Pod Save the World - War between Russia and Ukraine, Wikileaks, Brexit and more

Episode Date: November 28, 2018

First, Tommy talks with former US Ambassador to Russia Mike McFaul about fighting between Russia and Ukraine. Then Ben Rhodes dials in to discuss the latest with Brexit, a reported meeting between Wikileaks’ Julian Assange and Trump stooge Paul Manafort, protests in France and the climate report, Saudi Arabia, and how the US caused instability in some Latin American countries.

Welcome back to POTSave the World, the post-Thanksgiving sort of hate-yourself edition. I hope everyone is doing well. You're doing okay back in the office. There's less football on. There's less food to be eaten. It's okay. We'll get over it. Lots of news to cover that happened over the last week.

So it's a two-part show today. First, I checked in with Mike McFal, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia about what the hell is going on between Russia and Ukraine. Some very scary headlines over the weekend with boats being over the last. overtaken and sailors taking captive and shots fired and just unnerving generally. So we talked through all of that. Then Ben Rhodes joins and we do just a cornucopia of fun issues in the world. Brexit to Saudi Arabia and the potential to actually get a resolution passed to cut off funding for the Civil War in Yemen, to the crazy news about Paul Manafort and Julian Assange to the upcoming G20 and then Latin America and the caravan and how the U.S. is actually at the root of a lot of the

political problems in some of the countries represented by people in the caravan. So it's a great show. One of my favorites I've done in a while, and I think you will enjoy it. So without further ado, here's the interview with Mike McVall. Mike is the author of a fantastic book on the U.S.-Russia relationship called From Cold War to Hot Peace that I highly recommend and a very close personal friend of the pod. Mike, welcome back. Yeah, thanks to being back. It's great to have you. You were the first person I thought of this weekend when I read the news because for the first time in a long time we saw overt armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine, I believe the first time since 2014, when Russian special forces invaded

Crimea. The Russians opened fire on a Ukrainian Navy vessels. They rammed a tugboat. They seized three vessels and 23 sailors and closed down access to a shared waterway called the Kurchstrait, which connects the Black Sea to the Sea of Azov, which I totally knew that before I googled it this morning. Mike, how worried were you? when you woke up to this news, and do you think this was a planned event or a tactical interaction that went south? Well, your second question is a harder question. I don't know the answer to that. Was it planned or just kind of happened? You know, I think I and many other people have been watching this conflict, Simmer, anticipated that someday there would be a test where Russia is trying to assert its sovereignty over this territory that you just described, right, and over the sea. and claiming this is now Russian territory,

and those ships that go through that straight have to abide by their protocols, their alleged protocols. It was pretty dramatic. If you've watched the video, it's a dramatic, you know, they're hitting this boat, and if you speak Russian like I do, it's a good practice for all your swear words that you learned when you were 20 years old

because these guys are really worked up, the Russians, you know, in this attack mode. And so that's what happened there. I think if you go to the Kremlin, you know, Putin is now testing Ukraine. He's testing NATO. He's testing the West. He's seeing what he can get away with. It's pretty familiar to me. It's the way he operates, right? He prods and prods and sees what he can get away with. And so this is the next iteration in that prodding game. Yeah. I was watching some videos this morning. Putin recently inaugurated a $7.5 billion bridge across the Kerch Strait that now connects Russia and Crimea, the symbolism was so important that Putin himself drove a construction truck across the bridge on the day it opened and gave some remarks. Why is access to these waterways so important to the Russians into their broader claims to Crimea? Well, you're right about how important that

bridge was to Putin. And it's important because it's a direct way to connect from Russia, the Russian Federation that the world recognizes, and to Crimea. You know, before there was no direct connection between Crimea and the Russian Federation. This bridge provides that, you know, before you had to go through Ukraine to get to Crimea. And that's why they now having it, they are asserting for, you know, national security reasons. They have to protect this bridge against potential espionage and sabotage and terrorist attacks from Ukrainians. But if you look at the map, you know, your listeners, what you'll see is that you can't get to certain Ukrainian in port cities without going through that straight and under that, you know,

multi-billion dollar bridge that Putin built. And so over the long run, that's going to create real economic problems for Ukraine if they can't have open passage through that straight. Right, because Putin can just park a big tanker there and suddenly it's blocked, right? Right. That's what he did. I mean, that's, you know, it's pretty narrow straight. Yeah.

