Pod Save the World - Trump's Delusional Election Rant

Episode Date: July 18, 2026

In this special episode of Pod Save the World, Tommy and Ben speak in front of a live audience at the Aspen Security Forum.First, Trump delivers a rambling speech on election security that offers no new evidence, overstates the threat from China, and is laying the groundwork for Republicans to question the validity of the midterm elections. Then the guys turn their attention to the foreign policy establishment itself, taking on some of the more eyebrow-raising statements from fellow panelists at the forum — including Condoleezza Rice — and making the case that the blob needs to reckon seriously with its own failures: on regime change, on ignoring public opinion, and on dismissing anti-war voices rather than engaging with them. They also lay out their vision for reimagining American foreign policy, including more transparency around Washington think tanks, stronger lobbying disclosure rules, a bigger State Department, a smaller defense budget, and returning more war-making responsibility to Congress. Then in the second half, Ben and Tommy sit down with Annalena Baerbock, President of the United Nations General Assembly, to discuss the UN's near-total absence from negotiations in today's major conflicts, what meaningful reform of the institution would actually look like, and how alarmed the world should be about the rise of Germany's far-right AfD party.For a transcript of this episode, email [e-mail]

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An intimate look at the Italian entrepreneur known as the King of Kashmir. See Brunello, the gracious visionary in Select Theater's July 24th. Welcome to Pate of the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Roots. We are kind of token lefty, crazy liberals that this year's Aspen security form. Thank you for having us. We got the marquee time slot.

Thanks to everyone at Aspen for inviting us to be here and for all of you for coming out this morning. I know it's early. We got a two-part session for you. So Ben and I are going to talk a bit about President Trump's prime time address last night in claims of election interference. We're going to step back and do a little naval gazing about U.S. foreign policy in particular the role it may have played in the fact that Americans no longer trust their government or trust institutions. And we'll talk about foreign policy's role in that erosion of trust and talk about the blob, a phrase coined by my co-host. here. We're going to take a quick break, reset the stage, and then start the official programming

for today. And then Banner and I are going to interview UN General Assembly President and Alina Byerbach, so excited for that as well. But first, let's talk about Trump's speech, Ben. Last night, he demanded time from the major networks for a prime time address to talk about the top issue on the minds of every voter, an election that happened six years ago. Senator Bernie Moreno previewed the speech as possibly the most important Oval Office address since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Do you think it delivered on that? Easily. Easily.

It probably exceeded it. Remember when you didn't want to raise expectations in advance of a speech? Yeah. I remember that very well. What happened with that? Yeah. So the speech started with Trump bragging about

some accomplishments about the economy. It's clear like the domestic advisors got to him and they were like, please, sir, don't make this all about 2020, like talk about the economy. But the bulk of it was about election security with the goal of drumming up political support for the SAVE Act, which is stuck in the Senate. So the election security section range from like

standard concerns you could hear from any president about voting machines and technology to what seemed like almost attacks on his old intelligence team from the first term to these vague demands for investigations and indictments. And then he declassified a bunch of intelligence about election systems, vulnerabilities and electronic voting, a bunch of stuff about China, and an investigation into voter registration groups in Michigan and then claims about non-citizens. So Ben, let's just get your reaction to the speech. Then I'll talk about some of the stuff I noticed within the documents. Yeah, I mean, first of all,

I think it is relevant to talk about this at the Aspen Security Forum because it's at the nexus of the security of American democracy and also his claims of fraud and interference often have a kind of foreign nexus to them. My overall, you know, takeaway is, first of all, not surprising. There wasn't really any there there. There was, like, I spent a lot of time last night

just trying to figure out what he was talking. about and reading documents that didn't in any way validate what he had said. I do think that the two main takeaways I would leave people with, though, are first of all, it bears noting that he has systematically dismantled all of the tools of government that had been put in place to prevent against foreign interference. So all the capabilities of the intelligence community, the capabilities within the Justice Department that are designed to. detect, disrupt, report on foreign interference have been removed. And so he was complaining about

a lack of capacity that he himself brought about. I think the second and more important thing that we all have to bear in mind is all of this is just to create a pretext to preemptively so doubt not about the 2020 election, but about the upcoming midterm election. And so, you know, we remember Tulsi Gabbard, D&I at the time participating over the seizing of ballot boxes in Fulton County, the intelligence community is being brought into this effort by Trump to kind of create some pretext to sow doubt in the minds of at least his supporters around those midterm elections. And so I think, unfortunately, what the speech tells us is that we should expect a lot of effort and misinformation around foreign interference, around domestic

threats, around the need to securitize and federalize what should be state-run elections, potentially pretext to seize ballot boxes before votes have been counted. Like, I see this as a warning sign that we are going to be in it in terms of a potential democratic crisis around these midterms. Yeah. So I assume the speech itself would be rhetoric. I did, you know, kind of like approach the documents with an open mind because, you know, they're declassified documents.

Maybe there's something interesting there. But as I went through, a lot of it looked old. I mean, a lot of experts I follow who, who studied this stuff closely to say there's just not a lot of new emails or information there. Like there's some declassified emails. There's some raw intelligence documents, but the overall assessments haven't changed and they've been publicly disclosed. So the key document regarding claims of election interference in 2020 is this National

Intelligence Council report that was released in 2021. So it was prepared by Trump staff, released by the Biden administration. It found that like there were a handful of countries kind of running influence operations in support of various candidates, but none tried to change voter registration, vote counting, the vote reporting, you know, nothing to materially impact the results or to manipulate the results. That assessment found Russia tried to hurt Biden to help Trump, Iran tried to hurt Trump, China like probed various systems but decided the juice wasn't worth the squeeze if they got caught. And then there were some other like the Cubans, the Venezuelans were like kind of mucking around,

but nothing of note. But again, Trump kind of released these raw documents like these emails. They're hard to vet for accuracy. there's a redacted PDB piece. There's a CIA wire report, but nothing that challenges that consensus opinion, but also the existence of those documents undercut his broader claim that this was suppressed somehow. Like it went up in the PDB, it went in the CIA Wire report, which is widely disseminated. With respect to China, the documents show some debate in the intelligence community about what China did.

