Pod Save the World - Ukraine and the 2024 Presidential Campaign

Episode Date: July 19, 2023

Tommy and Ben talk about Russia pulling out of a vital grain initiative with Ukraine, 2024 Republican primary candidate views on Ukraine, Trump and Taiwan, the culture war amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act, John Kerry’s visit to China and climate change, the strange disappearance of China’s foreign minister, renewed fears of a second genocide in Darfur, the EU’s deal with Tunisia to curb migration, Iran’s morality police are back, and how a typo caused a massive military security leak. Then Tommy talks to Amir Tibon, the diplomatic correspondent for Haaretz Newspaper, about Biden inviting Israel PM Bibi Netanyahu to Washington as Bibi is trying to gut the Israeli supreme court. Crooked Media Reads' first book, Mobility by Lydia Kiesling, is out now! Get your copy at www.crooked.com/mobility For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben, congrats on the Jets getting hard knocks. Last time we got Hard Knocks, it didn't turn out too well, actually. Turned up very funny for me. That was the year that everybody thought the Jets were going to make a Super Bowl run and wasn't to be. Hard Knocks for everyone who hates this part of the podcast is when HBO goes behind the scenes with an NFL team during training camp. And even if you don't like football, it's very fun. Yeah, it's like a reality show.

Yeah, it's like human interest stories. Like, you know, Antonio Cromartie with like five kids or whatever. He was like fun, fun stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. We'll Pete behind the coach. Yeah, we had like a kind of sociopathic coach, Rex Ryan, who's kind of fun to watch too. Fun to watch. A big foot guy.

Yes. Anyway, Ben. Oh, I forgot about that. It's good to be back. Google it. Or maybe don't. Maybe don't. Google that.

It's good to be back. It was fun listening to UMX last week, covered a lot of ground. We're going to talk about the latest news from Ukraine, including Russia, pulling out of this really important initiative that keeps food. flowing around the world. We're going to talk about Republican 2024 candidates in their foreign policy views and these wacky defense votes in the House of Representatives. Climate change, fears of another genocide in Darfur. China's missing foreign minister, how Iran is up to lots of terrible things. The EU and migration in Tunisia and some fun news out of Australia. What else? They only do

fun stuff for us these days. Ben, Ben, I talk with Amir Teabone from Haaretz about Netanyahu's judicial coup and Biden inviting Bibi Netanyahu to Washington. That was very well pronounced. You know, I think I did a better with him. Pronounced. Pronounced. The heat, the climate change is getting to my head. It is quite hot.

Yeah, he's a great guy. Also, there's this fascinating story that Hararets posted today about Trump apparently taking a bunch of priceless Israeli antiquities and hoarding them at Marlako. It's a great, you know, it's a great, it's a great follow Haratz. You know, like it's, you know, if only that was the entire. Israeli media ecosystem. Exactly, exactly. I'm a subscriber.

Quick housekeeping, Ben. If you guys live in Los Angeles, come join me at a book event with Lydia Kiesling. She's the author of Kirkland Media's first book, imprint book. Mobility. I finished Mobility last week when I was off. It is great.

It was a really fun to read. I literally read it on the beach. But Ben, I think you will also like it because Lydia is obviously a novelist. And she's telling this fun coming of age story about a kid growing up in a house where her parents worked on the Foreign Service. And then she ends up in Texas working. in the oil industry. And it, you know, it was this cool way to, like, weave the impact of climate change

and the tentacles of this industry into this human story about a girl and a family. It's also, you know, she reports on really recent history. Like, it's history, though, like, 2013, 2016, there's, like, Obama references. It's very, it made me feel a little old, but it's a great book. I mean, I love that you got the first, like, Crooked Read to be so infused with world those themes. Right up our alley. I mean, this is something that everybody needs to check out.

It starts in Baku. Yeah, well, there you go. I mean, how many things start in Baku that you've read recently? Nothing good. But it's always entertaining, actually. Baku is a fascinating place. I would like to go there. I was more thinking of the treatment of the Armenians.

But yes. July 27th, Dynasty typewriter, Los Angeles. Come hang out. I'll be there. I'll check that out. All right. Let's do it. Come up.

Just bum rush the stage. We'll do a big Baku off. So lots of news out of Ukraine, Ben. You and Max talked about the Biden administration's decision to send clustered munitions to Ukraine last week. I saw that those munitions have already arrived, so they're probably in theater right now. Probably no coincidence either that this comes as concerns about the pace or the, you know, slow pace of the Ukrainian offensive are growing.

You're hearing, you know, people in Washington and now generals in Ukraine kind of expressing some frustration. The Ukrainians also have once again attacked the Kurtzstraight bridge, which is a bridge that connects Russia to Crimea. The Russians say Ukraine used a drone boat in the attack, which has become their kind of like go-to, low-cost way for the attacking and screwing with the Russian Navy. Shortly after this attack, the Russians announced that they will stop participating in the Black Sea grain initiative, which is the deal brokered by the United Nations and Turkey that allowed Ukraine to ship its grain

around the world. Ukrainian grain, as we've talked about, is critical to global supplies, especially in Asia and Africa. The UN says up to 783 million people faced chronic hunger in 2022 and that this initiative reduced food prices by over 23% since March 22. But, you know, wheat prices once again rose after this news. So not great. So Ben, a lot going on here. But one thing we talked about a lot in the show is how there's a Western U.S. Europe narrative about the war where Ukraine is the good guys and the Russians of the bad guys who invaded them. And then there's a lot of other countries that believe a more complicated take on what's happening. they're more amenable to hearing out Russian propaganda or blaming the U.S. for this war.

It seems to me, though, that Putin pulling out of this grand initiative creates some real risk for him if prices spike because they kind of did it flamboyantly, right? They announced they were pulling out. I'm wondering if you think that's true and if you can get messengers like Taya Berdogan, the prime minister of Turkey, to lead the messaging and kind of, you know, punch back a little bit here. I mean, I'm not sure because I think that Putin may be calculating that there is such sympathy for his narrative in Africa and parts of the global South that even with the kind of clear responsibility on his shoulders, you're pulling out of this, it's the war itself that people blame for the food shortages and high food prices. I noticed like in the run up to it, he was doing some calls. he did a call with the president of South Africa. I'm sure what he was doing was blaming the United States, the West for making this like a proxy war. We should say they want like off some sanctions lists.

They want a Russian bank reconnected to the global SWIFT system, I think. So they have some demands. They have some demands. And South Africa has been kind of caught in the middle here. But I think he might be calculating that look, Russia and China and others are doing a lot of work to kind of pin the blame for the war on the U.S. and NATO, who are often viewed with. some mistrust in the global south and that their basic argument, the Russian argument, is like the Zelensky could end the war, they're the ones prolonging it, because, you know, frankly, what they'd like is probably for there to be some kind of ceasefire where they get

to keep all this land that they're occupying. That's, I think, what he's betting on. He may want to just test that proposition for a bit of time. Remember, it took some time to get the grand initiative up and running in the first place, and it was delayed a couple of times. So he may be taking a few weeks to kind of see how this news is received around the world. To your point, I think what's going to be really important is not just for the U.S. to be delivering the message that, hey, this grand initiative was working. Putin's the guys pulled out of it. Like pressure needs to be put on him internationally to go back into it, but that you get other messengers. You know, sure, the UN Secretary General Erdogan, but also hopefully, ideally, you can find

some credible people in Africa and other places that may not want to be. You know, to take the Ukrainian side in the war, but might want to put a little bit more pressure on Putin to come back into this. So best case scenario, I think, is, you know, Putin tests the waters and finds what you said, that, you know, some people are like, wait, what are you doing here? This is working. The worst case scenario is this starts to work for them. Other countries are like, what's going on? Why are you guys pulling all these weapons in Ukraine? They start to be on, like, the Tucker Carlson line, you know? And we don't know. I don't know. To your question, like, it's hard to say, which way this will break, because I think there'll be symbol.

for the argument that NATO's prolonging the war, but there'll also be frustration with Putin for pulling out. And it's incumbent on the U.S. and all of our allies and others to drive home the message that, look, whatever you think about the war, this thing was working. There's global food shortages, climate, which we're going to talk about is going to exacerbate that. There's conflicts in Sudan. There's all kinds of reasons why this is the worst time to do. Yeah, it's terrible, terrible timing. Speaking of the cost of war, Medusa, one of the last remaining Russian independent news outlets, reported that they believe the true number of of Russian soldiers killed since the beginning of the war is 47,000, 10 times the Kremlin estimate,

and they estimate that 125,000 Russians were so badly injured that they can't return to military service. It's just like an enormous growing cost to the Russian people. Now, in addition to it, that there will be this higher food prices for the globe, basically. Yeah, and I wonder also about the cost piece, like the wounded. It's a very high number. This is like a pretty ugly war, right? It's like a, you know, front line artillery war. These must be pretty bad wounds. These people are going to be returning to communities, tens of thousands of essentially, you know, newly disabled Russians. And so the war may become much more visible inside of Russia. Obviously, it's visible when you lose somebody, but when suddenly you have a huge influx of disabled veterans, that's going to create its own strengths.

