The Dispatch Podcast - Putin's Bromance

Episode Date: September 15, 2023

A perfect storm of congressional battles has formed over the upcoming legislative session, just as the grown ups are leaving. Mike is joined by Steve and Jonah to discuss the impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden and: -Biden’s problematic Iranian prisoner deal -Kim Jong Un and Putin now BFFs? -Biden needs a nap Show notes: -The Morning Dispatch: A Rogue State Visit -Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns: This Will Not Pass -The Dispatch Podcast with Martin and Burns Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Phenomenal launch into the air. Absolutely incredible Air Transat! Fly the seven-time world's best leisure airline champions, Air Transat. Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm Mike Warren. That's Jonah Goldberg. That's Steve Hayes. We won't be dwelly too much on the presidential race this week. Instead, we're going to dive into the whirlwind weeks ahead for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in the House of Representatives. We'll also have a lengthy discussion about the state of the world, or at least some important areas of it, and what America's role is right now where it should be. we'll revisit one question about President Joe Biden we got into last week. All of that coming up. Well, Congress is back from its August recess and things are happening. One Republican congressman called it a perfect storm, and that seems like an apt phrase. We've got to a spending fight looming as the big omnibus spending bill currently funding the government runs out at the end of the fiscal year. And for you non-green eye shade people, that's September 30th.

On top of that, we've got a formal impeachment inquiry announced by Kevin McCarthy this week, having the three committees investigating Hunter Biden, his businesses, and any possible corrupt connections to Joe Biden jointly pursuing that inquiry. This is all coming as once again, House Conservatives are crowing about giving McCarthy the boot. The big problem with that is, who wants it? Who wants the job? Not me. Oh, and a non-insignificant number of elected members of Congress are very old and possibly infirm.

Jonah, when I look at Capitol Hill, I feel a bit like Lloyd Christmas in Dumb and Dumber when he says, we've got no food, we got no jobs, our pets' heads are falling off. tell me it's all going to be okay. Oh, it's not going to be okay. It's a hot mess. And, you know, it's getting worse because people like Mitt Romney are leaving. And I think it's likely that people like Mitch McConnell, you know, sooner rather than later in the grand scheme of things, won't be there either. And so a lot of the grownups are leaving.

And that's on the Senate side, which is more great. grown up than the house side. I am, so I kind of have a weird take on the Kevin McCarthy thing insofar as I don't think he's act, this actually is as the impeachment thing is really a way for him to try to keep Freedom Caucus from shutting down the government. And if you actually look at what he proposed, it's not actually changing anything that's all that hasn't already been happening. what's his face, Jim Jordan and Representative Comer,

they're not going to like dissolve their committees to form a special investigative impeachment committee thing. It's a little, someone was, because I'm driving cross-country, I listen to a lot of podcasts in the last 48 hours. Someone was making this point, and I think it's right. It's a little bit like the David Weiss appointment as a special counsel to investigate Hunter. He was already the prosecutor doing it.

He's not really, he has not really actually become in a meaningful way, a special counsel, but he gets to call himself one. It doesn't really change anything that the guy was doing. Similarly, I don't think the actual investigation, because we're calling it an impeachment inquiry, changes in a significant way. But it does buy, I think McCarthy thinks it buys him some time to keep the Freedom Caucus from shutting down the government and keeping him off his back. with a motion to vacate the chair.

At the same time, less people think I'm just criticizing McCarthy on the impeachment of himself. I do not, life of me, understand how the White House and all of the defenders, including all the people in the media, can simply say there is zero evidence that Biden did anything wrong.

Now, there's a difference between evidence and proof. There's different kinds of evidence, circumstantial evidence is not is not dispositive it never is or it shouldn't say never is it rarely is but there's real evidence I mean there's testimony from people alleging troubling things there are bank accounts and LLCs that we haven't had a good explanation for we know I mean it's it's evidence by inference to a certain extent that but Biden lied about his relationship with Hunter and whether he'd ever about business stuff. So I think there's like there's real stuff there. I don't think they have anything close to the evidence required for an actual impeachment, never mind an impeachment conviction

in the Senate. But everybody's sort of retreating to their corners and there's just a lot of kabuki going on, which seems even more kabuki-esque as I drive headlong into the west, into the new frontier away from all of this craziness. But yes, I mean, it seems that evidence of possible bad things, possible bad behavior or possible inadvisable behavior by the president doesn't rise yet

as it stands to the level of impeachable. But the investigations, as you point out, Jonah, were already going on. Steve, does Kevin McCarthy's use of the eye word here of impeachment of sort of formally declaring it, which basically has the power of formally declaring an impeachment inquiry and not much else, does that poison the well anymore?

Or was this already, Democrats were never going to get on board, even moderates, even people like Jared Golden and Maine, were never going to get on board with anything that would nail Joe Biden. And Republicans and Kevin McCarthy are just kind of jumping ahead to where this was already going, which was an impeachment inquiry that isn't probably going to go anywhere. What strategic benefit did this serve impeachment to do it now? Well, I don't know if people can see you, Mike, but you not only feel like Lloyd Christmas from Dumb and Dumber. If people could see your haircut, you look like Lloyd Christmas from Dumb and Dumber.