And that's what he did that helped to provoke this crisis. He is clever. So over on the Ukrainian side, the President Poroshenko delivered. a speech to parliament declaring martial law that apparently starts Wednesday and goes for a month. I think he walked that back from two months, which is a guess good. He also said he had intelligence about Russian preparation for a ground offensive, which is not good. What did you make a Poroshenko's reaction? And do you share the concerns I'm seeing about him calling for martial law? Well, I was surprised by martial law because there was not martial law back when Russia invaded in

2014. At the same time, you know, far be it for me to sit in Palo Alto and judge what the president of Ukraine should do for defending their national security. He's obviously got intelligence that I don't have about that threat. What I thought was good, I actually think yesterday was a good day for Ukraine democracy in that the president said, we needed martial law, you know, and people thought, well, this is going to threaten the scheduling of the presidential election, which is scheduled for March of next year. And yet, through a deliberative process, they reached a compromise in the parliament yesterday. You know, that's democracy at work, as far as I'm concerned. So I thought it was a good outcome, and I hope that the warnings of a Russian military invasion

were, you know, just hyperbole. But, you know, I'm not going to judge a guy sitting in Kiev with intelligence that I don't have. Yeah, me either. So let's judge a bunch of bozos in Washington. That's closer to home. Much easier. Trump's response was typical and frustrating. He did a brief pool spray where he refused to condemn Russia specifically saying, quote, we do not like what's happening either way, end quote. At the UN, Nikki Haley was tougher, although she's leaving soon. She called Russia's actions a violation of international law, and quote, an arrogant act that the international community must condemn and will never accept. Good. Pompeo condemned the act and called it a dangerous escalation and violation of international law. Curious what you made of the U.S. response and what tools you think we have at our disposal to respond beyond, I guess, statements and whatever Trump's decides to say to Putin on the margins of the upcoming G20 summit in Argentina. Well, I mean, reading the words of Ambassador Haley or the words put out under Secretary Pompeo's name, I agree with those statements. But they're undermined when the president of the United States says something differently. And, you know, this is a familiar pattern now when it comes to Trump and Russia.

The Trump administration seems to have one policy, but the president himself has another. And it is incredible how consistent he has been and avoiding any criticism of Vladimir Putin. I mean, you know, years and years and years it is now going on. And remember, this is a president that changes his mind and contradicts himself fairly frequently, but not when it comes to Putin. And so, you know, the Russian media, of course, picked up on that. They're saying, you know, we were happy, I think, is what Channel 1 said, with the equivocation of the president that shows that he doesn't really want a crisis here.

And I think it's a good lesson for people that words matter in diplomacy, as you may remember, Tommy, when we used to put out these words at the White House. And remember all the drama people used to have about at what level the statement was at and whether was the White House or the State Department? Well, it matters. What the White House says. Yeah, it was an absolute nightmare editing those things until they're ready to go out. You're right.

But it matters whether or not it comes from the White House or not. The whole world and most certainly the Kremlin is looking to see what the president says. And when given the chance to say something really simple, like we honor and defend and the territorial integrity of Ukraine, You know, not that complex. He whiffed. He couldn't say it. He totally whiffed. I just saw a quote from John Bolton saying that Trump and Putin's meeting on the margins of the G20 will be a continuation of the Helsinki summit. So that's not great.

That's not what I want to do. Oh, that's the great news. I mean, that's the problem. So it's a great point. Like, I'm not against presidents, Democrats, or Republicans engaging with authoritarian regimes and enemies of the United States. That is something one has to do in order to advance American national interest. The problem with Trump is that he doesn't seem capable of delivering a strong message when it comes to Putin. And we don't need any more continuations of Helsinki.

