Pod Save the World - Ukraine, corruption, and partners in crime

Episode Date: October 2, 2019

First, Tommy and Ben discuss Trump’s quid pro quo with Ukraine, that country’s history with corruption, why Joe Biden was pushing to fire a Ukrainian prosecutor, and how this controversy could destabilize the Ukrainian government. Then they cover Trump’s call to pressure Australia, the shady ways the White House is restricting access to information, and how Mike Pompeo is complicit in all of it. Finally, they discuss China’s 70th anniversary celebration, the protests in Hong Kong, the latest with Iran, Brexit, and why John Bolton is criticizing Trump’s North Korea policy. Then former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom David Cameron joins to discuss his new book For the Record, Brexit, and the future of democracy.

Welcome back to Pots Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Roots. Ben. Back in the studio. Great to have you back. Kelly Magisman did an amazing job in your absence last week, but I missed you. Yeah, I missed you with everything going on. I had no outlet. I imagine you wanted to talk about this. Yeah, I wanted to talk about this. So I've been looking forward to this podcast my entire life. Well, luckily there have been 4,000 news cycles since that day. So we're going to dig into all the various elements of impeachment from a foreign policy angle. We're going to talk about what this means for Ukraine. the origins of the conflict there, the problem of corruption, why Joe Biden might have been over in Ukraine asking them to fire a prosecutor. We're going to explain how poor Australia got dragged into all of this. We're going to talk about Mike Pompeo, that paragon of virtue, who is a fixture on the Sunday shows.

Talk about the latest out of China and Hong Kong. Talk about Iran, North Korea, and Brexit. And then we are going to talk with the former prime minister of the UK, David Cameron, about his new book for the record. Busy show. never had a prime minister of any kind, current or former on the show. That feels like a big deal. Open invitation. Prime Minister just DM me. Yeah. Get at me. All right. Two quick things before we get to the news, though. I want to make sure you guys all check out America dissected. It's a brand new

podcast from Abdul al-Sayed. In this 10-part series, Dr. Abdul al-Saiad goes through all the headlines to explore what actually matters for our health. So the first two episodes that are out, he talks about the anti-vaxer movement and the goop wellness industrial complex. And it is fascinating. It is funny. He's young. He's cool. You will love Abdul.

So definitely check out that show. I also want to let you guys know that I've mentioned a couple times on this show that we are working with Stacey Abrams and her team over at Fair Fight 2020 to raise a million dollars to help her hire teams to fight voter suppression in swing states before the 2020 elections. We have hit that goal. You guys, the listeners, are amazing. In just two weeks, we blew through that million dollar goal.

But Stacey needs like $5 million. we have so far raised one. So if you feel left out and you want to chip in, go to VoteSaveamerica.com slash Fair Fight. If you can give five bucks, ten bucks, any amount, it really matters. And this is the most important thing you can do to help Democrats win in 2020. So with that, Ben, the impeachment train has finally left the station. Yes. We have now seen a detailed whistleblower complaint that says President Trump use the power of the presidency to solicit dirt on Joe Biden and his son in an effort to influence the 2020 election. We also know that he pressured them to investigate these wild conspiracy theories about the 2016 election.

We've read the transcript that Trump's call with President Zelensky where Trump complains that the U.S. does a lot for Ukraine but gets nothing in return. And then he responds in that same transcript to Zelensky's request for these anti-tank missiles by saying, I need a favor, though. And that favor, as you'll be shocked to hear, does not advance the national security interests of the United States, but it benefits Trump politically. So that seems like a problem. Ben, I think we should start this from the Ukraine. perspective. So you're sitting in Ukraine. There's this novice president, President Zelensky, who recently was a comedian who got elected on this big anti-corruption initiative, basically. He said he's going to fight corruption. He's going to reign in the country's billionaire oligarch class. So just months into his term, voters now see this transcript where he seems open to pursuing phony investigations in exchange for weapons from the U.S. So that doesn't seem like an anti-corruption crusader. They see a U.S. government that used to push them to clean up their Act and is now advocating for political interference. Oh, and by the way, poor Zelensky is on the record criticizing the Chancellor of Germany, the President of France, and the European Union. So I'm sure he loved

that. And then finally, he is just kind of humiliated at this bilateral meeting at the UN with Trump, where he looks like a deer in headlights and then has to listen to Trump after creating all this political trouble for him, suggests that Zelensky should just sit down and work things out with the Russians who had invaded Ukraine just a few years ago and still occupy that territory. So I think it's worth noting that Trump didn't just create a massive and political mess in the United States, but he also did the same thing in the Ukraine. Yeah. And I mean, I think one of the pieces of this story that sometimes doesn't get enough attention is this isn't like a minor foreign policy account. You know, this is one of the biggest crises in the world. One of the biggest crises, certainly in the West. You know, Ukraine has been invaded by Russia. Russia has annexed Crimea, a part of Ukraine. And Russia is. currently still engaged in a war in eastern Ukraine that is killing Ukrainians. 13,000 people are dead.

So this is literally an active war in which Russia is moving military advisors, troops, to back these separatists who literally couldn't be operating without Russian support. And they depend upon aid from the United States as a lifeline to sustain themselves under that siege from Russia. they depend upon the sanctions imposed by the United States in Europe to be a tool of pressure on Putin to check him from coming all the way into Ukraine and perhaps trying to conquer the place like he did with Crimea. And so the fact that Zelensky is ingratiating himself to Trump is not a surprise. You know, when Trump says, look, the president of Ukraine agrees with me, you know, that I was impressing him. Of course he's saying this. He needs us. He needs this assistance. And this is the very assistance that Trump was leveraging to get Zelensky to dig up dirt on Joe Biden.

And we can get to the fact that totally inaccurate and bogus conspiracy theory that Trump wants to investigate. But I think we have to get at the fact that this isn't, again, just Trump going around and looking for someone to bully. This is Trump exploiting a nation that is highly dependent on the United States for its survival and trying to bully this new president. into doing something that is profoundly not in his political interest or anybody's interest except Trump's. Can I ask you about the assistance question? So you hear a lot from Republicans that Obama wouldn't give Ukraine lethal weapons and assistance. They just gave them blankets. You were part of those deliberations. What is true? And if someone is skeptical and they say there's no way the U.S. could give Ukraine enough weaponry to fight off the Russian military. So what's the point anyway?

What's the answer to that? It's a complicated question. So basically what happened is, you know, Putin annexes Crimea and then he invades eastern Ukraine. We did start to give them military assistance and training and different types of defensive security support, right? We were wary of pouring in kind of offensive weapons, you know, tanks, planes, under the guise that Putin could use that as essentially a basis for, fully invading Ukraine, you know. So, so we were trying to, to do enough to give Ukraine the support it needed to better defend itself and to professionalize its security forces and to be able to defend its territory from Russian intervention. I think Obama was wary of

pouring in weapons because Russia's right there on the border, you know, and Russia could always escalate beyond that. And what we were trying to do is get a diplomatic resolution in place that got Russia out of eastern Ukraine. We were able, with the sanctions and the support we provided, to kind of stop Russia where they were, which is in the easternmost provinces of Ukraine, Luhansk and Denezsk, which are two provinces that border Russia and that have majority Russian-speaking populations in most of them. But we weren't able to fully dislodge Putin, obviously, from Crimea, for instance.