You can't go back to work necessarily if they were farmers. But Medusa, I think they were literally like having people go to cemeteries, counting graves. They built a model to try to figure out this cost. It's pretty amazing. One more sort of Russia flag before we move on to Republicans. in Ukraine. We talked a bunch of times about Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was arrested in Russia. He's been held hostage now for more than three months. His parents recently met with President Biden. The White House said they were in touch with the Russians

about a possible prisoner swap, though nothing decided yet, no deal done yet. And then just for those interested in more, the Wall Street Journal did a fascinating piece about the FSB unit that has been spying on harassing Americans and arrested Evan in Russia. That's worth reading. That's really worth reading. It was a really good piece. You know, because this unit is like grown in stature and aggression in recent years and basically exist to kind of target Westerners in Russia or sometimes outside of Russia. The one thing I'd say in all the reporting is that the Russians are trying to negotiate some kind of spy swap, which is hard for the U.S. because we rightly don't see Evan as a spy. Exactly. And so that's going to be a barrier to clear. And then they'll probably ask for some like horrible person like the. the person in Germany, you're like murdered somebody.

And so look, this is what's going to happen. The pressure is going to build over the coming months. And the Biden people probably be left with some pretty bad choices here. Yeah, that's right. So, Ben, over the weekend, speaking of bad choices, there was a big Christian conservative coalition event in Iowa called the Family Leadership Summit. It's what we call a cattle call event, right? You have a bunch of Republicans.

They come in. They all speak over the course of the day of the same audience. So this year, the organization at Tucker Carlson come in to host a fireside chat, his natural setting with 24 primary candidates. Ronda Santis, Mike Pence, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramoswami. We talked about this a bit on Positive America Tuesday, but I want to dig in deeper with you because foreign policy was so front and center because Tucker Carlson was like, I don't give a shit about any of the Christian conservative stuff you guys want me to talk about, like abortion or gay rights. I'm here to talk about why supporting Ukraine is really bad. So we want to listen to

a couple of clips to give you guys a flavor of this thing and talk about the implications. So The first one is Mike Pence trying to make the case for supporting Ukraine. The answer is not to shrink from America's role as leader of the free world. The answer is to invest in our national defense. I really do believe that. Look, remember, in a year and a half, and again, we have a strong disagreement on it. Well, I'm not sure we do. That's okay.

Well, that'd be great if we didn't. But let me say to you, we've made real progress there. Look, a year and a half ago, Russia had the second most powerful military in the world. Today they have the second most powerful military in Ukraine. All right. That's progress. So you could hear two people clapping there. Yeah.

So Ben, that could have been a Ronald Reagan speech or a Joe Biden speech, right? I mean, that's kind of like, that's your mainstream foreign policy on this issue at least. Yeah. Yeah. First of all, like, I always have to kind of pull back any temptation to feel any sympathy for Mike Pence whatsoever. I know. It's hard. As a man, you know, who was almost hanged on January 6th.

and is now like, you know, trying to defend Ukraine in front of a hostile audience. But the question that comes out is like, well, if you think that, like, how did you stand there for four years gazing, adoringly Donald Trump as he cozied up to Putin and leaned on Zelenskyy, right, in his first impeachment, right, for dirt on Joe Biden? That said, I think, like, you're right to flag this because, look, it's interesting to observe this kind of fissure in the Republican Party is really intense. I mean, this is going to be a problem for them from now till election day. Because whatever that weirdo MAGA audience is in Iowa, there's a good chunk of Republicans. I mean, not the MAGA people. No, they're not at all. That is like the most right-wing evangelicals out there.

You are the one who once guided me as a speechwriter to write the line for Barack Obama. The only Washington insiders I listened to in developing my rural policy were the Washington Insighted. in Washington County, Iowa. God damn right. That's the kind of local politics that we used to do in Iowa. Weekly papers. Now it's national politics,

I guess, for international politics. But the challenge for them is going to be like there are always going to be kind of traditional national defense, hawkish,

anti-Russian people in the Republican Party. Like even Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump cannot evict evict that portion of the party. And yet, what's notable to me is, not only is there a growing number

that are like where Tucker is, they don't like the war, they don't like supporting Ukraine. They don't like sending money over there. They're sympathetic to Putin. But also like, it's like the number one issue. And this is why it's worth watching. Yeah, this is not like the fourth. Even for Democrats who support Ukraine, it's actually usually not like the number one issue for why they're supporting Joe Biden. Like for Tucker, for Elon Musk and the PayPal brigades, for RFK Jr. to some extent, for that whole milieu over there, Vivek Ramashami.

Or get to him in a second. Yeah. Those people are. are like, this is actually their top issue. This is driving their campaign. And so they're going to move voters. Like, we've seen their capacity to shape how people think. And this is going to be a real civil war inside their public. That's the, it's the PayPal flag officers. Okay.

Sorry. So this is Tucker Carlson responding to Pence later on in this little fireside chat. When Pence is trying to criticize Biden for being weak, for being too slow and sending weapons to Ukraine, specifically the Abrams tanks. You are distressed that the Ukrainians don't have enough American tanks. Every city in the United States has become much worse over the past three years. Drive around. There's not one city that's gotten better in the United States.

And it's visible. Our economy has degraded. The suicide rate has jumped. Public filth and disorder and crime have exponentially increased. And yet your concern is that the Ukrainians, a country most people can't find. on a map who've received tens of billions of U.S. tax dollars don't have enough tanks. I think it's a fair question to ask like, where's the concern for the United States in that? Well, it's not my concern.

That kind of America First's sentiment was very prevalent with a lot of these guys. There was a lot of we need to secure our border before we secure Ukraine's border, et cetera. But you could, I mean, to your point earlier, this is a bunch of like right-wing Christian evangelicals getting pretty fired up. Yeah. about not wanting to help Ukraine, a country being slaughtered by a bunch of Russians. Yeah, really fired up.

I mean, in a way, like, if you listen to Tucker, you kind of see the potency of that argument. Oh, yeah, it's powerful. As much as he's, like, full of shit about... Democrats use it on Iraq. We should be building firehouses here, not over in Iraq. Yeah, John Kerry line.

It was, like, a biggest applause line than John Kerry stump. And, like, first of all, this is kind of, like, to nerd out for a second. Like, this is the Republican Party actually kind of going back to its kind of like pre-war War II, like isolationist, any semantic roots. right America first was a thing and it was a Republican thing like Father

Tom Coughlin yes the broadcaster who was like Tucker Carlson before there was Tucker Carlson was traveling around the country saying FDR was a warmonger for doing like Len Lease with the Brits and like you know so this is this is not actually new this is something that's like deep embedded in like right wing American politics

this isolationism and I also think that a lot of these evangelicals to be I guess sympathetic to them were lied to about Iraq for so long. And so they all got on board the Bush train after 9-11. We're going to go liberate all these people. It's going to be great. And they feel like they got a raw deal here. And so I think they're wrong. I obviously think we should be supporting Ukraine. But I don't think we should

dismiss this as much as Tucker is a crackpot any semi. That doesn't mean that this message won't travel. And it's going to split the Republican Party. And assuming Trump's the nominee, it's going to become the position of the Republican Party. That's going to be the, that language exactly is going to be used by the nominee of the Republican Party in the middle of the war. And that's going to give Putin incentive to wait out, like to the election. It's going to, it is going to impact the actual war. And to continue your sort of a raw comparison here, like a lot of what some of these candidates who support supporting Ukraine say is, look, we got to stop them there so they don't roll into Poland or NATO country. Basically, we have to take the fight to them over there before it becomes here.

That sounds just like the war on terror and al-Qaeda and all the arguments you heard back in the day. So to your point, I do think people are kind of tired of this shit. And they're like, I don't know, maybe a Charles Lindbergian argument sounds kind of compelling. It's certainly simple. And it does. It puts the onus on people. Look, I think you have to make a values-based argument to support the Ukrainians. Because sometimes, you know, I think I mentioned this to you, Tommy, like, I was on some panel with like a friend of the pod, Brett Stevens.

Love that guy. Well, where he was making this kind of very robust argument that, like, Biden should be doing more and you should go around the country and tell people why this is important. And he said the argument he wanted to take out in the country was like, if we don't stop in Ukraine, they're going to end up in Paris. And I was like sitting next to him. I was like, come on, buddy. Yeah, I was like, come on, man. Like, that's a, Americans are not stupid. Like, the Russian tanks aren't going to roll into Paris.

