Pod Save the World - WTF is happening with Ukraine?

Episode Date: January 26, 2022

Tommy and Ben cover the latest news about a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine, a coup in Burkina Faso, fighting in Yemen and the UAE, why the clock is ticking for the Iran deal, a new cabinet in Chile, New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern cancels her wedding, news about Havana syndrome, more trouble for party enthusiast and British PM Boris Johnson, buying the bitcoin dip in El Salvador, and Mike Pompeo seeks help. Then Tommy talks with Peter Beinart about the history of NATO expansion and how it may have made Putin more aggressive.Pod Save America is vaxxed, boosted, and headed back on the road! Join Tommy, Jon, Jon, and Dan on the road for Pod Save America (A)live And On Tour. Get tickets & learn more: crooked.com/events.Listener presales: January 25 at 10 am local time through January 27 (code CROOKED)General onsale: January 28 at 10 am local timeFor a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast. 

Welcome back to POTA of the World. I'm Ben Rhodes. I'm Tommy Vitor. Wow. We're switching it up. Ben, I just wrote down football banter. Some of the best games I've ever seen my life. I don't even really know what to say.

All I want to say is I want to send love to our listeners in Buffalo, to all fans of the Buffalo Bills. Yeah. Heartbreaking loss. Your 25-year-old quarterback played a perfect game and lost your defense. Tough down the end. But here's... I don't feel that bad. I don't feel that bad because they have Josh Allen for a decade.

You have a... Josh Allen for a decade. San Darno before Josh Allen draft. So I thought about that this week. Listen, I know non-sports fans just endorse. One of the most fun things in sports is when there's a draft. And some fan base knows the player they took ahead of all the really good ones. Like the most famous one is Michael Jordan.

Yeah. Not going first overall, but it's the best. It's just like the deepest well of it. Never get over it. Never get over it. Never get out of it. Well, Ben, today's show is more action-packed than an NFL divisional round game. Oh, is the transition I wrote. We're going to spend a bunch of time talking about Russia and Ukraine, including with our guest today, Peter Beinart, who wrote a fascinating piece about how NATO expansion may or may not be a factor in Putin's aggression towards Ukraine, but even more interestingly, how the topic itself of NATO expansion went from controversial

to just kind of like unquestioned. Yeah. And this is why I like Peter so much, because he is someone who is like hand up. I made a huge mistake supporting the Iraq war. And from now on I will question every assumption and question all my mistakes. And he does that here and sort of like takes on these these sacred cows. You should check out his Bynart Notebook on Substack,

excellent substack. I've been in the exclusive content. Get out of here. For the Bynard Substack, yes. Well, literally we booked him on the show because he wrote such a great piece on Monday, so it's definitely worth subscribing. Also, we are going to talk about

the coup in Burkina Faso, Yemen, the UAE, the Iran deal, Chile, New Zealand Prime Minister Dissinda Ardern, and Havana syndrome. And finally, we will check in with our friend Boris Johnson over the United Kingdom, as quite literally, as we discussed last week, addicted to partying. We're going to see how day trading is going for Naïbukele, the authoritarian president of El Salvador. And then a little more details come out about Mike Pompeo's glow up. But before we get to the news. If you like leaving your home, Potta of America is going back on tour this spring, allegedly. Our listener pre-sale is happening now through Thursday. Before tickets go on sales to the general public, you can use the promo code Crooked. For a full list of dates and for more information,

go to crooked.com slash events. It'll be fun to leave the house. I still think we need a world or world tour. I'm down. In part so I can travel. Let's go throw a party for Boris Johnson. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we should do that. That's an obvious one. A garden party. Yeah, in the good of Australia, yeah. Go to McDonald's. Yeah, go to McDonald's.

Yeah, go to New Zealand. Yeah. Done, planned. Someone help us, you know, make this happen. Yeah, invite us. Okay, Ben, so a ton has happened with Ukraine since we talked last week. I'm going to do a quick summary, and then we just, let's talk about whatever case you want.

So a bunch of news outlets reported that Biden is considering sending several thousand additional U.S. troops to Eastern Europe to buttress NATO allies in the region. Other NATO countries are sending military hardware like fighter jets. and ships. Again, this is not U.S. troops to Ukraine. This is to NATO allies in the region. So just to clarify that. The State Department is urging U.S. citizens to leave Ukraine, and they've ordered the evacuation of the families of State Department employees serving in the capital. Those moves have seemingly exacerbated a little bit of a split in opinion between U.S. officials who think an invasion from the Russians is imminent and people in Ukraine who are a little

more blasé and think Putin is bluffing. Interesting split there. Department of Homeland Security is warning that the Russian response to a U.S. response to a Russian invasion of Ukraine. If all that, could be a cyber attack against the U.S. homeland. I don't know what anyone is supposed to do with that information. Now we know. Get two-factor. Change your password. Changes passwords.

On Saturday night, the British government released a statement that said Russia is planning a coup, like literally developing plans to install a pro-Russian leader in Ukraine. The Financial Times reported that the U.S. and the EU are converging on a set of sanctions. They would enact if Russia invaded that would cripple Russian banks, focus on the energy sector. A lot of Republicans and Ukrainian officials are calling for Biden to preemptively sanction Russia and not wait for invasion. I'll be honest. I don't totally get that. Ben, what do you think of this consolidation around sanctions on energy, on Russia's banks, and this sort of preemptive call?

So the sanctions thing is interesting because the most notable thing out of that press conference Biden did was the reference to divisions inside of NATO that I think really about the severity of sanctions and the type of sanctions. And there are a couple of angles to this. I mean, the first is that Russia gets a lot of its revenue, obviously, from energy. they supply 40% of European gas. And so therefore, if we impose the more maximalist energy sanctions, let's say cut off Russian gas flowing in Europe,

that's obviously going to have the huge hit on the European economy. It's also going to drive up global energy prices. It's going to drive up prices at the pump on top of inflation. People could fucking freeze to death. Yeah. And so what you have is a circumstance where all of the political leaders who are essential to sanctions are, are not necessarily in the position that you would want to be in to absorb that blow.

So Joe Biden is heading into a very difficult midterm election year with inflationary pressure. And obviously, if he takes a hit, further hit to energy prices on top of that on behalf of Ukraine, you know, that's going to be tricky for him. But it feels like, you know, he's made that decision. the German chancellor who clearly Germany's clearly been the more reticent, you know, ally to impose sanctions, not always Germany not providing weapons to Ukraine, but they've literally prevented Estonia from shipping German-made weapons to Ukraine. They're taking a pretty reticent stance.

This is a new chancellor, though. I mean, imagine you finally get sworn in, you know, here you are. You're measuring the drapes. You're in the office. And it's like, oh, now I'm supposed to take a massive energy hit. to deal with this crisis. Macron is running for re-election. Remember how much the French people enjoyed rising gas prices with the yellow vest.

Oh, yeah, they loved it. And Boris Johnson is partying, right? So this is not the perfect political circumstance. I mean, I'm always hesitant to like ascribe design to Putin's strategies, but whether he intended it or not, this is like a pretty good time to try to exploit divisions amongst these allies on sanctions. I guess you got a lot of chances that a lot of chances. divided Europe, you know, they're kind of all over the place. Yeah. Now there are, and the thing is, I remember 2014 when we had to impose sanctions on

Russia to deter further movement into Ukraine. Like they had sent these special forces and this military hardware into eastern Ukraine with these separatists. And there was concern then that that might be foreshadowing a bigger invasion. So we do these sanctions. The Europeans, you know, were very hard to bring along. The only reason we got, there is because basically Obama and Merkel got it done. You know, Merkel whipped some of the Europeans and Obama whipped some of the other ones and we got some pretty significant sanctions on Russia. Obviously not enough to get Putin out of Ukraine, but maybe it, you know, deterred further action. And so one of the questions I add is who is the European leader that Joe Biden is closest to?

I don't know. I think he did like a quad call the other day. He did a quad call, but it's interesting that, you know, French Germans. It was clearly Obama miracle. That was like the partnership. You know, he's got Macron. He's got the new guy Schultz. Like, and so one of the things I want to watch in the coming weeks is, is there a European? And Macron is probably the most likely one who kind of emerges as Joe Biden's partner in this.