Like the overall IC assessment is that China considered interfering but didn't. But there's this one intelligence officer who dissented and said, quote, Beijing has taken at least some low-level exploratory steps, but not the most aggressive options. But again, we knew that. That was in this 2021 report that was released. Kind of hilariously, Trump undercut his own claim that Russia never interfered in our elections. He released documents that confirm Russia tried to interfere in 2020 to hurt Biden. It says Russia tried to, quote, orchestrate a high-profile corruption scandal and then push

narratives about voter fraud resulting from mail-in balloting. It's like Burisma, Hunter Biden, all that stuff. And then John Solomon, who's this right-wing journalist who has brought. in to kind of create all this material, was interviewed afterward by Von Hilliard at MS Now, and he said, quote, the intelligence community has zero evidence that a foreign power flipped a vote in 2020, 22, or 2024. And so it kind of undercut Trump's entire claim here. So I guess I guess this is why they brought in Bill Pulte to be the director of a national intelligence. I wouldn't say he's delivered yet. Yeah. Well, look, I, two reflections. Like, one is on

this issue of election interference itself, and another is on what the purpose of this was. On the election interference, I think one thing, because the documents show that there's not been any successful or even really concerted effort to affect the outcome of an election, right? The vote tabulation, the functioning of the electoral system. So all of this era of election interference, including 2016, by the way, has been principally about interference. in the form of, you know, misinformation, disinformation, or just outright overt messaging from foreign governments or their kind of cutouts. I do think 2016 was a little bit different in that you also had hack and release operations, right? So the reason that 2016 felt materially different

to me is that you had efforts to hack into people's emails and release them. So you have a kind of criminal activity on behalf of an interference effort. But I've been freely acknowledged, as we did at the time, despite what Trump has said, We didn't determine that Russia materially affected the vote count in 2016. Now, when you look at these reports, none of this is surprising. Every, you know, government with like an interest, they're just reflecting their positions, right? Like Russia doesn't like Biden. China kind of, you know, doesn't really have a favorite, and they just want to kind of undermine trust in institutions, you know, Iran didn't like Trump.

None of this is a surprise. That's what those governments actually would say if they were. speaking openly. Right. And so we're living in an era where countries regularly interfere in the politics of other countries because social media makes it easy and low cost to do so. And that's just something we live with. What is a different question is whether you are literally trying to interfere in the vote count and we see no evidence that's the case. But that leads me to, again, what is he doing here? It's a tried and true playbook where he doesn't need to actually have a there there. He doesn't actually need to have some smoking gun. He just needs to create enough of an

appearance of discrediting the electoral system of some semblance of a scandal that can then ricochet around his media ecosystem. It doesn't matter if people like us are persuaded or not. He just has to kind of create enough energy and doubt and distrust among his core supporters to provide a basis for, again, if we get to a place where they're ice or military at polling stations or efforts to seize voting machines. So nobody should take comfort in the fact that this didn't land well because the purpose of this is just to create a smoke screen. Yeah, it's long term. A White House official told Politico, it was as on the rails as possible. So that's the kind of, you know, verdict you want from your own staff about your prime time address. I was always pleased

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purchase of a website or domain. That's Squarespace.com slash world. All right, let's talk about part two, the blob. Ben, you want to define the blob for everyone here? Well, we thought we had to kind of go right at this question. I think what I was getting at back in 2016 was a kind of group think mentality that I freely acknowledge, like as someone who is at the upper echelons of the national security apparatus of this country, like at times I was a participant in where you, you, tend to have a bias towards intervention, be it military intervention or the imposition of sanctions. You tend to not question what you've done or own up to mistakes, and you therefore tend to kind of repeat patterns of behavior

that are not working and that have been losing credibility with the public. I was doing this particularly in the context at that time of the debate over the Iran nuclear agreement, which is... Wow. We'll get into that. because I was basically referring to the adversaries of that agreement. It was a pretty pitched battle at that time politically. I should say it was harder to do a nuclear agreement than it was to take this country to war, which is something I think we all need to reflect on.

Why is it harder to get a JCPOA through Congress than it is to launch a war against Iran or Libya or another country? And so that was kind of what I was trying to identify. So let's talk about the problems with the blob. And the thesis here is that the blob is helping hasty. in this erosion of trust and faith in institutions, and it needs to be reformed and changed. So we'll unpack some of the reasons why. I think one of the reasons, I think people have frustrations

with the kind of permanent foreign policy class is it feels like there's no accountability. There's no accountability for bad policies, bad decision-making, and people just kind of hang on forever. Like, take John Bolton, for example, guy's been in Washington for decades, there's no country he does not want to invade, there's no threat, he won't hype,

and yet he kind of Fox News hitted himself into becoming the national security advisor again, until he was indicted by the president. And I think that gets at this lack of accountability. I think the primary policy example is still the Iraq war. It was, I think, self-evidently a catastrophic disaster. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed. Thousands of U.S. service members.