Like, so you have to make a different argument that is rooted in values. It's rooted in the fact that like if Putin wins here, like the whole, you know, project of European security collapses. That's bad for us. Like Putin's a disruptive. It's not an easy. it's actually a harder argument. It's not as clean as Tucker's argument. Not even close.

Not even close. And so to your point, like, so this final clip is Vivek Ramoswami, who's like a 12-year-old businessman who has spent, I think $12 or $50 million already of his own money, says he's going to spend $100 million. But he's kind of,

he isn't caught fire, but of all the kind of no-name candidates has done the best. He's come out of literally nowhere, and I think it's in part because he has Tucker-like views like this. Nearly our entire field, is indistinguishable in practice from where Biden is on this, which is in an undefined, ill-defined way, pouring more money into a war that I think is destined

to become Vietnam or Iraq all over again. And if you don't learn from the lessons of the past, you're gonna be making the same mistakes on an even larger scale going forward. We have to end this war, we can end this war, and start prioritizing the interests of actual US citizens here at home. So I think, judging by the response you just got,

I think a chunk of, I don't know what percentage, but a lot of Republican primary voters agree with you, not all, but a lot. I don't think any Republican donors agree with you. I think that's accurate. And I've lost, to be really honest with you, I've lost many large donors or prospective donors over this issue.

And it puzzles me, because I think the tempting thing to say is to have some conspiratorial explanation that they have money, it's standing, and government contractors, Raytheon, or whatever. I don't think that's true, actually. I think there's something else going on in the psychology of an establishment in both the Republican Party and the Democrat Party that is reluctant to the idea that we somehow can't be the ones

fighting the war that's the popular war of the day, the politically correct war. I think there's no such thing as a politically correct war. So it's kind of fascinating what they do there. So Tucker makes this about the donor. class versus the real people. Vevac makes this about elites and sort of woke things and telling you what to do and what's right to think and feel. And they're just sort of like folding these nativist arguments into all these other, I think pretty powerful arguments to the Republican base.

It's, it's, I would be worried. I would be worried. I mean, I think the argument that, you know, Biden and others will have to continue to make, though, is, first of all, that there are no Americans in this war. So the one way to differentiate from Iraq or Vietnam is to emphasize that Americans aren't in it. And by the way, the thing that Biden says it kind of irks the hawks is when he says, we're not going in this war. Like, I'm not going to get involved in this war.

I'm setting limits on this. We don't want to escalate. He should take from this the importance of continuing to do that. Because that at least, you know, sets some distance between you and the cords that they're hitting there that are pretty powerful cords. Vietnam, Iraq. Like, there is a cost to the blob being so consistently wrong

about these wars since World War II, you know? And this is obviously a very different conflict. It's not the United States military directly involved. But that, I mean, again, I don't like, I don't agree with the argument, but it's, it's, it's, I wouldn't dismiss it. I get the appeal. I get the appeal. When Biden says, like, well, 3,000 more, you know, guys are going to be ready to potentially be sent to Europe. That's very easily used to say, sea slope, you know, yeah.

We're going to be in a war. I just, I would not dismiss this out of hand because. Just because it thuds on cable news and with donor class and with editorial writers, like, people don't trust those people about foreign policy anymore. Like, this is something that I felt acutely when I was in government. Like the gatekeepers, and I'd like to think this podcast, we'd try to have at least more open conversations about this stuff, even if some of our views trend in that direction at times. But, like, people don't trust the gatekeepers of opinion on farm policy. Understandably so. So Trump didn't attend that Iowa event, but he did do Fox News hit with Maria Barton.

where he asked about defending Taiwan. Here's a clip from that. The U.S. helped defend Taiwan if it means going to war with China. Well, I don't want to say it because if I'm in the position of president, I don't want to say what I'm thinking. You know, I just, if I, if I answer that question, it'll put me in a very bad negotiating position. With that being said, Taiwan did take all of our chip business.

You know, we used to make our own chips. Now they're made in Taiwan, 90% of the chips. Advanced semiconductor chips, 90% are made in Taiwan. If China goes in there, they'll be able to turn the world on and off, isn't that right? If China takes Taiwan, they will turn the world off, potentially. I mean, potentially. But remember this. Taiwan took smart, brilliant.

They took our business away. We should have stopped them. We should have taxed them. We should have tariffed them. It's just such a, like, that's sort of a vintage Trump take. Like, it's not anti-war. but it's certainly I'm not going to say the thing you all want me to say, which is like we got Taiwan's back.

And then he just randomly attacks them when the context is a Chinese invasion. And then alludes the world being turned off, which I don't. Right. I'm not sure what that switches. But look, again, this is a great, like, curated segment you've said up here, Tommy, because Trump is to Joe Biden's left on this now. Like Joe Biden has said five times. something that U.S. presence have never said before. Joe Biden has said on television repeatedly

and 60 minutes in other interviews that he would come to the defense of Taiwan. That is not the position of Donald Trump. So on both Ukraine and China, Joe Biden is in the hawkish position. Substantively, you know, like we can argue about that. It is, politically, it's a bit of a headspinning development in the sense that. you know, this is the Republican Party, like, really reorienting as it has been for a while now under Trump from its kind of Reagan-esque, like we, you know, we want to be the hawks and on all this stuff. But I think it's a potentially, I don't know, if it's a potentially difficult issue for Joe Biden. Because I'd much rather be saying, hey, these Republicans are nuts on China. They're obsessed with it. They're going to get us into war because I actually believe that.

if you look at the kind of crazy shit that the Republicans proposed in Congress, it's all about like arming Taiwan of the teeth and standing up to China and in escalation, Trump, like, you know, whether he is being savvy about it or just blundered into it is giving himself an argument to make that actually, you know, that's not the case. He's giving itself some space. Yeah. So Ukraine and these forums aren't the only place where crazy Republican politics are impacting foreign policy. The House Republicans recently passed an $886 billion.

bill to authorize the National Defense Budget. We should just pause on that number. $886 billion. That bill included amendments that would block a Pentagon policy that reimburses service members who have to travel to get abortion services. According to Politico, it also does the following. It muscled

to end coverage of transition surgeries and hormone treatments for transgender troops, guts, diversity, and inclusion programs, and limit the specific flags that can be flown at military installations. Basically, they're trying to effectively ban the flying of the Pride flag. Republican Bob Good of Virginia tried to defund a commission that was set up to rename army bases that were named after fucking Confederate generals and stuff.

So, you know, meanwhile in that same bill been, Margie Taylor Green, of all people, well, that actually makes sense first. She tried to block the transfer of U.S. cluster bombs to Ukraine. That failed by a vote of 147 to 276, back to here, like, everything is jumbled point. So there's a few thoughts on this. Like, one, I don't know, 98 Republicans vote to support sending cluster. from munitions to Ukraine, less than half the caucus. I think that's relevant data point. Second, it does seem like this is just going to happen in every bill going forward, right? Like, McCarthy

doesn't control the caucus, so the Freedom Caucus folks will make this happen on every bill. But I do think the broader question for Democrats is, does this sort of stuff offend moderate voters? Right. Like, will Republicans be able to maybe pick out individual amendments that they added that maybe their base likes or maybe do well with independence, or do we think we can make the argument that most people just won't like playing politics with defense spending like this and just like inserting random shit into these debates a la Senator Tommy Tupperville holding up promotions for literally every military nominee because he too is trying to roll back these reimbursements for abortion services, which are necessary, by the way, because half the country,

that have people, these people are serving in places where they can't get abortion services anymore because Roe v. Wade was overturned. I think this is a loser for them. And I was willing to entertain the potential potency of that Ukraine message. Like all this stuff together. And the Democrats need to wrap it all together. Like Tommy Tuberville holding up, you know, thousands of military promotions and then playing all this culture war politics in the NDAA.

I don't think people like making military readiness a casualty of your culture war. Yeah. And look, the. the marriage of abortion and these issues is also a losing. It's like... Hugely losing. People don't like what they've done on abortion, and they don't like generally, like,

inserting these cultural wars into the military like this. The reproductive health care, keep in mind if you are a female service member, you don't get to choose where you're deployed. Right. And you might have to travel several states over to get abortion services. If you're sent to a base in one of these states that's passing a ban, in Florida.

The military cannot compromise on this. It is not fair to, like, deploy someone to a base in a state that has an abortion man and not provide care where they can fly somewhere to get an abortion. That is insane. That's a readiness issue because, like, people won't want to serve. And by the way, it's not just service members. It's their families that come with them. So Democrats should stand firm on this. And ultimately, the NDA will pass.

Like, I don't. And they'll strip out all this crazy crap. They will. So this is not like a case where even, like, the, you know, the debt ceiling, like, for some reason, I have greater confidence in the Republicans just passing the defense bill than raising the debt ceiling. Normally I would too. So I have to think that maybe they'll score some points with the people that like to consume

content about the woke military. But like, I think this is a loser for them. I think Democrats should lean into this. I think people, the record showed under Trump when you started fucking around with the military and with veterans and insulting the military, like that's not a message that travels well. in the United States, especially with the independent swing voters of whom there are not many. The one thing I'd also say, Tommy, I was thinking about this. There is a lot of right-wing media now about how woke and terrible the military is.