But and do they see things eye to eye? That's one question. A second thing to look at. You want a bromance narrative. I mean, you want a buddy comedy with Joe and somebody. I mean, you just, you do need. You need a partner. Yeah, you've got all these different views inside the EU.

you need to identify the kind of core group essentially, right? The second thing is how are they going to deal with this energy question? If that's the way to impose maximum pain, now they've been putting out that they're going to try to backfill European energy supply in the event of these sanctions going into force or in the event of Russia cutting off things. And so what you're hearing out of the administration is they're going to increase natural gas supplies from the United States. Right.

They're going to get Qatar and some other Middle Eastern providers to ramp up production to Europe. You know, that's a smart strategy. I think people should be clear. That can minimize and kind of cushion some of this. It can't take the place of the infrastructure that is already built to bring Russian energy into Europe. You know, you need distribution mechanisms. You need terminals. You need literal pipelines that go from Russia through Ukraine.

So that's smart that they're doing that. but it's not going to fully make up for what would go offline. Then the other thing you hear a lot from leaks and reports is this focus on export controls. And I mentioned before, but to be more specific, they figured out under the Trump administration a rule that essentially allows for the prevention of semiconductors in the Trump case going to Huawei. And the reason isn't because all the semiconductors. Which is Huawei is a Chinese phone company. Yeah. That's right.

a Chinese tech company, because there are component parts to semiconductors that come from the United States. And so this is something that wouldn't necessarily whirl energy markets and would cut off potentially the kind of raw materials and semiconductors that Russia needs to diversify its economy, to have a high tech sector, to have an aerospace industry, to have smartphones, all these things. So that feels much like much more straightforward and less of boomering effect than the energy sanctions. bottom line across the board on these sanctions though is they have to do more work to kind of come to a common view between the United States and our allies, particularly our European allies, about how far we're willing to go on energy, and they need to figure out how to minimize what the blowback is in terms of the energy sanctions. And those are not simple things.

I do think that, look, if Russia, if there's a full invasion, you know, if we're talking like tens of thousands of people are killed, and this is like a land war like we haven't seen in Europe. in decades. I just think the sanctions happened because the shock of that. You've been in the White House. Like the politics can change quickly. But this is why the limited incursion point in the press conference, I think, sparked such a blowback from Ukraine. Because clearly if Russia, having scared everybody that there's going to be, you know, World War III in Ukraine, you know, they move some troops in Eastern Ukraine. They, you know, create a land bridge between the parts of Eastern Ukraine that they kind of de facto occupy in Crimea. Germans and others are not going to want to do this energy. Yeah, the hard things, yeah.

So that's my sanctions thing. But this is really important because this is the main tool we have to deter and respond to an invasion. The idea of putting them in place now, I don't quite understand that if it's supposed to be a deterrent against action. Can't sanction the guy and say, don't invade, but punish him anyway. I mean, if you're going to get punished, you're going to commit the crime. It doesn't make any easy. Also, you know, it's interesting. I read a bunch of reports on this semiconductor export control.

issue too. It is interesting. I mean, all these semiconductors go through the U.S., Taiwan, I think Japan and South Korea. There's not like a big domestic smartphone production capacity in Russia. They got a lot of stuff from China. It does seem like you really can cut off the flow of some really essential high-tech goods, and it sounds like it crippled the revenues of Huawei when Trump did this by like 30%. It did. It did. A huge hit. So the other thing we're talking about is the U.S. and NATO are sending more troops, more hardware to Eastern Europe. Apparently in response. the Russians have been conducting a bunch of additional military exercises in Belarus in the surrounding area. And if you look at a map, like the Russians have Ukraine surrounded, truly.

It's interesting you read about how Putin has this discreet window to act because he literally needs the ground to be frozen. So the tanks and these heavy, you know, artillery can roll over this turf into Ukraine. Does the escalation here worry you of like more NATO stuff, you know, potential escalation. cycle? Well, I mean, first of all, I think the other problem he's got is it's just like hard to maintain the deployment of over 100,000 troops like that. Sure. You know, for a long time, they're not doing anything other than hanging out, right? And I think the window people tend to look at is the Belarus deployment is tied to a military

exercise they announced, which ends on February 20th. The opening ceremonies in Beijing are coming up. And if he doesn't want to do this before the Olympics, because Xi, Putin himself is going to those Olympics and he's his buddy and he may want to consult with him, that there's this kind of window between the opening ceremonies in February 20th. I don't know. We're all guessing here. I think people should understand about the 8,500 troops that have been reported as going to NATO. That's not about Ukraine at all. That's about NATO allies in Eastern Europe and reassuring them. Right. So, you know, this is about sending troops potentially to places like Poland, the Baltic states, Romania.

to why are we doing that? In 2014, we did something similar in terms of additional deployments of U.S. forces to Poland and the Baltic states. And the reason why is that those allies believe, they believe what we say about Article 5, but they also believe that if there are American troops in their countries, that it's much less likely that Russia will come into the countries, because they may end up clashing with American troops, and then America is definitely in. I remember, for instance, in 2014, we set up something called a Baltic air policing mission, right?

So this was like an important function to have more planes in the skies over the Baltics, and you can obviously gather information that way. But that's not what the Baltic states are really interested in. They were just interested in the Americans on the ground who were manning that detachment. Yeah, yeah. They just want Americans in their countries

as a human shield. kind of like I hate to say it, but this is the kind of word that we get thrown like a tripwire. You know, like if someone's going to shoot into the Baltics, that there might be an American there. And that means the U.S. really will act on its Article 5 commitment. So to me, this deployment is about, number one, reassuring those allies. And number two, it is sending a message to Putin that like, hey, if your whole thing is that you want NATO off your borders, actually this is like one good example of the fact that because of what you're doing, you're going to get more NATO, more U.S. military. Yeah, the reverse so you want. You're getting the reverse what you want. I don't want to go all MSNBC on you, but remember a lot of hits my friend.

Remember how? I was up at 6 a.m. on Stephanie Rule this morning. Remember how eager Trump was to pull like 10,000 troops out of Germany? Yeah. Makes you think, Ben. Yeah. The Intercept reported that Congress is planning to rush through about a half a billion dollars worth of military aid to Ukraine. So there's a lot of movement on this.

So, Ben, you mentioned this. You know, Biden was asked about Ukraine last week at a big press conference that went on for like 17 hours. Here's a clip of what he said about Ukraine. Russia will be held accountable if it invades. And it depends on what it does. It's one thing if it's a minor incursion and then we end up having a fight about what to do and not do, et cetera. So I worry this is going to be annoying for the Biden team. It probably already is.

Like, in my opinion, Vladimir Putin learned nothing new from this exchange. He obviously knows that what he does is likely to get a proportional response. He knows this from common sense, from intelligence. public statements. But if Putin does invade, this comment will be part of every Republican talking point in an effort to blame Biden for Putin's actions. Where does this comment rank for you in terms of like potential future political challenge on a scale from not a problem to Obama, Syria, red line? Well, look, there's an old saying, right, in Washington, which is a gaffe is when you say something that everybody knows is true already. Right. And that's kind of what,

this is because he's speaking about what we just discussed, which is that like there are clearly divisions in the NATO alliance and, you know, beyond NATO, just between the United States and Europe on how far to go with these sanctions in response to Russian actions. And again, you'll have to remember there's like a scale to what Putin could do here. Like there's a world in which he does nothing. That's looking less likely, but it's still possible. Then on the maximalist end, there is like, you know, something that goes far beyond what we saw in 2014, like a mechanized invasion of Ukraine. Then there's this space that Putin might have conveniently set up for himself, where what he's essentially doing is scaring people about the worst case scenario so that when

he then moves in a significant amount of Russian troops into those parts of eastern Ukraine, it doesn't feel that dramatic. And in that case, like a Germany is like, well, we're not going to cut off gas supplies over this. He didn't invade the country. country. He just did an incursion. And that's clearly the, I think that remains like the most likely scenario analytically of what Putin's going to do. Because doing that for him would be enough to undermine, embarrass and maybe even topple the Ukrainian government. It would further make clear, like Ukraine is not going to join NATO. Like it's, you know, if a chunk of its territory has been annexed and another chunk is occupied, nobody really thinks that in that circumstance they could join NATO.