I mean, Helsinki was a complete disaster in that he stood next to Putin and he defended Putin and did not defend our intelligence community. And then just to remind your listeners, that's the somewhat where he said, be a great idea to hand me over to the Russians. So maybe I take it a little personal, but, you know, so far President Trump has proved incapable of advancing American national interests when he's next to Vladimir Putin. If the meeting goes forward, I hope it'll be different in Argentina, but we don't need a continuation of Helsinki. We need something different. Yeah. Well, I'm very glad they didn't hand you over. I'm very glad that the Russians didn't get control of Interpol, which is, I guess, a conversation

for another day. But seeing that our president never fails to whiff when it comes to Russia, do you think there's a chance that the UN or NATO will be able to take meaningful action that will actually deter Russia in situations like this? UN is unlikely, of course, because Russia has a veto on the Security Council there. NATO, I think, has made the right statements, and I hope that individual NATO countries will provide more military assistance to Ukraine. And then I think the U.S. Congress should step up. There are several bills already that have been tabled for new sanctions against Russia that was before the elections. It all got frozen because of the elections. But if the president proves

unable to take more coercive actions, I think the U.S. Congress should push those bills forward and dare the president to veto them. Yeah, that would be great to see. Final question. It's been four years since Russia annexed Crimea and helped create this rebellion in eastern Ukraine. The issue is dropped from the headlines, but I mean, the fighting has been ongoing between the Russians and the Russian-backed separatists ever since. And according to news reports, 10,000 people have died. 1.7 million have been displaced. Millions more need urgent assistance. I mean, there was supposed to have been the Minsk agreement in 2015 that brokered a ceasefire, which has been violated countless times, and I'm supposed to resolve this, but none of it's been enacted. What do you think it

takes to actually resolve this crisis? Like, what is missing diplomatically? Well, I'm not optimistic because I think Putin sees it in his interest to just keep this thing going. And our instruments of leverage are weak. So that's my baseline. Having said that, I referred to these bills that are floating around both on the Senate and congressional side, the House of Representatives side for new sanctions. And I think you have to increase sanctions for, you know, lack of momentum on Minsk, right? So there's this notion that we've got to wait for them to do something negative.

in order to increase sanctions. I actually think it's the converse that continued occupation of eastern Ukraine is the predicate and that should be the trigger for new escalatory sanctions. And you keep doing that, even if Putin doesn't change his behavior, right? There's this long discussion in my world. Well, sanctions aren't effective. They're not working. And I think sometimes you just have to have punishment for crimes. These are crimes. These are international crimes, including what just happened 48 hours ago. And for crimes, there have to be punishments, even if it doesn't alter Putin's behavior in the short run.

Yeah. Mike, I wish you were still sitting in Moscow as the ambassador. This would be, I feel a little better about what's happening. But thank you for helping explain this to me because, you know, I guess I'm not as nervous as I was when I woke up this weekend and read about, you know, shipshooting in each other, right? That's a good thing. Maybe we walked it back.

They walked it back today. But, you know, Tommy, I think there's a real possible. at some point in the future that this kind of low-level simmering conflict will become hot, and Putin's going to dare us to try to stop it. And I'm worried about it. I want to be clear, we dodged the bullets, and literally Ukrainians dodged some bullets today a couple of days ago, but this hasn't been resolved. It's not going away. Well, now I'm terrified again, so thank you all over. Keep terrified. And let's keep talking.

I appreciate it, man. Thank you again. Okay. Talk to Zip. Thanks for having me. Bye. On the line from a beautiful hotel in Houston, Texas is Ben Rhodes, co-hosts, Pod Save the World, friend of the pod, known globally, and my buddy. How you doing? Good, good, Tommy. Are you still there from Thanksgiving stuff?

I was in New York. Got it. I came down here for a book event, I have to say. There were some friends of the pod at my book event last night, as there have been everywhere. So thanks for coming out. And going to see our former president, Barack Obama tonight here in Houston. That's awesome. I don't know why I thought you would do Thanksgiving in Houston,

because you went to Rice. That doesn't make any sense. But hey, here we are. Ben, lots of fun stuff to catch up on. So I'm just going to let rip if that's cool with you. Yeah, go for it. All right. So December 11th, looming crisis.