So our calculation was essentially you could reach a point where if you're pouring in weapons, it gives Putin the pretext to further escalate. And just makes it life worse for everybody. You hear Ukraine and corruption discussed a lot. And I think it's worth spending a minute to talk about the scale of the corruption we're talking about and how damaging it can be to an entire country, to the existence of a country. Because I think in the West it's probably hard to understand this. So very recently, Ukraine, like last week, they were negotiating with the International Monetary Fund, the IMF,

about future loans and an agreement around future loans. So they failed to get that deal. And on Friday, the IMF released a statement that said, quote, growth is held back by a weak business environment with shortcomings in the legal framework, pervasive corruption, and large parts of the economy dominated by inefficient state-owned enterprises or by oligarchs, deterring competition and investment. So that sounds very bad, but that is still exponentially better than where we were when the former president, Victor Yanukovych, was in charge back in 2014. So he reportedly paid $2 billion in bribes over the years he was president. That's $1.4 million a day. And we know this because his own team did very good record keeping. They had little detailed logs. When he finally had to flee the country,

the Ukrainian citizens basically charged the gates to go check out his presidential mansion. And it was like corruption Disneyland. He had a replica Spanish galleon boat that he had created and was just floating in a pond. He had his own golf course. He had a private zoo. He literally had a half a dozen little houses for the ducks to live in. Yeah. That's just wild. I highly recommend Googling this place. Ben, can you help us understand that history and how corruption helped Russia exert influence

over Ukrainian affairs for many years? Yeah. So, you know, you have to understand that Vladimir Putin has always seen Ukraine as a part of Russia. You know, when he says he regrets a breakup of the Soviet Union, he principally regrets that Ukraine became an independent country. Yeah. And the Ukrainians have periodically stood up for their sovereign. notably in the Orange Revolution in 2005 that ousted a Russian-backed president. Putin then,

mysteriously, that president became poisoned. And Yanukovych becomes president. And what's really important for people understand is that corruption is how Vladimir Putin controlled Ukrainian politics. Because what you had is, as you've heard about, quote-unquote, oligarchs in Russia, these are rich guys who basically fund Putin, probably pay off Putin, and Putin in return counts on their loyalty. to control the media and the apparatus of the state, Putin orchestrated something similar in Ukraine, where a guy like Yanukovych, if he did Russia's bidding, could count upon the fact that he personally could be rich, that there were these people, these oligarchs in Ukraine who controlled Ukrainian industry and Ukrainian wealth, who were also close to Russia. And so Putin

essentially had the entire power structure of the Ukrainian economy and political system rigged to ensure Russian dominance. And the Ukrainian people got more and more peasant. And the Ukrainian people got more pissed off and fed up with this corruption. And ultimately, that's what led them to protest in the Maidan, the central square in Kiev, until Yanukovych fled the country in 2014, which is what then precipitated all the events since, you know, the Russian incursion into Crimea and Ukraine. So what people need to understand is when we talk about corruption in the Ukrainian context, it's directly tied to the sense that Ukrainians have independence from Russia so that their government isn't kind of corruptly controlled from Moscow, and that they have democratic leaders who

are responsive to them and not responsive to a bunch of power brokers who are just spreading money around in politics. So corruption really gets to the core of can Ukraine be an independent democracy. Yeah, that's a really good laydown. And Bill Browder's book, Red Notice, he's been a guest on the show a while back, talks about the way Putin uses all these oligarchs in Russia to cement control. And in return, he demands half their money. And we should ask, by the way, that this has ties in the Russian investigation, because you'll remember Manafort, Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign chair who got convicted and Rick Gates as partner, they were working for Yanukovych. They were working for a Russian-backed client, essentially, and they were

paid by this shadowy network of Russian-backed oligarchs in Ukraine. So Trump's own political team, like long before this scandal, Trump's own political team was in bed with the very people responsible for Russian-backed corruption in Ukraine. So I think that context helps you understand what Biden was doing going over to Ukraine to say, you got to fire this prosecutor. Because I think on its face, you know, you see that clip of Biden talking about how he told the Ukrainians, you got to fire this specific prosecutor or we're not giving you a billion dollars worth of aid.

Like that probably feels like some pretty intense power politics. But I think it's less weird once you understand that most European countries, the IMF, the world blank, also believe that Victor Shokin, than the prosecutor. prosecutor general of Ukraine was actually blocking corruption cases from going forward, right? Yeah. And I can explain this as I was in government at the time. And so you had this new Ukrainian president, Petro Porchenko, who himself was an oligarch, but it was positioning himself as a reformer and was dependent upon Western assistance to fend off Putin like we talked about, but also this support from institutions like the IMF to keep the Ukrainian government afloat.

Now, we did a process, an interagency process, and people have heard us talk about this on this podcast, but essentially what that means is everybody gets together from the State Department, the Pentagon, the NSC to review, okay, what is the basis of our policy in Ukraine? And what we saw is the Ukrainian government wasn't doing enough to clean up the corruption that literally was a cancer on its politics and on its economy. And we had this assistance that was in train for Ukraine. What's really important for people understanding about Joe Biden, Joe Biden was just delivering the points that have been produced by the U.S. government. Yeah, he's not freelancing.

He's not freelancing. So we had a process and we said, what is the problem? What is the root of the problem of the corruption in Ukraine? And one of the things that we found is that the prosecutor general, who was responsible for rooting out corruption, was not doing enough to prosecute corruption cases, right? And so Biden's message was that the problem is that this guy isn't doing enough to fight corruption. So it's the opposite of saying that the problem is that this guy is prosecuting my son. No, it was literally the opposite conclusion. It was like, unless you get a prosecutor general in place who will actually root out corruption,

we don't want to pour all this money into your country because this money could just go in service of corruption. And so if we're going to give you a billion dollars in aid, we got to make sure that you're cleaning up your act, you're cleaning up your economy, you're cleaning up your politics. So all Biden was doing was delivering the message of the entire U.S. government, not some freelance Biden message like Donald Trump was doing and giving a freelance Donald Trump message on the phone. He was simply delivering what was the policy of the United States, which is to root out corruption. Yeah. And so when Trump says Biden wanted to fire a prosecutor because that individual was investigating a natural gas company on whose board his son sat, literally the opposite is true.

He wasn't investigating. He was not. It's 100% false. Yeah. Black is white. Yeah, this is not like a shades of gray thing. He was not investigating things like that. It is the definition of gas lighting. Yeah. And so, look, can reasonable people find it weird that Hunter Biden was put on the board of this natural gas company in the first place? Absolutely. Yes.

But I also, like, look, to defend Biden for a second, I think it's a bit unfair to say that Joe Biden should have been aware of policing all of his son's business activities, especially when we're talking about a period where his son, Bo Biden, had just died. It was like months later, I think, when Joe delivered. this message. So, look, I know politics is awful and we should hold politicians to a high standard, but like, we're human beings here. Yeah. Did Hunter Biden demonstrate poor judgment in doing business there? Yes. You know, at that time, as you say, though, number one, Joe Biden was doing nothing to help his son whatsoever. But number two, this is his only surviving son. He just lost Bo Biden. This is a man who previously lost family members in that tragic car accident when he was first elected the Senate. His mind was, you know, on the loss of his son and

frankly on what he had to do as vice president. And really, Hunter's activities, I don't, I don't even remember being aware of them at the time. This was not like something that was interacting with our policy in any way. Again, especially because our policy was to try to make sure there were more investigations of corruption in Ukraine, not less. Yeah. Okay. Let's drag another U.S. ally through the mud for a minute. So we also learned this week that President Trump called the Prime Minister of Australia this week to ask him to help the Attorney General Bill Barr gather information that might undercut the Mueller probe into Russia's interference in the 2016 election. So it's so complicated and weird, it's going to take a little explaining.

You guys probably remember our boy George Poppidopoulos in May of 2016. He got hammered with an Australian diplomat in London, revealed that the Russians had offered dirt on Hillary Clinton, and that was how this whole thing, the whole investigation got kicked off. So what Trump is doing here is he's asking the Australians to work with our attorney general to, I guess, investigate themselves and see if somehow that Papadopoulos meeting with an Australian diplomat didn't happen or happen differently. Before that, Trump was calling the president of Ukraine in asking him for help and proving a conspiracy theory that claims Ukraine was somehow part of the DNC effort to either hide Hillary's server or- Totally fucking bonkers. or frame Paul Manafort as a way of interfering in the 2016 election. And then all of this is part of a larger effort by the Department of Justice to look at the origins of the Mueller probe in an effort to prove that they were somehow fraudulent. So if you had trouble following that, join the club.