Thank you. No gap in the teeth, though. Thank you very much. I think the main purpose for Kevin McCarthy doing what he's done in announcing an impeachment inquiry is to help Donald Trump in the presidential election. I think he wants to be able to say, wants, you know, voters across the country to be able to read headlines that say,

you know, House launches Joe Biden impeachment inquiry. And if you look at headlines from newspapers across the country, many of them carried those headlines. And without going much deeper, as many voters won't, they will think, oh, Donald Trump was Joe Biden was impeached and come to the conclusion that either everybody's corrupt and everybody does things worthy of being impeached, even if Joe Biden is not actually likely to be impeached. Or they will say, boy, Washington is so partisan and so broken. People are taking shots at one another. You know, how do I choose who's good and who's bad? And I think McCarthy probably accomplished that. We know there was reporting in Politico a couple days ago that Donald Trump has been coordinated. with House Republicans, including Elise Stefonic and others in leadership, about this. He's been making open calls on social media calling for Joe Biden's impeachment, not really

making a sort of solid case about exactly why or not showing that he has any deep understanding of the evidence. And I agree with Jonah, there is evidence that that's problematic for Joe Biden. Instead, just saying you should do it to him because he did it to me. So I think if you sort of stop and take a step back, that's really why this is happening. Whatever the Freedom Caucus machinations are, whatever the internal house politics are, that's the sort of the biggest argument. You know, I spoke this week with Ken Buck, who's a conservative Republican congressman from Colorado. the idea that his conservative credentials could be in question is absurd.

He is as conservative as they get. And he has been outspoken, and I spoke with him about this. He offers this essentially, when you put it that way, Steve, a very quaint pushback against the idea that now is the time to impeach Biden. Again, he comes back to the question of evidence. he is a career prosecutor himself. He says, I've been trying to get people to understand that if we're going to pursue this, we're going to need Democrats on board. We're going to need lots of evidence that gets us to the point of proof.

There's more work to be done. And I'm sitting there listening to him, nodding my head. That makes sense. That seems like responsible good government. And then I hear you make the very correct point. that none of that matters. This is about optics. This is about politics. This is about muddying the waters. You know, what is the point? And it brings me to this, if we can veer a little bit away from impeachment, broaden it out a little bit to the retirement, the announced retirement

of Mitt Romney. It just brings me to think about how serious people, no matter their ideology in Congress, particularly on the Republican side, have to be looking at the situation and throwing up their hands the way Mitt Romney seems to be doing and saying, this is not worth it. That's pretty grim, Steve. It's very grim. Yeah, look, I mean, you know, we don't really have themes, or at least we don't have themes on purpose on this podcast. But one of the things we talk about pretty consistently is this idea of performative politics and what it's done to governance, what it's done to what happens in Washington, D.C. And I think that's what we're seeing here. I think that's what we're seeing here with a lot of

the dancing around on spending. You know, you have Republicans who suddenly cared tremendously about spending, who didn't care at all about spending under Donald Trump or to the extent that they cared about spending under Donald Trump. They wanted more. They supported his calls for more spending most of them. And now they're willing to shut down the government to get, you know, what are, I would say, relatively minor in the scheme of things, changes to discretionary spending. This is not serious. This is all about performative politics and getting hits on Fox News or praise on Steve Bannon's podcast. And it's frustrating. I think it's frustrating to those of us who observe it from the outside. But as it happens, I talk to two members of, two Republican members of

the house yesterday, and talked about exactly this. These are serious people. They came to Washington to do serious things. They're conservatives. Everybody would describe them as conservatives, and they said, I'm just done with this. This is so frustrating and voiced sort of the kinds of concerns about where this is going that we've often expressed on this podcast. And the real fear is, and we're seeing.

it, as you guys both noted, with Mitt Romney's departure, is that just good people will leave. They don't want to do this anymore. If you come to Washington, you subject yourself to the kind of scrutiny that running for office requires these days. And you are willing to, you know, spend hours in a dank basement making fundraising calls to hand over to the leadership of your party in either chamber so that you have the privilege of remaining in Congress. You want to be able to do something in addition to sort of spinning your wheels on on the fundraising stuff. And as you figure out that more and more members of Congress figure out that they just can't do much because the performative people are running things or driving the debate, winning the arguments,

leading leadership around, good people are just going to continue to leave. And, you know, we've seen that. You go back to the kind of, you know, I was doing a lot more reporting. Many of the really good people that I had as my sources in Congress are gone now. They've just said forget it. And, you know, when I was doing more reporting, I sought out the people I thought were smartest, most thoughtful, people likely to be in leadership, people already in leadership. And they're just a lot fewer of those people to call on these days. Yeah, that's right. Jonah, I want to tie this into the spending fight because, you know, Steve raised a good point about the kind of silliness when you look at the grand scheme of this, what's driving the debt,

the deficit, and the budget. It's not these discretionary programs. You can, you know, nip and tuck here. Of course, it's it's non-discretionary. it's the entitlement programs. And all of what Steve just described about good people throwing up their hands and say, I'm done with this and allowing the vacuum to be filled by the performance artists, you pair that with the uns seriousness about spending. Isn't this just all our fault, as in the American people? I mean, isn't this the government that we deserve at this point?

We like the entertainment. We don't want to make hard choices about spending. And we blame leaders in Washington, but shouldn't we, shouldn't we blame ourselves? I like that this is a very deep cut of ultramontane counter-enlightenment intellectual comte Joseph de Maestra, who actually is the guy who first said, people get the government they deserve or something to those lines. And he wanted to restore the monarchy and all that kind of stuff. So, for the record, I do not want to restore the monarchy. Make me a case. No, I, I, I, anyway, of course, it's, it, yes.