So he could accomplish like his objectives in that in that regard and and and not face the kind of sanctions that are the more maximalist versions of what we've been talking about. And so I think what Biden did there is he just kind of set out loud and reflected the divisions about what to do, which is not helpful, frankly, because it does kind of play into the sense of like Putin cares about this more than the rest of us do. Right. But here's the thing, Tommy. Like, you remember that when there are statements like this in press conferences, it cause problems, sometimes the cleanup also causes problems. And I think one of the challenges is that the cleanup was saying, no, no, no, no. Like, if he moves an inch into Ukraine, you kind of box yourself in. You're going to, we're going to throw the book at him.

And I'm actually not sure that that's possible, you know. And so they've taken a maximum line to kind of clean that up. and it's not clear to me that like Germany and others are in the same place. And so in a weird way, the clarification may present the biggest challenges because they may not be able to deliver on that statement. I say this is an enormous amount of sympathy because I've been at the exact same meeting in the situation room in 2014 when we're trying to get the Europeans on board with like stronger sanctions. Just don't take the hypothetical, man.

You know? Yeah. That's sort of like the one rule. Okay. There's no reason to take that. So we're going to do a lot more Ukraine in my conversation with Peter Beiner. later, including the talk about NATO expansion and whether that is sort of part of the reason we're at this precarious place. So definitely check that out. But for now, Ben and I are going to

turn some other issues. Starting in Burkina Faso. So over the weekend, there was a coup in Burkina Faso. After a group of military officers ousted the president, they suspended the constitution, they dissolved the government, closed the border, and finally announced their coup on state TV on Monday. The man deposed President Cabore. He had been in charge since 2015. He spent a lot of his 10-year fighting a really brutal bloody war against Islamist insurgents. There was a drastic escalation of violence starting a few years back. Thousands of innocent people have been killed. Well over a million have been driven from their homes and displaced.

So it's really an awful situation. The weekend before the coup, the military leaders behind it were making slightly different demands. They were calling for a change in military leadership. They were asking for more help in fighting the Islamist insurgency. A lot of it comes out of Mali. and it seems like there was some support for them from sort of like regular people. But then, you know, by Monday they had pushed out the president. So, Ben, you know, it's really tragic for the people of Burkina Faso because there was a protest movement in 2014 that at the time removed a longtime dictator.

There was a lot of hope for more democratic future. And instead, it's just been this horribly violent tenure and now another military coup, which is the eighth military coup in Burkina Faso, since its independence. France in 1960, and it's also one of several recent military coups in the region in Western Africa, including Guinea and Mali. So not everything is about the U.S., but, you know, I think you and I try to talk about mistakes the U.S. made or that Obama made. And it's notable, I think, that a lot of the coverage of this coup points to the toppling of Libya as an inflection point for Burkina Faso because a bunch of militants who have been working in Libya,

working for Gaddafi, went home, they brought their weapons with them, they went back to Mali, they started cooperating with these like Islamist factions. And it's been a nightmare for people in the region ever since. There's also a lot of concern about the presence of Russian mercenary forces in the region who are known to, you know, torture, rape, murder, innocent people. There's just horrific groups of people. So the whole situation seems very bad. Any thoughts or takeaways from you, from what you've read about this or, you know, the memories from this. you know, uprising in 2014 to now. Well, there's two issues I'd highlight. I mean, the first is like the kind of obviously worrisome trend of, you know, we've had coups now in Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, you know, West Africa.

Molly again, I think. Yeah, yeah. I mean, so there's kind of a normalization of military coups, which is not a good thing. And ECHOAS, the regional grouping there, has tried its hardest to kind of push back on this trend and maintain like the, you know, the democratization of the region, but obviously things are moving the wrong direction across the swath of it. I think the second thing is the Russian thing is real here, right? So the Wagner group, that's like the Russian black water. It's like the, but they've become much more present in Africa being mercenaries. They have their own mining

interests and the guy who just got tossed overboard had resisted, essentially hiring the Wagner group to be the paramilitary force there. And, you know, so like there's some connection here. You know, that was part of the pressure that was building on him. And again, this ties, like to tie it back to Ukraine, I mean, I keep thinking a lot. And I think we have to question our assumptions, like, why do we care about this? You know, like, why do we care about Russia and Ukraine and the rest of it? And I think that that's right. And I'm sure you talked to Peter about like the reality is like I think some Americans are going to be asking questions in a few months if like gas prices are way up. Absolutely.

There's nothing we can really do to stop this anyway. Like what are we doing? The flip side of this is obviously, you know, you know why Europeans care, right? Because Putin, you know, Ukraine first and then Moldova and then, you know, the capacity of him to undermine Europe grows. But also you just see this like this pattern of aggression. and undermining, almost kind of making a mockery of self-determination and democracy and sovereignty, it's just a worrisome trend, you know, and it extends to places like Burkina Faso, you know. I mean, Russia is is flexing in a lot of different places in ways that have no regard for the people that live in these countries, you know.

Yeah, and I saw, you know, Mali's coup leaders of postponed their elections at 2026. So, you know, there's a lot of, it's going to be a long time since he's told these things. are resolved, not that elections resolve it anyway. Yeah. Totally different issue. A quick update on Havana syndrome. So those who don't know, it's this mysterious debilitating illness that has impacted hundreds of U.S. personnel serving around the world.

The latest reports are that the CIA is now determined that is unlikely that a foreign actor, especially Russia, has been conducting some sort of worldwide campaign to harm U.S. personnel with a mysterious weapon, microwave weapons or sound, like, there are lots of things that were floated. it sounds like the CIA believes that the majority of these cases are natural medical conditions, like stress causing these challenges. But there are still cases where it does seem like something happened, some sort of exigent event, happened to individuals who are suffering.

So, you know, I think it's probably good to have this assessment out there and not, you know, hopefully prevent officials, elected officials, members of Congress, anybody else, from just blaming Russia or other countries for attacking Americans without any real evidence. That does nothing for the people who are struggling who feel like the government has not done enough to help them, has done enough to figure out what's going on or protect them. But it was interesting to have like a little bit of clarity finally on at least what the U.S. thinks is happening here. Yeah, I mean, I think what this really did, there was, you know, useful in adding information and clarity, is it kind of identified the scale of what is.

happened, you know, in making, because it made clear two things. One, that there have been some events that we still don't know the origin of, but that the much broader universe of cases that have been reported includes a lot of people with symptoms that were not connected to some unexplainable event. And this is like, you know, what we talked about before, like, when you get in a place where the symptoms are kind of migraine headaches and nausea, like there's a bunch things they can cause that. And so at least this gave us a sense that the scale is not not the maximalist scale where it's like there are these events everywhere. It did kind of narrow the geographic scope to like Havana and Geneva. And so we still don't know what it is, but that, you know,

that continues to raise questions about like, well, you know, who's active in both those places? It is Russia, right? But obviously they need to keep pulling the threat on this thing. It's a little disconcerting that, you know, and I don't blame anybody. It just speaks to how hard this stuff is that, you know, it's been a few years and there's still like a mystery at the center of this. Yeah, you really want them to solve this one. Okay, let's turn to the UAE because a scary situation there. On Monday, the U.S. military helped the United Arab Emirates intercept and destroy two missiles that have been launched by the Houthi rebels in Yemen that targeted an air base where 2,000 U.S. personnel are stationed. So we've talked about the Houthi

rebels before, they are a rebel faction fighting for control of Yemen against a coalition of countries led by Saudi Arabia, backed by the UAE, backed by the United States. It's horrific civil war that's been going on for, what, seven years now? I mean, a long time. Last week, the Houthis attacked two additional targets in Abu Dhabi and actually killed three people. In response, the Saudis, of course, launched a bunch of airstrikes into northern Yemen. There's reports that they killed like well over 100 people, that they hit a prison for some reason. And, and, and, you know, It knocked out internet across the entire country. So just, you know, plunging Yemen into an even more desperate situation.