I kind of wonder if it's going to change the competition in the military. Oh, interesting. Like we were coming in here and DeSantis was yelling about a recruiting crisis. Well, if there are people that are not signing up for the military now, they are probably people that watch, like, you know, that content. And they're probably like MAGA people. Yeah. So in a very bizarre way, the Republicans may be driving the U.S. military to the left. Oh, no.

Fewer proud boys in rolling in the military. Exactly. Well, this is Tommy Cooperable saying about not white nationalists. Like, and I don't think that's the intention of the Biden policies, but it's the effect of this right-wing freak out. It's really good point. It's kind of interesting to think. I'm curious to look at the military five years from now and see if it's like, you know, more diverse. Yeah.

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Europe is dealing with a huge heat wave, especially Spain and Italy. There's horrible fires in Spain. Spain, Arizona. Today was the 19th consecutive day of temperatures over 110 degrees in Phoenix, Arizona. Tuesday was reportedly the 27th day of this year where Beijing had recorded temperatures above 95 degrees Fahrenheit. So these are, it's a combination of climate change doing this and El Nino, which is the cyclical warming of the Pacific Ocean. But those heat waves were the backdrop for Biden's special envoy for climate change, John Kerry's trip to Beijing for meetings with this counterpart about climate. Kerry is pushing the Chinese to slow their release of greenhouse

gases by curbing methane emissions and slowing the expansion of coal plants. The latter goal is not going well at all. But the challenge here, of course, is record temperatures mean these countries all want more energy. So they turn to coal because it's available and cheap to power air conditioners, et cetera, and things just get worse. So the data suggests that China is actually uniquely susceptible to climate change. It will impact them worse than a lot of other. places, Beijing in particular. So the U.S. is responsible for 15% of yearly global emissions, really stopping global warming will require action from India, China, Europe, everybody. But, you know, the Chinese in particular are building a lot of cold fire plants with the Indians.

Did you see any positive signs coming out of Kerry's meetings or any other part of it? The fact of him going, I thought, was positive. This is the one issue where the U.S. and China should be able to find a way to work together. It's, you know, in the Obama years, were able to kind of compartmentalize it and make progress on it, even when there were some tensions in other areas. This Chinese government feels less willing to do that, less willing to kind of compartmentalize climate separate from other tensions. But the fact that they had them there is a step forward. And hopefully, even if you can make incremental progress on something like methane that would help, this coal issue is a huge issue because the Chinese are expanding these coal plants. And they also outside of China in their Belt Road initiative and their international lending and investment are still building,

So this is a huge fucking problem. A couple things I observed at this time is like, I don't know, doesn't it seem to you like this last week or two was like almost like a tipping point in climate change coverage in the sense that like in the past it'd be hot and they'd say like in the third paragraph they'd be like some scientists say this is climate change. And now it's like climate change is brought this extreme heat and it's never going. Like I feel like something is changed. I agree with that. I don't know if it's a U.S. thing or it's international thing, but you're certainly seeing. I mean, Europe is going to get hammered. People are not going to be able to live in like Catalonia and Spain anymore if these temperatures persist. You've got a lot of countries where people just don't have air conditioning because they've never needed it.

So you're having elderly people die all across parts of the country or parts of the planet. So yeah, I agree with you. The climate change element of the coverage is front and center now. And in terms of China, I read that they approved more coal-fired power plants in 2022 than any year since 2015. Obviously very bad. But China has drastically increased its use of solar and wind and they're on track to reach their renewable power capacity goal five years ahead of schedule. So that's sort of the... Yeah, they're trying to pour money into the renewables but in part because it's a profit model for them, right? I think that what we're going to see going forward that might be different because of the experience of the last couple weeks is, first

of all, I do think that there was some pressure that kind of released on governments after that COP summit, that climate change sum in Glasgow, because that was like the big five-year check-in after Paris. I just think that this is going to ramp back up because publics are going to be like, what the fuck is going on? Why aren't you doing more? And so I think, you know, the next one is later this year in the UAE. So literally, like totally gross, right?

That like a massive energy oil and gas producer like that is having basically a PR exercise. But, hey, you know what? if they want to use that to dramatically change their energy model. I'm not hopeful, but I do think that the pressure is going to be much greater than it has been. And I also think that this issue of how do you make cities in particular livable in a world of extreme heat, this is going to become a huge challenge too. We tend to think of climate mitigation as, you know, Pacific Island nations and things like this. Miami.

No, climate mitigation is like, can people live in Phoenix? It's been 115 degrees Fahrenheit for like a couple weeks now. And how do you have to change the nature of cities and public transportation and cooling systems in order to make cities livable? Yeah. And the people dying are the elderly and very young kids. And that's who you're protecting by mitigating. But I am hopeful that, look, in the U.S., our debates on policy are never about policy. It's about your identity, right?

And a bunch of, like, lib, woke scolds told you that climate change was bad for. you're probably not ever going to acquiesce and say, okay, you were right. I was wrong. Let's deal with, you know, carbon capture technology. You didn't fix it. I don't think that's as much of a problem in other countries because their politics are just slightly less stupid. Well, you know, I like, it's weird to think back about COVID. But like when you read these stories about people that, you know, we refuse to get vaccines and then they like kind of almost refuse to take COVID seriously and then they literally like died, you know, and they died still. Like, like, There are people that are living in places that are being like rendered unlivable by climate change who probably still, because they're partisan identity so wrapped up in being anti-woke climate change, that they won't change.

But globally, I mean, this is going to be, you know, a country like India has big choices to make. They need to develop. They need to create a lot of electricity. It is easier to do that by building coal plants and using cheaper forms of energy. and yet India is one of the most acute places in terms of extreme weather and extreme heat. So will the political balance shift? Will basically people be like, wait us against like 125 degrees here

with like horrible air quality? Like should we maybe not be building these coal plants? I'm curious whether even outside of this country and like developing parts of the world that the balance shifts from just like generate more electricity as cheap as possible to like are we being part of a solution. I don't know if you feel differently about this. issue from having like a kid, you know, because like to me it changed the, your time horizon is

like 80 years now and you're kind of like, what the fuck? Absolutely. I mean, I think that's the hardest thing in all of politics is to get people to change their thinking to long term, from short term and the incentive structures for politicians in particular because, you know, look, back to my daughter, I mean, if my house was too hot because we didn't have electricity and she was at risk of health issues, I'd be like, build as many coal plants as you need right now to protect my kid. But long term, you know, like, obviously we want a planet that is livable for all of them. And this is the challenge, right? And, like, I,

one of the things that we can, like, continue to think about, I'm going to continue to think about here is that there is a bit of a difficult debate inside of progressive geopolitics around democracy versus climate because, you know, like, we have problems with Modi. We have problems with Xi Jinping. But, like, you know, in the Obama years, what reason we bear hugged, Modi was for climate purposes. Like to do what's necessary in climate, you probably have to work with all manner of odious autocrats, you know, around the world, or people like Modi, who I don't want to say he's fully in that camp, but like are, you know, have those tendencies. The prioritization of climate, if it really is the number one issue, which it appears to be, everybody is going to have

to examine tradeoffs, not just the people on the right, but the people on the left. For sure, for Sure. Speaking of China, Ben, it's not every week that we get a kind of genuine foreign policy mystery, but there's one that's coming out of China here. Yeah, I love this. Yeah. So China's foreign minister, this guy, Ching, who has not been seen in public for three weeks is, I think, as of recording right now, still missing. So he's a 57-year-old diplomat. He was China's ambassador to the U.S. before getting promoted to foreign minister back in December. He's tight with Xi Jinping, president. No one has seen the guy since June 25th. The Chinese government says he's been having health issues and he's going to skip some more upcoming meetings.

Extreme secrecy like this around Chinese leaders is the norm. I think for a while, like we didn't know Xi Jinping's birth date or anything about his background until he released some sort of authorized version through state media. But I don't know, the speculation is off the charts. I think Taiwan, media in Taiwan believes that he was having an affair with the TV personality and maybe that got him in trouble. Any theories out there speak to you and any thoughts on? what the impact of this is for, I don't know, Chinese diplomacy, Chinese diplomats?

I mean, first of all, it's a weakness in their system that they can't even tell us, like, what happened to this guy. He's like the foreign minister of, like, the largest country in the world that wants to be, like, the center of a new international order. And this guy can't even, like, show his face in public or they can't even put out, like, a press release saying he has, yeah, COVID or whatever the fucking thing is. Can't even an RCP. And so, like, I don't, like, I think it hurts them. I really think it hurts their credibility, because, Because what if their other farm ministers need to get this guy on the phone, too? Like, it's not like there's no business involving China the last few weeks, right?