And look, there's a better enlightenment figure was Adam Smith, who said there's a lot of ruin in a nation, right? America has had always had problems and we've been able to sort of deal with their problems. And sometimes we dealt with the problems by kicking the can down the road and dealing with the problems that are, dealable. The problem with the financial crisis is that it's like cankicking is no longer a responsible, you can't make really a good responsible argument about it anymore. In the process of accumulating so much debt for so long, Americans have been acculturated to the fact that are, acculturated to the belief that it doesn't matter, right? And one of the things that did that is that they've seen their political leaders get very, very concerned about the debt and deficits

only when the other party is in power. And you can't, you know, and so there's a lot of blame to go around. I got to be careful. I'm in Cheney country. But, you know, Dick Cheney famously said that, you know, Reagan proved that deficits don't matter in terms of politics or in elections, whatever. I still think Cheney is more responsible than a lot of the clowns. we got today.

But Joe Biden doesn't care about debt and deficits. Barack Obama didn't care about death and deficits. George W. Bush didn't care about that in deficits. I mean, you can make a better case for Bush on some things. And Donald Trump actively had contempt for any idea of fiscal restraint. And now we just don't have a public that, for understandable reasons, is willing to hear arguments from politicians because politicians as a group have lost all of their credibility on this stuff.

But it does, and I want to move on from this real quick, but Steve, I'm just thinking back to 10 plus years ago when sort of out of nowhere, a congressman from this state somewhere in the middle of the country called Wisconsin proposed and pushed these ideas of reforming, Social Security, and particularly Medicare, in ways that would put them on a sure fiscal footing. And he got the Republican conference, the Republican majority in the House eventually, to sign on to a budget like that. So at the same time, while the American people don't seem to, you know, have a stomach for these tough conversations, on the other hand, I mean, it does fall down to leadership. It does fall down to individual people. I'm, of course, talking about Paul Ryan, who's not in Congress anymore, speaking of.

But, I mean, this does fall to individual leaders in Washington sort of doing the hard things. Is there any reason to be hopeful that there are diamonds in the rough on Capitol Hill or waiting in the wings to be elected? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, in a surprising way that there are diamonds in the rough serving in Congress. There are, you know, the kinds of people that I've spoken to over the last few days about this. They're not in a position, I think, right now to defy leadership and try to out-compete. You know, they're not going to, like, elbow Marjorie Taylor Green away from the camera or Lauren Bobert or Jim Jordan or these others in order to have a conversation about entitlement reform. And if we're being honest about it, you know, what is Sean Hannity? What does he want to have them on to do?

He's not going to have them on to make a detailed case going over the history of U.S. entitlements and the various prospects for reform of the drivers of our debt. Like, John Hannity doesn't care about that stuff. He wants somebody to come on and yell and shout about the Biden criminal family, right? That's what's getting people on TV. That's what people pay attention to. And that creates these incentives in Congress. that I think are really destructive.

But I think, yeah, I mean, yeah, look, Paul Ryan was, in some ways, was a unique political figure in a unique political moment. I remember when I talked to him about why he was doing what he did. He tells this story about being up in the deer stand after Republicans lost over Thanksgiving after Republicans lost the House in 2006. and thinking, well, very much along the lines of what I hear from some of the people I talk to today, why am I going back there? Like, what is this for? You know, this is almost 20 years ago he's having these thoughts. Like, can anybody do anything? Can I actually accomplish anything?

And he thought pretty serious about quitting, decided that he wasn't going to quit. But if he wasn't going to quit, he was going to go back and make sure that he worked on the big issues that he cared most about. So we went back and proposed this, these Medicare reforms, this path, I think it was later the path to prosperity and forgetting what the first was it the roadmap. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, set about basically saying that's what my career is going to be. And if this costs me my seat, it costs me my seat. And that's a pretty healthy way to approach this stuff.

Remember, he had to fight his own party to do it when he first announced this. roadmap and talked about these reforms, the National Republican Congressional Committee, the body in Washington that's charged with getting Republicans elected to the House, put out word to members of the House of Representatives that they should run away from Paul Ryan's entitlement reforms, that this was political death, and they sort of trashed one of their own as he was building this out in the lead up to the 2010 elections. But he was willing to lose a seat. He basically said, I don't really care if I remain in Congress, if I can't work on the big things. He was, you know, his district wasn't a deep red district,

but it was a pretty safe district and his constituents liked him. So it wasn't, I'd say, a monumental risk. But he took the risk and he, you know, he did these tutorials, six, eight, 10 people at a time, walked people through the arguments for it and earned the support that way. Nothing like that is happening today. They're not, nobody's doing two. tutorials on the big issues of the day. Yeah, no, that's the problem. They're doing tutorials about how to do conservative media training. You know, that's sort of, you know, how to go on Newsmax, how to talk and raise money for small dollar donations.

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of international sanctions. Critics, including a number of Republicans, say this is a ransom payment. I'm getting flashbacks to the Obama administration and the sort of Obama approach to Iran Steve, talk a little bit about this exchange. Are Republicans right? Is this a ransom payment? Should we be outraged about what we expect to see happen next week? Yes. Okay.