But the specifics here are scary because the president seems to believe conspiracy theories that are like right out of the Info Wars comment section. But also like on a mundane level, it's just worth pointing out that the president has a finite amount of time in political. capital and he is spending it calling allies, adversaries, whoever you can get on the horn, not to say, hey, can you help us with North Korea diplomacy? Or, hey, this China war, trade war is heating up. We need to find an off ramp. Or hey, help us lock down sanctions on Iran. No, he's calling them to say, help me prove that my 2016 election was legitimate. Yeah. Help me attack my own intelligence community. I let me just try to unpack this for one second. Baffling. Yeah. I mean, number one, the origin of the Russia investigation was Russia interfering our election, right?

I mean, so the whole basis of his conspiracy theory is somehow that this was a fake investigation or something. No, like you all were there when the DNC emails were hacked and released publicly. That was done by Russia, right? So the reason there was an investigation in Russia isn't just because George Papadopoulos got hammered with an Australian diplomat, which he did. It's that Russia intervened in our election, and of course it's the job of our intelligence community to understand that and to investigate that. The second thing, though, the broader point I would make here, this is qualitatively different from some of the Trump scandals we've seen for a simple reason. He is completely and utterly corrupted the entire foreign policy of the United States of America. Right. So the most obvious example is calling up the president of Ukraine like a mob boss and saying, I'm going to leverage tax.

taxpayer money, foreign assistance that we're going to give you, unless you investigate my political opponents. But what we also see here is it wasn't just Trump doing that call. It was Rudy Giuliani flying around Europe having meetings. It was State Department officials helping set up those Rudy Giuliani meetings. And now we learn it's literally the Attorney General of the United States, who was also, by the way, named as someone who was involved in this pressure campaign with Ukraine. Literally, what is this man doing? He's in charge of the Justice Department. He's going to fly around the world and meet with other countries to try to validate a crazy right-wing conspiracy theory. And they're not even trying to hide it.

No. Trump is saying publicly, I hope that these other countries will work with Attorney General Barr on these matters. Yeah. And so the reason you have impeachment as a recourse in the Constitution is if a U.S. president is committing crimes, which these appear to be, they're at a minimum campaign finance violations to get in-kind donations from foreign governments to investigate your political. opponents, but more insidiously, I believe, is he's turned the entire foreign policy apparatus of United States, the Justice Department, the State Department, into extensions of his personal political interests, right? As you said, there's no national interest being advanced here, either by Ukraine or by Australia. In fact, you could argue it's undermining the national

interest to say to our allies, investigate U.S. intelligence agencies. He's literally saying, you know, go back. And going forward, if you are a foreign intelligence, surface, is that going to make you a little more wary about, you know, cooperating with the U.S. intelligence community, the U.S. law enforcement community? Oh, yeah. If you think you're then going to have, like, you know, Inspector Clousseau, Bill Barr, or Rudy Giuliani showing up and second guessing you for cooperating with us in the first place? Yeah.

I mean, that's what he's saying. He's like, investigate yourselves, Australia or Italy or whomever, for cooperating with us. Yeah. That is completely and utterly fucked. It's also worth noting that, you know, this news what we're hearing isn't just alarming to you and you and me. It's Tom Bossert, who was his head Homeland Security advisor for years in the White House, has expressed concern that these conspiracy theories like the server being in Ukraine or whatever are in Trump's head. And it's like driving him to distraction. Two more things on this before we move on some other issues.

I want to talk about Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for a minute because, again, you know, we've talked about this before. he is treated like this sort of serious, respected foreign policy thinker. But, you know, he is in on all of this stuff we're talking about, right? He was on the call with the Ukrainians where Trump delivered his extortion message. And then when he was asked about it on ABC with Martha Raditz, he lied. Like you said earlier, his team was coordinating with Rudy Giuliani. And before that, they fired the U.S. ambassador who's actually doing the right thing in trying to fight corruption. And then today we learned that Pompeo is going to try to block State Department witnesses from testifying in this impeachment inquiry. Also today, he apparently brought Seb Gorka, who you guys probably know

because he used to work in the White House. We used to make fun of him all the time. He brought him on this official trip to Italy so that Seb can like make weird Twitter videos and continue to sell like fish oil pills and promote his website. Like that's not even a joke. He literally sells fish oil pills and like just cosplay that he's some like giant headed JV James Bond. So, Yeah, Pompeo is, like, I know Pompeo wants to get out of there and run for Senate in Kansas, but it sounds like he might have waited a little too long because he's in the thick of this corruption stuff. And now it does not seem like he's on board with, you know, doing the right thing in terms of protecting his whistleblower. No, absolutely not. And look, it bears like pull back the camera here a little bit,

all these people who present themselves as grown-ups around Trump, right? H.R. McMaster was in the meeting with Trump and the Russians in 2017, where we now know from reporting that Trump apparently said he had no problem with them intervening our election. We never heard that from H.R. McMaster. Jim Madison, untold meetings. And when was asked about this on television recently said, it went beyond his expertise to comment on Trump pushing the Ukrainians to investigate Biden. Jim Mattis. Let's just pause. That was such a duck. Such a fucking duck. You know, it's not beyond his expertise to criticize Barack Obama. It's not beyond his expertise to offer Pablam lessons in leadership, but when asked about a pretty obvious black and white right or wrong thing, he has nothing to say. Now, Mike Pompeo, if there's anybody who kind of represents the heart of the kind of callous Republican capitulation to Trump and his right-wing fever dreams, someone who will consistently put their own ambition ahead of any other interest, it is Mike Pompeo. This guy is treated like some mainstream figure.

He was in the Freedom Caucus. He was on the Benghazi committee, right, that was investigating Benghazi four years after the fact, right? So this guy today is saying he can't be expected to comply with this subpoena of a very important matter, a phone call that he was a fact witness to. He's saying, well, I don't know if I want to meet that subpoena. He spent four years investigating Benghazi. And in fact, Trey Gowdy, right, right wing, Trey Gowdy's Benghazi report was not sufficiently part of it. is in and not sufficiently a hack job for Mike Pompeo, that Mike Pompeo got together with Jim Jordan, that raving lunatic who you might see on television, the guy who never wears a jacket

and looks like a complete nutcase, ranting and raving about conspiracy theories on television, Mike Pompeo and Jim Jordan got together and wrote a 50-page minority report to trade Gowdy's Benghese report because it wasn't crazy enough in its criticism of Hillary Clinton and its validation of right-wing conspiracy theories. This is not a serious person. This is not a serious man, right? And what do we now know about Mike Pompeo? Mike Pompeo, on the one hand, puts out Pablam's statements about the State Department when, as you said, he canned a career ambassador who was doing a great job because she wasn't sufficiently participating in Trump's schemes to pressure the Ukrainians to sit down with Rudy Giuliani and investigate his political opponents, right? Mike Pompeo, who thinks congressional oversight is sacrosanct when they're spending four years investigating Sunday show talking points,

won't cooperate with congressional oversight, and he himself goes on Sunday shows and just lies, right? I mean, his whole thing was that Susan Rice used talking points that didn't match the reality that Mike Pompeo believes about what happened in Benghazi. Susan said, I had the information for the intelligence community at the time. If our assessments changed, we corrected it. Mike Pompeo went on television and said, Down is up, black as white.

He was asked, what do you think about this report of this phone call and said he didn't know anything about it when he was on the phone call? And let me add one more thing about this. Why was he on the phone call? I was, the secretary of state does not normally participate. It's really weird. This just shows you what a corrupt cabal we have running our foreign policy. The secretary of state is usually in the state department. They don't come over and participate in White House phone calls. We know that noted warmonger John Bolton, who was now security advisor at the time, says he wasn't on that call. So it turns out that the only people that Trump has on this call, just like the only people who could access the transcript, were the people who'd agreed to go along with his scheme. to completely corrupt American foreign policy. That's who Mike Pompeo is. Yeah, it is very strange that he happened to be there for this call. That kind of gets us to the process of this call.