So whatever the thing is, whether it's like an affair or an illness or he pissed somebody off, he's the farm minister of China. Like, they should at least be able to tell us like what happened to him and what went wrong where he is. And I think it makes their system look bad that they can't. Yeah, I agree. Imagine if Tony Blankin just went missing for three weeks. For three weeks. What would people be saying? Crazy. Yeah.

You can be crazy. Ben, switching gears hard here. So we've talked a lot about the civil war in Sudan. There's a growing body of reporting now that suggests another wave of ethnic cleansing has happened in the Darfur region of Sudan. And this is happening 20 years after the 2003 genocide that killed hundreds of thousands of Sudanese people. So there's reporters and human rights groups on the ground interviewing survivors who say that

these Arab paramilitary groups called the John Joid have been attacking and killing non-Arab men, women burning their homes and driving them out of their own. country. The violence really exploded in April when the Civil War started. Since that time, the Sudanese military has been fighting against a militia group called the RSF. The RSF has its roots in the Janjaweed. So they're, I think, responsible for a lot of this latest violence. It's hard to know how many people are killed, but, you know, it seems like millions of people have been displaced within the country and an estimate of 700,000 have fled Sudan to neighboring countries. So, you know, Ben, the human consequences of the civil war, I think were kind of

immediately apparent, right, and concerning well before you saw these reports of ethnic cleansing. But what we were hearing about in Darfur has the potential to be catastrophic. There's reports of mass graves. There's satellite imagery of like entire villages burned. And I keep thinking that this is not just a moment that's important for Sudan, which of course it is first and foremost, but kind of the entire human rights community because, yes, like Syria, Libya, the Arab Spring, really complicated these conversations about the interventionists, the right to protect and, you know, how to prevent mass atrocities. But the genocide in Darfur in 2003 was supposed to be this never again moment for the world,

right? And now it is happening again to the children of Sudanese people who were murdered in the last genocide. And I think the question becomes, like, what can or should the world do about it? Because I'm seeing coverage of this. And it's hard. Let's be clear, it's very hard to get to Darfur right now. If you're a reporter, like, it's incredibly dangerous. But it's not like front page saved Darfur, you know, kind of global issue that we saw 20 years ago.

Yeah. I mean, it's kind of, it's interesting time capsule to go back when, like, you know, you flagged this. I kind of went back and looked at some of the stuff. from the Save Darfur movement. And it is this time kind of was like right, like, I don't know if it was pre-Iraq, but it was like, you know, before that all went completely off the rails.

And it was kind of a high watermark for like a movement of people coming together to say we have to prevent atrocities in other parts of the world. And look, I mean, what's tragic about this is, I don't know what to say about what could be done here. I mean, the only thing I can say is that clearly the central conflict, like you said, the RSF and the Sudanese military was inevitably going to unleash all of this kind of

tension and all of this kind of factional and ethnic and religious-based killing. And I think unless you can get that core conflict solved, stopped, cease fired, your capacity to address a spillover is not going to be there. So there's actually not like a playbook of international intervention in Darfur to stop it, other than can you stop these two warlords from essentially duking it out for the future of the country? And the longer that that civil war happens, the more these kinds of things are going to happen. And I think that's a tragic reality. I also think when people get frustrated about like why don't more people in Africa care about the war in Ukraine, their answer is going to be,

why do you guys care so much about the war in Ukraine? The scale of human suffering is basically the same in Sudan, you know, and there's not. So it does, you know, that also kind of plays into this sense that, you know, there's a different standard when it happens in the West. And by the way, all this stuff is going to tie together because grain scarcity, right, is going to infect Sudan. Climate change that we just talked about. Darfur, the 2003 genocide and Darfur is often referred to as the first climate change war because a lot of it had to do with the sort of tribal scarcity for grazing field, et cetera. And so, yeah, these are the kinds of things that are going to happen over again get worse. Just to put a point, like it's just, so just take a Putin, like, you know, the war and the climate change dynamic are going to drive also migration because millions of people are going to flee Sudan.

Many of those people are going to try to come into Europe. That exacerbates what Max and I talked about last week, which is like right-wing populism in Europe, which could lead to far-right governments that are afraid. Like, this stuff is all like connected and it all evades easy answers. Yeah, it does. Well, speaking of migration, we saw this week that Tunisia and the European Union. have signed a deal to prevent migration from Tunisia to parts of Europe, especially Italy. The EU basically is going to give Tunisia like $120 million to stop smuggling, harden their border and return migrants to where they came from, I guess, essentially, or at least I guess,

kick expel them from Tunisia. In exchange, it sounds like Tunisia just cracks down on migrant boats, leaving from Tunisia ports. Tunisia's president recently accused migrants of coming to his country as part of a plot to change the demographics in his country. So it was like this guy was watching too much Tucker Carlson. Yeah, exactly. So was he at the freedom breakfast?

He might have been in Des Moines. He might have been in freedom. Yeah. I didn't see him there. I'll check the YouTube. But, you know, like this is the latest example of basically Western countries paying off other countries to prevent migration and sort of solve their political problem. And in this case, doing so with a president in Tunisia who was elected in 2019 and since then

has seized as much power as he possibly can from parliaments in the courts. So he's becoming even more authoritarian. Well, yeah, that's the key point, right? So, like, this guy, like, has, you know, been criticized by people inside of Europe and other places for essentially, you know, unraveling Tunisia's post-Arab Spring experiment in democracy. And yet, what is the message of this deal? It said, we care more about you stopping these migrants and we care about Tunisian democracy. And the European model has increasingly been, you know, paying off people on the periphery to try to stop this influx. And to your conversation with Max last week, I think the two leaders who were in Tunisia to sign this deal were, what's her name from Italy and the Dutch guy you guys talked about.

Yeah, yeah, Mark Ruta. Yeah, yeah. So, like, these are... Maloney. Yeah. Well, yeah, Maloney. Not Mussolini, Maloney. Yeah.

Yeah, this is like where global politics are at, you know, like we just have, you know, it doesn't mean that you can't do as much as you can to help the people you can who are in Dutch. desperate circumstances and migrating, but it does mean it's just going to be a, at some point, my argument is they need a much bigger solution to the migration crisis that is not like the stopgap measures, but clearly people are not ready to use that degree of imagination. No. Speaking of human rights concerns over the weekend, Iranian officials confirmed that the so-called morality police were back on the streets and harassing Iranian citizens again. mostly women, but also men too, for not dressing conservatively enough or wearing the hijab. This comes nearly a year after a member or members of the Morality Police murdered a 22-year-old

woman named Masa Amini. That led to months of protests and promises by the regime to reform or curtail the morality police's activities. These goons will reportedly now have a different name. I saw a report that they're going to wear body cameras. I don't believe that's going to do anything. But I do think the real question, Ben, is whether these protests explode again like they did after Masa Amini's murder. Because the Guardian reported that up to 10 percent of women are now not following these sort of strict mortality police-enforced rules.

And it's become more common for women to post photos without their hair covered on social media, et cetera. So, I mean, I think like you could see another explosion here in Iran. I think that's right. I mean, because on the one hand, it's not surprising that this regime is just cracking down and hanging on. They're not reformers. Remember, they said they were going to disband the morality people. Full shit. They're going to hunker down, crack down, and then come back just as ugly as they've ever been.

But the big but here is it just because that revolution or, you know, uprising or series of protest didn't result in, like, the immediate collapse of the Iranian Islamic Republic does not mean that this is over. And I think that, like, this will flare up periodically. there'll be some incident that flurts it up again, or like, as we said, the Supreme Leader could die and then the succession crisis could ensue. So I think that we're going to see this kind of tug of war for probably a period of years where the regime cannot put that back in a box. Like they can't make those younger people or people writ large okay with this. So they can clamp down and hold the lid on and then the little pop off and then they'll try to put it on. And at some point, I think that will lead to some change in Iran.

Yeah, I think so do. It's just going to take years, I think. Yeah, two quick additional things. The first is you did a great interview. Was it last year, I think, with Jason Rezian and Yegi Rezion. They talked a lot about their experience with morality of police. We did a podcast with Jason called 544 Days, which is about him being held hostage in Yegi, too, by the Iranian regime. It is now available on all podcast platforms before it was just on Spotify. So check out 544 days. If you haven't heard, it's really great. Also, there were reports that the U.S. is sending more military. assets, including a destroyer F-35s and F-16s to the Persian Gulf in response to these incidents where Iranian vessels have been harassing merchant ships. It's funny, this is one of those things, Ben, where I got some texts from like Normie friends, like, what's going on here? Does this mean there's a war, et cetera? And I think we just wanted to raise it to say, like, yeah, it's not good when the Iranians are harassing random tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, but it's also the kind of shit they do all the time. And we have military assets in that region all the time.