Children killed in that 100. Yeah. I mean, it's just a reminder like this civil war still raging. Millions of innocent, you many people are at risk of starvation. The U.S. is still selling arms to Saudi Arabia. I don't think we've done enough to stop the civil war or pressure, you know, the party's first ceasefire. So it's just, you know, frankly, I think an area where you're seeing activists get really, frustrated with with President Biden, with the State Department, and continue to push harder and

harder and, you know, Congress as well. Yeah, I mean, the one like progressive pledge that he really sought to follow through on early in his presidency was announcing that, you know, the U.S. he said, would stop support for offensive Saudi military operations because it's a civil war, but it's also a Saudi invasion or Saudi intervention, I guess, in that civil war. And since then, there hasn't been progress in stopping the war. the U.S. frankly, has not pulled back in its support, really, for the Saudis. I mean, the weapons are flowing again. And I had like a couple of things. The first is, again, to connect this to Ukraine, if we're going to be going to the Middle East and asking for increases in

energy supply to potentially make up for the sanctions that we want to put on Russia, we're going to soft pedal the Saudis. Yep. And because we're going to want them to be increasing world production within OPEC, right? That's just the reality. This is why the job is hard. Well, it just shows you, the secondary effects to everything you want to do. Yes. The second point is these Houthi attacks in Abu Dhabi, where they fly these drones. And look, we give them Patriot batteries as a missile defense batteries that can shoot down

these fairly rudimentary drones. But clearly the objective of the Houthis, which they've said themselves, is that they want to make Abu Dhabi and potentially Dubai. feel unsafe. And these are cities that depend upon the impression that unlike the rest of the Middle East, you can come do business here and you can travel here. You can party here. And you can party here too. And they had to stop air traffic into those airports. It's a massive airport. And so this is a real escalation on their part too. And look, at the end of the day, though, I just think this whole thing is insane. Like the Saudis are not achieving any military.

military objectives in Yemen. They're not. And so I look, I'd like us to be able to stop the war. I think what we can do is stop our support for the Saudi war. Like, and that was our position when Trump was president. I think that remains like, you know, our position of like, why are we supporting a war in which children are getting bombed like this in which nothing is being accomplished, right? And frankly, I don't think that we should, I mean, to use the tired pun, make it so clear that the Saudis have us over a barrel here like at some point you just you can't allow like Muhammad bin Salman to have like a veto over everything that you do vis-vis him because you know you you want him his help on other things like this is this is a mess and

and it's not getting better it's getting worse and by day in the press going to have attention got to ask about this and you know it was kind of like ah it's hard then you know you didn't offer a lot of hope here. So I do think that the pressure's got to continue to raise questions about why we're providing continued military support to this. Speaking of efforts to stop wars, how are you feeling about efforts to get the U.S. and Iran back into the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear agreement? I mean, this is kind of, again, a bit under the radar with Ukraine, but like it feels like we're in a kind of crunch time here. Yeah. Because if you listen to what's coming out of the administration, the Iranians clearly actually came to negotiate in the,

this latest round that is ongoing, right? So that's positive. And there's like a potentially, and we don't know if the Iranians would ever actually say yes, but there's potentially a deal to be had. But you also hear from the administration that the Iranians have so advanced our nuclear program since Trump pulled out of the JCPOA that at a certain point, if we don't get a deal, like, we're in a different phase because the Iranians are nearing like a capacity to break out and get a nuclear weapons capability. So, you know, the next couple of weeks could be a, you know, decision points here on the Iranian side, on the U.S. side. And you saw this reporting, you know, about changes in the negotiating team. Yeah. Richard Nephew, who's the deputy to Rob Mallet,

the envoy, apparently stepping down because, you know, but I don't, you know, Richard Nephew's a good guy. He's a sanctions expert, too. Look, at the end of the day, we've always known that the choice in front of Joe Biden is going to be, do you go back to the sanctions relief that was in place around the time that Trump pulled out of the JCPOA? That's obviously going to be the Iranian position. Trump stacked on all these sanctions that they'd gotten relief on and he designated them under terrorism-related designations, right? So things that had been sanctioned and gotten sanctions relief for nuclear reasons, he then kind of redesignated under terrorism so that if you you want to get back into the deal, you have to lift that. Biden's going to, I think, and again,

the Iranians could still say, no, you may never get there. At some point, the question is going to be, is he willing to take the political hit for, you know, lifting those sanctions or relaxing those sanctions? I would argue, like, think about what we're talking about here. We had a potential war in Ukraine, right? We know the state of inflation. We know the state of the economy here. Like, absent a deal, Do we want an Iranian nuclear crisis this year? Because we could be looking at that. We could be looking at a situation in a few months if you don't get a deal where the Iranians are on the doorstep of a nuclear weapon and then that's hanging out there too. So, again, we don't know if the Iranians would say yes.

We don't know how far the U.S. is willing to go. But hopefully in the next couple weeks we get some indication as to whether or not we can at least close this account for the time being. If not, I think we're looking at, you know, a pretty tricky few months. Yeah. Let's get that one done. Okay, we're going to turn to a couple of lighter things for the close here. So the first is in New Zealand. New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, sadly, has canceled her wedding celebration

because of the outbreak of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus. Boy, this is, this story is such a contrast to the Boris Johnson conversation. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's good lead in. Lord was going to play the event. You remember her? Yeah, never be royals. I should have a new album. This summer was very good.

So the wedding was going to take place. Good album. Yeah, good album. Yeah, good album. Some billioners of state. New Zealand is at 15,000 total. Coronavirus cases in 52 deaths since the pandemic started. So they did a hell of a good job.

Helped being an island, but they locked down. She's predicting, Jacinda Arden's predicting that case numbers could rise to a thousand a day, which obviously is a huge escalation for them. Nearly 80% of the country. That's like a neighbor in L.A. Literally. 80% of New Zealand is vaxed. 56% of their booster shot.

Ben, this is probably going to make some subset of our listeners very, very mad. But I'm going to be honest that I think this is a dumb decision. Like, she has to make this. Wait, wait, we've never criticized just under it on this podcast. Well, look, it's more about COVID stuff. Like, she obviously has to make this choice for political reasons, as Boris Johnson ably demonstrated. But like, if you're having a small outdoor wedding, if everyone is boosted and they test like three days in advance and then day of, you can do it safely. you know what I mean I just I just wish she's sending a message she's being a leader she's doing the right thing but like it isn't really what common sense or medical best practices dictate if we're being honest it's kind of like you know prime ministers are just like us like you know omicron and these latest waves been a pain in the ass for everybody and you know I think she's just going to say like hey like every I know everybody is being inconvenience so I'm an inconvenience myself too I think it's the right thing politically it's the right thing political yeah and I think like the right thing to do you know she's

She's really established herself as someone who whose personal actions and behavior in the way she carries herself connect to not just her politics, but her policies and her whole leadership brand. And, like, you know, this is the thing to do. It's the thing to do. But, like, meanwhile, like, we're going to have the Super Bowl in L.A. was 65,000. Well, yeah. I mean, we're stupid. She's smart. There's a middle ground. You are correct. There's no common sense being applied to this scenario.

In the same way, the, like, global freak out about Obama's. birthday party was stupid and irrational. You know what I mean? It was like the amount of focus put on sort of little things like weddings versus like, you know, the Olympics that are happening, the Super Bowl. It's just it can be a little frustrating seeing the lack of proportion and irrationality and the various actions taken for me. What they should do is have therefore like the rager of all ragers when she has a wedding.

Yeah. That would justify the decision. It's like, okay, well, we're going to, like, you know, we're going to invite, like, all of New Zealand to this wedding. Sure. We're going to invite, like, the cool leaders from around the world. Peter Jackson. We're going to have, like, the Chilean guy and the Finnish woman and, like, you know, like, we're going to have, like, just, yeah, Peter Jackson. Or we could do, like, a boy in the bubble kind of thing, too, if we want to do it sooner.

Yeah, you could do that, too. Bubble boy. Well, Lord, I have to say, was, I mean, that's cool, the Lord was flying. I like Lord. Yeah. Yeah, well, hopefully she was available later. So you mentioned Chile. So very fun, sort of fascinating little twist and turn of history out of Chile.

So Gabriel Boric, who is the new left-wing president of Chile, is named his cabinet. 14 of the 24 ministers are women, which is cool. But the coolest part of this is his new defense minister is a woman named Maya Fernandez, who is the granddaughter of Salvador Aende, the socialist president who is overthrown by a military coup in 1973, killed himself. as the palace was being bombed. The coup backed by the United States, by the way, that ushered in the Pinochet dictatorship.