So our last thing I want to talk about. Sorry, I'm getting off my chest. You've had a few podcasts in between. It's all right, it's all right, man. I'm working some things out. We'll get there. Sorry, woldose. So the last thing is,

I think we're talking about how they are seemingly trying to hide these foreign leader calls and write-ups from their own government. So just some like NSC process stuff. So when you work at the NSC, you work in a SCF with a sensitive compartmented information facility. That means you can look at classified stuff. We all had three computers at our desks.

You have the unclassified one. We call that the low side. One is Sipper, which is a computer system that transmits secret level information and you use it a lot to talk to the State Department and the Department of Defense. And then you have the J. Wick system, which is like the top secret information. We call it the high side. Basically, NSC staffers almost exclusively use the high side because we're a bunch of nerds. and you want to protect everything as much as you can, and frankly, it's just have it. So it doesn't mean all those messages are classified.

You have to classify every email, but that's the system you use. When the president does a foreign leader call, like this Ukraine call, generally it gets connected to the situation room. There will be some staffers with him in the Oval Office who will listen in. And then the sit room team produces like an almost verbatim transcript of what was said. They use some software that transcribes stuff automatically, and then they check it with a note-taker. ultimately gets disseminated to the right people, the National Security Advisor probably makes that decision.

The conversations are often sensitive because like any conversation at a leader level is sensitive, but they're not highly classified usually because it's just like you're not calling up a foreign head of state to talk about classified matters generally. Those are things usually within the own government. But apparently the Trump team has been taking a lot of these transcripts, the calls with Mohammed bin Salman,

the call with the Zelensky of Ukraine and then one other. Putin, Putin, Putin, and maybe this Australia one. And putting it on a different computer system that's used for information that's classified at an even higher level called code word. So that stuff is more sensitive than top secret. It often involves like covert action programs or highly sensitive military or diplomatic operations that are just known to a small subset of people. So I don't totally recall exactly how that system worked in part because I never had a need

to know and I wasn't dicking around with like the Intel directorate's computer system. But suffice to say, it does seem like they've taken fairly extraordinary steps to lock down access to a call between Trump and a foreign head of state that would have been pretty mundane if not for this political quid pro quo. Yeah. I mean, the way for people to think about this, right, is that, you know, I used to get the transcripts, all these calls. There's sometimes fun to read.

if 95 plus percent of these calls are pretty widely disseminated, right? So if there's a call with the leader of Ukraine, that transcript would end going to everybody works on Europe because Europe is very involved in Ukraine policy. Everybody works on Russia for obvious reasons. They'd go to you probably as NSE spokesperson because there's kind of a press interest in what's going to Ukraine. And we used to do readouts of these calls. They would say nothing. Yeah.

Yeah. But you had to know. You'd have to know what happened on the call. But it's also notable that Trump people sort of stopped doing that. Yeah. they no longer read out foreign leader calls. And so the fact is that this could go to dozens of people, right? The only reason to restrict that access is if something very sensitive was discussed.

So, for instance, we're going to talk to David Cameron later. Some of the – we had a secure line with David Cameron. So if President Obama was on the phone with David Cameron, they'd be on a secure telephone and they could discuss very sensitive matters, matters derived from, say, intelligence collection, right, that you want to protect from a lot of people knowing about it at times, not every call. Here's what's so important, though. Like Syria red line discussion. Yeah, well, not even that.

Like if there's, if the information itself depends on like a human intelligence source. That's what I mean. Like, let's say we have the goods on the Syrian government that they did use chemical weapons. And Obama could relay that on this line. Yes, exactly. Now, here's why this matters. We've all read the transcript. Yeah.

There is nothing classified in that transcript. They put it out precisely because it wasn't classified. So if nothing is classified, nothing in that call derives from a sensitive source or a, you'll say, a covert operation, there is no reason whatsoever for you to manipulate the classification system of the United States of America to shield your crimes, right? This is them using a system designed to protect the nation's secrets to protect Trump's corruption. So that is yet a further corruption of the U.S. national security making. because, again, they're hiding behind systems that are put in place to protect secrets. Nation's secrets, not Trump's corrupt secrets. Everything about this thing stinks.

Okay, let's talk about some other parts of the world for a bit and maybe leave President Trump behind for a little while. First, let's do China and Hong Kong. So in Beijing, the Communist Party is commemorating their 70th year in charge with one of the biggest military parades in probably recent world history. President Xi presided over, I think, all 80 minutes of the parade. He gave a speech. You saw all kinds of fun hardware going down the street like new nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missiles, tanks, planes, drones, all kinds of fun stuff. But this carefully crafted image of military might and precision was marred internationally, at least, by a split screen that showed violent protests happening in Hong Kong. Protesters also did not miss the fact that Hong Kong. Hong Kong's chief executive, Carrie Lamb, attended the parade, sat near President Xi and the other dignitaries up on a riser. So, Ben, we've talked about the massive power imbalance between these very brave protesters and the Chinese government. But it is remarkable to me how much they are able to puncture Xi's all-powerful international image.

I say international because I imagine the Chinese state-run media and their information control will lock down anything out of Hong Kong or anything negative. out of the event. But it was, you know, pretty stark. Well, and this is why this is so important, right? Because in mainland China, there's really no possibility for people to protest, right? In part because they're fed a steady diet of state propaganda, but in part because if they did, they could be detained, killed, right? Yeah.

So Hong Kong is the one place where you can see what people think if they are kind of under the governance of the Communist Party, but have some freedom, right? Right. So what these people are doing is puncturing this mythology of the Communist Party that they enjoy universal support and that everybody wants to live in their kind of authoritarian one party system. No, here's some people in Hong Kong who feel like they have a choice, a choice between having some civil liberties and the universal suffrage that they believe they should have to choose their own leaders versus being fully absorbed in the mainland China. and they're creating a split screen, right? So instead of it just being Xi looking at a bunch of missiles and talking about how wonderful the Communist Party is, that's in one screen and the other screen

is people desperately fighting for their rights standing up to totalitarianism. And we saw today the first protester shot and killed, or I don't know if they were killed, but the first protesters shot by live fire in Hong Kong, right? So the Communist Party clearly wants to quash this, but they can't. And so to me, you know, it's an indication that,

yes, the Communist Party has been. managed to be in power for 70 years. And it's very powerful. But at the same time, when people are given a choice in Hong Kong, they want civil liberties. They want universal human rights. Yeah. So I'm going to keep watching this one. God knows when it'll end. But it's going to keep going and going and going. And I was recently in Singapore and it was interesting to see how much attention the protests are getting there. You know, that people see this as, you know, a direct challenge to the Chinese government, which we don't often see. Yeah. Let's talk about Brexit for a bit. and all the good things happening to Boris Johnson.

We'll also talk to David Cameron about this a bunch. So as of this recording, there was a leaked British plan to create customs checkpoints on the Irish border that were declared a non-starter by Ireland's deputy prime minister. This is an incredibly sensitive issue because if the UK Brexit, that means Northern Ireland is no longer part of the European Union. And if Northern Ireland's not part of the European Union, they would have to erect some sort of customs arrangement or barriers with Ireland, which, will remain part of the EU, but removing those checks and barriers separating Ireland and Northern Ireland

were a big part of the success of the Good Friday Agreement. So people are obviously very worried about, you know, igniting that conflict again. Additionally, there was news that a journalist alleged Boris Johnson groped her at a lunch in 1999. He is alleged in a separate instance who have had an affair with the U.S. businesswoman who received 100,000 pounds in public funding and access to multiple government trade missions and oh yeah uh britain's highest court ruled that johnson's decision to suspend parliament and the run up to the brexit vote was unlawful it's good week for boris man like this guy is stepping on rakes like it's his job i i so like what what's what's the next thing you think we should be watching here on the calendar well you know what's interesting here is you know boris had

said he uh leave with no deal by october 31st which is their deadline parliament has now prevented him from doing that. The Supreme Court has, you know, again, called out Boris Johnson's gambit to try to keep Parliament from meeting as unconstitutional. And so he's kind of checkmated on a no-deal Brexit by October 31st for the time being. At some point, that means something has to break this logjam unless he can get some new, qualitatively new deal from Europe, which I don't think is likely, because the Europeans don't have a lot of incentive to bail out Boris with a sweetheart deal. Like, this is going to have to head to an election, a general election, so that the British people can vote, change the political dynamic, and then see what happens. And I think what's very interesting to watch there, too, is you have this fracturing across British politics because you've got Boris who's decided you've got, you essentially got four parties.