All right. Well, let's move on. Okay. It is a ransom payment. We can just move on. Yeah, it's a ransom payment. It's outrageous. They've done this without Consultant Congress, which, depending on how you,

depending on what you believe about. whether there is sort of a secret underlying nuclear deal, which has been reported and I think makes a lot of sense when you watch what the administration has done. This is a bigger part of a, this is another step in a bigger deal. And we're giving, we're giving or we're allowing Iran to access funds that were previously withheld. And I think we can be certain that Iran will do with the funds, the things that Iran has done with its funds for the past four decades, which is in part, fund terror, fund anti-American activities, continue to build its nuclear weapons program. None of this should be surprising. And I think there are a number of reasons to be frustrated with what the Biden administration is.

is doing here, first and foremost, beyond the providing Iran funds that we know they'll use for malign activities is making it far more likely that they're going to take hostages again in the future. You've had leaders of the IRGC, the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps, say this in public on tape. We know that these hostages, these prisoners are worth money. So we're going to to take more of them. These funds, if you listen to the Biden administration, are to be restricted to humanitarian use. Even if that were true, that shouldn't give us much comfort because, of course, money is fungible, whatever they're spending on humanitarian reasons is money that they, you know, with this new money is money that they would have had to spend for those same

things with less money, which gives them freedom to spend. Also, Steve, just because I don't know if you saw this, but Raeisi, the president of Iran, gave an interview with Lester Holt, and Lester Holt was like, you know, well, you're going to spend this on humanitarian things. And he's, nah, we're going to spend it on whatever we want. So like the Biden, even that talking, that's talking about which was always stupid, you know, the idea that like, hey, I'll pay your mortgage for a month. Um, but you can't spend that money, the money you save on, on hookers and blow is just, you know, money is fungible. But they're an. out even playing that game, which is they're beclowning the Biden administration.

They're mocking them. Here's the exact quote. Iranian President Reisi says, we will spend the $6 billion, wherever we see fit. And Lester Holt follows up and says, this won't just be spent on food, medicine, humanitarian goods, which again, as Jonah points out, is the Biden administration line. And Raezy says, humanitarian means whatever the Iranian people need. I mean, not serious. The final point I'll make real quick is this, the sort of additional details of this deal were announced or confirmed by the State Department on 9-11, which is just a really bad look when you think of the fact that many senior Al-Qaeda leaders are being harbored or at least allowed to operate freely in Iran. And that we know Osama bin Laden, Iman al-Zawahiri, other al-Qaeda leaders had seen Iran and it, the sort of on against, on again, off again, mutually exploitative relationship that they had with Iran as absolutely crucial to the growth of al-Qaeda when we, when our military raided Osama bin Laden's compound and captured treasured, it's. trove of intelligence. One of the things that we found was a letter from Osama bin Laden in which he

wrote, quote, Iran is our main artery for funds, personnel, and communication. And the U.S. Treasury Department under then-President Barack Obama used this intelligence that we gathered to make serious designations of both Iranian regime officials and al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda individuals. So, the idea that this would be confirmed on September 11th was, you know, more than just tone deaf. It was really pretty outrageous. Jonah, I've tried to approach both the Biden and the previously, the Obama administration's Iran policy, at least try to think of it in terms of good faith, you know, accepting a bit of their argument that, look, this is about preventing Iran from getting a nuclear war.

weapon. And I keep coming up against this idea that they seem to be pursuing the idea of a deal at the expense of everything else. That no matter what they do, Iran continues to get closer to a nuclear weapon. And yet the deal seems to be a deal. Some kind of deal seems to continue to be the object of pursuit. Again, at the expense of everything else, are we having Are we having Redux here? Is there sort of a group, a number of people who, in Washington, in the blob, in Washington, the State Department, or where else, just pursuing a deal for the sake of it? Have they lost the plot on Iran, or is there something else going on?

Yeah, I mean, no, I don't think there's something else. I think this is one of these things where it always reminds these kinds of situations. One of my favorite movies is Bridge on the River Kwai, where Alexander's, Guinness, plays Colonel Nicholson, who decides he's going to, he's a prisoner of war in Japan, or in a Japanese prisoner war camp, and he, uh, he decides he's going to show up the Japanese by using his own soldiers to make a better bridge than the Japanese ever could because they have better engineers and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and he loses the plot and realizes, you know, I won't give out the spoiler, but, you know, realizes that he's actually aiding the

Japanese in their war effort. And as, you know, this, this spoiler alert, he has this, my God, what have I done moment. And I think that, you know, like my friend Charlie Cook compares it to like, there are certain liberals who are just obsessed how we need to have like more trains in this country. And you say, well, what's the problem that it's solving to have more trains? And the problem is the lack of trains, right? And there is this thing that has gone deep into certain parts of the Democratic foreign policy establishment that thinks we need to have an Iran deal to solve the problem

of not having an Iran deal. And it becomes this sort of self-justifying kind of thing. And when you point out stuff like, look, there's a real politic argument. I have friends at AI who are serious people who on net were like, I'm better to have the Iran deal than not because at least delays the nuclear program for a decade. And I kind of disagree with them. But like if you have open eyes and you realize that the Iran deal, as Obama put it out, was not actually going to prevent a nuclear bomb or a nuclear weapon program, it was simply going to, at best, delay it a little while. Then I can have a conversation with you.

