kind of direct federal authority and responsibility for governance, which is hugely inflammatory in Kashmir, because people don't like this. It will create openings for extremists and Pakistanis and, frankly, just ordinary people who resent this.

And it could lead to more violence in the form of terrorist attacks in Kashmir or, you know, provocations emanating from Pakistan. So it's a pretty aggressive move. And I think what it shows is two things. This Hindu nationalist government under Narenda Modi that just got reelected is feeling emboldened and feeling like they can blow through previous lines that weren't crossed. The second thing it shows, we sat here like two weeks ago, Donald Trump, you know, after putting the Pakistani prime minister on the people mover, Dulles, has this crazy press spray in the Oval Office where he indicates he's going to mediate the dispute. Yeah, I'll have that go. Within weeks of doing that, the Indians essentially say, not only are you not going to mediate this dispute, we're going to get ahead of you and restore direct control here. This is a gigantic embarrassment to the President of the United States. And nobody will talk about it because everybody's focused on the fact that he's a racist, white nationalist, understand.

understandably, but my God, what a failure. Yeah. Like literally within weeks of the guy hosting the Pakistani prime minister and saying he's going to insert himself into this, the Indians essentially insert themselves into it and say, we're going to do one of the most provocative things that we can do. You know, yet again is random comments and sprays that seem like they don't have consequences. Well, look at the outcome of what he's done. Yeah.

And this, I don't, if the intel community somehow missed this, we got problems. because the Indian government moved 35,000 additional troops into Kashmir last week. Tourists were evacuated. They cut off internet service, I think, for a period of time. Kashmir officials, as you said, condemn the moved. As did Indian politicians who oppose Modi, the Pakistanis are furious. Imram Khan said, quote, I fear they may initiate ethnic cleansing in Kashmir to wipe out the local population.

I mean, that's a big deal. But, I mean, you know, you sort of alluded to this earlier about this nationalist spread from China, Japan, India. I mean, in your opinion, how does this compare to the Chinese government cracking down in Hong Kong or the Russians annexing Crimea? I mean, how should the U.S. respond to something like this? It's a great question. I mean, I think what you see is, look, another analogy is the Chinese government having a million Uyghurs in detention in Western China. Big powers, China, Russia, the United States, India, the big powers, clearly feel like there's no. no reason to abide by traditional international norms or standards. There are UN Security Council

resolutions about Kashmir and how this should be dealt with that India is ignoring, for instance, in this case. And, you know, we hear a lot about norms, international law. It seems like this kind of, you know, inconvenience or this thing that a bunch of we need lawyers at the UN talk about until you need it, right? And I think what you're seeing is when countries feel like it's the law of the jungle and international law or national norms don't matter anymore, like, you get pretty unstable outcomes. And the first people to suffer are ethnic minorities, right? Because if you're sitting in Kashmir and you're a Muslim citizen of that state and you see 35,000 Indian troops coming in and direct role, you're freaked out. I'm vulnerable. Maybe I'll end up like the Uyghurs in China,

or maybe, you know, I'll end up like the Muslim tartars in Crimea who the Russians have suppressed, right? But ultimately these things can lead to actual wars too, right? Because, you know, wars are usually fought over territorial flashpoints. And the more we're creating these, you know, with the Indians and the Pakistanis and Kashmir, with obviously the Russians are going into Crimea, with the Chinese and potentially Taiwan and Hong Kong. Like this is, you know, one of these flashpoints will actually catch fire, right? Yeah, man. It's a scary one.

And it's why the U.S. needs to be for an international system of, laws and norms and consequences for countries that violate those laws and norms. Because if we just toss out the rulebook, you know, everybody's going to break the rules. And that's what's happening under Trump. Yeah, be good to have strong diplomats too. Two things I guess they're more in the just sort of update category. So on Tuesday, the Trump administration put in place a total economic embargo on Venezuela. So that means they're freezing all government assets. They're prohibiting any transactions with Venezuela. The National Security Advisor John Bolton, he's in Peru today, Tuesday, and is going to give a speech where he justifies the move by talking about how

previous embargoes on Panama and Nicarago were effective. Cuba, not effective. That one's going real well. What year are we on? 60-something? Sixth decade. So the Wall Street Journal pointed out that in July, the International Monetary Fund predicted a 35% economic contraction for Venezuela this year. So that means we are like hammering and crushing an economy that basically already collapsed. So again, I mean, this is a question that you raised earlier about a couple issues, frankly, is like, what It's the end game. Like, I know they want Maduro to go. They are crushing the Venezuel economy and not really incentivizing them to leave

or seemingly having any of the talks we need to make that happen. Yeah, I mean, the one thing you know is this will hurt more Venezuelans. They will suffer more. What it feels like to me is Trump was frustrated, Bolton was frustrated. Remember John Bolton taping videos declaring that Maduro is about to leave? Mike Pompeo putting out that Maduro had a plane on the tarmac and was going to get on it. Well, here we are. Weeks, if not months later.