So pretty amazing. He takes office March 11th. He'll be 36 when he takes over. Amazing story. Think about what you've accomplished. I mean, it is a reminder. I mean, Salvador Allende,

dies in the presidential palace, I think, in a Henry Kissinger design coup. it's a good reminder. What I thought about is like things can look, you know, pretty grim. I'm sure like things look pretty bad if you're Chilean in 1973, particularly if you're a progressive Chilean. And here we are, right?

It shows you how much history can change. You know, it shows you that things can look one way and then it can look very differently later on. So hopefully we don't have to wait 50 years for things to look better here. But man, it's a marker. Times in Chile. Our version is like Ivanka's triumphant return as president. Yeah. Some sort of dark black mirror version. Okay. So the flip side of Jacinda is Boris Johnson. So somehow, I literally don't know how this is possible. I don't think there are that many

days in the week during which one can party, but there is another report about another party thrown by Boris Johnson's administration during COVID lockdown in 2020. ITV News reported that Johnson's wife, Carrie Johnson, threw a surprise birthday party for him in the cabinet room at number 10 Downing Street, indoors with up to 30 people attending on June 19th, 2020. Boris's team is trying to claim he was only there for 10 minutes. They are denying reports that there was another party the same day later in his home. That led to one of the most hilarious pieces of spin I have ever heard.

heard. This is a clip from Conservative Party MP and Boris Johnson super supporter, super fan, I guess, Connor Burns. Here's a clip. People came in, presented him with a cake on his birthday. They're saying happy birthday. He was there for about 10 minutes. It was not a premeditated, organized party in that sense that the prime minister himself decided to have sent out. Well, he, as far as I can see, he was in a sense ambushed with a cake. Ambushed with a cake. Ambushed with a cake. There's like a hint of Mary and Barry, bitch set me up. Yeah. Well, I mean, the guy's like trying to make himself, like they're trying to be a hawkish on Ukraine.

Like this guy is fucking ambushed by a cake and he's going to stand up to Putin, right? Like, I mean, like this is so British listeners. Like, what is going on over there? Like, this is the country of the stiff upper lip of Churchill, of shirt sacrifice. We're in this together. These guys locked down so hard too. I think that's what's hurting him. And by the way, well, but the thing is, here's the thing.

Like, we have to get back to basics too. Like, yes, this guy's in a drip, drip, drip of absurdity because at a time when we were all locked down, this guy seems like he just couldn't stop partying, right? Couldn't stop. But like, it's not as if, like, again, Churchill had like the seven or eight extra drinks, you know, before the afternoon. But he was fucking Churchill. Well, then he went to the roof and he watched the Germans fly shorties and drop bombs onto his. city. This is Boris Johnson.

While reciting Tennyson poems. That's exactly the point I'm making is it like, it's not like this guy is such a high caliber individual too that you know, you can look the other way about the parting. This guy is like a cartoonish lying buffoon nationalist, right? Shapeshifter, like who has so little respect for everybody that he's like parting his way through the early weeks of COVID.

Slamming drinks. While locking you guys down. Go in a pepah pig world. Get this guy out of there. Like what is going? on over there. Have you ever seen a more devastating, like, death by a thousand cuts leak campaign ever in his, like, someone is a genius. Clearly, people don't like it out. And clearly, clearly people don't like him. And look, I know we're in the largest glass house in the world here in the United States. We've got Donald

Trump circling around. So I'm just saying that like, like, I mean, I guess maybe like the benefit of him sticking around is it like you get to see this kind of drip, drip, drip, drip, drip. But I mean, like, let's get a real prime minister over this. So along that line, our friend Mark Landler, who's the New York Times Bureau Chief in London, who's Good gig, by the way. Didn't get invited. Good for Landler to get out of D.C. and get over there. Well, yeah, but he didn't get invited to any of the parties.

So that's just making me wonder if he's just not a good time. You know, I've hung with Landler on foreign trips. I mean, he's good for like a hotel bar. I'm just saying like, hey, British people, someone invite Mark to like a lunch or something. Anyway, he had a great report on this whole scandal for the Daily today. It does sound like Boris Johnson. 80-seat majority, 80-seat majority, is really at risk for the first time. You had conservative lawmakers dramatically crossing over, you know, parliament to the labor side before

Boris spoke. There's another senior member standing up and saying, you know, it's time for you to go. There's a broader sense. Lamies don't haymakers. Lamies is wagging. There's this broader sense. So that like Boris Johnson was like, his vision was Brexit and he's got nothing else to offer. And I can see that.

well that's the thing is like what what is this like governing program that's so worth putting up with this kind of national embarrassment if you're a tory like get rid of this clown just get rid of this clown and like i mean i you know if your labor you got to be wishing there was an election around the corner i mean like uh the timing is is unfortunate for a curious darmor but yeah i mean this again i guess the upside though is like because you know there are more parties like everybody seems to know that there are more parties that are going to keep coming out like this. And each time they're going to send some

somebody with like no dignity to go on television. He was actually he was ambushed by the cake. Yeah, just waiting for like... Premeditated? What does that even mean? Premeditated? This is like a terrorist attack or something?

Drive by fruiting. Yeah, like how could it get where like the ice luge was accidental? Like the the apple bobbing competition was not sanctioned. And here's the other thing like let me just find another angle to make fun of Borson. about this. Please. It's not like this is Camelot in number 10, right?

It's not like this glamorous guy, right? You know, this is, it's not like we had some like James Bond Prime Minister and they're partying with like martinis and it's cool. It's like it's Boris Johnson. Like, how good are these parties? Like could these parties? Can't be good. Like, I mean, Landler may, like, Landler maybe did get invited and didn't want to go.

Maybe it had better things to do because like it doesn't like, like, if I had a list of things to do in London, like the garden party with Boris Johnson. is not very high on my list. Yeah, maybe Landler was running around with, you know, Kier Starmor and some soccer hooligans. It's just like wrecking shit. I don't know. Okay. This one goes in the category of it could get worse, which is a story about Naïi Bukali,

we talked about on the show before. He's the young, brash, authoritarian president of El Salvador who loves to be, you know, kind of a little dictator and he loves Bitcoin. He really loves Bitcoin. So he's talked about building a bit of Bitcoin. So he's talked about building a Bitcoin City. He's talked about powering it with geothermal energy from volcanoes, blah, blah, blah. As we said before, I own some crypto.

I think there's cool applications. You do? Yeah, yeah. I don't get it as a currency per se, given the volatility. I certainly don't think it's like a safe place to put all your money. I think it's a small speculative bet that could be interesting in the long term. For me, that's like weed stocks. There you go.

Yeah, but you're doing great. But Buckele is basically, day trading. You're a consumer and an investment. Buckele is basically the day trading with like El Salvador's treasury funds. And the results are... And the results are... And we know this, right,

because he tweets about it. He tweets about buying the dip. So on November 26th of last year, Buckely said he bought the dip, bought a hundred additional Bitcoin after the price had fallen 8%. The low Bitcoin price that day was $54,377

per Bitcoin. Today, the price of Bitcoin is hovering around $36,000 per coin, and that's up from its low. So all told, Bitcoin has been off by about 15% from its record highs, which is about the time Bukali got into the buy-the-dip game. And this isn't the only time he has tweeted about buying the dip and caught the falling sword as traders like to say. So he's constantly tweeting about buying millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin. He's appropriated like the stupid mean culture you see from Elon Musk and others where like the latest thing he did was he changed his Twitter icon to his avatar to be a McDonald's employee, which I guess is like a reference to a Bitcoin stonks, you know,

meme thing where these traders say like that's what they'll do for a living when their holdings crash. So I'm sure everyone in El Salvador finds that hilarious. He also tweeted, most people go in when the price is up, but the safest and most profitable moment to buy is when the price is down. It's not rocket science. So invest a piece of your McDonald's paycheck. in Bitcoin. Now go back to flip more burgers, you lazy fuck. And he spelled fuck with some weird characters. So, again, he's a great guy. He's right. You buy low, you sell high. But in the interim, the problem for him is that El Salvador's creditworthiness has tanked in part because their crypto holdings have tanked. So like this is just a disaster. It's so predictable. It's

tragic for the people of El Salvador. Like, you and I invest a little in crypto, but like, we don't want the Treasury Secretary buying the dip. It just it does nuts, Ben. And all these tweets about Bitcoin are in English and everything else is in Spanish. So clearly he's communicating with like

at Jack. Well, that's the thing. It's like at what point, I mean, what is like the tether between this guy? I mean, he came up as a populist. Like a populist in a country, he's tweeting in English, buying the dip and losing everybody's money and then making fun of people who work in McDonald's.