Then we can talk about like, well, what are we going to do with that delay to sort of what is that time buying us to do. And at some point, that part of the equation that seems have just dropped out like, you know, like a muffler out of an old car. And it's just this idea of getting a deal to have said we got a deal. And I think this kind of thing, for weird reasons, I think this kind of thing comes up historically in arms control more than in other things. There was this obsession with arms control, you know, in the 80s, 70s and 80s, obviously, and I'm not saying I'm against all arms control with nuclear weapons and all that kind of stuff, but there was this whole body of thought that said if we're not making forward progress, we're like sharks, we have to swim

or we drown. We're like riding a bike. If we're not pedaling forward, we're going to fall over and be a nuclear cinder or something like that. And I think that sort of logic takes over certain bureaucracies. And so again, with this, I'm softer on the hostage payment ransom stuff. I don't like it. I probably would, I would like to think I wouldn't have done it. But every administration screws up that kind of stuff because it's just really hard internally not to try to bring people home and that kind of thing. But you get this sense with all this weird stuff with Robert Mallee, which I can't explain and maybe Steve can, but you get the sense that the six. The Iran envoy, the US envoy, Biden administration's envoy to Iran, been suspended. Yeah.

Right. Who's been sidelined for, for mishandling classified information, and we don't have any more information than that, really. And which is just sort of bonkers. And one gets the sense that, you know, remember, I keep thinking about it right after 9-11, since we're right after the anniversary of 9-11, there was this wonderful piece in the New Republic about how crazy Joe Biden was, right? So this is not a senility point. This is 22 years ago. And right after 9-11, he's having a meeting with his foreign policy team, because I guess he was the chairman of the Foreign Policy,

Foreign Affairs Committee or something. And they're talking about how do we respond to the fact that we just had these buildings knocked down and all these people, all Americans were killed. And he says, you know what we should know what we should do. We should cut a check to the Iranians for $150 million. Just to show that we're not angry at them and we don't think they're part of this, whatever. And the entire room is just sort of like, don't interrupt them. don't respond. He'll move on to talking about something else in a second, and we don't have to

follow up on this. But if we fight him on this, he'll dig in, right? Biden has this weird mindset about Iran that I think goes way back. And he's having arguments in his head with people he had arguments with 30 years ago and 20 years ago about stuff that doesn't apply today. And I think it infects his entire team. Yeah, that scene, it's like every time Steve brings up that the dispatch should invest in a Spanish winery, you know, at editorial meetings. And we all sort of sit there and wait for him to get through it and move on. It's like the downfall video where we all just have these knowing looks at each other and we're like, let Steve keep talking. No one's saying. But my, that prospect has the chance of really turning out well and succeeded. And the Biden's

Iran policy doesn't. All right. Well, from, uh, from one, uh, I guess aspirational nuclear power to two actual nuclear powers. This week, Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin held a summit together in which these two strongmen, I guess, vowed to be BFFs forever and ever. This is from the Associated Press, North Korea's Kim Jong-un vowed, quote, full and unconditional support for Russia's Vladimir Putin at this summit in the Russian Far East. The AP continues, this meeting, which lasted over four hours at Russia's spaceport in the Far East, underscores how the two countries' interests are aligning. Putin is believed to be seeking one of the few things impoverished North Korea has an abundance, stockpiles of aging ammunition and rockets for Soviet-era weapons.

Nothing to see here, right? Nothing to be alarmed about, Steve. just two strong men with nuclear weapons and anti-American views getting along. Yeah, two points. One about the Russians and the North Koreans, and then another point about the Biden administration's foreign policy and coherence, which I think this highlights in some respects. Look, it's very interesting.

We have a terrific sort of reported analysis on this meeting in Thursday's morning dispatch. We'll pop it in the show notes so people can read it. But, I mean, it really tells you something about Vladimir Putin that he would seek this kind of help from North Korea. It suggests that he's in pretty desperate straits. And if the North Koreans are providing this to him in a way that actually helps his war effort, I think it suggests that his ability to play this out over the long term, which has long been assumed to be a huge advantage for Russia, is at least more questionable than the people making that claim might have suspected initially. You don't want to be going to, you know, one of the poorest countries on earth, this hermit kingdom, seeking real help for your, for your war effort.

But second, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, the Biden administration, was asked about this meeting and what it meant. and he had, you know, sort of tough-sounding language on North Korea and said, in effect, you know, North Korea will be isolated from the international community and will be punished for supporting Russia and its aggressive war against Ukraine. And then you stop and think, I think he said this either on the same day or within a day or two of the Biden administration announcing that. that was freeing up this $6 billion to Iran, which is also providing Russia arms, weaponry for its fight against Ukraine.

Who's going to believe that? Like, how do you square that circle? It's a level of foreign policy incoherence that I suppose it shouldn't be surprising. At this point, I think we saw this kind of naive realpolitik throughout the Obama administration. But this is sort of crazy. How can you threaten North Korea for doing something, potentially doing something that Iran is already doing when you're rewarding Iran or not, at least not punishing Iran in the same way? sort of further, deeper incoherence from the Biden administration on these issues. Jonah, do you have any thoughts on the big summit with Putin and Kim?