And that hasn't happened. Step back. China trade war getting worse. North Korea building more nuclear weapons and firing off missiles. Iran preparing to restart its stockpile of enriched uranium. Maduro is still there. None of these planes are landing. And there's no fucking aircraft controller to try to detangle all these different crises. And this is really frightening stuff because the bottom is kind of falling out of the Trump farm policy in all these different places. you know and and where where is this going there's no sense of like all they know how to do is is the next you know pressure point and we don't like you know how China respond to our terror so we'll label them a currency manipulator nothing will come of that we we don't like the maduro hasn't left yet so total embargo well the Venezuelan people will suffer and I don't

see Maduro leaving right now and so they're just firing bullets and emptying the chamber without any real strategy to get from A to B they're also just flailing yeah I mean the foreign policy, the grand strategy is unclear, and then the tactics in the near term are silly. So let's take an example. Iran's foreign minister, Javad Zarif, was invited to the meeting with Trump in the Oval Office two weeks ago. Then the administration, when he said no, decided to sanction him. So he invited the guy to talk, the guy who would negotiate a diplomatic solution, and then they

sanctioned him. So meanwhile, Iran is still seizing tankers in the Strait of Hamoos. Meanwhile, like Chinese companies are finding ways to smuggle fuel out of Iran. The international community is totally divided on the response. So again, this is more an update than it is a question or anything else, but it does feel like the bottom is falling out a little bit on some of these policy choices. Well, Iran's a great example. And you just gave the – they say they want a deal,

and they're so eager for one that they're doing something that we never did, inviting the foreign minister to an Oval Office meeting. And then when that doesn't happen for pretty obvious reasons, because if you're Zareef, like you can't go meet with the president who's just throwing all these sanctions at you hurled all these insults that you almost bombed your country without getting on a limb that gets sought off. Yeah. The hardliners back home are going to be like, you know, what are you doing and having that

meeting when all we've gotten from the Trump people are threats and sanctions, instead of trying to figure out how to build up to that kind of meeting, right? Diplomacy, hard work, multiple meetings at a lower level before you get in the room. They just say, okay, we're going to throw sanctions on this guy. I saw some reports that said that they wanted to, you know, fire another bullet of the sanctions, you know, because it would make, you know, APEC happy, you know, they welcomed it, you know, Netanyahu, the Saudis showing that we're being taught. to all this collection of friends that Trump has.

But, like, in practice, you just slam the door in your own face for the diplomacy you want to get. So there's this kind of incoherence. And the only thing they know how to do is escalate. And, again, the thing that worries me, really, is, like, you keep escalating in all these different places. Like, the China thing could lead to a global recession. The Iran thing could lead to a war.

The Venezuela thing is going to hurt a lot of people. Like, the escalation has a cost. Yeah, not great in Iran. Speaking of arms control, Ben, so this is a story that I think should be getting a lot of attention, but just isn't. So I wanted to raise it today. Previously, you've talked about how John Bolton hates arm control, and they are just systematically walking away from a whole bunch of arms control agreements with the Russians that were set up. You know, it used to be bipartisan that Reagan was a champion of and, you know, suddenly were in a very different place. So we pulled out of a treaty called the Intermediate Range Nuclear Force or INF Treaty with Russia.

In fairness, we did so in part because they were violating that treaty, but that doesn't mean you abandon the whole thing. You could try to amend it. But now the U.S. is developing new weapons, which apparently is pissing off the Chinese who announced overnight that they will not, quote, stand idly by and be forced to take countermeasures that the U.S. that the U.S. Ground missiles in Asia. So there's some consequences that they probably didn't anticipate. Then there's the New START Treaty. This treaty that Obama negotiated reduces the number of nuclear weapons that are deployed by the U.S. and Russia.

it expires in 2021. And the Trump administration is apparently not sure that they want to renegotiate it. Because, you know, Bolton says it's another Obama deal that's bad, blah, blah, blah. But, I mean, look, the thing had to go through the Senate and got 71 votes. So, again, it's just an issue that in normal times, I think, would be front page news, would be on TV, would be getting talked about because at the end of the day, the number of nuclear weapons that are, you know, red alert in a plane or in a bunker somewhere, is a big existential deal, but we're just distracted from all this stuff.