What's the populace from there? Like making fun of people, like, in a country where there's serious poverty in this country, like, what is going on here? What is going on is the question. This guy, it's like he was designed in a laboratory to be the most obnoxious 22 autocrat bro possible, you know? I mean, and where does this end? pretty young guy. I mean, he may just have like an exit strategy where, like, he knows he's gonna, like,

you know, he's, he was popular there, but like, something tells me that's going to dip to use one of his phrases. And maybe he just, like, washes up, you know, hanging out at like, crypto bro investor conferences in the valley. And like, I mean, he must have an exit strategy that is something other than being present of El Salvador. Yeah. Yeah. And look, don't add us. I realize that Bitcoin could go way back up. It could quadruple in value. It could be a great investment. But the point is, it's very speculative. It's gambling.

Just don't do that with Treasury funds. This guy's whole tenure as President Val Salvador feels like a 90-minute Hulu documentary that I'm going to watch three years from now with an edible and be like, I can't believe this happened. Which is him and the we work guy. Yeah, yeah, him and the we work guy. Just hanging out. That's good. Last story, Bed, Axios reported that former failed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spent $30,000

on media training from last March until June. $30,000. This guy was Secretary of State, who's a member of Congress, and he drops 30 grand on media training to do what? To do a bunch of like Fox News safe space hits? So question for you,

can media training make you not an asshole? Is that a service? The basic problem that Mike Pompeo has is that he comes across in his very being as a smarty asshole. Yeah. And he's got kind of like a smirk and, and like this is, I mean, remember the swagger thing?

Oh, yeah. You know, and that's kind of an unsolvable problem for him. I'm very much, I mean, look, I don't want Donald Trump to run for president for the sake of American democracy and the future of humanity. but another reason why it'd be great if Donald Trump doesn't run for president is it will be a lot of fun to watch Mike Pompeo take that like 1% in Iowa yeah yeah Mr. 1%. Like I'd like to see that presidential campaign because it'll be hilarious to watch the guy flounder. You know, he'll have his like Madison dinner donors and his like 100 pounds off waistline and his. media training and none of it will make any difference because people just don't really like that guy.

He'll have like a Mike Bloomberg-esque ROI on the votes he receives. And that Kansas paper that hates him will just troll the shit. It's so funny. It's so funny that Edmore. Did you see him out there attacking Biden for being weak and not like deterring? Oh yeah, because he did so much to get ready for it. It's like, you know, man, you were on a call when Trump was like trying to extort President Zelensky of Ukraine for dirt on Biden instead of, I don't know, helping them out. Yeah. Yeah. drives me absolutely crazy the come i mean i think like i've been thinking a lot you know in 2014 like i'm sitting in the sit room constantly dealing with two things like probably above anything else like the iran nuclear deal in the ukraine crisis and you know here we are in 22 and a lot

of the same people are sitting in the same room dealing with it and and the trump presidency made both things so much worse and harder. Yeah, it could have just stayed in the JCPO. So, like, on Iran, they just trashed a deal, and now Iran has all this other additional nuclear capability, and it's harder to get back in the deal because who's ever going to trust the United States, keep a deal, and blah, blah. And on Ukraine, like, think of what's happened in the intervening years. Like, you know.

Yeah. And he spent, like, four years, like, attacking NATO for no reason. And not resolving any of these issues in eastern Ukraine and not, you know, doing anything to prepare the ground to push back against Putin. And it does make, like, I've been trying to just to end back on Ukraine as you go into Peter's discussion. Like, I've been trying to think about, like, why would Putin do the maximalist thing, right? And I think the point is that if you're Putin, and this has been your objective for 20 years,

is to get basically a buffer between you and NATO, right, to have these countries on your border that are not democracies and not NATO because the two things that you feel threatened by are mainly democracy, but NATO is kind of a symbol of democracy. Yeah, the color revolutions. And also to kind of recover some greatness. There's no ideological project at home, but to kind of recover some Russian standing. Make Russia a grid again. You can say it.

You can say it. You can say it. And you get to this point where you've got, you know, Belarus in your pocket and Kazakhstan, you talked about and all this stuff. But the one problem is Ukraine. And the thing that I've been thinking about, and the Trump, this is where the Trump piece plays into it is that. he's actually lost, you know, he gained Crimea in this annexation and he kind of messed around

and obviously has de facto occupation of a chunk of eastern Ukraine. But in the process, he lost Ukraine because, and Alexei talked about this when we had him on, like, Ukrainians now are more anti-Russia than they were even, you know, a decade ago, eight years ago. He knows he cannot ever kind of pull them back just through coercion and disinformation damage and things like this you cannot be a Ukrainian politician and and be pro-Russian and so if he really wants to solve this problem there's this one big chunk of land there's one really big important country which by the way is also the country that Russian nationalists truly believe the most should be part of Russia and

he might just think that like look now's the time I'm gonna do this like I'm coming out of a pandemic every's on their back foot there's inflation all these people and I'm just going to go. And if Trump had done anything with those four years, you know, to try to resolve this, to try to fortify Ukraine to make it less vulnerable. And it's just like, instead all he did is, you know, yeah, talk about pulling troops out of Germany and undermine U.S. credibility, make this alliance, you know, like something that there's no muscle memory of working together in this way. You know, this moment is much harder for the Biden people than than even 2014 was for us.

Putin gained a peninsula and he lost a friend, you know? Yeah. And the Mike Pompeo's, then the Republican Party can't figure out whether they're like super hawks like Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo or super Krellandboosters. Yeah, like it's crazy. Yeah, we actually talked about it with Peter. Speaking of which, we're going to go to a quick break, but stick around for my conversation with Peter Bynard about NATO expansion, you know, whether it incentivized Putin to be more aggressive with some of his neighbors. conventionalism in Washington, all of it. Really great conversation.

So check it out. I am thrilled to be joined today by Peter Beinart. He is the editor at large of Jewish currents, and he's the author of the Binart Notebook on Substack, a fantastic Substack. I'm a subscriber. Peter, thanks for being here today. Thanks for joining us. My pleasure.

So I wanted to talk to you after reading a piece you wrote on your substack earlier this week, I think on Monday. It was about the topic of NATO experience. which went from controversial to, I would say, maybe generally unquestioned or infrequently questioned in Washington or at least in foreign policy circles. And there's the broader question about how much Putin's aggression towards his neighbors may or may not come from him feeling threatened by NATO. So I wanted to explore that topic and maybe just start with just a little bit of basic history. In the late 90s, NATO decides to expand to include.

Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic. Why was that controversial at the time and who criticized that decision? It was controversial because it was a time of greater optimism about the U.S. Russian relationship, about the possibilities that Russia might be a democracy, and also just the possibility that Europe would no longer be a place of kind of hostile camps, that with the end of the Warsaw Pact, which had been the Soviets along. that there would be some kind of overarching structure that wouldn't divide Russia from the West as it had during the entire Cold War. And so the critics who were a pretty all-star roster of kind of establishment graybeards, you know, from George Kennan, the kind of OG himself, the father of containment, to John Lewis Gaddis, probably the most prominent Cold War historian to Thomas Friedman to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

they warned that this was going to produce the very backlash in Russia that we didn't want to see. And they took seriously that Boris Yeltsin, who was Bill Clinton's kind of big buddy, was saying this is going to empower people in Russia that you're not going to like. Now, there were, of course, people who supported NATO and expansion. I don't want to suggest that there wasn't an argument for it. I mean, there were inspiring leaders in Eastern Europe like Vlasov Havel, you know, who wanted it. And frankly, if I were Polish or Hungarian or Czech, I would want it too, given their horrifying history. So I'm not claiming it was a slam dunk. My point was just that

this was considered a respectable argument in Washington when you were just talking about letting Hungary, Czech Republic, and Poland in. Now we're talking about Ukraine, which is much closer to Russia. And you're considered kind of a little bit of a freak now if you think that maybe actually, it's not a good idea. Yeah, I mean, just so folks understand, I mean, I think you wrote this in your piece. These are not members of Code Pink. George Kennan was the author of the Long Telegram, I believe, was what it's called, sort of the original cable that set out the course of Cold War theory and containment and

a rather hawkish individual. Some people point to this specific conversation between then-secretary of State James Baker and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev as maybe part. of the seed of the problem here. Baker reportedly said that a Germany was allowed to unify within NATO, that NATO wouldn't expand eastward. Now, none of this was put in writing. The details are disputed. Can you help us understand the details of that dispute? And do you think this started the mistrust? Yes. Now, it may well be that Baker never said, we will never expand U.S. troops into Eastern Europe. But what's important to remember is at that point, that was not even something

that was on the table. What he was, what the discussion at that point would be, would NATO troops move into east, the former East Germany? Which just gives you a sense of how much the playing field has shifted, right? It was considered, the debate then was would U.S. troops even be in the eastern part of Germany. The idea that they would eventually be on former Soviet soil in the Baltic states and now potentially Georgia and Ukraine was not something that people were even imagining. So yes, the Russians, and I think it's important to record, not just, you know, right-wing, ultra-nationalist, thuggish, autocratic Russians like Vladimir Putin, but Russians who actually genuinely wanted to integrate with the West saw this as something that was a threat.