We wasted trillions of dollars. And yet it feels like the architects of that war have faced no professional consequences that are often treated as kind of foreign policy luminaries. While there are these lonely voices who oppose the war or great journalists, the team at Knight Ritter that were reporting on the truth and undercutting the administration's claim, and they are hardly celebrated. In fact, they're largely forgotten. And so there were a couple

examples, frankly, not to pick on anyone, but here at Aspen this week. Condoleez-Rice offered some comments about Iran that I wanted to highlight. She said about the threat from Iran, when I hear it wasn't imminent, do you really want to wait until it's imminent? Of the nuclear deal, of cutting a nuclear deal, I wouldn't buy a nuclear agreement under any circumstances. I just let them Iran sit there and stew in their lousy economy. And then of Europe's refusal to join Trump's war with Iran, quote, with Americans fighting, whatever you say about it, this is in our war is not really a very smart thing to say, and recounted a story about Jacques Chirac and Gerard and Gerard Schroeder opposing the Iraq war and how much it pissed off George Bush. And again, I don't want to

pick on Dr. Rice, but I would just say like, first of all, that comment about the threat from Iran sounds nearly identical to the infamous. We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud line about Iraq WMD, which was discredited, with respect to the JCPOA, which I believe she opposed, Trump tore it up. That's the problem. Now we're in the war that everyone was trying to avoid. And Trump himself is billing it as a new forever war. And then again, when we talk about like Iran stewing in its bad economy, I think we should be clear that 90 million people get to then stew in that, bad economy and suffer. And then finally, like, I'm sure Bush was frustrated with Schroeder and Chirac, but they were wrong.

right. And he was wrong. So I'm like, I just, I don't know the value of that anecdote all these years later. So, Ben, again, not trying to be a jerk, but if we can't learn from a mistake as obvious as Iraq, what can we learn from? Yeah, and I'll turn internal here. Because the Democratic Party has its own problems in this regard. I mean, you and now are shedding last night. We've kind defaulted to a certain perspective at times. You take like a Bob Menendez, for instance, hawkish guy, you know, pro-rock war, anti-JCPOA, obviously corrupt, and yet was allowed to continue to be the lead Democrat on the San Farm Relations Committee after narrowly averting one corruption investigation. And so to me, the question is, because if you take Iraq,

I think sometimes there are often these conversations about why do Americans not appreciate enough the role we play in the world? Or do they not understand that the United States has a central role to play in underpinning an international order, which has now, frankly, unraveled. When the message from the electorate for successive presidential elections has been we won accountability over the Iraq war. Like Barack Obama, our first boss, would never have become president of the United States without his opposition. to the Iraq war. There was the single policy difference with Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primary that allowed him to win. Donald Trump in 2016 ran against Jeb Bush and the legacy of the Iraq war. That is when he caught fire. And so the message from the public is we want accountability for these foreign policy disasters and for these forever wars. I would say that one way

to do that, there are a couple ways to do that. One is, I think the people that that participated, American foreign policy have to be more willing to acknowledge error. When I look back on the Libya intervention in the Obama years, which I supported, I have to acknowledge that that turned out to be the wrong decision. And it turned out to be a decision that perpetuated aspects of American foreign policy that have alienated people in this country and around the world. Because while I can defend it on the basis that it succeeded in a near-term objective of averting Gaddafi from massacring some civilians,

It created through regime change effects that have destabilized North Africa and the Sahel ever since. And I think people like, yes, they want to see different people in positions of power and authority when it comes to foreign policy. They want to see generational change just as we want to see generational change with politicians. They want to see generational change with the people who are responsible for American foreign policy. But they also want to see people, and I think would show some grace to people, if they, were willing to reckon with error and didn't feel like they had to dig in and defend everything. And particularly, it's intervention that we fail to reckon with. We have now had Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Iran, which was an attempted regime change

war, none of these have worked. And instead of questioning whether we can do it better, we need to be questioning why we continued to try to engage in regime change wars in the first place. Right. The problem wasn't just the intelligence about Iraq, WMD. The problem was engaging. Or we didn't send in the troops or whatever. Another challenge with the blob, this would get away you were just talking about, is

this, some members of the kind of permanent foreign policy establishment class act like foreign policy is somehow above or separate from or immune from politics. And you and I would often go to meetings in the situation room and someone would sort of performatively say, like, politics has no place in these walls. And like, they had good intentions. They were trying to signal that we are making national security determinations, not, you know, decisions of political expediency. But of course, you know, politics was in that room. We were only allowed in that room because Barack Obama won a couple elections. But, you know, the mentality you hear in D.C. is often that, you know, foreign policy, national security, these are matters that are discussed and decided

by small groups of elites, inner matters, you know, without real input from the rest of the country. And I think that can lead to the establishment in both parties making mistakes in ignoring the will of voters. That's how you end up with the Democratic Party ripping itself apart over Gaza, which is happening today. Or how you end up with Trump running on not starting any new regime change wars and then launching one with Iran, never mind Venezuela. And so, Ben, how do you think about how to better incorporate? incorporate the will of the people, democratize these decisions, while also acknowledging that populism, nativism, isolationism,

those are powerful political forces that can lead to really, really bad foreign policy outcomes. Yeah, this is such an important question. First of all, the things that I think a lot of us can agree on, right, that you would want to functioning international order, that you would want to sustain alliances, that you would want to sustain certain overseas commitments, foreign assistance among them, that you need to have a credible intelligence community. Those things depend on maintaining trust.