Yeah, I mean, after World War II, the thing that the world decided you needed agreements for the most were try to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, because the more people have nuclear weapons and the more nuclear weapons are, the greater risk that they get used. And at the end of the Cold War, there's this opportunity to roll back the threat of nuclear weapons, and a lot of agreements were reached. And agreements like the INF Treaty were fundamental to the global kind of non-proliferation and arms control regime. And, you know, by kind of systematically taking apart the global nonproliferation regime and arms control regime, they're just green lighting. The Russians to build new nuclear

weapons, the Chinese to build new nuclear weapons. We know the North Koreans are building new nuclear weapons. Trump doesn't seem to care about that as long as he gets nice letters from Kim. This is going to make the world more dangerous. And the things we've talked about come together. Because think about some of the situations we've discussed. The Indians, Pakistanis have nuclear weapons, right? The Chinese have nuclear weapons. The more there's this kind of mixture of a lack of agreements and treaties to regulate and limit nuclear weapons combined with escalation in different areas, like the unthinkable could happen at some point, right? And so I think this idea of how do you reinvigorate and reinvest in arms control agreements

and reduce the spread of nuclear weapons and limit the use of nuclear weapons and deployment of nuclear weapons has to be a part of the foreign policy for all these Democratic candidates. I'll try to find the silver lining here, Tommy, which is that, yes, Trump is kind of taking an eraser to the world, to the agreements and institutions and practices that have kind of governed how the world operates. We've talked a lot about the downside. I think the opportunity for a Democrat is to say, like, here's my vision for how to restore this and build it back better, you know, like what is an updated 2.0 version of all of these. arms control agreements look like. And yes, it'll be hard to get the Russians into that, but at least

put forward that vision, start talking to the Chinese about this. How do we strengthen the international system to better deal with some of the flashpoints that we've talked about? You know, the Iran nuclear agreement was meant to be a starting point for that type of effort, obviously, in limiting Iran having a nuclear weapon, but also having a diplomatic channel open with the Iranians. And so I think that the candidates should be thinking big about, okay, Trump is essentially broken. apart this international system, what should it look like in 2021? And I think that's a really important debate to be had. Frankly, it would involve moderators in Democratic debates actually asking questions about foreign policy. Yeah. How'd you feel about that, by the way? Yeah. Well, you know,

because all this stuff is happening around the world. And, you know, I get that it's not as fundamental as health care, but any one of these things could become, you know, we could have a flood of people from Venezuela coming here. We could have a war breaking out somewhere. We could have tensions in Kashmir. I think where these candidates are going to have the most power as president is in foreign policy, and so we should hear from them on it. It's also just a good way. I mean, these questions are not what candidates hear every day on the stump. So it's a good way to figure out who's been briefed, who's doing some reading.

Remember when Trump was asked by Hugh Hewitt of all people, now a Trump lackey, but then someone who was seen as a reasonable journalist, what the nuclear triad is? And that's the three different ways that the United States has to deploy nuclear weapons. Ash Carter, a big supporter of that. He clearly didn't know what the nuclear triad was, and I think he exposed him as someone who was totally unqualified for the job. Now that didn't prevent him from getting elected, we all saw that. But, I mean, I think, you know, the exchange between Steve Bullock and Elizabeth Warren at the debate showed that she's really been thinking a lot about, you know, nuclear weapons and nonproliferation in her campaign and has put forward agenda. And he didn't seem to have the greatest handle on the concept or the policy.

Yeah, and look, these are issues that matter in people's lives. I remember talking to Stacey Abrams about this, and she said, yeah, I got farm policy in Georgia. Like, I got farmers who are suffering because of this trade war, you know. I've got guns on the streets that are a national security issue. You know, we've got the risk of conflict that, you know, we've talked about Afghanistan. Like, we had troops fighting over there. We spent trillions of dollars there. Like, this stuff matters to your pocketbook, to your security, to the economic context that you're in.

And we need to hear the vision from these candidates about where they want to lead, not just the United States, but the world. and we need some woke worldos out there, you know, woke on arms control here, not just on... Total events. Because, yeah, because essentially, like, people out there care, like people listen to this podcast care. And, you know, politicians will be responsive to that. And you're right. It reveals something about your kind of basic knowledge and preparedness for the job if you're able to talk about this and put forward a vision for how to deal with this. And it's connected to the democracy piece.