The far right party, Nigel Farage's Brexit party, and it's pretty obvious with their messages. then Boris has decided that his biggest threat is from that Brexit party. So he doesn't mind being seen as his villain to people on the center and center left. He's going to be the guy for Brexit because he doesn't want to lose those Farage votes either. Then the Labor Party just had a very contentious convention where Jeremy Corby, the leader of Labor Party, did make their policy that they had favored remaining in the European Union. But, you know, he's always been kind of reluctant to make that his central project. he's more focused on kind of his socialist agenda. And that's, by the way, not the pejorative way in which socialism is used in the U.S.

It actually is a socialist agenda. And then the Liberal Democratic Party, another party, has basically made itself the remain, you know, stay in the EU party, have a second referendum. And so to me, it's very unlikely that this is solved in negotiations before there's an actual election. And the election itself could lead to kind of a further fracturing in British politics. that, you know, so to me, the question is going to be, do they end up, there's kind of three scenarios. Boris does get a stronger mandate and might force through a no-deal Brexit, or they have a very soft Brexit, right, where they're kind of staying in the parts of the EU so that they don't

have to have that a hard border northern Ireland. That'll piss off the far right, but that may actually be the consensus position in British politics, or they just can't figure anything out and they have to have a second referendum. I honestly have no idea which of those scenarios it's going to be. What's clear right now is that nobody is particularly popular in British politics. Yeah, no kidding. Corbin's not. Boris is not fraud. All of them have kind of 25% support, right?

And so that's part of why you see this paralysis. There's a lot of leaders who have fervent support from small factions, and nobody who can seem to build any consensus in that country. Yeah. Why the fuck is Tom Cruise in Kiev? Someone just sent me a link to a photo. of Tom Cruise with President Zelenskyy hanging out in Kiev. Well, maybe he can figure it out.

Yeah, maybe he can figure out a lot of shit. Mission Impossible, you know. God, the world is stupid. Okay, we talked about John Bolton earlier, and we've also talked about the things we like about him and the things we don't. He was Trump's national security advisor until very recently. So, Ben, you mentioned this earlier

about all the former Trump administration officials who have refused to criticize him. You do have to give Bolton some credit because he stepped out and is speaking out about Trump's failed North Korea policy, and he's doing so long before some sort of book release that could make him much of money or whatever. So specifically, Bolton criticized Trump for not cracking on North Koreans sanctions violations and acting like the North Korean nuclear arsenal

has been handled when things are actually getting worse. So, you know, look, again, you shouldn't be surprised by these views. Bolton is an ideologue. We're not big fans of his policy judgment. But it is notable that he was privy to the most up-to-date information possible about the North Korean program, advances they might have made. And so his alarm is, I think, worth listening to here. It's also interesting that Trump hasn't lashed out in response to Bolton. I guess maybe he's worried about what he'll say about Ukraine and all the other stuff that's going on. But we should say that the U.S. and North Korea, I guess, plan to meet again this week. So maybe those negotiations are actually ongoing. Yeah. I mean, I think Bolton confirms what we know, which is that Trump has

rewarded North Korea with a lot and got nothing in return. I think Bolton's removal suggests that the likelihood of there being some agreement is higher, but that agreement is likely to be kind of warmed over bullshit, like some North Green promises to do something over some timeline that is not very clear, you know, that Trump will declare some huge victory. I do think the Bolton thing, you mentioned that Trump's been reluctant to criticize him. You know, there have been all these, this flood of leaks out of the administration or from former officials recently. It does confirm that Trump treating all these people like shit on the way out is a way to guarantee that when you get into political trouble, like people will pile on. I mean, a life lesson is don't treat people

like that because they're likely to fire back. And he treated Bolton, who I have no sympathy for whatsoever, but he treated him like crap. And so Bolton's not holding back. And neither are all these other people who are putting out this information. Yeah. Last interesting thing, before we wrap here. So the last time you and I recorded, we were both very worried about what might happen in response to an alleged Iranian attack on Saudi Arabia's oil infrastructure. So far, it seems like the response has been pretty limited. Trump sent a few hundred U.S. service members over to Saudi Arabia, essentially to man their missile defense systems. I think that the reality is that the Saudi military is not particularly competent in that they need some help. You and I were

also speculating about whether Trump and Rouhani, President Rouhani of Iran would meet at the UN General Assembly. That did not. happened, but apparently it came very close. It came very close to having a phone call. So in Trump's head. Yeah. According to the New Yorker, French president, Emmanuel Macron, pushed Rouhani very hard to set up basically a conference call with Macron and Trump.

They took all these steps to facilitate it. They set up a secure phone line at the Waldorf Hotel. Everything was pre-scheduled for a 9.30 p.m. discussion. But then Rouhani blew them off. And the next day, Trump banned Iranian officials and their families from visiting the U.S. I guess the sticking point from Rouhani's perspective, and this should be no surprise, is that he wanted the U.S. to ease sanctions before he was willing to have a conversation. But instead, Trump has been ratcheting them up. So I don't know. I don't know how to feel about this one. Maybe I don't feel anything. But I know Ruhani has politics back home that would make a meeting with Trump very difficult. But recent history suggests that you can get our president to climb down from a lot of very hawkish positions by being nice to him for a little while. Yeah, well, in one side note on that Iranian diplomats, they prevented even Iranian diplomats who were at the UN, right, from traveling something like 20 blocks to visit a guy who had cancer. Yeah, that seems unnecessary.

You know, there's an Iranian diplomat who has cancer. And I saw a bunch of, like, right-wing, you know, Iran critics on Twitter, like praising this as, you know, this is kind of gross, right? Yeah, we should be better. That's the kind of thing they would do. We should be bigger and better than that. I will say what's so strange about this is Trump is more interested in meeting Rahani than like doing anything. Like it just because Obama didn't meet Rahani, we did have a phone call with him. From all the reporting, it seems like he's just desperate to have this photograph with Rahani.

The guy, there's such a gigantic hole in Donald Trump's soul that like if there's something that Barack Obama didn't do. like that's what he you know he cares more about that meeting than an actual diplomatic agreement I do think we've learned a couple of things that are important here though the Saudis have massively climbed down right I think here's the reason why the Iranians just proved how vulnerable they are you know that a drone strike or some kind of missile strike could decapitate or take off line like half their oral production for period of time the Saudis know if there's a real shooting war like they could be finished you know like they could take out the Saudi regime, right? And so they don't want that war. And so now you have, I think,

in a positive element, there are indications that Saudi Arabia wants to talk to Iran, something that we were urging them to do three years ago. That would be a positive step to try to climb down and de-escalate these conflicts. And, you know, let's see what happens first. And again, the thing with Trump is, the focus on having this meeting and discussion, we know what the deal is. There's an Iran deal. There's Macron's versions of the Iran deal. There are things that he could call the Trump-Iran deal and say the Obama deal. I would like there to be a diplomatic agreement in which Iran doesn't advance its nuclear program in exchange for some sanctions relief.