The British Parliament will vote on Theresa May's Brexit deal. I read today that she is apparently launching a national campaign to try to persuade the voters and MPs, but even the Brexit secretary saying this is going to be a challenge to get her deal passed. Meanwhile, the EU is saying that this is the best. best deal that the UK is going to get, so you better pass it or else God knows what happens. No one, none of the political prognosticators over and Britain seem to know what the hell's going on. What's your read on the state of Brexit and the stakes of this vote for the UK, for us, the global economy, everyone involved.

Yeah, well, it can't be said enough to begin with that the reason she's in this bind is because everybody who led the Brexit campaign essentially lied to the British people about the fact that they could leave the EU and still have some of the benefits of the common market at EU, not have to pay money as a part of their exit. Somehow they said it would lead to more money for the National Health Service. All of those things have been proven to be wrong. And, you know, unlike the lies in our own politics, the requirements of Brexit demand that, you know, those lies be revealed because essentially the EU is never going to agree to the kind of terms

that the Brexit campaign put forward. So now May has a bind in that she's got the best deal she could get from the EU. It's not a very good deal for the British people. There's almost no chance that the British Parliament is going to approve her deal. And so then the question becomes, what does she do next? There's a March deadline to decide what they're going to do about Brexit. Without any deal, if they go forward and leaving the European Union, there's just massive uncertainty in economic shocks that could come with that

because they'll essentially lose everything that they have under the current arrangement with nothing in place. right and there's actually like medicine being stockpiled in the UK for this and food because they don't know if they'd be able to get those things uh... and the aftermath of what is called a hard Brexit i think Tommy the growing sense in the UK is there might need to be a second vote on this and they call it a people's vote essentially on whatever the terms are to leave Brexit and then potentially on

whether brexit should go forward at all so the political reality is no deal seems to be good enough to make it through the british parliament And then they're going to be faced with this question of revisiting Brexit in the first place or potentially being left with the worst of all worlds, which is a hard Brexit. Oh, Jesus. This does feel like something that could royal already kind of sensitive markets at the moment, no?

Yeah, no, absolutely. And London is obviously like a center of global finance and the British economy would suffer enormously in the hard Brexit and there'd be reverberations. you know, one of the things I think gets underappreciated is any number of economic shocks are there on the horizon in the global economy. And, you know, any one of those could trigger, you know, the potential for a global slowdown or recession here in the U.S. So this is one of those things to watch. Yeah. I mean, God, remember how much time we spent worrying about Greece's economy? Imagine the UK multiply that by a few thousand times and that's the concern here. But the UK isn't the only

European country dealing with a bunch of turmoil over the weekend. Thousands of protesters known as yellow jackets, protested gas tax increases across France. So far, President Macron has refused to walk back the gas tax hike saying that that short-term pain is needed to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels. You know, the mood music here is that France is a very high tax country. Gas is really expensive and there's this broader class-based anger. But I raise it because it does sort of painfully show the major political challenges world leaders face when they try to take meaningful steps to deal with climate change. And you and I haven't talked since the Trump administration tried to bury their recent climate report.

So I was wondering what you thought about that report, the global political implications and really national security implications. Yeah, well, you know, first of all, got to give it to the French, the yellow jackets. They do protest with a certain amount of style. They do. But, you know, it is a sign, you know, in some of the accompanying information with the climate report,

what is also clear is that none of the major economies are meeting their emissions reductions targets. So even the ambition in the Paris Agreement is proving difficult for the major economies to reach. And that's a lot harder when the U.S. is willfully leaving Paris and kind of reducing our own efforts to meet our commitments. Ultimately, the basis for the Paris Agreement was that everybody's got to do this together, and everybody's got to take hard choices together. And it's that much harder for an individual political leader to do the difficult things necessary to reduce emissions and deal with the climate crisis,

if there's not a sense that the U.S. and China and India and others are doing this as well. So it's both, I think, a signal of how difficult it is to pursue policies like a gas tax. It's even that much more difficult if you're doing this in isolation. At a certain point, though, everybody does have to get in this together because as that report highlights, the impacts for our economy and our society are profound, But when you magnify that around the world, if you think the current refugee crisis is bad, the potentially hundreds of millions of climate refugees that we could be facing in the next couple of generations, the conflicts, you know, the Syrian Civil War, for instance, and many researchers believe that climate change droughts contributed to the fighting in that conflict,

you could see similar conflicts in the most vulnerable parts of the world in Africa and the Middle East and Asia. So it's hard to show political will, but tragically, it's necessary. Yeah. Do you think it helps when the President of the United States says, I don't believe it? Yeah, it's not the most helpful thing. Unbelievable. I mean, we had to, in the Obama years, you know, just to get China and India in on the deal, it took an American president kind of putting all of his diplomatic focus on this.