The way to defend those things is not to pull up the drawbridge from politics and public opinion and say, we know better. That's been a recipe for essentially the dismantling of those things, because you become so distant from the people that it opens up a space for populism to kind of come directly at you. And in a time of anti-establishment sentiment that we've been living through for not just a decade, but I would argue since 2006,

Obama ran as a populace. We've been living through that. I think the second thing is, you do need to incorporate some respect for public opinion into your decision making because this is a democracy. And if you cannot sustain

your policies because you lack public support for those policies, nothing you do is going to succeed. And to take, and sometimes, by way, the public has it right. And if you look at Gaza, as we were experiencing that through late 23 into 2024, there was just no way to explain to democratic voters why this policy made sense. The machine had been built to provide a certain amount of military assistance and kind of an open

spigot to the Israeli government. The Israeli government was clearly ignoring the council of the Biden administration. The Biden administration was even putting out, hey, we really are unhappy with what Nanyahu is doing. Or Biden had a really tough phone call with him. And yet, all the public sees is their tax dollars funding all of these weapons going to an Israeli government that is using them to destroy civilians inside of Gaza, right? And that, it's not just, like when people talk about the election, it's not just whether or not there was support for that policy. It's whether you could believe anything else that the administration was saying because they had lost such credibility in this space. So the second point is, you know, sometimes the public opinion is telling you

something that you need to listen to, or frankly, is giving you space to change. It may have seemed hard to break from an Israeli government in that context, but when you have your voters telling you to do it, there's your basis for doing it. The last thing I want to say is a policy solution is I actually think it means that Congress should be more involved in foreign policy. If Congress had to vote to authorize these wars, they wouldn't happen. Like Congress never would have voted to authorize the war in Iran, right? And so if we get back to a place as intended by the founders of this country, where Congress is actually the decision maker on matters of going to war or not, you would end these wars right quick because after the Iraq war, which ended a lot of congressional careers,

ever since then, nobody has wanted to take a vote to authorize a war. Yeah. So we're running low in time. We'll do one more complaints and then we have some, you know, thoughts on how to fix things. The last kind of grievance with the blob is I think there is a tendency in Washington to treat pro-war people as realistic and serious and anti-war pro-peace voices as fringe and unsurious. You see this a lot in establishment media. Lindsay Graham, who recently passed away, was appeared on Meet the Press 63 times. This would have been a 64th appearance. The record for the most appearances is held by John McCain.

I would wager that the overwhelming majority of those media appearances focused on advocacy for war or U.S. intervention somewhere. And on the flip side, I'm sure some folks might remember a congressman named Dennis Kucinich. He was a congressman from Ohio, something of a gadfly kind of perennial presidential candidate. Ultimately ended up working for RFK Jr. somehow. I don't know what happened with him. But his signature idea was a- It's been a journey. It's been a journey.

His signature idea was the creation of a Department of Peace, and it was treated like a joke. And I remember thinking that he was a joke and that idea was a joke and what a silly notion. But I went through the bill text yesterday. The mission of the department was to make peace and organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy to promote justice, democratic principles, and expand human rights and promote conflict prevention through diplomacy. I don't really get why that's a joke and why the Department of War, which exists and is run by Pete Hegsef, is a real thing that exists and in this world. You mentioned the example of the JCPOA ban. It was nitpicked to death by Congress. They passed a law to make it harder to cut a deal with Iran while these wars just could

kind of race through. So thoughts on this sort of like frustration around anti-war voices being treated as unsirious for its solutions. Yeah, I think there's two quick points on this. I mean, one is just the idea that like I started in a think tank in D.C. And part of the issue here is that intervention is often presented as the solution to the problem. But then that can create a situation where every problem is an ale and so you reach for the hammer, right? And so the way you show you're trying to solve a problem

of a government doing something we don't like is to bomb it, invade it, or sanction it. And so therefore, these are the people with the solutions and so their platform where if someone's saying, wait a second, we shouldn't do this. I mean, if you look at the people that voted against the Iraq war in Congress, they tend to be the people that are not

taken seriously in certain elite media debates about these things. But so part of this is you've got to change the paradigm where there needs to be more skepticism that intervention is always a solution and the person coming and arguing for bombing a country is therefore offering a solution that's more credible than someone who's saying, hey, we shouldn't do that. I would argue on our progressive side, we need to get more involved in foreign policy, though. Like part of the issue is that progressives often in the past, and this is changing, now, have focused on domestic policy. And they've kind of ceded the terrain in the Democratic

Party on national security to more hawkish people that end up running committees, right? You know, we had Bob Menendez and Elliott Engel running the foreign affairs committees. You know, these are the hawkish parts of the party. And so part of, and this is happening now, but I want like an AOC to have more of a foreign policy profile, right? Bernie Sanders, when he moved after the 2016 election to have more of a foreign policy voice, it was very healthy, the party. And so a part of the way you do this is you have progressives and you have to kind of create permission structures for that to happen and give them committee assignments and things like that. But you need to democratize the discourse so that it reflects the American people.

Right. Yeah. I wrote criticism of Bernie in 16 was that he didn't really have a foreign policy agenda that he was running on and that changed quickly after he lost. So look, we complained about the blob. Let's talk about how to fix it. I'm going to throw out a few thought starters and then you offer your own. I just think you need generational change within the kind of staffer class and more diversity of voices. One way to get at that is we need more transparency and oversight when it comes to foreign policy think tanks in Washington. There is a revolving door between a lot of these think tanks and institutions and the government. A lot of them have funding from right-wing billionaires or whatever. We need fewer of those voices constantly coming out of government and more new people.

I think we need stronger lobbying bans, disclosure rules, enforcement of FARA, and just, you know, campaign finance reform too, but that's a panel for a different day. We need a bigger State Department. We need to build back a modernized version of USAID. We need to rethink and shrink the U.S. military footprint and spending so that we aren't just constantly adding and adding and adding without subtracting anything. You know, currently Trump wants a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget. That is crazy. You mentioned this, the AUMF. We need to repeal the post-911 authorizations for the use of military force. And then Congress needs to put some real teeth into the War Powers Act and clarify it so that it doesn't just get ignored over and over

again, including by Barack Obama. And then arms sales, I just would love to see Congress vote up or down on arms sales. Why is there not more scrutiny of like massive, major arms packages to countries around the world. But Ben, your thoughts? I think that's a really good list, and we're short on time, and I don't want to just echo it. I will say just a couple of things on this. The first is democratizing who does foreign policy, it's generational change, but it is very much like different recruitment pipelines.