And whatever Trump wants to call it, just do it. But he seems much more fixated on this kind of bizarre optics of whether he gets a meeting, which is not the point. The point is, what is the outcome? And I guess better that we're arguing about that than, you know, the brink of war. But let's not forget, there's all kinds of diplomatic offers on the table for Trump to take if he was actually serious about this. Yeah, fair point. One other thing I just want to mention, it's a year anniversary of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, which we should all keep in mind

that the U.S. government had information that MBS killed this man brutally and Donald Trump covered for him. Everybody should go check out friend of the pod, Jason Rezion, who edits the Washington Post Global Opinions section, has a special kind of series of columns on this by him, by a friend of mine named Muhammad Sultan, who's a human rights activist. So a friend of mine, Rula Gibriol has an interview with Khashoggi that's never before been published, so it's worth doing a little digging here on this. Yeah, agreed. And it was interesting that there was also this pretty damning front-line documentary that came out about the Saudi regime and Muhammad bin Salman. And the Saudis decided to bracket that by giving 60 minutes another sit-down where Muhammad bin Salman

denied any knowledge of Khashoggi's death in one of the least believable interviews I've ever seen. But they tried to go back to the well because they got a pretty puffy story at a 60 minutes. Proof that Muhammad bin Salman, yeah, and proof that Muhammad bin Salman has Western political consultants. He used this line, I take responsibility, but I wasn't responsible, which is a classic Western politician Dodge. Brutal, ridiculous. Okay. When we come back, we'll have our interview with former UK Prime Minister David Cameron. We are honored to be joined by the former Prime Minister of the UK, David Cameron. His new book, for the record, is available. now, Mr. Prime Minister, thank you so much for doing the show. Great to be with you. So there are

critical, weighty affairs of state that we want to get to, but I think Ben Rhodes has a story that's really been on the mind of everyone who listened to this show since he first told it. So we want to turn to him first to see if you maybe recall this incident. Yeah, I don't know if you remember this amidst all the issues that we worked on together, Prime Minister, over many years. But in 2014, Do you remember the Normandy D-Day anniversary that we all went to? I do. It was very beautifully done. I remember some stunning events, some really wonderful memories, actually. Well, I have one memory that wasn't that great. I just want to see, you probably don't remember this. But so I was in the staff area, and you'll recall this as the height of the Ukraine crisis.

Yes. And I got a note passed to me that President Obama was in an impromptu meeting with Vladimir Putin, right? And I have to admit, I'd been out a little late in that before. And so I run through that room that I didn't know was only reserved for world leaders. And so I'm like running through. I think I saw you and Uncle Merkel and I see Obama and Putin. And I get there and I lean in to hear what they're saying. And I'm exhausted.

I'm like sweating. And this interaction comes to an end. And so I go looking for a restroom. I'd use the restroom. And I had this situation happen that's probably happened to all. of us where you don't know if the door is locked or not. And so you're turning the doorknob and you're pushing, you know, you're pushing it over and over again to see that it's open or not.

And it's clearly locked. And I'm in that embarrassing situation where I've just kind of bothered whoever's in there. And I take one step back and the door to the restroom opens and it's the queen of England. Right? And this was literally, I've never felt like as big a loser in my entire life as I did. at that exact moment. And you may not recall, but then I go into the next room and I see Obama and he's talking to you and your wife. And I relay this story, and he just devolves and laughter and proceeds to make fun me for the rest of the day. And I just want to know, I noticed

that that anecdote didn't make it into the book. I do now you reminded me of it. I do vaguely remember. You're lucky you didn't end up in the Tower of London. Well, exactly. Is that the kind of, there's got to be some kind of punishment for that, right? I mean, I'm sure, I'm sure there is. But I remember it was as well as the beautiful meetings and everything else. Of course, it was very tense because of Ukraine. And that's where those Normandy format meetings came out of that. And actually, Barack Obama and I didn't want to play any part in talking seriously to Putin at the Normandy landings. Because, you know, there we were commemorating the liberation of Europe.

And we thought it was so wrong to be having discussions about what Russia had done in Ukraine, potentially redrawing the boundaries of Europe. There was tension, I remember, of course. Yeah, and there was a great moment when Putin came out and they showed him on the Jumbotron and the entire crowd brood. But, well, look, we're going to start with Brexit because, you know, obviously that's on a lot of people's mind, but then we'll get to a bunch of other topics. And I know you've covered this a lot. I wanted to start. The last time I saw you, I think, was in April of 2016 when we came out.

to London. And what's interesting to me is at the time, this felt like a huge success. Obama was polling, you know, 70, 80 percent in the UK, he goes, he makes kind of a forceful case for the Remain campaign. And it seemed like, and I remember talking to your staff, Ed Llewellyn and people like that, and we all felt good about it. I was struck when I went back to London on my book tour that the impression is that that that had backfired in some way and that Obama's comments about, you know, the UK being at the back of the queue for a trade agreement with the U.S., which is entirely accurate, you know, that that had somehow, you know, galvanized the opposition. Now, you never know when a campaign loses, everybody looks at every event, but I was just

curious what your impression was of that trip at the time and looking back at how that trip went. My impression at the time, and I put this in the book, actually, my impression at the time is at that stage of the campaign, it felt like it was going extremely well because we were, you know, scoring a lot of runs on the argument that staying in was best for the economy. We needed access to the single market. It was good for jobs. It was good for growth. And, you know, having the leader of the free world pitch up and say, this is none of my business, but, you know, I can talk about what might happen if you were to leave and what happens. with trade agreements. At the time, it really did feel like a very powerful argument because, of course, the Leave campaign were losing on the economy. They were winning on immigration,

and that was going to become more and more important. But one of their arguments was it's going to be really easy to sign trade deals with the rest of the world. And Obama were coming along and saying, well, it's not actually that simple. I felt was pretty powerful. I think you're right. When you lose a campaign, you look back and then sometimes reinterpret the things that happened. But I felt at the time it was pretty positive and I still think, you know, it was a helpful intervention rather than unhelpful one in my view. And one of the things that struck me at the time, you know, we've obviously seen a bit of an increasing ugliness in our politics in both countries.

I remember when we landed, we had an op-ed, I think in the telegraph from Obama. And Boris Johnson had an op-ed at the same time that really took us a bit. back because he essentially made this argument that Obama, because he had Kenyan ancestry, was kind of inherently hostile to the UK. And it was a tone that I didn't expect, you know, kind of a racially tinged, you know, attack on Obama's kind of view of the UK. What was your response at the time? Where did that come from? That's a good point. I didn't put that in the book, but actually you're right at the time. It was quite shocking, actually. I don't know whether Boris Johnson had, you know, sometimes he writes things very quickly. He dashes something

off and, you know, there are unintended consequences or whether this was thought through. I've never really got to the bottom of that. But it wasn't very pleasant. And it was a bit shocking. But I think we were still at that stage, the campaign was still relatively civilized. And we were talking mostly about the economy. It was sort of later on when we started getting onto the subject of immigration, where I think my side of the campaign started losing, but also the opposition side of the campaign, you know, was telling some pretty tall stories about how 80 million Turks would be able to come and live in Britain and such like. But you're right. It was quite an important moment in the campaign. Mr. Prime Minister, you lived through Brexit. You know, he watched from afar as the United States went through this brutal election in 2016 and elected Donald Trump.

A lot of observers look at those two events, those two campaigns and look for some sort of unifying reason or connection between the two. Do you think, do you see any sort of connection or do you think it's wrong to, you know, try to find a theory? I think there is some connection. I think it can be overdone. I think the connection is this. Both our countries suffered from the economic crisis of 0708. We actually had the biggest banking collapse with the Royal Bank of Scotland and our recession was as deep and long as anybody's.

And I think what that led to was a lot of thinking about the economic instability and economic uncertainty we faced and particularly those that have done less well from globalization. And I think what both Brexit and the election of Trump had behind them was this sense of economic insecurity and also to an extent a sense of cultural insecurity where in both our countries not enough had been done to address the issue of immigration and demonstrate that we had firm and fair systems that worked for our countries. And I think that was the background to both those elections. But you shouldn't overdo it because of course with Brexit there was a separate question, which was, do you want Britain to be part of the European Union or not? And, you know,

there are a lot of people in Britain who had done well economically, but who actually didn't want to stay in the European Union. You know, the arguments about sovereignty and so forth played very strongly with them. So it wasn't a vote of possessed versus dispossessed. There are a lot of people in wealthy parts of the country, people who have done very well who voted to leave. So you can only take the commonality argument so far? I mean, how worried are you at this point about a no-deal Brexit potentially breaking up the UK in the long term? And what circumstances do you think might allow for or justify a second referendum?