And I think we should also explore some more this incoherence idea of the Biden administration's foreign policy, which, you know, say what you want about the Trump foreign policy. It was always sort of keeping other people, enemies, people like. like North Korea and China sort of on their toes. This is really just sort of incoherent, as Steve said. What are your thoughts? Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure I'm going to get nostalgic for Donald Trump's North Korea policies. But he must be pretty jealous because he, you know, one of the things he took with him was the love letters between him and Kim Jong-un,

and he loves to show him to people. And now, you know, Kim Jong-un is dating Putin instead of him. And that's got to bother him. But, yeah, I mean, I, it's, I hadn't thought about it until I was just listening to Steve. I think part of the incoherence part comes from, it's sort of metaphorically like this point about fungible money, right? If you give money to Iran or you free up Iranian money for Iran for, and you say, well, this is for humanitarian stuff, and you don't realize that, like, even if they were going to honor that

commitment, which the clearly not. Freeing up $6 billion, you know, getting $6 billion for this stuff frees up $6 billion for others of. Politically, it's the same thing with sort of political capital where you, it's sort of like the Biden administration's policy towards China, you know, whenever you listen to John Kerry about how they're going to negotiate things about climate change on a completely different track from everything else. And they think because one guy at the office,

has the folder for this. It has no relationship to the guy down the hall who is the folder for that. When all the foreign governments are like, okay, you're the five things the U.S. wants. And it's blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Weapons, blah, blah, blah, blah, terrorism. They don't see these as like separate tracks to negotiate or anything like that. They just see it as sort of leverage in power. And but if you actually have this sort of bureaucratic sort of intellectual

mindset where you compartmentalize issues and problems in those ways as you deal with things in foreign policy, it's invariably going to look incoherent from the outside because it's incoherent. The only other thing I'd say is I think there's something reassuring as terrible as this is, you know, Iran's sending drones to Russia. Now North Korea is going to send artillery shells, which I hope some of them we find out. I have a 50-50 kind of hope here that we're going to find out that a lot of North Korea's munitions are in really terrible shape. And we may hear about like Russian artillery batteries blowing up when they try to shoot some of

this stuff. But it does sort of underscore why bad governments, bad states, villains end up hanging out with each other. And, you know, it's sort of like go back to the mall. of Ribbentrop Pack, right? There's a reason why the Nazis and the Soviets cut a deal is because autocrats have it. It's really hard from dictators and totalitarians find it really difficult to deal with Western countries that have standards and, and care about some principles and human rights and democracy and all that kind of stuff. And it's just

really, really easy to deal with other people who can autocratically make a decision, make a handshake deal and not give you a hard time about anything. And what's reassuring about this with the marginal exception of China, which is just more complicated, all of these countries are second rate countries or third rate countries. Being a totalitarian, being an autocrat, contrary to what some of our friends on the post-liberal right want to tell you these days, makes your country weaker and more pathetic. I mean, it may make your military stronger in a narrow sense, but like North Korea is is strong but super brittle, right? Russia, we're finding out that its military was nowhere near what everyone thought it was on paper. I suspect that's true of North Korea, too.

These are crappy countries to live in. These are crappy countries to raise your kids in. And if people think I'm being too harsh on North Korea, suck it up because I'm being 100% accurate. I'm not going to apologize for it. It's an evil totalitarian state that has, you know, slavery and caste systems. And there's just a reason why bad countries end up forming clubs with each other. It's because they're the only ones that will have a stomach

for hanging out with each other. I'm thinking of the opening scene and the naked gun. I think about that all time. Yeah, and Frank Trebin breaks into the room. Yes. I think Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollah and everybody else. Steve, the other thing about this meeting between Putin and Kim.

And maybe this is a pedestrian point, but I think it's important. It's a reminder that we live in a global world. And, you know, Russia is a country that stretches across two continents. And what happens in its relationship with North Korea affects what's happening in its war in Ukraine. And it really does, to underscore Jonah's point, sort of undercuts the new rights approach to foreign policy, which does have a sort of compartmentalization, we should be worrying about China and not what's happening in Eastern Europe. But of course, these are all one thing affects the other. Yeah. I mean, it is ironic, I think. And there are there are some

through lines between the supposed realpolitik or realist approach that Joe Biden is offering or has been said to offer, the Obama administration as well. Remember, Barack Obama was going to move us away from ideology-driven foreign policy and national security policy to sort of a hard-nosed assessment of U.S. interests and conduct his foreign policy that way. I think if you, if you look at what Joe Biden, I mean, to the extent that you can make sense of what Joe Biden is doing, he's, he's naive and I think in some cases, delusional, but just in the other direction. I mean, just as it relates to our enemies in some ways. You know, he hasn't been this way, certainly on Vladimir Putin, although I have my criticism

of how late we've been on virtually everything. We eventually do the right thing, but it takes us a long time, and that time elapsed has costs to it. But if you look at the approach to Iran, you know, there are these echoes of the Obama administration's approach. Barack Obama's team literally talked about decoupling. That was their phrase. We were going to decouple nuclear talks from everything else the regime is doing. But the nature of the regimes in these cases, particularly when you're dealing with rogue states, matters a lot.

That should, in my view, tell you how you should approach the regimes. We know a lot about the nature of the Iranian regime that doesn't allow us to neatly separate, you know, sort of the actual diplomatic language in the Iran deal. You need to know whether you think it's like they're going to follow this. You need to know what the likely outcomes are. And, you know, sometimes it feels like excuse making, both from people making these. arguments on the new right and from people making these arguments on the realist left so that they don't have to do, I think, some of the hard things that the United States has to do. That doesn't mean we need to be the world's policemen. But in my view, for exactly

the reasons you suggested, you know, the world is an interconnected place. The United States should do what it can to use its influence to create alliances or world. a world order that benefits the United States. And as often as not, that requires us to try to determine outcomes. It doesn't mean that or try to influence outcomes, if not determine outcomes. It doesn't mean that we should go charging into every dispute with our own troops or throw our weight around making demands that we can't follow up. But it does mean that where you're able to influence outcomes, we should try to influence outcomes.