Okay, so almost getting us up to today. I mean, over time, as you mentioned, NATO's expanding to right to Russia's doorstep. And then on the way out the door, the Bush, administration decided to nominate Georgia, the country, and Ukraine for NATO membership. Why did they do that? And can you sort of help everyone explain or understand that weird place, the limbo that left those countries in? Yes, this was a very controversial decision in 2008. It was opposed by some of America's biggest European allies, the Germans and the French. And I think by elements inside the U.S. government as well. But I think Bush felt a kind of an obligation to those countries to try to bring them into the Western system. And again, that impulse

is totally understandable and noble. But in foreign policy, it's not just a question about what your ideals are. You have a limited amount of power. And so the question is, are you biting off more than you can chew? I don't think that the people who were opposing that promise were opposing it because they wanted Ukraine and Georgia to be under Russia's thumb. They were opposing it because they just didn't think it was realistic for America and its allies to make a military promise. Remember, NATO is a military alliance. It would require American kids to fight in Ukraine on Russia's border and given how important Ukraine is to Russia, that it was considered unrealistic to make that military promise. And so the compromise was that it would be offered at some kind of future date, but with no

plan for it actually happening, which in some ways was the worst of both worlds. It produced a Russian backlash, but it actually hasn't gotten the Ukrainians into NATO with the protection that would provide. Yeah. So that's because it's today. And I think, you know, everyone should read your piece and everyone should subscribe to your substack because you read about all kinds of fascinating stuff. And you sort of take contrary and interesting positions often. I guess I didn't come away from your piece thinking, Bynard's blaming NATO expansion for Putin's aggression. I came away thinking you were saying essentially like, hey, we should talk about this, whether it was a bad idea, whether it was part of a range of sort of factors that are leading

to this, you know, this super-nationalistic, you know, former KGB guy to be hyper-aggressive in our faces. Is that a fair assessment? Yeah. Look, part of what's so hard about these situations is that, you know, Putin, to use the term that you guys throw around liberally, which I appreciate, is an asshole, right? I mean, he's a horrifying leader. And so the last thing that anyone who cares about human rights and liberal democracy wants is to be seen as an apologist for Vladimir Putin in the same way that the last, that would never want to be seen as an apologist for Chi in China. And I remember this very distinctly from the Iraq War debate.

One of the reasons it was hard to oppose the Iraq War, which, by the way, I got completely wrong and I supported it. But one of the things that the people who opposed it had trouble with was they got accused of being apologists for Saddam Hussein. But it was possible to understand that Saddam Hussein was a monster and also recognized that it was beyond the limits of American power to invade Iraq. And I think the problem we have here is it is beyond the limits of American power to make Ukraine a country that can be, have an anti-Russian. foreign policy. Do they have the right to have an anti-Russian foreign policy? Absolutely they do. Of course they do. But unfortunately, in the world, location matters, right? So just as Mexico doesn't really have the ability to join a military alliance with China or Russia, even though they should be able to do that, but they can't because they unfortunately or fortunately are located next to

us. We have to think about what is the best possible deal that Ukraine could get. And I think that given that the dirty little secret is they're not going to be admitted into NATO because no American president is going to take the risk that they're going to have to send in American 19-year-olds to fight in eastern Ukraine against Russian troops, the most crucial thing is, first of all, that it gets to remain a free society at home. And secondly, that we don't, that the war doesn't break out. And so that we should be open to the possibility of some kind of neutrality arrangement where they don't enter NATO, but also Russia agrees to let them alone internally, if that's possible.

I don't know, but that would be the goal for me. Yeah, some writers point to the example of Finland as being a country that's done this pretty well. So, okay, I would say the outer bounds of this debate was a piece I read by Stephen Walt, who's a professor of international relations at Harvard. He wrote the following. The great tragedy is this entire affair was avoidable. How the United States and its European allies not succumb to hubris, wishful thinking, in liberal idealism and relied instead on realism's core insights, the present crisis would not have

occurred. Indeed, Russia would probably never have seized Crimea and Ukraine would be safer today. The world is paying a high price for relying on a flawed theory of world politics. This is part of a long, thoughtful piece about realism, the sort of heady late 90s, the sort of over-moralizing foreign policy where, you know, democracy was going to rule the day and sort of crass interest didn't matter. I was curious what you thought about that and whether, I don't know, it feels like it leaves out Putin's fear of color revolutions, his domestic politics and the need to lash out the, you know, the precarious situation there in economically. But I'm just curious if you read that piece any of your thoughts. Yeah. And I generally agreed with a lot of it. Look, I want to make it clear. There are very smart people on the other side of this. People who I respect, you know, Anne Applebaum at the Atlantic, Michael McFall, who you know, I mean, people who know a lot about Russia. So I don't want to claim that this is a slam dunk position at all. I think two things can be true, though. It can be true that Putin is a dictator who is afraid that a thriving Ukraine would threaten his hold on power. It's also true that Russian leaders from the Tsars through the Soviets, through our buddy Boris Yeltsin,

all have felt, even Alexei Navalny, right, the guy who Putin is thrown into that dungeon has said, made statements that suggest that he doesn't, wouldn't want Ukraine to be at odds with Russia. And so I think these things are both true. And I think the problem is that I think we have inflamed some of the very kind of hypernationalism in Russia that Putin has therefore exploited in order to secure his dictatorship. And also that we have essentially, we, in two, 2008, we made a promise that we can't keep. And one of the dangers, I think, historically in American foreign policy is we write checks that we can't, that we don't have the funds to cover. And I think this was one of the problems with that promise in 2008. Yeah, I mean, look, there's just a fundamental

asymmetry of interest here that we should be honest about. I mean, Russia is going to care about events on its border more than we will care about a country thousands of miles away. And I agree with you. I don't think it's a slam dunk at all. I just, I, in reading, your piece, I was struck by how remarkable it is that the Mike McFall and Applebaum position to people who I read closely, highly respect, is on TV all the time, even on MSNBC. But the, you know, conversation we're having is not surfaced very often. I think that's such an important point. The big, the problem, of course, is that the person who's surfacizing, surfacing the most

in the crudest and most dishonest way you could, because that's just the way he is in general, is Tucker Carlson, right? And because nobody wants to be on the same side of what Carlson is on anything. But I think partly he's filling a void that I think has been left by some people in the Democratic Party who I think actually should be finding their voice more. I feel like this this happens in the United States. There's a really bad guy on the other end. And nobody wants to be seen as being on his side. And I think it means that people who have private reservations about the path that the U.S. is going, sometimes avoid voicing them.