Well, I think, let me try and take it in turn because this is complicated. What I hope is going to happen and what I think is still perhaps the most likely is that Boris Johnson secures a deal in Brussels, brings it back to the past. It passes it through the Parliament and we leave with a deal. Now, it's still not an outcome that, you know, it's not the best outcome for Britain. Better would have been to vote to stay in a reformed European Union. But it is at least a stable and deliverable outcome and, you know, the economy will be able to keep moving forward. I think a no-deal Brexit in the short term is looking less likely because Parliament has effectively legislated against it.

So what could happen if we don't get the deal through is we go on being stuck, as it were, and we've been stuck for three years. And if you're stuck, there's only three ways out of it. You can either have a deal, you can have a general election, or you can have a second referendum. And I think if we don't get a deal, I think probably you'd move towards an extension of our membership and then a general election. And that could in turn lead to a second referendum because there's no guarantee that an election will change Parliament so much that a deal can go through.

So my view is don't rule out a second referendum. We may need it in order to break this on-pass. But the sensible thing to do would be, and to have done already, as it were, would be to fulfill the referendum with the deal to leave the EU on reasonable terms. One other question I had about this, before we get into other things, which is when I look back on it, I actually remember the previous referendum that you held was a Scottish referendum. And there, it was a very good result. And the polls were close and at the end, everybody kind of broke in favor of staying in the United

Kingdom. And to me, a lesson that, you know, that I think I probably drew from that. And I'm curious if it led to your thinking on holding the referendum, it seemed like at the end of an election, people broke towards the status quo in the Scottish referendum. Did that lesson give you greater confidence that, in a breakfast, referendum, people would break towards Remain. In other words, you know, was part of the surprise that actually those polls broke against the status quo at the end to what appeared to be the less safe choice? How did that Scottish referendum impact your thinking? Well, obviously,

we had announced that we were going to hold an EU referendum before the Scottish referendum took place. But in both cases, the way I'd put it is you had people who were passionate about having a independent Scotland and people who are passionate about keeping the United Kingdom together. But in the middle, you had quite a lot of people who were uncertain and unsure, but to whom the arguments about prosperity and security were the most important. And that's why we focused on those arguments. And when it came to the end of the referendum campaign, as you put it, people broke towards, yes, the status quo, but they broke towards arguments that favored prosperity and stability insecurity. And when it came to the European referendum, obviously I was hopeful the same

thing would happen. There are people passionate about leaving, people passionate about staying, a lot of people in the middle uncertain. And I thought the economic and security and stability arguments would be the most powerful. I think the problem we had with the European referendum was the argument the opposition was making about control and linking that argument to immigration in some ways painted the status quo somehow, you know, very unsatisfactory and uncertain and all the rest of it. And that was part of the problem that we had. Yeah. Mr. Prime Minister, I'd love to ask you about Syria for a minute.

You know, I think that many people, Republicans and Democrats, have criticized Obama for failing to strike Syria after the chemical weapons use in not adhering to the red line. But, you know, I think we all also remember that at the time, you know, you know, would take in a measure to the House of Commons to seek authorization for that, that action. And I was defeated. Obama tried to take a similar action in the U.S. Congress. And we never even got to that point because Republicans and Democrats both told him that they were not going to vote to authorize it. And frankly, most Democrats said, hey, look, we don't be able to want this political issue

on our voting record. Don't call us, right? So I guess I wonder what the lesson is there about incredibly difficult foreign policy decisions like that, that, you know, a lot of folks in hindsight think were mistakes, but were blocked by the popular will of the people. I think the lesson's very clear. And in my book, I sort of try and blame myself as much as I blame President Obama, which is, I think it is right to draw a red line about chemical weapons use.

Chemical weapons on the battlefield, you know, they've been kept off the battlefield for decades because of the international taboo and the international rules. So drawing the red line was the right thing. I think what President Obama and I should have done is agreed when we talked about the red line, which I think I remember having a conversation with him about it at the G8 in Northern Ireland, we should have agreed then and there. If the line is crossed, here are the set of measures that we'll take almost immediately. And that would have been a series of cruise missile and other strikes on the chemical weapons,

facilities, establishment and leadership in Syria. Now, I'm not claiming it would have brought an end of the Syrian Civil War. I'm not claiming it would have made a huge difference in that massive crisis in that country. But I think a red line correctly would have been drawn. Action would have been taken. And instead, what we got into was the chemical weapons horrific attack underway. And then a sort of nervous set of steps from both the British and the Americans talking to each other, trying to agree the steps forward. But it's a long process, so I feel compelled.

I have to take it to Parliament. I then lose the vote, which was an absolute disaster. People were really voting. They kept coming into my office and saying, I'm not against chemical weapons strikes against Syria, but I'm voting because of Iraq. And I was like tearing my hair out and saying, this is not Iraq. This is Syria. This is chemical weapons.

But the real lesson is we should, I think, have agreed what to do earlier. We could have done it. It wouldn't have made a massive difference in Syria, but it would have kept that red line. And I think the world would be a better place for it. Yeah, so I've obviously thought about these issues a lot. And, you know, our administrations obviously cooperated on a whole range of fronts, the war in Afghanistan, the intervention in Libya, Syria policy, the Iran nuclear deal. I think this question about the ghosts of Iraq, though, is really important in the sense that kind of, as you and President Obama found out, that after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there wasn't public. support for similar military interventions.

I totally agree. I mean, look, in the book, I mean, I say first of all, how much I enjoyed working with Barack Obama. I think he was a thoroughly decent, intelligent, honest, and honorable man. I definitely agree that operating in the post-Iraq world made life a lot more difficult. It was one of the reasons I felt compelled to go to the parliament to hold the vote. And I think we did have, there were some successes where we worked together and deliver good results. I would say Ukraine, actually. The sanctions went in place rapidly. I still defend

what we did on Iran because at least then we had Iran verifiably away from a nuclear weapon. But I spend quite a lot of time brooding about Syria and acknowledging it was very difficult. There wasn't much permission to do much more than we did. But, you know, it's really tough when you see how bad that situation has been. The civil war, the loss of life, the refugee crisis, the use of chemical weapons, the growth of ISIS. I mean, and I think it's just one where, and I'm sure Barack will do this in his book, of thinking, you know, kicking the tires over and over again, what could we have done more? Was there a way of making more of a difference? But yes, we were operating in the post-Iraq world. It was hard. And, you know, one of the interesting

things to consider, you know, obviously the counter-IS campaign, which you were at the beginning with President Obama that ultimately proved successful, you kind of demonstrated. It's okay, our military can take out these terrorist safe havens if we really go after it. The Iran nuclear deal obviously shows that diplomacy, if stuck to, can achieve an objective. One of the tough things to look at for me is how do we think about the role of our militaries in internal conflicts? Because in Iraq, we have a huge military presence and you still have a very difficult outcome. In Libya, we have a very light military presence, a difficult outcome. in Syria, we have no military presence, a difficult outcome.

I mean, do you look back at all these issues you worked on? What do you think the role of Western military power is in a region like the Middle East? Well, I think Banky Moon put it right when he said, you know, look, a missile can kill a terrorist, but it's good governance that kills terrorism. And I think, you know, we shouldn't think that there are military only solutions to these situations. We need to spend far more time thinking about how you knit together and make work better the countries that you're trying to help. But having said that, there are moments when military intervention is necessary and rapid action has to be taken at least to try and give that country a chance. And I think, you know, Afghanistan in 2001 is a good example. You had to get rid of the Taliban regime while it was hosting al-Qaeda.