If we're not getting our democracy in order at home, how can we advocate for these things abroad? right? So all these pieces kind of fit together in the vision that you want from a presidential candidate. Yeah, agreed. Okay. Most important issue of the day. Page six reported on rumors that Lindy Lohan, yes, that Lindsay Lohan is friends with or maybe romantically linked to a friend of the pod, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Freaky Friday, indeed. The reps denied that this is happening. There's a report that he gave her a gift-wept credit card. I assume that'd be on the kingdom. He's flying around his jets. people were surprised by this pairing, I would argue that they might be perfect together.

Was Britney Spears not available? This is just the weirdest. Like of all the people to be friends these two bozos. Yeah, I think there's just an international jet set community of rich and famous and terrible people that hang out of that international jet set community. Yeah, that's a fair point. Well, maybe it's a sign like, you know, a few months ago or maybe a little over year, like before Jamal Khashoggi, like, Mohamed Salman was over here in California hanging out with like the rock. And now he's with Lindsay the Lawyan, right? So maybe there's been a bit of a diminution in his star power. There are some questions about sequencing.

Maybe they were friends. Maybe these reports or whispers are from before the Khashoggi incident. So you never know. But you're right. Mohama bin Salman was the great reformer taking the United States by storm, hanging out with Jeff Bezos, hanging out with Tom Friedman, hanging out with actors in Hollywoods and agents and screenwriters. And now we're in a very different place.

It does speak to the fact that like there used to be at least outwardly. this effort to demonstrate kind of sobriety and piety among leaders in countries like Saudi Arabia. I mean, it is kind of interesting. Like, Mohammed Salman's whole MO, right, is kind of impunity. I can do whatever I want. I can chop up a journalist in another country. I can hang out on yachts with Jared Kushner. And now it's like, yeah, I can date Lindsay Lohan because I, you know, or maybe not

just hang out with her. I don't know what they're doing. But like... At least give a bunch of money to someone that would probably not be seen as acceptable to the average salary. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of, there's something interesting there somewhere. Yeah, some weirdness. And, you know, we are living in kind of like these bizarre times where, like, if you look at these different leaders, right, you got Trump, Stormy Daniels and the sexual assault, and you've got Bolsonaro and, you know, these kid is like, you know, in all these corruption schemes.

There's this, there's this kind of sense of, like, impunity, I can do whatever I want. I can hang out with whoever I want. I can enrich myself in any way I want in lots of places. And I think my hope is, you know, that there's kind of backlash to that globally, that like the anger that had previously been directed at kind of amorphous political elites, like, no, like, look at what these leaders are doing, look at the choices they're making and their policies and their lives. Like, let's like maybe mobilize here and try to get the type of leadership that's more responsive.

Yeah, agreed. I'm not sure how I got from Lindsay Lohen to that. You know what? I followed you. Yeah. I went on that journey with you. When we come back, I'll talk with Nick Resmussen, who is the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center from 2014 to 2017. I am honored to have on the line right now, a friend of the pod, my friend, Nick Resmussen.

Nick was the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center under President Obama. He also worked in counterterrorism jobs for President Bush. She's one of those nonpartisan national security officials that I love working with back in the White House Day. So, Nick, thank you for joining the pod again. It's been too long. Thank you. And you left out the part where I served for a year into the Trump administration as well, which, of course, was a change in atmosphere, you might say, from... Sorry, I memory-hold that.

From my time in previous administrations. Yeah, I don't know how I memory-hold that. You're like the one guy that sort of hung on for a year. Well, me and Brett McGirk. Yeah, you and poor Brett. Well, anyway, thank you again. It's been an awful week because of these domestic terrorists. So, you know, like I said earlier, you know, you worked for Bush. You work for Obama on their counterterrorism.

teams, you and I spent a lot of time in situation or meetings or in your office talking about the threat from al-Qaeda, the threat from Hezbollah, the Taliban, you know, sort of Islamic terrorist groups. How concerned were you and other counterterrorism officials about right-wing extremism or the kind of domestic terrorism like we saw in El Paso? Well, you know, it was always a feature of the landscape here inside the United States. And so it wasn't as if those problems didn't exist and it's not as if what happened in El Paso this past week, you know, had not happened in America before. But of course, for most of the post-9-11 period, as your question suggests, Tommy, the focus really was on that overseas or international dimension of the terrorism