So don't get super worried. Yeah, there's always like a degree of cat and mouse and harassment and then we deploy a bunch of heavy You know big ships there to intimidate them I mean you know it doesn't mean that there's a flashpoint in Iran right now It's not great But this doesn't necessarily mean it's gonna lead to any escalation two more quick things for the interview So I don't know if you saw this Ben but saw a report in the financial times That said that millions of US military emails have been accidentally sent I saw this this.

To the country of Mali. Yeah, yeah. That was amazing. Because the typos. So here's what happening. People are sending these emails to the dot ML domain instead of dot MIL domain. That is the ending of all U.S. military email addresses. These messages have reportedly contained sensitive information, travel details for officials,

tax returns. There is some random Dutch guy who for the last decade has been managing Mali's country domain, the dot ML. He has been collecting these messages. He's sitting on 117,000. of them. He's trying to like sound the alarm to the U.S. military because on July 17th, he had to hand control of the domain over to the Mali's government. They're tight with the Russians, for example. Wagner Group. Yeah, like none of this is classified, but here's one, this is from the F.T.

story. One misdirected email this year included the travel plans for General James McConville, the chief of staff of the U.S. Army, and his delegation for then forthcoming visit to Indonesia in May. The email included a full list of room numbers, the itinerary for McConville and 20 others as well as details of the collection of McCannville's room key at the Grand High at Jakarta where he receives a VIP upgrade to a grand suite. So that's a typo. Oops. Would that guy know that he got, I guess, like, he, does he know he gets upgrade?

Like, what did, like, do they get the emails or do these emails just disappear like they're gone? Well, I think they would normally just go into the ether, but this Dutch dude created some way to, like, collect them all. But how did these 100, how did these people not realize, like, over time that, like, their emails weren't getting to where. It's just interesting to me that like, if I'd sent all my emails to like the wrong server and never gotten responses for a while, I would have been, I mean, you mentioned the most alarming thing, which is like Molly is one of those places

where the Wagner group under you give any prognosis, like basically was beginning to function as this kind of like Pretorian Guard security service for the government. So like, probably not great if the Wagner guys are like going to get their hands on all this stuff. But like, They might also be busy. We don't really know who the people, the Russians and Mali, work for anymore. You know, maybe they're going up to Belarus to go to the summer camp up there that Progerson has. Like, I don't know. Yeah.

Unless you think, well, this is like a silly alarmist example. Like, we know, for example, that the Iranians are very, very mad that the Trump administration assassinated their top general. And with lava crack at one of ours. And if you can figure out where they're going to be when and who's going to get the room key, like, that's pretty helpful info. It is. You know, I'm sure if you canvass this, there's stuff, too, that. Like, it's interesting for people, like, to see who is so-and-so meeting and, like, what are the dynamics? Like, you know, it's useful.

Yeah, definitely useful. But you also have to think on classified email, someone could get their hands on that anyway. For sure. Yeah, and they probably have. I saw that Richard Engel, there's a new NBC documentary coming out about Progotion that he's been working on for a couple years. So that's working out. Yeah, and Richard was down in the Central African Republic too. So he was, like, actually following the stories, like, not just in Russia, but down in the Middle East and Africa.

I heard him interview talking about it. I've not seen it yet. Yeah, he's pretty amped about it. Like, you know, he... Yeah, he was way out of... I mean, I think he's pitched this like two or three years ago to the NBC brass and they were like, who is this loser?

What are you talking about? Then all of a sudden it's like the biggest story in the world. Yeah, suddenly it's good that he has had like archival footage of being with a bunch of Russian dudes in the Central African Republic. Yeah. I think he sent progogian a request for a comment and Pergotion basically threatened to kill him. Yeah, it was actually...

It was really funny. It was like this really chilling, like, fuck off comment. Yeah, it was good. Anyway, last thing, Ben, so you were excited about the story about a mystery object in Australia. What do we know about this hunk of metal on the beach here? So I just love these Australian stories because they just keep coming back. And so this one is like there's a giant piece of metal that is on the beach in Australia, right? Near Perth.

Near Perth. And nobody knows what this is, how it got there. It's really fucking big. There are all these theories now. Like one theory was that this is space junk. It fell out of space. but it doesn't bear the markings of something that like passed through the atmosphere.

It doesn't have burns on it. Then there were other theories that this is from a plane. Like it could be a piece of a plane. And so maybe it's that long lost plane that took off like from Malaysia or something and never landed that Wolf Blitzer talked about for like every day for months. But like then it didn't match that.

Like is this like my theory is this like, you know, the opening scene in 2001 Space Odyssey when like the, you know, the black slab appears before the apes and they get into is this some yeah yeah is this some some greater intelligence signaling us you know with like a hunk of metal in australia like i want australians you are the best people to figure out this mystery like interesting stuff seems to happen on your beaches whether it's like naked people running into the woods or like you know scott morrison shitting himself like we just need our people out there to solve this and tell us tell us what what this is it does seem

like this object lends itself to doing mushrooms on the beach. Just look at that object. It's pretty big, right? Yeah. There was a guy quoted in one of these stories about it. Someone who lives near the beach said that, like, some people were worried about the thing. And then he said there's like 20 or 30 people at the site. Like a bunch of kids were building sand castles around.

Yeah, yeah. It's like a bluey episode to come, you know. I heard there's new bluys coming out. They dropped 10 new bluys. How are they? Cody Keenan was psyched. We binge them before noon on the day they came out. That's the thing.

It was like just a savage binge. It was great. Blue's getting into themes too. Like they're taking on issues now. It's good. I like that. You know, my daughter is not, like, she'll like be, she'll stare at a screen. Yeah, of course you would, right?

It's like this magical thing on the wall that, like, flash this photos. But you'd be like, we can't, she can't watch stuff yet. Yeah, no. It'll, don't worry that's coming. You had the rest of her life to deal with screens. It was the only time I wanted was on the plane. It's very useful on the plane. We had some brutal travel delays.

Very, very useful in the plan. Okay, that's it for us for the news. But stick around after this quick break, because I'm going to talk to Amir Teabon from Ha'arets. We talk about Bibi Netanyahu's efforts to gut Israel's Supreme Court. We also talk about President Biden inviting Netanyahu to Washington, D.C. for a meeting and how protesters reacted to that. So stick around. Check it out.

I am very excited to welcome to the show. Amir Teabon. He is the diplomatic correspondent for Haar. Aurett's newspaper. I'm a subscriber, by the way, a paying subscriber. So it's great to have you in the show. Thank you. How's my pronunciation? Good pronunciation. And the most important thing, Tommy, it's a pleasure and an honor to have you as a subscriber. So thank you for supporting the work of Aareth. Well, you guys really do great work. I am genuinely a subscriber, have been for a while. In part, because you have done such great coverage of Israeli Prime Minister B.B. Netanyahu's effort to ram through all these changes to the Israeli court system, the judicial system. Your newspaper is called it a judicial coup.

We've covered that a lot over the past few months. There have been these massive weekly protests, I think, for seven months now. Members of the military have refused to report to duty. There's been international outcry. Can you just remind listeners what the proposed judicial changes are and what you think the impact would be? Sure. So basically, this government that Netanyahu is leaving, he came back to power just over half a year ago. It's the most right wing, most extreme, most religious government in Israeli history.

And it came right in with a plan to completely change the balance of power between the authorities in the country. Today in Israel, we have a very thin system of checks and balances, not as developed and deep as the checks and balances that you guys have in the United States with the Constitution and two branches of Congress and a lot of power to local governments in the different states. Here in Israel, basically, the government and the legislator, the Knesset, our parliament, in a way, act as one because the government always has a parliamentary majority. The local authorities have very little power. Tel Aviv is a very liberal city, but it cannot dictate its own policy separate from the more conservative religious Jerusalem. them. And so basically the only real check on the power of the government that exists in Israel, unfortunately, is the Israeli Supreme Court. And that's a problematic situation because we, I think, in a democracy and you guys are dealing with some of that as well, we don't want the court to have too much power. But at the same time, we also don't want the government to have too much power.

And so there is really a case in Israel, a young country, 75 years old, to do some kind of reform in the balance of power between the authorities. The problem is that this government, instead of trying to do some genuine reform and much-needed changes, is trying to push through a plan that would give the government unlimited powers, remove this obstacle of judicial review from the Supreme Court, and basically make it impossible to have any kind of review over government policy and majority legislation. Now, to give practical examples, in Israel, most of the progress that has happened in recent decades on issues like LGBT rights, women's rights, equality for minorities.