Now, when you have a President of the United States thing isn't believe in climate change, you're kind of giving a path to, you know, ironically, Trump always says he wants countries, to do more. We want China and India to do more to fight climate change. He's giving those countries a pass by what he's saying. Yeah, it is truly infuriating. A couple of big updates on Saudi Arabia that I guess are related. The first reports that the White House is refusing to allow CIA director Gina Haspel to brief the Senate about Jamal Khashoggi's murder. Instead, they want to send Secretary Pompeo and Mattis, which makes no sense. Haspel has been running point on dealing with the Turks, dealing with the Saudis collecting information. She's the obvious person

to brief them. This is an intel question. This decision comes after a bunch of senators, one on the record contradicting Trump's statement about Mohammed bin Salman's involvement in Keshoggi's murder. Second, Senator Bob Corker says he expects the Senate to vote this week on a resolution to end our involvement in the Saudi-led war in Yemen. This is actually a big shift for Corker and why I think the two may be related because he seems pretty fed up. Do you think there's a chance that Congress can get done a resolution of some sort to cut off military support to the Saudis that they're using in Yemen? Yeah, I think the Senate could pass this resolution this week. It got 44 votes the last time it came up. Corker and some others have indicated they're willing to shift.

So you could have a resolution passing the Senate calling for an end to U.S. support for the Saudi war in Yemen. It'd be a huge deal. It'd be a rebuke of the administration and be a message to the Saudis and their allies in the UAE that the opinion in the United States has shifted. Hopefully it could bring about an end of fighting so humanitarian assistance can get into Yemen where millions and millions of people are at risk of famine. It's unlikely to pass the House with the current leadership, but it could be taken up in the next session by a Democratic House, and you could see the beginning of an effort by Congress to say that this blank check to Saudi Arabia is unsustainable. I think you make the bright point about Gina Haspel, you know, unlike the State Department, the CIA, the Director of National

Intelligence are supposed to be able to appear before Congress. kind of offer the depoliticized, unvarnished view of the intelligence community, which suggests, you know, if reporting is right, that Mohammed and Salman was responsible for this, they're kind of not subtle in their effort to cover this up by having her not go. I mean, Tommy, can you imagine if there was a comparable global event in our administration and we had instructed John Brennan not to appear before Congress to share his finding? The articles of impeachment would be in the mail by now. I don't know if you saw this, Ben, because I think it just happened.

But Sarah Sanders briefed today, which is notable because it's like the first one she's done in a month, which just blows my mind that they don't brief the press anymore. But she had John Bolton come ostensibly to preview the G20 summit this weekend in Argentina, and he was asked whether he listened to the tape of Khashoggi being murdered. And he said basically, no, why would I listen to the tape? It's in Arabic. Yeah, well, there are these things in the U.S. government, these capabilities. called translators.

So I think the National Security Advisor would be able to get their hands on someone who could translate Arabic to English. Not that you need much translation to understand an audio tape of a brutal murder. I think it shows the base cynicism of this administration that they don't even care to examine the evidence. They basically made a decision to absolve Maham bin Salman.

There's a pretty chilling article to Tommy me that David Ignatius just posted that details how the kind of Game of Thrones mentality in the Saudi World Family from MBS contributed to the Khashoggi murder, how he had attempted to render people to Saudi Arabia in the past. And very importantly notes that there's this meeting that Jared Kushner had with MBS late last year that seemed to come right before the crackdown on the writs in this effort to start to detain dissidents abroad, detain women's rights advocates at home, I think once again, people need to be looking at what the hell Jared Kushner was talking to MBS about, what kind of deals he might have made, what kind of money might have gone into

his property at 666 Fifth Avenue from Saudi Arabia. So, like, a lot of questions remain unanswered here. But the easiest question to answer might be what the Arabic translation of the audio tape is that's sitting on John Bolton's desk. Yeah, I just, you know, this is the serious version of POTSA of America sometimes. But we can't stress enough what an asshole John Bolton is. I mean, the guy is just more comfortable manipulating intelligence that takes us into a rock and he won't listen to an audio tape that would tell him definitively what happened in that room that day. I get, if you don't want to listen to something because it's horrific and you don't want it to haunt you for the rest of your life, I get that.