It is both older, but it's also a very white establishment. and if you were able to diversify the voices and the perspectives that are informing American farm policy, you would get different outcomes as well. And then I think critically important is I just say that a lot of the common threads to what you said, because I throw into that the permanent sanctions regimes, we sanction countries

and the sanctions never go away. So we're just building sanction upon the top of sanction, until by the way we're going to lose the dollars of reserve currency. and things are going to get real here very fast, because we cannot sustain our standards of living without that. But in order to do things like repeal the AMF, get Congress involved in the declaration or authorization of use of military force,

restrict arms sales to countries engaged in human rights violations, you need to end this mindset where it is more of a political risk to take those positions than it is to advocate for sanctions and for military intervention. And the reason that should not be hard is that is where public opinion is. Yet political leaders are often far too afraid of being called weak on national security than they are and taking principal positions against those things. Public opinion keeps telling us you will be rewarded for doing this. Don't be afraid to have fights on these issues.

Because if you do and start to win those fights, that's how the tie turns. In fact, have fights because it draws attention to these issues, as we saw with Barack Obama and we saw with Donald Trump. Okay, that's it for this section of the show. Thank you for being here. We're going to take a quick break, reset the stage, and then we come back. You'll hear our conversation with Annalina Byerbach. So please come for that too.

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Thank you so much, Madam President, for joining us for this conversation. I have admired your work as leader of the German Greens and as foreign minister. I want to start by just talking a little bit about the role of the United Nations. and then later we'll get to some specific things you're working on. I speak as a huge supporter of the UN system. And I wanted to kind of frame this around the fact that we, I've been watching, like everybody else, the negotiations around the Iran War play out

in a kind of fairly improvisational, is a word you might use, manner. in Islamabad and Qatar and other places. And I've noticed the kind of absence of a UN participation in those talks. Whereas during the JCPO, the UN kind of had a formal role because it was UN Security Council, Permit 5, that were in the negotiations along with Germany. What does that say? How do we get to a place where the UN is kind of reinserted into international diplomacy on the leading peace and security issues. You've looked at this as the perspective of foreign minister

and now as a perspective of a UN officer. How can we revitalize the role of the UN international diplomacy? Good morning, and thank you for having me in this wonderful and beautiful landscape. Well, obviously, the world is not in a good shape, to put it very diplomatic, and obviously it's a huge challenge for the United Nations. And third point, obviously,

the UN needs a deep, reform and we come back to that later. So don't get me wrong that I want to sugarcoat anything with regard to the United Nations. However, I think we always have to get the context right because context matter a lot if we all know. So in a situation where key drivers of the Security Council are not only challenging the charter, but attacking the charter, it is impossible for an institution like the UN of 193 member states and five permanent members of the Security Council who do have a veto power to solve a war

where some veto powers are involved. So in the end, the UN is always the sum of its 193. But this does not mean at all that the UN cannot do anything, and we might come back to that later as well. I mean, there's now total revitalization of the General Assembly. And the narrative of saying, we live in a polarized world, one against the other, in my point of view, is totally under-complex. We are in a multipolarized world, and we have a two-thirds majority for kind of everything what holds this world together, from the SDG to fighting climate crisis, to governance structure for AI, and also on peace and security.

Because most of the countries in the world know the UN Charter is their life insurance. If we would exact that might is right again, this would be the death sentence for almost everybody, my country, including, and I would even say for those strongest armies, as we can see right now, with a straight of Firmuz, you cannot end this alone with military force. And obviously, this has a deep effect for your own economy. So in a nutshell, yes, the Charter is under pressure. The UN is working. and very challenging times, we have to do better. And this would only work, so put pressure in the Security Council, if this two-thirds-majority dares. And this comes to a deeper point now. You mentioned the war of Iran. We know the effects we saw it yesterday night again,

not all the neighboring countries, very strong Gulf countries. But when we had the discussions about resolution, be it on Gaza, be it on the Board of Peace, be it on the Strait of Hormuz, who dares to stand up and speak up. I leave it there because I'm the president of the General Assembly was 193 member states, but individual leadership matters, I would say, more than ever. And if individual leaders join forces, if two or third majority individual leaders

joined forces, I would say they can move hardly anything. But obviously, for some of the big crises at the moment, it's not possible, and this why we have to keep on not only reforming the UN, but also asking every individual country, do you step up in your own interest for the principles of the Charter every day? Yeah, let me ask you one follow-up on reform then, because, and it's an interesting point about the democratic body, the General Assembly, kind of taking more of a role, given the divisions in the Security Council. I have often defended the UN by suggesting to people that if the member states, particularly on the Security Council, particularly the veto-wielding members of the Security Council, disagree,

the system can't really function the way that we would want it to. That said, we are kind of living in a reality in which that doesn't feel like it's changing anytime soon. And so when you talk about reform, essentially the way in which the UN has a voice, the way in which component parts of the United Nations are functioning, how can the UN reform absent any kind of consensus among particularly the United States, Russia, and China? What can be done by the UN itself as an organization in a context when it's kind of leading board members to take a phrase are at odds with each other? So there are different parts of reform. Let me start with the political one first. We saw what member states can do a year ago at the beginning of the high-level week, where I took over the presidency, where one day before the official opening happened,