I'm not speaking now about Palestinians in the occupied territories. We can talk about that in a second. I'm sure you will ask Tommy. But when we talk about the Arab citizens of Israel, 20% of the country's population, a lot of the progress that has happened on these fronts, you know, minority rights, women's rights, LGBT, human rights in general,

came through landmark Supreme Court decisions in Israel and not through legislation because usually we have religious, parties or right-wing parties in our coalition, and it's difficult to legislate on this issues. And Netanyahu's current coalition, again, very right-wing, very religious, views the Supreme Court, rightly so, as a liberalizing force in Israeli society. And so it wants to weaken the court, give all the power to the government, and a lot of people here in Israel are deeply worried about that. And these are the hundreds of thousands that you've been seeing out in the streets,

protesting, even now, as we're recording this podcast, by the way, there are massive demonstrations, in Tel Aviv tonight, people blocking the main highways. So at the end of the day, we can go into the technicalities, this piece of legislation. But the main question is, what kind of limitation or check will there be on the power of the government? This is what the struggle here is all about. And you mentioned the protesters happening as we speak. I mean, it's been an incredible success story for protesters, for collective action, for the power

of, you know, organizations and people coming together. I have read that the next couple of weeks will be critical in efforts to ram through this judicial coup legislation, despite the fact that Israeli citizens and the protesters have basically fought these changes off for the last several months. Is that accurate? Like, what's going to happen in the next couple of weeks? That's so important. So originally the government's plan was shocking off. They won the election.

We had here in Israel last year. By the way, they won even though they did not get a majority of the votes. That's the situation. You guys may be familiar with. Yeah, exactly. But by the way, I respect the election result, even though, again, there are these issues because of how our system works that the government did not win a majority of the vote, but it has the majority of the seats and they should be able to rule and lead the country, you

know, all good. But when they won the election and the shock of having Netanyahu returned with such an extreme government, they said, now we can do anything we want. And they tried to push through all these different bills that weaken the judicial system and empower the government all at once. And they did not anticipate the very strong response from the Israeli public, from sectors in Israel that usually don't get involved in political protests, like the tech sector, which is very important for the Israeli economy.

I mean, when we talk about the miracle of Israel's economy in the last two decades, it's mostly high tech companies. They've been on the front lines of this struggle. In the military, reservists, people from the airport, from the special forces, from top intelligence units are saying, we're not going to serve if this passes. because we made a contract with a democratic state of Israel to serve and defend. And now we're being asked to serve in a country that is slipping away from democracy. And we're seeing it really all over the place.

And then after one specific night four months ago in which Netanyahu tried to fire his defense minister, a member of his own party who had the chutzpah, as we say, to come and say, you know, this may not be a great idea. It's tearing the military apart. let's stop sonatan tried to fire him hundreds of thousands took to the streets and Nathan said okay we're halting the legislation but they didn't give up on the dream of absolute power I mean what kind of politician would give up on that dream ever right so what they're trying to do now is what we call here in Israel the salami method they're trying to cut it into

pieces instead of pushing everything at once they're going to do it slice by slice and they have one piece of legislation that's going to be up for a vote in the next few days basically but by the end of next week it will be determined that is going to severely limit the Supreme Court's ability to conduct judicial review over government decisions, not legislation, but governmental policies and decisions. For example, one just quick, you know, way to show what's all about. As you remember, Tommy Netanyahu himself is a criminal defendant facing trial in the Jerusalem district court these days in three cases of corruption. He wants to fire Israel's Attorney General who's leading these cases against him in court.

Today, if he would try to fire her, the Attorney General, the Supreme Court of Israel would very likely determine that this is an extremely unreasonable decision. It's not a piece of legislation. It's a governmental policy decision. It would strike it out. They want to cancel the court's ability to use what we call here the reasonableness standard for judging governmental decisions. And the last sentence I will say about this, that like on so many of these issues,

issues around this judicial coup, overhaul, reform. We have different language for it here in Israel. I personally see an argument in favor of some kind of reform on this question of the reasonableness standard and the court's ability to review governmental decisions. I understand that there's a case to maybe limit it or change it. But what they want to do is extreme. They want to cancel it. They want to put the government above judicial review.

And that will lead to unreasonable and dangerous decisions. Yeah, it does seem like they could just run roughshot. I like that you call it the salami method here in the U.S. We've lost the ability to legislate. So we just jam everything together and pass these omnibus bills. I think you call it the Turducken method, maybe for lack of a better term. So Joe Biden, president, is meeting with the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, today, July 18th. The Israeli presidency, it's a largely ceremonial position, but Herzog is also addressing a joint session of Congress. On Monday, around this visit, Biden invited Israeli Prime Minister B.B.B. Netanyahu. to a meeting in the U.S. for the first time since Bibi got power back most recently in December with this new right-wing coalition that you described. The two reportedly had a long and warm phone call. I think that came from the Israeli side. Not long ago, Biden called a Netanyahu's coalition extremist. What was the reaction to that outreach and that invitation from Biden from the activists on the streets

trying to stop these judicial changes? I think there was surprise and also some disappointments. Because in the previous round, when we got to that point of decision, when Nathaniel tried to fire the defense minister and hundreds of thousands took to the streets, Biden intervened and actually told him to now, you really have to stop this. And I think Biden didn't do it just because he loves Israel, which is true. Joe Biden loves the state of Israel. He considers himself a Zionist and has supported Israel throughout his career. And unlike some opportunistic politicians in your country, I think he really cares about Israel in a way that it's not just about the politics behind it, but he wants Israel to succeed and thrive, which also means he wants to see peace with all of Israel's neighbors, including the Palestinians and the resolution of the occupation.

But to put that aside, his deep love for, I think last time he also intervened because this plan can also harm American interests. And I want to give you two quick examples about that. First of all, the Supreme Court in Israel today plays a lot of times the role of a babysitter for the far right and the religious extremists. Netanyahu actually for many years enjoyed that because his crazy coalition partners would advance all kinds of crazy legislation and decisions, and he didn't have to stop it himself because he knew the Supreme Court would come and intervene.

If you take away the power of the Supreme Court to stop these crazy decisions, unreasonable decisions, legislation that hurts human rights. Who's going to be the babysitter, Tommy? Who's going to stop these far-right actions? It's going to be the United States. Every crazy initiative of the far-right in Israel will end up on the desk of the American ambassador and the American Secretary of State and maybe the president. So I think there's a clear interest there for Biden to stop it.

And the second reason, which I also think is important. The main theme of the Biden presidency, as I see, is the protection of liberal democracy of home and abroad. This is what's driving his battle against Donald Trump since the previous election. This was his message for the U.S. midterms. I know some of his advisors told him, don't talk so much about democracy. And he insisted, and I think it worked out surprisingly well. This is what's driving. It's, you know, his policy in Ukraine, his confrontational approach on, you know, China, Taiwan. And so he is committed to protecting liberal democracy. What would it mean for his legacy and also in terms of policy consistency if a close ally like israel under his watch

would slide away from liberal democracy toward the you know victor Orban style illiberal post-democracy government i think that would be harmful to him as well yeah i think that's why he intervened and i think this time around what we're seeing is perhaps an attempt by biden to on the one hand keep the message that he's opposed to these changes and he wants to see consensus in Israel and compromise. But also, I think, push back against some Republican talking points that what he's doing is against Israel. And of course, that feeds into some of the tensions within the Democratic Party with the more progressive lawmakers who are much more critical of Israel. And I think at some point they said in the White House, okay, you know, let's have this meeting. Maybe it will be at the UN,

then maybe even if Netanyahu slows down a bit with the legislation, maybe he'll even come to the White House and we'll put this issue of the visit behind us, but I don't think they're going to give up on the policy disagreement here, because again, there are also American interests at stake in this issue. Yeah, I think that's probably a good, the right analysis and accurate analysis. I mean, you know, it does, you could argue for just saying, all right, let's make the invite. We don't have to actually schedule a date anytime soon. We can let this thing penned a little bit and kind of like get this annoying, irritating question off the table. You know, I think what frustrates people like me is you're also hearing about the administration

doing an enormous amount of work trying to broker a diplomatic agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which is not something I oppose on its face, but it would be an enormous gift to be being in Yahoo in the middle of this judicial coup. And I guess what I wonder is, you know, when Obama was president when I was in the White House, it seemed clear to us that Netanyahu enjoyed, you know, giving. him the middle finger probably saw it as politically beneficial at times, especially on Iran. Then he had BB and Trump who were just thick as thieves and best friends and Trump gave BB basically everything he asked for. Now, I mean, I agree with you. I do think Joe Biden has a genuine affinity

in love of Israel. He seems to like Netanyahu despite no one else liking Netanyahu. But I'm wondering, what do you think the politics are in Israel now for Netanyahu of working for or against the U.S.? That's a really smart question. I think Netanyahu has failed to poison the Israeli public opinion against Biden and succeeded at the time against Obama. I think this is one of his political achievements at the time to turn Barack Obama, the American president who gave Israel the largest amount ever of security assistance. An American president who only once during his eight years in office did not use the veto in the UN Security Council for Israel. Israel's benefit. And even that was basically two weeks before he left the White House. It was a total joke to turn him into some kind of an enemy of Israel. And I think with Biden, he did not succeed so far in doing that. Most Israelis like President Biden, they view him as a friend of Israel. Even by the way, people who would have preferred Donald Trump to remain president in the U.S., I don't think they hate Joe Biden's much. There is a fragment within Netanyahu's party, the Likud, and, you know, the more right wing that really don't like Biden and feed into all the crazy stupid concerns.

spirit of theories that you have from the far right in your country. But that's not the general public opinion. So I don't think the confrontation with Biden is good for Netanyahu. I think he does want to meet the president. He does want to show Israelis that he's still respected and can garner, you know, some kind of diplomatic achievements abroad. On the Saudi issue, you're absolutely right. It will be a huge achievement for Netanyahu.