That's okay. It's understandable. But the way these guys are just covering this thing up on behalf of MBS is disgraceful. Yeah. And it's just a total side note here, Tommy. You were in the White House press office for a period of time. I mean, what percentage of your job was preparing for that press briefing? Because my question is, like, what the hell is these people doing in the absence of a press briefing? Like, what do they do in the White House press office all day? I think in, yeah, like we would wake up in the morning, figure out what was in the news, prepare guidance that for us, national security side was prepared with the NFC staff, was cleared with agencies, like hundreds of people saw this stuff before it was ever spoken. I think all that time

is just them chasing down Trump tweets. Like, I honestly did. Yeah. A bunch of bozos. So, weirdest story of the day. The Guardian reported that Trump's goon, Paul Manafort, secretly met several times with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, including right around when he started running Trump's campaign. This would be a huge deal, given WikiLeaks his role in releasing all the Democratic emails. Manafort's denying it. WikiLeaks strongly denying it.

I have to be honest that when I read this, it seemed dubious to me because I assume that Brits and a whole bunch of other intelligence services, know exactly who goes in and out of that building every day and who meets with Assange, and this would have leaked long ago. But it also comes on the heels of Bob Mueller saying Manafort has committed more crimes by continuing to lie to him. There was a report by CNN that said that Mueller has been asking about conversation between Manafort and leaders in Ecuador. So who knows? But what did you make of this report? Well, you know, we obviously don't know, and you're right that if he did go into that embassy, somebody would absolutely know about it. It's got to be one of the

most heavily scrutinized embassy entrances in London, if not the world. I mean, it does point to two things. You know, one, just the cozeness of Julian Assange in general. I mean, we know at a minimum, you know, Roger Stone was in touch with him for the Trump people. This is a guy who even before the Russian invention, had basically made it his single-moded mission to undermine. And the United States, back when the Republican Party used to like to criticize Obama, they basically beat us up for not doing enough to go after Julian Assange. And now, you know, we have the possibility that, you know, they were directly colluding with him to undermine American democracy, their Trump campaign. I think it points the second thing, Tommy, though, which is if you look at

Trump's body language, if you look at how Mueller has worked from the outside in kind of rolling up people like Manafort and Gates and turning his attention to stone. You know, there's a sense I have that Mueller has some information that is pretty clear cut. You know, if this happened, Mueller would know about it. It just trumps nervousness, his tweets lashing out as we approach the endgame of this investigation, the confluence of Manafort, you know, apparently lying to Mueller at the same time that Mueller got Trump's answers.

you know, it's pretty obvious that Bob Mueller knows a lot, and Bob Mueller knows things that we don't know, and Bob Mueller knows things that Trump is really freaked out about. And you kind of got to feel like there's a shoe to drop here that is a pretty concrete evidence pointing at collusion. And everybody's just kind of waiting to see what it is. I just found a shoe. We started recording this at 1 p.m. This just posted at 1257. Two months before WikiLeaks released stolen emails from the Clinton campaign, Jerome Corsi, right-wing lunatic, sent an email to Roger Stone, anticipating the document dump, according to draft court papers attained by NBC News. Quote, word is friend in embassy plans two more dumps,

Corsi wrote on August 2, 2016, referring to Julian Assange. One shortly after I'm back, second in October, impact plan to be very damaging. So that feels like a smoking gun. Well, there we go. like real-time podcast in your time. I'm now sympathetic to the Pod Save America dilemma of the recording time. But yeah, no, this is the thing. I mean, this is what we've been talking about all along.