this was on Tuesday morning. We had the Monday morning first celebrating third years of Beijing, women rights and security, also very important topic. Maybe you could touch it later as well. But then we had the two-state solution conference, organized and set up by Saudi Arabia and France. Interesting again, coalition in these times. And the U.S. was totally against it. They didn't even participate yet, and here comes my two-thirds majority example, 142 member states adopted a resolution, which was a detailed plan for how to end the war in Gaza, actually something I've worked before

for a couple of years since the 7th of October, was a core group, again a core group. This is why I'm such a fan in these times of frontrunners and collisions, not of the willing, this is a bit a synonym from another time, but a collision of those who believe that they can really do something. So it has concrete steps, disarmament of Hamas, withdrawal from the Israeli armor from Gaza, access of humanitarian, steps towards the governing from the Palestinian themselves. So it's all in there. And this was adopted. And if you would look at the video from that day again, it was the celebration of the UN itself. I've never felt an atmosphere like this in this room because it really showed to member state, well, this is our house. This is

our house of humanity and we can do something if we do something together. And this mood, and again, politics in these times is different than in 1970. Yeah, it's all over social media. I think some who weren't there have watched that very carefully. Also how to, one president was there and the other was a foreign minister, two persons were celebrated at this event. Because then the next day, we had the official speeches by heads of states. And then we had a meeting in the Security Council. First, we had an invitation to D.C., and then we had a meeting in the Security Council. And then we had the steps towards the Board of Peace. But this last step would not have happened if we wouldn't have that Monday and the two-state solution. And there you see all the power.

And there you see also that, and this is my theory, no single country in the world in this time can move in total isolation. So if there's the strength, so this is not an institutional reform, we don't have to change anything in the Security Council for that. We just need leadership and we just need coalitions for protecting the Charter. Having said this, obviously many things would be way easier if we would have an institutional reform of the Security Council. If I were a professor and sometimes journalists pretend they are professors, and then they say, but Madam President, yeah, don't you see that we need a reform of the Security Council, that the veto is totally blocking peace? Well, obviously I see it.

But then I ask back to them, since you're also having eyes, don't you see in the world that it's almost impossible at this moment to take away the veto right? And all of those who said, maybe the UN has failed, we have to build something new. Yeah, there was an effort to build something new. It was called Board of Peace. Did you see that the veto power was taken away? Well, the veto power was even increased

because there's now a single veto power that not only one country, but one person has an individual veto power. So all these theoretical discussions about maybe we just built something new, I mean, this would be the end of multilateralism, bringing me to my third point of. the reform. Reform is boring. Being in national politics before, nobody applauds you of saying, you know what, I've a wonderful idea. We just change the rules of procedures and please vote for me at the next election for that one. But as you also know, those in administrations, these reforms

and rules of procedures matter heavily. So this is what we are working on. Nobody reports about it. Maybe this is also good because then nobody is like making fake news on social media about it. But the deep reform, obviously, of the Security Council, the first steps are right now. How do we get more justice of Africa having a seat, for example, at the Security Council? This would open slightly the door. It would not change the veto power, but at least it would give more credibility to this institution. Other reforms, even more boring, but heavily crucial. How do we take away this overload?

I mean, this is where especially the U.S. is definitely right. There's an inefficiency, which I could not believe as a German because we love bureaucracy in Germany. But now I found a place where I don't love it anymore. So we really have to do something about it. And this is, again, a deep structural challenge, which is not so easy to solve. You don't have any checks and balances within the UN. So there is no finance committee challenging the government saying, well, this is a bit inefficient. It's all the member states.

And again, in theory, it's very easy. just get rid of many, many of the USGs and ASGs, for those who are experts in the United Nations, yeah, the highest positions in the security in the UN, yet they are all political. You gave one to that country, you gave another one through that country, so every individual post is already a geopolitical challenge.

Yet, this is what we have to do, also the next Secretary General, and maybe we can go into that deeper, but if we are not reforming this house from inside, it will collapse given the challenges from outside. Potsie of the World is brought to you by Helix. I got a Helix mattress. I forget the exact mattress model

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One of the best ways to get a better night's sleep is to upgrade your mattress and make sure you are actually comfortable at night. Helix is the answer here. We can't recommend it enough. Go to helixleep.com slash world for 27% offsite wide. This offer is exclusive to our listeners. That's helixleck sleep.com slash world for 27% offsite wide, helixleep.com slash world. I want to follow up on Gaza and threats to the UN chart. because it seems like the announcement of the Board of Peace, it was ostensibly to deal with long-term reconstruction in Gaza,

but it does seem like it's trying to supplant or replace some of the core functions of the UN. And so far, the Board of Peace has been a failure. Almost none of the pledge money is materialized. I read recently that the International Security Force that they're pulling together currently has four members, I believe they're supposed to provide security within Gaza. So I was wondering what you make of the Board of Peace's brief tenure and whether it's making your job harder at the UN? Well, after a couple of months, no, because it proved what I just said, that obviously it's not

so easy to build another institution and for sure it can never ever replace United Nations. Yet, in the moment when we had the discussions, and again, my role is now president of the General Assembly, and I represent 193. Obviously, there's hardly any consensus. So I always say, I swore my oaths on the charter. and I speak on the charter because this is a base for 193 and in the frame of the charter,

I said at the beginning when there were discussions about the Board of Peace, there's a reason why we do have a body for peace and security where every country, no matter how big or small, how powerful or rich, has a seat at the table

and an equal voice and vote at the table. So you can understand this. and obviously something else hasn't. But I was one of the few who said anything about it, also from the UN family. And this is, I think, I mean, some things, as I said, we cannot change. We cannot change the veto power at the moment.