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Okay, well, let's revisit a topic we discussed last week. We got into it a little bit the questions. And I will say we will get into now presidential politics, but not on the Republican side. There were polling results from last week that suggested that there are, a number of voters who are concerned about Joe Biden's fitness for office. And when I say that, I mean physical fitness, his age, his ability to carry out the duties of the president for another term. And this comes, I should say, is followed shortly thereafter by a column from David Ignatius,

who I would say is sort of the most, maybe the dean of the mainstream liberal punditry corps in the Washington Post. He suspends several paragraphs this week building up Joe Biden and all of his accomplishments, and he gets down almost near the end of the column to say this. quote, Biden has another chance to say no to himself this time by withdrawing from the 2024 race. It might not be in character for Biden, but it would be a wise choice for the country. The number one or one of the top liberal columnists read in the Biden White House, urging Biden not to run again in 2024. Jonah, what do you make of this?

Why is this happening now? I think partly it's just it's the panic setting. in. I think that, I mean, look, let's just be clear. Like, Mitt Romney, God bless him, you know, says I would be my mid-80s. No one's worried about Min Romney's age, right? People age at different rates. And so when people talk about age, what they're really talking about is cognitive ability, but age is a short end for that. And there are a lot of defenders of Joe Biden who really want to make it want to confuse the issue as if, like, um, they can talk themselves out of the problem. And the idea that the Joe Biden that people see is different behind the scenes.

It's just not persuasive to anybody. And in fact, it's probably like the case that he is more old, seeming, more sort of, fuddled. Yeah, a little more foggy, um, off camera than on, because he realizes he can't see he's got a political problem about how he is perceived when he's in front of a camera so he's trying harder but like when you're in um um in a meeting you you know you let your guard down more and my hunch is that a lot of people are seeing it and you hear stories about it and um and i think it's just dawning on people that as flawed as it is to look at polling a year out more than a year out 18 months out whatever it is uh from a presidential election in any sort of granular way as predictive.

Directionally, these polls tell you that Joe Biden is much more vulnerable than people want to admit. And so I think it's just, but I don't have any grander theory than this. It's sort of like it's one of these things where you can't spin your way out of something. you can spin debt and deficit stuff. People do it all the time. We talked about this earlier. Every single American or nearly every single American has a relative or a friend or a loved one of some kind

who they've seen these signs in before and they recognize it. Now, it doesn't mean he's a vegetable or he's about to be a mess. But when you tell people there's no they're there, they just know they're being lied to. And I think that that's just a fundamental political problem that they're struggling with. Steve, you have an active bet with our colleague, Sarah Isker, that one of your bets is that Biden will not be the nominee in 2024.

So I need to ask you, did you somehow slip David Ignatius, knowing he's read in the Biden White House something, some kind of payment to write this column to help your bet? I did not. You know, I know David Ignatius a little bit. I think he's a, I think he's a sharp calmness. He usually has, if you want to, as I think Jonah said, if you want to tap into the thinking, particularly national security and foreign policy of the sort of democratic intelligentsia, Democratic establishment, David Ignatius is the way. He regularly, and it's true of sort of the establishments beyond sort of partisan, he had

very good sources forever at the top of the leadership of CIA and the director of national intelligence, but I did not. We didn't agree on everything all the times, even though we were, we were friendly. I did not slip him a note to do this to win my, to win my bet. But I think Jonah's point, it can't sort of be, be emphasized enough. It is, it's weird to listen to, you know, the White House, you know, the White House, they, they sort of, or the White House of the Biden campaign, they don't really have a choice but to try to spin this in whatever way they can, right? So you have this wave of polls come out and then you have responding to it a series of arguments or op-eds or pushback from

Biden partisans, effectively telling voters that what they're seeing is not what they're seeing. And that's the problem. It's not that voters are suddenly waking up and saying, oh, my gosh, I know his exact age and that's the problem. It's that there's, it's what they're seeing him do and what the White House is doing with and about him. I mean, you know, it looked like he fell asleep in a meeting with the Israeli president back in June. He's had all of these gaffs. He looks like he's lost sometimes when he's speaking. The White House in Vietnam, he said, I got to go take a nap. right i mean like he said i've got to go to bed yeah and it came the irony of that statement i mean

there been a couple of these moments uh on this latest trip and um the irony of that is it comes on the heels of these protestations from biden partisans uh that he's you know full of him and vigor and oh by the way he's racing around the world so how dare you suggest that he's too tired for the job I mean, that was the line for about three days. And then Biden, you know, he on a couple of different answers for back to back, made no sense at all, clearly lost his train of thought. Like, he couldn't follow it up. Now, that happens to me. That happens to all of us.