I mean, whether or not there was foreknowledge and coordination for the timing of those WikiLeaks dumps. And here's why this is so important, okay, to take a step back, those emails that were dumped in October sought to make a case about Hillary Clinton's corruption. Remember that? That was the drip, drip, drip that the U.S. media followed, that, you know, seemed to, you know, push a narrative that Hillary Clinton and her speeches on Wall Street and some of her dealings in the foundation was corrupt. The Trump campaign's closing argument in the campaign was about Hillary Clinton's corruption. It was entirely similar to, if not coordinated with those WikiLeaks dumps, right? So this is not just a matter of like, oh, maybe we got a heads up. It could have been that the the Trump campaign's closing argument was coordinated with the actions of foreign power in dumping out these emails, that the creation of all the fake news by the Russians was meant to reinforce those themes that was also reinforced by right-wing media like Breitbart. So again, we're not just talking about some crazy coincidence and some grifters like Jerome Corsey and Roger Stone, perhaps having a heads up.

This could be an indication that the entire Trump campaign strategy was built in part around a coordinated effort with Russian intelligence and WikiLeaks to push certain narratives about Hillary Clinton. That's a gigantic deal. That's not just like, oh, this is a coincidence and this crazy thing happened with Russians. That could suggest that this really was a criminal conspiracy to coordinate with a foreign power to undermine American democracy. Yeah, this is a huge deal. And just because Jerome Corsey and Roger Stone are fringe idiots doesn't mean that they weren't directly involved in this. It doesn't mean they haven't been involved at the highest levels of power for a very long time, especially Roger Stone. He's a creep, but an operator that's been around forever.

Well, they're fringe idiots, but there's fringe idiots running our government every day. Fair enough. Fair enough. Seb Gorka used to work there. Never forget. Back to our nerdy substance here. The G20 is later this week in Argentina, as we talked about before. The Guardian is reporting that the Argentinians are considering charges against the Saudi crown prince, Muhammad bin Salman, if he attends. So that would be exciting if they arrested the Crown Prince. But the main event is still the fact that Trump is going to meet with President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the summit. Apparently, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, he renewed his threat to increase tariffs on Chinese goods from 10 to 25 percent. This doesn't feel good, Ben. Like, Trump hasn't really

left the Chinese much of an off ramp in these negotiations. No. And, you know, what's clear about this trade war is Trump, you know, went down this road. of imposing these tariffs without much of a strategy about where he was trying to go and what he was trying to get here. And the Chinese responded in kind. What we see already is these tariffs having negative impacts on American workers that GM is closing plants down in the United States in part because of the uncertainty generated by these tariffs. U.S. farmers, particularly soybean farmers, are suffering dramatic losses. The very voters that Trump promised to help, right, these forgotten men and women of America,

America that he talked about, who worked in plants or on farms, are the ones suffering in his trade war. And he seems to have no idea what the endgame is here. And even if you support getting tougher on China, there's smarter ways of doing that than just slapping tariffs down, which he apparently doesn't even understand. If you look at his interview with the Wall Street Journal, he couldn't tell the difference between a tariff and an interest rate. Oh, good. Which, you know, I'm not an economics graduate student that I have some idea about, you know. So, you know, I think the danger, the tariff story has been a bit underappreciated, the danger this trade war escalates, more Americans suffer.

And again, another thing that could help trigger an economic slowdown, inflation, a recession in the U.S., you know, these are very real possibilities. And Trump, if anything, appears to be in way over his head here in dealing with the Chinese. Yeah. And we've lost all the stock market gains to date this year. So, again, this is a delicate situation. All right. Last thing, and bear with me here, listener, because we'll take a little bit of a setup.

So there's this right-wing creep named Eric Erickson, who is a truly vile political blogger, commenter, who for some reason gets invited on Meet the Press all the time, and it's just appalling. So last night, he tweeted that the U.S. should find and prop up the next generation of Pinochet types in Latin America, referring to Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator. For some context here, Pinochet's death squads famously through. prisoners out of helicopters, a tactic. Erickson said he hoped would be replicated. He literally tweeted that.