But I think then the mistake we made was it was a victor's piece where what the Taliban represented, sort of conservative, push-toon, quite fundamentalist Islamic views, was left out of the reconstruction of the country. And one of the things I've done since leaving office is some work with Sir Paul Collier at the Oxford School of Government, thinking about how you help fragile states. And the truth is the model which has been followed too much, which is military intervention followed by a rush to elections, actually just sees the conflict in those countries move from the battlefield to the ballot box

and you get kind of one person, one vote once. And then you're back to the problem again. And so you're absolutely right. We need to spend more time thinking about what's the limited role for the military and then what's the far greater role for delivering provisional government, bringing countries together, power sharing arrangements, making sure everyone has a stake in the future of the country your building, which is far hard to work. And, you know, that's why fragile states are so difficult to deal with. Yeah, amen to that.

Mr. Primezzer, did you ever withhold military aid to a foreign country in exchange for dirt on a political rival? And if not, do you feel like you missed an opportunity? I certainly didn't do that. And I'm trying, I'm having a week in New York and Washington and elsewhere. I'm trying to stay out of your politics. But my God, it's quite a hard, it's not as if Donald Trump always stays out of our politics, but it's hard, but I'm doing my best. Yes, yes. Well, let me try it this way then.

part of what I remember, obviously, you mentioned the Normandy meeting where I embarrass myself, but the more consequential outcome of there being this unified effort from the United States in Europe to impose sanctions on Russia. And I remember you, we could count on you to help build support for that in Europe. And really draw a line around the importance of upholding both international, norms around there being a consequence when a country invades its neighbor and annexes a part of it. But also kind of the sense that the West, the United States and Europe stood for, you know, both an international system rooted in principles like not violating sovereignty, but also a set of

democratic values. And I think part of what's been so difficult for Americans, at least some of us over the last two or three years, is not having a president who puts that at the center of their policy that seems more comfortable with with dictators than democratic alliances. As someone who is, you know, was the prime minister of our closest ally, just what is the value of the United States, not just acting like another big country like Russia and China that, you know, says America first and doesn't really care about values in our firm policy, what is lost when the United States is not playing that role that we did?

Well, I mean, frankly, everything is lost because, yes, there are things that European countries can do together. Yes, the French and British militaries are quite significant, particularly if we can cooperate more. But without America as that sort of leading superpower, acting on behalf of values as well as using its strength, it is incredibly hard to stand up for freedom and the rule of law and democracy and all the rest of it. But I think the argument we have to make, and here I'm going to start getting involved in your politics. The argument we have to make is, yes, it has been expensive for America to maintain NATO and its bases and alliances and everything else. But actually, America has benefited hugely from a world of rules and institutions and norms and all the rest of it. And so I think we need to attack the problem from both sides. The Europeans need to pay more for NATO, no doubt about that.

Donald Trump is right about that, not a phrase I use very often, but nonetheless, he is. But at the same time, we've got to try and, you know, convince ordinary, hardworking Americans that the standing up for democracy and freedom and values is actually in your national interest as well as a sort of international obligation, if that makes sense. Yeah, it does. I mean, so, you know, Mr. Prime Minister, over here, there's a lot of concern about the institutions, both international and domestic that you're referencing. And, you know, I imagine that there are some in the UK who are wondering, you know, they see Boris Johnson suspend Parliament for five weeks, although I believe the Supreme Court just struck down that decision. But there are folks on both sides of the Atlantic wondering if our institutions are stronger than the current forces that are testing them. I'm curious where you land on that question. That's a very good question.

I think our institutions are pretty strong on both sides of the Atlantic. actually the example of the Prime Minister progging Parliament for a long period of time is quite an interesting one. There aren't really proper rules about how you perug Parliament and our immensely flexible constitution has sort of found a way of the Supreme Court

stepping in and saying, look, I think this is slightly sharp practice and putting it right. I think if I look at your country, actually the institutions and the courts and such like have been pretty robust when it came to things like Muslim travel ban. and what have you. But look, I don't know whether I take the same view as President Obama on this.

I think we have to address this problem from both sides. On the one hand, we have to stand up for institutions for the rule of law, for the democratic values that we think have been great for us. But I also think we have to address some of the concerns and causes. And I think there are moments when I made the point already about immigration reform. I think that is essential. It lies behind. I think a lot of Donald Trump's success and partly explains Brexit.

But I think there are also moments when sometimes international institutions can look as if that they are the masters of the nation state rather than the servant. And I think there have been occasions where we need to remake these institutions and restore in some way the sense of mutuality and mutual obligation that they have on us rather than on occasion some international institutions sort of act like they wave the magic wand and everyone else has to jump in line. So I wanted to just shift gears here because you know you write, you know, quite powerfully about the loss of your son in the book. And I, you know, I do, I remember actually one of my visits to London, I was with my wife. You were quite generous. You welcomed us into number 10.

and I remember we watched the parade commemorating the end of World War I with actually your other children who were lovely and better behaved than I would have been at that time. Actually, I remember your son was mainly excited that there was like a veteran in there who he could talk to about weapons and medals. He loved all that sort of stuff. Exactly. He was very into weapons. But, you know, what was it like to be a person in public life? life, going through that kind of wrenching personal loss. But of course, with Ivan, he was, he was born in 2003 when I was a member of parliament,

but not leader of the opposition. And then he tragically died when I was leader of the opposition. So I was a public figure by then, but obviously not prime minister. Yeah. And, you know, I sort of tried to be as good a dad as I could. you have, as I try and explain in the book, no one who's the parent of a profoundly disabled child is, you know, we're not volunteers. We didn't know what to expect. And so I try and describe the journey of learning about the medicines and the seizures and the hospital visits

and everything else and try to sort of admit to failings as well as hopefully some of the things we did to make his life comfortable. And I wrote about it a lot because of so many other of disabled children have said it was, you know, interesting and seeing someone in the public eye dealing with these things. So I wanted to sort of write about it. But it was very difficult. Obviously, when he died, you're so much in the public eye. And you just want the world to go away and leave you in your sort of dark space thinking about it for a while. And you can't really. I think in the book, I say I probably went back to work too quickly because it's such a terrible thing to try and deal with. But the other children have been an absolute delight.

told when we had Ivan, you know, maybe we won't be able to have other children and, and you know, it might happen again. And luckily, we, we gambled and had three healthy kids who are, now two of them are impossible teenagers and going on climate change marches and all the rest of it. But we have a happy family life, I'm pleased to say. Well, and that was going to follow up as having met your children. Did it change how you looked at your balance, having lost a child? did you, you know, you seem to try to include them in your very busy schedule in life. I mean, I'm just curious as a parent how that loss might have shaped.

Well, it makes you, when you lose a child, you're, the first thing is you're always paranoid about anything happening to your other children. And so my children will tell you every time they cross the road, thereby I sort of grip their hands so firmly they can hardly move. You're, you know, but I mean, I think it makes you think a lot about how precious childhood is, how precious parent it is. And, you know, you only get to do this once. And I was, as prime minister, luckily, you know, they lived above, we all lived above the shop, as it were, so I could see them a lot. But you're determined to try and not miss too much of the childhood and to try and, you know, make sure you make the most of those precious years. It was something President Obama and I used to talk about a lot because, of course, he had two daughters and I had three kids.

And we always used to start our calls with sort of just the rundown of how the family was doing and the grief we were getting. But, no, I think, I mean, in some ways, I wish I hadn't had to resign in 2016, but in some ways not having teenagers in Downing Street. Maybe that wasn't such a bad thing. Fair enough. The book is for the record. Prime Minister David Cameron, thank you so much for doing the show. Everyone should check it out. It's in stores now.

And thank you again. Yeah, thanks for joining us. Thank you very much for having me. Thanks to Prime Minister David Cameron. Thanks to all you, the listeners, for tuning in. We know this week was a little Trump heavy. We're sick of him too. Yeah, yeah.

But like, I don't know how you get around. It's hard not to talk about Trump. We're like extorting foreign countries with anti-tank missiles in return for political dirt. So talk to you soon.