problem. And even when we did think about it in terms of the domestic terrorism set of problems, we tended to kind of whenever they did crop up, everybody just turned, you know, their heads to the right, looked at the FBI and said, over to you. Because this was something that was kind of squarely within the FBI's domain to cover. My organization, that you mentioned, the National Counterterrorism Center, actually, our reading of the statute that created NCCC after 9-11, was that we should be focusing on international terrorism, not on domestic terrorism, because that was, again, the FBI. And again, I think the FBI is, you know, the preeminent, law enforcement organization in the world. There's kind of nobody better at doing what they do

than FBI. But when you think about it now at the size and scale of the problem we're facing, the idea that we would kind of turn and expect them to deal with it on their own as solely a law enforcement matter, that seems, you know, oddly out of step with kind of the way we should be approaching it. And certainly not the way, as you know, that we approach the international terrorism problem. Because as you know, from all those sit-room meetings, you know, we were relying every tool of national power. Every agency and department was around the table when we were trying to figure out what to do with al-Qaeda or ISIS. And that's just not the way it's been approached with this domestic terrorism problem set.

Yes, that's right. And so, you know, when you were on the NSC, the Bush administration, I think, commissioned a report from DHS on the rise of some of this far-right violence and extremism in the United States. And then that report was actually released by the Department of Homeland Security during the Obama. administration. And I am embarrassed when I think about the fact that we ended up sort of backpedaling and walking away from that report because it got politicized and there were all these attacks from Republicans. And, you know, I also remember one of the primary things we used to hear back in the day was if Democrats would just say radical Islamic terrorism, you know, that you needed to state what the problem was clearly and those magic words would make the threat go away.

But I wonder if in hindsight that contributed to a, you know, sort of collective blind spot about this very real bubbling right-wing threat? I think it might have, and again, the other challenge with dealing with this particular part of the terrorism threat is that we have a strong First Amendment tradition that allows for the full range of kinds of speech in our political debate, including speech that is hateful, including speech that is offensive, including speech that the vast majority of us find, you know, odious and whatever adjective you can think of. But so long as that speech stops short of violence or advocating violence or encouraging violence, then it's deemed acceptable in our political life.

And so the challenge of dealing with domestic terrorism here is how do you get at the underlying ideology, whether it's white supremacy, anti-Semitism, some other hate-based ideology, how do you get at that ideology without treading on our First Amendment traditions? and it was, in a sense, easier, and I hate to say it that way, but easier to deal with the ISIS problem or the, or the Al-Qaeda problem in this context, because if you were speaking out on behalf of one of those groups, you were almost by virtue of that very speech, guilty of a crime of providing material support to a designated terrorist organization. So that's just the way we've divided the problem set into international and domestic is just made it harder for us to deal with the domestic side of this terrorism problem. Yeah, I mean, when I think back to a lot of those counterterrorism meetings we had, there was discussion of intercepting communications between al-Qaeda leaders, for example, you could monitor travel of individuals into Afghanistan or Syria and figure out if someone's going to a training camp.

I mean, you could take out bad guys abroad before they got to the U.S. None of those tools are really available here. Well, and the very fact that somebody decided to try to travel to Syria via, you know, Turkey or something like that, That put them in violation of federal law, and the FBI could build a case against them for material support to a designated terrorist group like ISIS. So even before some violent act was undertaken, there were tools the government had to be able to disrupt or mitigate this potential terrorist threat tied to ISIS or al-Qaeda. And those same tools just don't translate into the domestic environment in the same way.

Yeah. And in fact, it's even worse, right? because the nightmare scenario we always had was some sort of al-Qaeda sleeper cell or someone living in the U.S. who started watching on Warholki on YouTube and got radicalized online and then decided to do something terrible without communicating about it. I mean, isn't El Paso sort of what we feared from Islamic terrorists all along? It feels like the worst case in some ways. Well, and again, this is something that I think I took away from my experience at the National Counterterrorism Center was this process of radicalization where an individual latches on to a hate-based ideology, whether it's an al-Qaeda ideology or a white supremacist

or anti-Semitic ideology, the process they go through to get there looks very much the same, regardless of the flavor of ideology that you're talking about. And there's a period where they are consuming that ideology in an online, usually in an online environment with like-minded, you know, fellow travelers. But they can often just be dabbling or sampling or not necessarily looking to act on this ideology. But then there comes a point when they mobilize and they move into kind of a more action-oriented phase. And it's because, you know, not to get all psychological on you, but, you know, the narrative that they've been consuming almost forces them to kind of look at things in existential terms. Right. You see that with the El Paso

perpetrator who talked about, you know, invasion. This was life or death stuff to him. And of course, all out of whack with reality. But again, in many ways, the psychological process that he went through likely mirrors that which an al-Qaeda or ISIS-inspired extremist or terrorist might have gone through a few years ago and still today. And just to be clear, that side of the problem said is still very much out there. You know, not too many weeks go by when you won't look somewhere in the United States and see that some U.S. attorney's office has brought federal charges against somebody for being