And it would change the trajectory of his current political standing because his government is very unpopular right now. It won the election, but there are a lot of people who are disappointed with their focus on this judicial overhaul and say the government should focus more on issues like cost of living, inflation. You guys, you know, some of it too, although I heard there were good news recently and, you know, Bidenomics seems to be working. But, you know, these are big issues here as well. And so I think this Saudi agreement would really help Bibi. I'm not sure how much it would help Biden. No.

I mean, that is a bit of history. I mean, he would basically be emboldening two guys that don't really want to see him reelected. You know, Netanyahu and MBS. I mean, Netanyahu, I think, likes Biden personally, but still would prefer a Republican in the White House. MBS, I think, completely hates Joe Biden. And so what does he get by empowering and legitimizing these two guys right before the reelection and giving them more legitimacy and more power, which I don't think they will hesitate to use against him? I mean, Netanyahu's shown in the past that he has no second thoughts about intervening in American politics, including in presidential years.

That's a big risk right there. I mean, yeah, you would get that headline about a win and an achievement for three or four days, but you would give a lot of standing to BB and MBS to later criticize him over Iran and other issues before the election. Yeah, I agree. I mean, Muhammad bin Salman is a sociopath sitting on several trillion dollars. and he's basically, according to the news reports, asking for a domestic nuclear program. So yeah, it seems like the U.S. would be giving up a lot to help to people whose values at the moment, I don't think are totally in line with Joe Biden's. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, and I guess, you know, I can see again the idea that it would also be considered a win in an achievement. And when he runs against Donald Trump and Trump says, I did the Abraham Accords, Biden could say I did Israeli-Saudi. You tell me if that actually decides American elections. I'm not sure this is what the 2024 election is going to be about. Yeah, no, I don't think it is either. I think there are some states and communities on the margins where it's extremely beneficial, but I agree. I think Joe Biden is likely to do well with U.S. Jewish voters.

You said at the top, you know, well, your conversation about Israeli democracy didn't include the treatment of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories, and I'm sure we would talk about that later. I'll be honest with you, I didn't even prepare a question about the peace talks or the efforts to get a two-state solution going, because it just feels like there's absolutely nothing happening. And all we're reading about is, you know, these military raids in Janine or challenges with settler violence.

So I guess, I mean, I put it to you. I mean, where do you think the prospects are for any kind of even dialogue to begin between the Palestinian Authority and Israelis? Obviously, it's very low. I mean, the political reality in Israel and also on the Palestinian side makes it impossible. Because here in Israel, we have this far-right government in which Netanyahu is kind of like the moderate element. Right.

I mean, that's crazy in itself. But you look at the people around him. They're not exactly partners for any kind of peace talks. And on the Palestinian side, it's divided between Mahmoud Abbas, the aging Palestinian president sitting in the city of Ramallah in the occupied territories. Basically, he's a, you know, a mayor with some contractual responsibilities giving to him by Israel and the United States to maintain calm. And you have Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which is designated as a terrorist organization for us,

Meish out of Israel. And so there's really not much you can do about it. And I think one of the interesting trends to follow, and this is more in the academic world right now, but it's been spilling into the world of diplomacy as well. And I think at some point it would reach politics too. There is a growing discussion about the notion that the two-state solution, whether it's good or bad, it doesn't matter because it's not going to happen. Yeah, yeah.

It's dead. And you need to think about alternatives. And we had a visit here in Israel about a month ago by Ban Ki-moon. You remember that name? It used to be the UN Secretary General last decade. And he came here for a visit and he finished it by saying, I am seeing a one-state reality on the ground. I don't believe it's going to be divided anymore.

There's basically the Israeli population, the Palestinian population. It's all one piece of land controlled to different levels. by Israel, and we need to start talking about what that means, this one-state reality, which will not be broken into two. And that opens up the door for discussion of one state with equal rights. Now, I have to tell you as an Israeli citizen, I find that a very, very problematic situation, because it would definitely mean a huge change in what it means even for Israel's existence. And I still believe the two-state solution is in Israel's best interest, and it's where we should try to be. But we also have to be realistic and look at what's happening on the ground and the political

forces shaping our reality. And to just keep saying two-state solution, two-state solution, okay, it's the right words to say, but right now is that even relevant anymore? That is the big discussion that is starting to happen. It hasn't really reached the political ranks yet. I think everybody's terrified to open it up here in Israel and over in Washington. But usually these things that start in the academic world and in the media and, you know, in the diplomatic ranks, at some point we'll also have to become political questions. Yeah, no, you're right. It's much easier politically to say, oh, we need to pick up where Oslo left off and continue the negotiations and get to two states rather than talk about what a one-state solution could mean in terms of

rights for the Palestinian people or the makeup of Israel and its existence as a Jewish state. Things get a lot more challenging those conversations. Last question for you. And thank you, and thank you, and for doing this. I know it's late there. You have a report out today that suggests that in addition to hoarding classified documents at Marlaco, President Trump is also... I know you would have to ask about this. This is an amazing story. The president, did he steal these Israeli antiquities? He's refusing to give them back. What the hell is going on here? The Trump antiquity story. So we're not saying in our story, this is, you know, first reporter

on Haaret and it's been quoted in many places since. We're not saying that Donald Trump stole anything or that even that he's hiding it. but we are putting out a set of facts that is really interesting to follow in 2019 uh toward the end of that year these israeli archaeological artifacts were sent by the israeli antiquities authority with you know authorization to washington for some kind of event at the white house eventually they were not presented in the white house and then there was this whole debate about how they would be sent back to israel by the time that was figured out covid arrived And it was very difficult to send someone from Israel to pick them up securely.

And they ended up at the hands of this big donor, American Jewish donor of the Israeli Antiquities Authority. And over time, they kind of lost track about it. And a few months ago, the officials in Israel who deal with this found out that these antiquities are now in Mar-a-Lago. They've been there for a while. It's not clear if Donald Trump is fully aware that, you know, what this thing is and that it's in his premises. but it's definitely there. And there have been attempts through all kinds of diplomatic channels to return them to Israel, which so far have failed.

And that raises a lot of questions, Tommy. I mean, could this be an Indiana Jones movie, for example? I was thinking National Treasure, where we're trying to find the steal the Constitution. Exactly. Will they send them Assad? You know, the FBI has already visited. Is it time to send them Assad to Mar-a-Lago? My guess is they've already been, but good idea.

I hope they have. And maybe they're using some of it is old candles from like 2,000 years ago. They must be priceless. Listen, incredible. But maybe he's using those candles at night to read the classified documents that he has about the Israeli nuclear program. I mean, that would be complete circle. That's a good call.

Maybe you guys should send Nicholas Cage because he seems like he's sorted out issues like this in the past. Amir T-Bone, thank you so much for doing the show. Everyone should follow you on Twitter and also subscribe to Haret's. You need a more progressive view of the media that BBNNYahu hasn't tried to pay off. You know, it's important to have those voices out there. So thank you. Thank you, Tommy. I'll take the endorsement.

And thanks again for having me. Thanks again to Amir T. Bone for joining the show. And to all our friends in Australia, the truth is out there. Get to the bottom. The truth is out there. Get on it. I do want to say like two plugs, Tommy. Like Chris Miller, we've had on the show a bunch.

Great guy. His book dropped today. Oh, nice. What's it called? The war came down. It's basically the Ukrainian view of what's happened. And Chris has been there since 2014, so he's obviously not just somebody who came in after the full-skulled vision. And then did you read this John Lee Anderson piece about Haiti and the New Yorker?

No. It is like, you know, I mean, it's the piece that somebody needed right, and John Lee Anderson is like the right guy to write. Just really heartbreaking. Oh, Haiti held hostage. Yeah, yeah. All right, I'm in. Great plugs. And we'll talk to you guys next week.

Yeah, see you. Pod Save the World is a crooked media production. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor, Ben Rhodes, and Michael Martinez. Our producer is Haley Mewes. Our associate producer is Ashley Mizzou. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick, Kyle Seaglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vesilius are our sound engineers. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, D.B. Bradford, and Milo Kim, who upload our episodes and videos to YouTube every week and check out the Potsave the World YouTube account.

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