And unfortunately, it leaves the space to people like Tucker Carlson who are the last people that you want to be the poll in this debate. Yeah. And I want to ask you a little more about Tucker in a minute because he's an interesting example here. I have noticed that in blob circles, the blob for listeners who don't know is, you know, Ben Rhodes's term for like the sort of hawkish elite foreign policy. establishment that never dies or goes away. But in blob circles, when you talk about NATO expansion or maybe criticize it, the reaction is sort of like what you said. Like, how dare you Neville Chamberlain blame America? But those same people are the first to say that Joe Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan sent the message of weakness to Putin or maybe to China or maybe to Iran. Name your favorite

boogeyman. They'll name them all. Do you sort of stepping back a little bit, and there's a big question, Do you think that there's evidence that shows that a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan or even Iraq or even Vietnam emboldens an enemy like the sort of conventional wisdom says? Is there times in history where we've seen that? There's a fair amount of international relations kind of theory writing on this. Dow Press has written about it, a bunch of other people. For my reading of that literature, that's generally not the way things work, which is to say, you know, one of the things that people used to say during the Vietnam War was if we leave Vietnam. the Soviets will be emboldened to attack us in West Berlin. No, they weren't because they understood that the dynamics of the conflict in West Berlin

were really different than in Vietnam, and that we cared a lot more about West Berlin and we cared about Vietnam. And in fact, one of the points that actually George Kennan made was the best way to weaken in our position in West Berlin would be to over-extend ourselves in other places that don't matter as much. And so there are a lot of people who are saying, no, no, we got to stand up in Ukraine because otherwise that will send the message to China, that they can get away with it in Taiwan.

I think the stronger argument is in reverse. The more the US gets bogged down in its focus and expends resources in a new Cold War in Eastern Europe, the less we're able to actually focus on securing, to focusing in Asia against China, which is a much, much more formidable threat. We have a limited amount, we're powerful country, but not an unlimited power,

not a country with unlimited power, we have limited resources and we have to deploy them wisely. That's why I think Biden was wise to get out of Afghanistan and to try to refocus on Asia. And I really worry that this chain of events with Russia could set off a series of things that actually really undermine that whole effort. Yeah. And look, we've all seen that happen before. I mean, back to Tucker, you're right that he is sort of voicing this counter argument.

I would argue that he's doing it in ways that are sort of not honest, right? He says, oh, Ukraine joining NATO would be like Mexico being controlled by China, which is just not factually true anyway. But what do you make of that? I mean, I mean, he's, I think back in Budapest broadcasting again, he spent a week there with Victor Orban. He does seem to have this thing for sort of like, you know, hyper religious, conservative authoritarian. But I don't know what else to make of it. Yeah. I mean, that's definitely true.

And that's why he's like the worst possible spokesperson for this argument that. as I say in my substack, was made by Henry Kissinger and Zbizivnih Brizensky, when they argued that the Finland neutral model was the best model for Ukraine back in 2014. Because you're right, we don't know whether he's just concerned about the U.S. over extending itself or whether it's just because he likes, you know, he obviously has an ideological sympathy for authoritarian leaders. But I think that it does speak to a disturbing disconnect. And Trump revealed this as well in some ways, between, I think, of the kind of the foreign policy blob and where some segment of the American people is, which is to say there's a kind of lip service paid to the idea in Washington

that the extreme, that the expansion of American power in the post-Cold War era was not seen by a lot of Americans as necessarily benefiting them, which is partly what produced, led the kind of created the conditions for some of the backlash that we've seen, obviously not the only thing, one of the things. And I worry that even though people talk about that and a kind of foreign policy for the middle class and refocusing, that there's this reaction when something happens like this, but it leads them to forget some of those lessons. I really don't think that I'm not convinced that there is an appetite among the American people for the kind of level of commitment that would be required for a sustained confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, which is why I'm more open to forms

of compromise to prevent that, if possible, that I think a lot of people in the blob are. And I worry that the further we go down this, the more people in the blob may find that they don't actually have a constituency for this outside there and out there in the country. Look, I agree. I mean, I don't know the right answer. I obviously don't want the Russians to invade Ukraine. I don't want anyone to get killed. I don't want people in Ukraine to be told how to live their lives or who to ally with. But I do think that lack of support you're talking about it's kind of self-evident when, you know, when someone to ask you like, so why would we send a thousand troops to Ukraine? What's our interest there? And it's it's not, it's a values based answer.

It's not an easy one to explain. And I think, you know, the weakness of the kind of neocon argument here is probably demonstrated by how quickly they reach for China. And they say, oh, we got to, you know, show Xi that, you know, he can't do this to Taiwan. It's like, I don't know that he gives a shit about what we do in Ukraine when it comes to Taiwan. I think if he wants Taiwan, he's going to make some moves there. And we're going to have to deal with that separately. But I don't know. I could be wrong. Yeah. And I think this points to the fact that I think, you know, tragically, unfortunately, the U.S. isn't in that strong a position, I don't think. I mean, we can level all the sanctions we want. But at this point, I think, I don't think it's

very likely that our sanctions. I think the fact sanctions have been kind of factored in. And the more nuclear we get with our sanctions, the more there could be all kinds of blowback effects to those sanctions that we can't even predict. And so given that we're not willing to fight, I think the danger is for me is that there's a mismatch between the resources we're willing to put into this and the demands that we're making.

And I think that's always dangerous in foreign policy. Yeah, I do too. Last question. I mean, Washington seems very alarmed about a potential invasion of Ukraine. You hear a lot of people in Ukraine kind of saying like, chill out, calm down. We think he's bluffing.

Do you have an opinion? How do you make sense of that disconnect? I really don't know, but I do think that it is really interesting that it's not just in Ukraine. In Germany and France, there seems to be less, they seem less convinced the government there that he's going to make a move than in the U.S. and the U.K. And I'm not privy to this intelligence. I don't know why, but I think it's one, again, this is as someone who lived through the Iraq experience, one of the things that I think is really, really important is we can get caught in

a certain bubble in terms of the U.S. media, the U.S. farm policy, and it's really important to be able to step outside of that and recognize that this is not necessarily being seen in exactly the same way, even in some other countries that largely share our values. And I think that's important. I really hope that the French and the Germans and the Ukrainians are right. Yeah, yeah. And countries, at least in the case of Ukraine, with a hell of a lot more skin in the game. I mean, Germany, too, with Nord Stream and everything else that would be that could fall victim to some sort of conflict. Peter, where can people find your writing in your Substack? At Jewish Currents, which is a magazine that I think folks will find interesting if they're interested

in Israel, Palestine, from a progressive Jewish perspective, and also at substack.com, the Bynart notebook. I literally can't believe we just talk for 22 minutes and BB Netanyahu didn't come up. I mean, do you think he's going to get a plea? It sounds like there might be a deal here. You might not go to jail? It sounds like he could get a deal which may keep him out of jail but require him to not be in politics. And that'll be interesting because remember the thing holding this Israeli government together is the fear of Netanyahu.

So you take Netanyahu out of the picture and instantly Israeli politics changes dramatically. The government would actually probably change dramatically. So it would be a big deal and it would be a good thing. Oh, man. Well, if that happens, you got to come back and we'll talk about it. And we'll, I don't know, we'll pop a cork or something. Yeah, exactly. Peter Byner, thank you so much for doing the show.

Everyone should subscribe to your substack. Check out your work at Jewish Currants. It's fascinating stuff. It is not the conventional wisdom you sometimes find in other places. And I really appreciate it. Thank you. I enjoyed it. Thanks to Peter Barnardt for joining the show.

Thanks to my hero, Roger Goodell, for all the joy and pleasure he gave me this weekend. I hate that guy. The overtime rules suck. The overtime rules suck. Didn't you want Josh Allen to get the ball back? Oh, of course I did. Yeah. Poor Josh Allen played a perfect game.

Yeah, I think Goodell makes like $44 million a year. a year. Yeah. To do what? To be like a shill for like the NFL owners. Yeah, to make them more money. To take Jerry Jones's phone calls. I'm sure that's not true.

Well, the one thing that the NFL did that was really smart is by getting rid of all these, you know, protecting quarterbacks and protecting the middle of field, you know, that opened this up to have these wild finishes. I was thinking about this. I mean, there's a reason these guys are lighting things up. I mean, you know, you couldn't do that back in the day. You know, because the quarterback's getting hammered, like people coming across the middle. Like, Vantes Perfect.

Yeah. Tries to literally rip your head off. Yeah, not good. Now you can't do that. So, yeah, you scroll out more points. It may better. I don't give him credit. Someone else must be.

No, coaches. Good people, not that schlub. Okay, that's it for us this week. Talk to you next week. Yeah. Potsave the World is a crooked media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our producer is Haley Mewis.

It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seiglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Yale Freed, and Phoebe who film and share our episodes as videos each week.