connected to ISIS or al-Qaeda. So it's not like that problem's gone away either. Yeah. So, I mean, so let's talk about what we can do about it. I mean, I saw you signed a letter with six former Bush, Obama or Trump White House counterterrorism officials calling on the current administration to take domestic terrorism more seriously. I guess my question is, what does that look like to you? Do we need new laws, more money? Like, how do you resource this? It's a great question because, again, I've kind of asked myself, okay, if you gave me, you know, $500 million, which in the grand scheme of national security spending is not a big sum, you know, certainly not compared what we spend at the Pentagon or in the intelligence community, I'm not sure I would know what to do with

it, you know, if you gave me, as I said, $500 million. But there are a couple of things I think that we can latch on to as immediately available steps. And one, several of our colleagues, Tommy, who worked in the Justice Department under both Republican and Democratic presidents have brought forward the idea of trying to create a domestic terrorism statute, which would give the FBI more tools, more investigative reach, perhaps at an earlier stage. You may have heard FBI Director Ray recently talk about when he was doing testimony on the Hill, but the FBI doesn't want to get in the business of policing speech. They only get involved when there's violence.

Well, that obviously sounds great, but it's also reactive. The FBI can't do things until something violent has happened. That doesn't seem like an approach we want to be taking. And so domestic terrorism statute, according to my friends who have much more of a legal background than I do, would allow us to be more aggressive investigatively at an earlier stage in dealing with domestic terrorists. So that's one category of things. Another category of things is very late in the Obama administration under the leadership of Lisa Monaco and Jen Easterly at the White House,

We ended up creating a countering violent extremism task force. It was housed at the Department of Homeland Security, but it was basically made up of four agencies, personnel from four agencies. FBI, Homeland Security, the Justice Department, and some of my staff at the National Counterterrorism Center. And the idea was pulled together all the resources of the federal government to do some of this prevention work of countering extremism

before bad things happen. And this was an incipient effort. was probably i would say probably took us too long to get to this answer which we'd thought of it in year two rather than year six or seven of the obama administrations but it was i think a great step forward because it had it brought everybody together who was a subject matter expert on this thing on this problem set and it kind of co-located expertise and resources which of course is the way you get results it was starting to have some traction um and then came the end of the administration and of course

the Trump administration, they didn't, you know, slash and burn immediately and kind of dismantle the organization, but over the two, first couple years of the Trump administration, this particular component, this task force has kind of been allowed to wither and basically die. And that is something that is easily reversible and won't cost hundreds of millions of dollars. What we're talking about is tens of millions of dollars. Wow. And these are dollars that can be best spent in local communities through kind of grant programs that find organizations, find their way to organizations who are actually on the ground in places like Los Angeles or Chicago or New York, who are actually working to kind of devise intervention

programs when some individual is identified as being at risk of becoming this kind of extremist, whether it's an Islamic extremist or a white supremacist extremist, getting resources in the hands of people who can do something about it and not having, as I said earlier, be simply an FBI problem because that's usually the too late part of the story. Yeah. If you get to the point where FBI is on the case, that means laws have been broken. Yeah, those quotes about when they're able to jump in. I mean, I understand where Christopher Ray and others are coming from, but it certainly doesn't make me feel better. And if you think about it, kind of the analogy as to what we talked about on the international terrorism side, Tommy, was the kind of soft power tools we were trying

to use overseas to dry up sources of extremism. And you remember how hard that work was and how impossible it was to measure whether you were being successful or not. Yes. Places like Yemen or Somalia or, you know, Afghanistan for all those years. So you can imagine when you try to use these tools in the United States, it's not without controversy because sometimes these prevention or counter-extremism programs are viewed by some elements of the community as being hostile in and of themselves. Yes. This is the federal government in Washington paying attention to my community solely for the, purpose of gaining intelligence or because they suspect my community of

being involved in something bad so that makes it hard for the government to be effective in this area and so that's why even though I blame us in the Obama administration for not making as much progress as we would have liked it was hard work and it was hard to kind of demonstrate a return on the investment for these programs how do you to demonstrate that you've diverted X number of people from because coming terrorists. Right. You know, it doesn't. And as a result, the Congress sometimes wasn't willing to step up and fund these kinds of programs at DHS, Homeland Security as part of this

task force, because again, they wanted to know, well, if we give you $10 million, what can you tell us about the return on that investment? Yeah, yeah. We might not be able to tell you anything about return on investment, or maybe not for years. So I don't want to make it sound like there's an easy solution either, but clearly the Trump administration could turn back in the direction of trying to support these prevention programs, which, again, are much more analogous to soft power tools than they are, you know, traditional hard power tools. Yeah. You're right that, you know, obviously the government is the biggest and most important player in this. But there are, you know, broader issues about online radicalization in the spread of propaganda. And I just, I've noticed that, you know, technology companies have done a pretty damn good job of getting ISIS propaganda off of the most prominent social media platforms.