But it happens with great frequency to the president of the United States. And when he then announces that he's got to go to bed, that would be something that I might say, after all. a long trip to a different continent. But it comes at a time when people are really wondering whether he can do the job. And every seemingly, it's not accurate to say every appearance. But many of his appearances have the effect of affirming what voters have increasingly come to believe that the guy is just too old. How do you campaign for the next 13, 14 months to try to displace?

prove that when his very presence often affirms it. This is a very difficult dilemma. And that is to go to your original question, Mike, that's why you're seeing people say this now is because Democrats have long been concerned that Biden isn't going to, he won't be able to campaign in a strong way through the election. That's why you're hearing people say this now. So I have a theory about this. Two theories. One, I think one of the problems about talking about this stuff is it's sort of like the impeachment. Everyone's going to go to their corners. They're going to say any criticism is partisan, whatever. And I think one of the things a lot of liberals who defend Biden don't actually understand about a lot of conservatives who are bringing up this point is that most of the

conservative, like, yeah, there are pro-Trump people who are all in for Trump and they're like, the guys, you know, they're like attacking Biden as senile and all that kind of stuff. And then there are a bunch of people who really don't want Trump to be president again who are saying, hey, we're pointing this out while there's time to fix it because this guy could really lose. And I think one of the things which we didn't mention, which I wrote about a couple weeks ago, the Mitch McConnell thing is really kind of hammering at home for a lot of people because even if you buy the Mitch McConnell story, which I do for the most part, that this

is all just from a concussion, well, old people fall down. And if Joe Biden had the same effects from a concussion that Mitch McConnell did, you'd have to talk about maybe implementing the 25th Amendment for a while. That's not great, Bob. And I think the assumption of bad faith on the part of anybody who talks about this is one of the things that causes people who have the ability to do something about this to sort of lock in and refuse to do it. The, and I, And obviously the other part of the problem is Kamala Harris is an insurmountable bottleneck politically because people think that she would do even worse than Joe Biden. And but the other, the other theory I had, and I'm going to have a Biden moment while I try to remember what it is. Jonah, don't run for president.

I think the thing that Biden needs to do, like you get in trouble in politics when you pretend that you're something. you're not. Right. And if you're not an intellectual, don't try to talk like one. If you're not funny, don't try too hard to be funny. Joe Bunn's got to stop talking about how he can do push-ups or whatever, that kind of nonsense. They should start cutting ads with him sitting on a porch, whittling a piece of wood, drinking some iced tea or some lemonade, owning his... Off and some Wothers to Originals. Yeah, owning his age, right? In this way that Lloyd Benson kind of owned his age. And I think that that would be me, that would be far more reassuring to a lot of voters if he seemed to be acknowledging that he knows he's got this issue, then him trying to pretend that he doesn't.

Because that disconnect, I think, really bothers a lot of people. So I'm not sure you're right that owning it. I mean, you know, that's, that's often when you have a, what do they say, that you take your biggest problem and hang a lantern on it, like shine a light on it, own it. Own it. Be honest and transparent and work your way through it. I'm not sure that works in this case. But it's hard to imagine it working less than what they're currently doing, which is just saying to people, you're not. Yeah. You're not. I think it's a good option. I mean, the best option is to be 40 years younger. Right. Right. But effectively what they're saying now to voters is like you're not seeing what you tell us you're seeing and you shouldn't be concerned by what you say you're concerned about. I mean, that's, like, you can't, that's not going to work. That's not going to be very effective. Two quick points just on, on, to pick up on Jonah's point there.

Look, I've mentioned this here before. I talked to senior Biden advisors in anticipation of his run in 2020. And, you know, even going back further. And people had these concerns. Biden people had these concerns about Biden. in his debate prep, in other private settings, they worried about his ability to sort of track and move forward. Those people weren't saying these things because they're hostile to Joe Biden.

They were saying these things because they just had these concerns. Second, there was this book that we talked about here. We interviewed the co-authors back in the day by Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns, then at the New York Times. It was a book that looked at the transition from the Trump. administration to the Biden administration, a lot of really great fresh reporting about what was happening in Trump world, but also, and January 6th and sort of taking us through that chaos, but also really good reporting, didn't get as much attention on Joe Biden and what was going on in Biden world. And they have detailed passages in that book, interviews with top

Democrats talking about this, talking openly. This is a big concern. And I remember when we, when we did the podcast with them, and we'll post that in the show notes, too, I asked them about this. So, you know, is this a concern? And Alex Burns, now both Burns and Martin are at Politico said it's a major concern. Like, people are really, really worried about this. They were talking about Democrats who were concerned about this. So I think Jonah's right. People are inclined in a partisan environment in the way that Washington works, the way that too much the country works these days to go to their partisan corners. But it's nonsense.

Democrats are concerned about it. That's why you're seeing people like David Ignatius, Dean Phillips from Minnesota, who's calling for a competitive primary, and others begin to speak out about this because these are the conversations that have been taking place behind the scenes about Joe Biden literally now for years. Well, as we close out, my only thought on this is there is a problem. You mentioned, Jonah, everybody knows somebody, has a family member, a friend, a neighbor who they've seen this happened to. You know who votes a lot are people in their 70s and 80s, and these are people who know themselves, know their peers, and are watching Joe Biden as well.

This, I think, is a problem, particularly with those voters, my own anecdot, talking with people that I know in my life at that age who are open. Swing voters, they're talking about this. You would think that maybe they would be defensive themselves, but no, of course, they know what it's like to be 80, 81, 82 years old. So definitely something that everybody is going to be watching. Thanks so much for listening. Join us at thedispatch.com. Join us.

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