But we can change every day if we dare to speak up. And if in a situation where the UN is so heavily under pressure, because obviously it was a momentum where some thought, we show now how easy peace and security can be built. And those from different countries here, yeah, I mean, there was an invitation. And I was not the foreign minister anymore, but I just said, by the way, and this is a good thing when you have media access, I just wanted to remind that in the German constitution,

I don't even see how Germany could participate in this because of our history. we are bound to act for peace and security only within international organization, regional ones, European Union, Council of Europe and international ones, obviously the United Nations. But I felt it was a need for saying this, that we do have a constitution. But people were like really searching for arguments because they, in my point of view, could not just say the simple thing of saying, well, there's a security council. there's a General Assembly, just take these forums.

And I think this is also when we speak about Iran. Again, it's not as easy as we see in the headlines, yeah? The UN failed because they didn't deal with it. The topic of Iran was not even brought to the Security Council. When we remember Iraq, there was a heavy debate in the Security Council. Again, you can have different political opinions about who was right and who was wrong in this. One of the foreign ministers from my country back then said, With all due respect, I'm not convinced.

But he could only say that because the topic wasn't the Security Council. This time, it wasn't even in the Security Council. And I think this is really the point. If we just start of bypassing an institution, obviously, cannot act. It can still fail in their action. But the biggest threat is that we pretend we have a easy way out. And as you said, now we're a couple months afterwards. Even the funding is not there because all the complexity

and sometimes also bureaucracy of the UN with all the different agencies, has a region because we have specialized agencies who can go into Gaza. We have specialized agencies for health, for education, and obviously a new setup where you just say we just collect money and somehow we throw it into an area

does not work at all because you need the structures in the ground and it's even there, you don't even have the money. I mean, we need billions, and I think we have, what, 23 millions so far collected. Not enough. You guys were right about Iraq, by the way. We were wrong. I want to ask you a question about putting on your hat as a former German lawmaker. I mean, there's the far-right AFD party, some would say, you know, extremist or neo-Nazi party seems to send it in Germany. It's polling at record levels in a number of different opinion polls now. Several German states have elections in 2026. There's concern that the AFD could win outright in some of those regions. Historically speaking, as you know, other German parties have kept the AFD out of power

by refusing to work with them to keep the so-called firewall up. But there's also concern that the firewall may be breaking down. How worried are you and should we be about the AFD's rise and potential of, you know, attaining real power in Germany? Because I'm not a fan of claiming that politicians or presidents of the General Assembly have answers for everything. I don't have an answer and this is my biggest fear. I really don't understand in many parts of the world, especially in democracies,

especially in countries like mine where you have everything, even health access for everybody in your country. So this narrative about everything is falling apart. And I'm such a deep fan about multilateralism, about an interconnected world, because it broadens your horizon so much. Obviously, you learn when you travel and when you're an international context.

And this is, again, at the UN, you're seeing and understanding the cultural background from every country, but now more in an easy way, yeah? When you travel abroad, and I think the best answer to fight extremism and facism is you enable every school kid at the age of 16 to spend half a year in a different country. Not only that you understand the culture there, you feel what it means to be a foreigner. I was with 16 in the US, and I'm back obviously. And I totally remember the first time I had to go to a doctor, how shy I was, yeah,

because I didn't know the system, I didn't know what to say. Then I was making friends with a German who I would have hardly spoken to in Germany because I didn't like her at all. But at least she understood my problems, yeah. So when you have sometimes here in your own country, people saying, so why don't they speak German, yeah? Why they come from Turkey and they don't speak German in our subway. I mean, I don't speak English with my children

because they say it's very embarrassing with your German accents if people hear that. So all these kind of experience, what it means, I mean, totally changes your mindset. But now coming to Germany in the extreme right, also how you see your own country. I mean, when I'm abroad, taking the doctor's example again, even though I would be paid back at my situation right now, I'm thinking if I go me as my kid to the doctor to put cash on the table. So I value our health system a lot, even though I would complain in Germany again.

So I think this attitude of really trying to educate global citizens is crucial, and we should never give up on this. And if it's the narrative of my country first, also on the European continent, this is a toxic first. But it takes time. And now coming to your concrete questions right now, this is obviously a challenge because we cannot do the education right now on spots. And this is why at the moment we have to hold this firewalls, as we call it currently in Germany.

And we had a discussion with a couple of colleagues yesterday night. There's a difference with the extreme right party in Germany. I mean, this is based on the facism we had 80 years ago. Yeah, this is a tradition because we have also other extreme right parties and other countries. I discussed also a lot of with other European colleagues about it. In some, for example, in Finland with the true Finns, they formed a coalition with a theory of if they are in government. Maybe they show that they are not so anti-EU because, and most of them actually did it in government. But this is really different with at least part.

part of the AFD, but they have the core. They are anti-constitutional. We have set up because of our horrible crimes in the past. We have a body called Verfassonschuts, so protection of our constitution. I mean, there are reports about this party that this is against our constitution. We have in our constitution, if this happens, you have to defend your constitution that never, ever something happens again like the Holocaust and all the crimes like the Second World War. before. So yes, we are at a crucial moment and again, it needs backbone, leadership, or just moral, human sense to say whatever the outcome is. The good thing is again in a democracy, yeah, you need a majority. Even if they are running first in some of the federal states you're

saying now, in Germany you still need at least 50%. So then you would need a coalition from all of the other party. This is not a nice at all. I was in the coalition with three parties. Obviously, it didn't end it a bit earlier. But then we have to do it. I always say the UN was not built for the easy times. It was built for the hard times, exactly for right now. And it's the same for democracy. Democracy is easy and easy times. Yeah, but it's tested in challenging times. And this is when you really see if you are a true democratic leader. So, One last question, because I know, you know, we were chatting, and you want to mention the Secretary General Selection process,