in general, we've done a terrible job collectively of dealing with platforms like the Daily Stormer or 8chan that traffic in white nationalism and are hosted by fringier service providers and, you know, ISPs and whatnot that we just, you know, can't seem to pressure. Are there success stories from the effort to deal with ISIS propaganda online that are not being applied to this white nationalist propaganda? Is there a First Amendment issue, or is it just, is it different? Like, how should we understand this? It's a great question. You know, as hard as the task was for social media companies to deal with the former form of terrorism that you described, whether it was ISIS or Al-Qaeda type propaganda or messaging, it's much more difficult for them, I think, to identify what is the appropriate line to be drawn

when talking about something like a right-wing white supremacist ideology, because again, again, the First Amendment tradition, obviously, allows for, you know, even noxious, odious, hateful expressions of political views in an open way. And so what exactly is the tipping point or the threshold at which you want companies to set, to set their kind of, to train their algorithms, to point their algorithms at? So I don't want to make it sound like I feel sympathy for them, but there's certainly a bigger challenge in addressing this problem, a more complicated. challenge it for them in addressing this problem than there was on the kind of more pure

international terrorism problem set. And you can also imagine that they're wary of ending up on the wrong side of a political debate or any side of a political debate. Yes, clearly. Are viewed somehow as taking sides with the left or the right. And interestingly, there's also a strand of views in the Civil Liberties community that kind of looks at this and says, yes, if you do this against white supremacists today, you could just as easily turn those same authorities and tools and procedures against other forms of ideology at other times. And so today it is the white supremacists that are the outliers, but what about five years

from now when some other administration turns the tables and we, the environmentalists, are deemed to be extremists, for example. So that's why these are, you know, as easy as it would seem to say, That's bad. Get it off the internet. That's why it's complicated. Yeah, man, I got to tell you, like, I have a lot of sympathy for those kinds of arguments. I mean, I felt like I worked for a good president. I worked for a lot of great bosses like yourself who are doing, you know, the best they could for the right reasons.

And I trusted them. But then the Trump administration takes over, and I wonder every day what kinds of things they're asking their intelligence and national security teams to look at read or otherwise collect. And it makes me a little bit nervous. So, yeah, I do want to. have some rules. And as you know, messaging from the top is everything here. And, you know, you can have the government with its programs working and pulling in the right direction. But if the messaging from the top runs counter to that, then, you know, what is that audience of potential extremists really hearing? And again, even with the president's statement yesterday, I mean, I was, of course,

moderately pleased to see that he at least was able to speak out against white supremacy in a kind of somewhat generic way. But what he didn't do was that next step of actually speaking to white supremacists and saying, I'm not one of you, don't misappropriate me for your purposes, don't act and do terrible things, and then claim somehow that I wanted you to do that. He didn't do anything to separate himself from that community, which obviously views him as their president. And so again, that's why I think as much as you talk about the social media world and the technology world, it also matters what public officials say, particularly the number one public official. Yeah, agreed. Two last things, and I promise I'll let you go.

Yahoo News recently reported that for the first time the FBI has identified fringe conspiracy theories as a national security threat. So I guess they got hold of an FBI intelligence bolden from the Bureau's Phoenix Field Office from May 30th, 2019, that described conspiracy theories. driven domestic extremists as a growing threat, specifically mentioning the Q&on conspiracy theory and the Pizza Gate conspiracy theory. And I just saw that. And like if people listening don't know what Q&on or Pizza Gate is, we don't really have time to explain it to you here, but Google it and you will go on a weird dark journey. But like, have you ever, have you ever seen something like that where there's just like an anonymous conspiracy theory community, actually not even anonymous, a conspiracy theory community that is just sprung from nowhere online that is

become an actual threat to people's lives? Well, I actually think that the FBI is wise to be doing this, because again, I think about Q&ON, because my name showed up in one of their little postings, you know, at an early stage for some, you know, again, as my, given my status as a deep stater, somehow I entered into their consciousness. And, you know, it gave me a little pause, because who knows if, you know, someday on the street corner, I might just be out walking the dog and I walk up to someone who's wearing a Q shirt and all of a sudden he's decided that I'm the enemy or some other official in government or somebody who's labeled in that particular conspiracy theory as a threat or as the