I raised this not just to dunk on an awful idiot, but because it's the kind of comment that underscores how little the far right and the media has learned from and talks about the ways the U.S. screwed up many of the countries that people in the caravan are trying to escape. So, Ben, I was hoping you could take us through a bit of that history because you worked on this stuff a lot, especially in places. like Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Yeah, I mean, again, the mentality that the U.S. should go into a lot of America and kind of

install our own dictators and metal non-American politics did a lot to completely screw up these Central American governments in the 1980s, right? I mean, you remember the Iran-Contra scandal, the Contras that we were funding in Central America, right? Again, helped to lead to violence and civil war and instability. death squads that we supported in a number of Central American countries. We had to formally apologize for the role of American death squads in Guatemala. You had American-backed death squads in El Salvador. You had American-backed contras in Nicaragua. And so the political dysfunction

in these countries, much of it roots back to the 1980s when geniuses like Eric Erickson were avidly cheering on the Reagan administration in its anti-communist efforts, its funding for contrast, it's funding for right-wing death squads in Central America. You know, this helped breed the violence and instability that has continued for decades and the corruption in those countries and helped fuel migration that has gone on for decades from those countries. So Eric Erickson, if nothing else, offered a convenient reminder that, you know, the U.S. has some, you know, load of responsibility to bear.

for what was done in these Central American countries and the conditions that continue to prevail that drive people to seek asylum. And remember, people seeking asylum aren't just people trying to come here illegally. They're trying to go through a legal process and to get to our border and say, look, here's the risk I face at home from gang violence or from drug-fueled violence in these countries. So, again, Eric Erickson is basically reminding everybody, yeah, we used to have politics. he's supporting murderous dictators like Pinochet or murderous death squads in Central America. Thanks for the useful history lesson and reminding us Eric Erickson that the U.S. played a role

in breaking some of these countries from which these migrants are coming. Yeah. And part of his point was for just a fraction of the cost of the wall, we could invest in these dictators, essentially. But they never take that logic and go to the next step, which would actually maybe make sense, which to say, assistance, programs, development, governance support, to improve conditions in the countries that people are leaving so that they would want to stay. Like, I don't understand how they could think that spending on dictators is okay, but spending on making countries a better place for an aid is horrible. It's so illogical. Yeah, it's a hugely important point because to put in context, at the end of the Obama administration, we put together a billion dollar package in the aftermath of the unaccompanied children coming here from Central America in 2014. a billion dollar package to improve governance, to improve security.

But by the way, we know that this kind of approach can work because we did it over many years in Colombia and to dramatically reduce levels of violence in that country, dramatically increased economic growth. Obviously, that cut down on migration to the U.S. from Colombia, right? It's a tourist destination. Yeah, exactly. The Trump administration has cut that funding, of course. Now, to put this in context, Trump wants $5 billion for his wall.

So he already wants five times more than one. we were aiming to spend to reduce the flows of these immigrants to build a wall that's not going to actually get built, that's not going to solve the problem. So it's a lot cheaper, actually, to spend some money to improve governance, to improve security in these countries than it is to throw money at a wall that's never going to get built. It's a lot more morally acceptable than tear-gassing people coming to the border. It's a lot more legally acceptable than trying to deny people the right to pursue political asylum when they get here. It's, you know, common sense suggests that less money spent on prevention of migration is a lot better investment

than pouring good money after bad at the border. Yeah. Eric Erickson, man, an actual, like, conservative thought leader who says that his views are informed by his faith, suggesting that we should prop up dictators to throw political prisoners out of helicopters. That is who meet the press invites on their shows, and that is who people are listening to in the conservative, I don't know, wherever they listen. Yeah, that's their thing thing. Just like Tom Delay and Rickson-Toram, we're going on CNN to tell us about how scientists get paid to report on class. Yeah, or Daniel Plek, who works at AEI, a organization funded mostly by Exxon, but, you know, no use of disclosing that to the viewers. Ben, thank you for doing the show.

I look forward to you getting back in Los Angeles soon, and next week we can do this in the studio. Yeah, I'll be in the studio this month. I'm really excited about it. All right, buddy. soon. Travel safe. All right, man. See you. Thanks again for tuning in. POT save the world. If you like this episode, please share it and rate and review us in the iTunes store and look forward to talk with you guys next week.