but one way to kind of frame the question coming off this is, I could argue one of the reasons why there's been a loss of faith in democracy and in the international order that has kind of created an opening for the AFD and other parties is because there's a sense that decisions are now made in a sense. an opaque way that corruption has really entered decision-making inside of governments, you know, whether we're here in the United States or inside the international community itself in terms of how decisions are made, that people don't feel like these institutions that are supposed to be responsive to them have their interest in mind, that rather there's

some back room somewhere where somebody is making a judgment. And so in that context, you know, one of the main ways in which the U.S. presents itself to the world is in the selection of a secretary general. What can you tell us about the process that is underway of selecting the next secretary general? What can be done to the maximum extent possible within the kind of rules of the UN to democratize that, to make it feel like a selection process. It's not either corrupt or just some very powerful countries getting together and

kind of forcing their candidate through? First of all, I would disagree that the rise of the right is related to corruption. I mean, I'm speaking for my own country. Yeah, you can never have your hand in the fire. So obviously good leadership is the best promotion for democratic parties. So if you're not a good leader and if you're even corrupt, it's even worse. People don't trust you. But if you would look maybe also a bit here.

or in another reason, the opposite not always the same true. Yeah, you could also spread fake news if not to say lie, which is obviously also not a good leadership, but still people follow it. But, I mean, you cannot change people's minds. And again, I would also give responsibility to citizens. Yeah. I mean, democracy depends on active citizenship, yeah. And if you don't want to live in a dictatorship, you have to support democracy.

And I heard always in Germany, yeah, but I don't like this party because the Greens, they are way too much on climate change, yeah, and I don't like the conservatives because they don't take the battle with the old companies, and I don't like the ones in the middle. And I always say, well, this is democracy, it's a compromise. If you want to wash your clothes, don't have dirty clothes, you go to the supermarket, yeah?

I also could say, I don't like this washing powder because it's too expensive. I don't like the others because it's not biological as a green politician, but then if I take the other one, my children say it doesn't smell right. In the end, I have to fight a compromise because I need washing powder for my clothes. And it's the same for democracy. If you want democracy, you have to decide in the same, what is the compromise you take for yourself in this moment.

And the good thing is, at the next election, you could take the other party because you said, well, obviously, this doesn't wash, as I wished for, four years or five years long. So now coming to the UN, obviously, there we have also now different candidates and a promotion here. We have a town hall, which is kind of like a presidential debate next week. In the General Assembly, it is being broadcasted also by a big broadcaster, television show, so you can see it.

And again, the question is, which Secretary General do the people 8 billion people want? And the broader membership made very clear two years ago that after 80 years, it should be time for women. Because in 80 years, we didn't have a female secretary general. And not only because I am a woman, which I obviously am, but because I defend the credibility, and here comes your point, the credibility of the UN, I think it's really hard to explain if, by consensus, two years ago, the broader membership called for a female secretary general, and then suddenly two years later when we have four women, all in national leadership, presidents, foreign ministers, so on, and two men for the moment.

And then you explain afterwards, like many male politicians did in the past, unfortunately, we could not find a qualified woman. Yeah, I mean, it was wrong already 10 years ago, but these times, I think it's really really, really difficult. And this comes to the point of trust. I think even the strongest supporter of the UN, which are most of the time younger people, people who are really engaged in human rights, also many in women rights, because UN has done so many things also for women, I mean, if then member states would have to explain how they could not find a qualified women if in theory have four billion potential candidates out there in the world. I think this

will be a challenge of credibility, which many, especially governments and PRs, ambassadors at the moment, don't really see. And this is why I'm addressing it here. I'm addressing it every time in the General Assembly. Obviously, it's in the hand of member states. Obviously, as a president, I'm neutral, but obviously, I'm only describing facts that 4 billion people are women. And it's very hard to explain why after 80 years still they are not at the top of this helmet. And this comes also to other points, yeah. Now is a moment where member states could say, well, for us it's crystal clear because the General Assembly has the last say. Again, in theory, you would say it's a security council, the P5, they have to make the proposal. But if you say very clearly, we as a broader membership, we as Africans, Europeans, Latin Americans, or just we who believe in the UN,

cannot vote for a person who is not supporting the charter that you're not allowed to. invade another country if it's not based on international law. We cannot support a person who's denying climate change if we see that half of the forest is dying right in front of our eyes. We cannot support a person who's questioning the sustainable development goals because then we won't have any peace and security. So there's a deep power within the General Assembly and it has shown that before. When Kofi Annan was being appointed as Secretary General, the African group made very clear If this is not an African, because it was their turn, yeah, then we won't vote for that person. So you see the so-called soft power, if you really join forces again, it's a very, very strong power.

And this is what we need at this moment, that we are not sitting here next year again. And then you would ask me, I'm not in office then anymore, but if you would ask me, well, you said that the UN is not perfect, but it's the only institution which can stand up for peace and security for everybody in the world. would say, unfortunately, they didn't select a secretary general who believes in it. So I trust on the broader wisdom of the General Assembly and the broader membership to understand that obviously we need a candidate which is a compromise for many people. This is also very clear. We won't have the perfect person, but we need a person who is standing with both of her feet

on the Charter of the United Nations. Thank you, Madam President, for being here today. Thank you to the Aspen Institute for having us. We're out of time. So see you the next panel. Pod Save the World is a Crooked Media production. Our show is produced by Alona Minkowski, Michael Goldsmith, and Anisha Bonnergy. Our team includes Matt DeGrope, Ben Hethko, Jordan Cantor,

Kenny Moffat, David Tolls, and Ryan Young. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.