bad guy. So I mean, I'm glad the FBI is taking these threats seriously because as as ludicrous as they seem at face value or when you're looking at them at face value, it's clear that these conspiracy theories are capable of motivating people to do terrible things. And again, it's because they somehow convince individuals that it's existential, that you, you know, this, unless you act, terrible things will happen. And, you know, that's frightening. Yeah. When, you know, we grew up thinking that democracy is about rational discourse, and that's not the democracy we live in right now. No, it is not. Last question. So we've just had this, you know, 15-minute conversation about how complex the problem is, the range of options, the legal and First Amendment,

complications. But there's a very simple solution that's on the table, right, which is just like get rid of guns. How important in your mind is gun control to the sort of overall equation of stopping these domestic terrorists? You know, this is about as simple an equation as you can think of because, you know, there are plenty of countries around the world where people have hateful ideologies who have violent impulses, who have a need to act out or strike out in support of their hate-based ideology. But in most cases, they're lacking the wherewithal to do so, or they're lacking the tools that would allow them to be really lethal. Maybe they can get their hands on a knife. Maybe they can drive a car up on a curb. Maybe they can get their hands on a handgun.

But it seems like it's only here where the lethality index goes way, way up because of the availability of high-powered automatic weaponry. And to me, that's not some brilliant analytical insight, that's just patently obvious. And when I was stepping down from the National Counterterrorism Center job, after one year in the Trump administration, I did a farewell backgrounder with a bunch of journalists who had covered the terrorism set of issues for a number of years who I knew well. And one of them asked me that question. So, what about gun control? And I said, well, obviously, you know, obviously less lethal weapons in the hands of the most extreme people would render us safer. If we just didn't simply make it possible for these individuals to have the worst

tools of war, then we wouldn't face as nearly as lethal a problem. It wouldn't make the problem go away, but it would be a much smaller problem. And so the idea that we can't wrap our heads around that politically as a country, I never really thought about gun control very much before I started working on counterterrorism, but now it just makes no sense to me that we don't think of this as a national security imperative. Yeah, agreed. Nick, thank you so much for all the work you did to keep us all safe over many, many years, and thank you for doing the show today. I am always smarter when I get a chance to talk with you.

Well, it's great to talk to you, Tommy, and thanks for doing what you guys do. It's important to kind of have smart, thoughtful dialogue on national security and foreign policy issues, and I think your platform really does help sustain that, even when the rest of the political landscape, some of that smart, rational discourse is hard to find. It looks like you're having some fun doing it too, so that's great as well. We try. Every once in a while I get Ben really excited and he yells about something. So, you know, that makes my day. All right, man, I really appreciate it.

And I hope to see you soon. Thanks so much. Bye-bye. Thanks, Nick, for joining the show. It was great talking to you, Ben. Yeah. I feel like I threw a lot of bummer issues at you today. We banged down under an hour.

Okay, yeah, you're right. But I think we found some connections between them, too. You know, it's a little dark out there. It is. But I will say that. like with all the attention, understandably, on these shootings, like, it's important to not lose sight of this stuff that's happening around the world because we're not choosing to be dark here. Like, there's an unusual assortment of crises and unstable situations that bears some attention.

Right. There's no good news section of the paper that we're just flippet fast. I'm trying to think what it would be, you know? I mean, honestly. We didn't do the Brexit update. That's going down to tank. That sucks. Thanks, Rory. Yeah. No, I was thinking, like, what would I give Trump credit on? I guess it would be like taking territory back from ISIS. That would be, you know, fair. Yeah, and that would have been the answer like two years ago also. Right, right.

I mean, I don't, I mean, I wish I could give credit for more. I mean, I guess the argument he'll make is I beat the hell out of ISIS, okay? That was, you know, continued Obama's plan. What else is he pointing to? North Korea, Iran, we've talked about that. I mean, I don't see the success out there. To quote Ariana Grande, thank you next. Yeah.

What have you done for me lately, Janet Jackson? Yeah, that's how government works. Yeah. Anyway, that's a long outro. Talk to you guys next. week. Potsie of the world is a product of Quirgin Media. The show is produced by Michael Martinez. It's mixed and edited by Chris Basil. Kyle Seglan is our sound engineer. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Mokonian, and Milo Kim, who film and share these interviews on video each week.