The President's Daily Brief - May 24th, 2022: Russia Selling Stolen Wheat. Why Kabul Fell in Weeks. Biden Announced That We Will Aid Taiwan If Invaded By China.

Episode Date: May 24, 2022

It’s May 24th. You’re listening to the President’s Daily Brief. I’m your host and former CIA Officer Bryan Dean Wright. Your morning intel starts now. First up: There’s Ukrainian wheat getting out of the Black Sea this morning, but the ships aren’t being sailed by Ukrainian captains. They’re Russian. We have satellite imagery that we need to discuss. Second: The Intel Community failed to predict what would happen in Afghanistan. I briefed you on that last week. There’s an update on what went wrong. Finally: Joe Biden said yesterday that if China ever invaded Taiwan, America would step in to protect its island ally. I’ll give you an update on what that deadly war might look like. All up next on the President’s Daily Brief. ------ Please remember to subscribe if you enjoyed this episode of the President's Daily Brief. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's May 24th. You're listening to the President's Daily Brief. I'm your host and former CIA officer Brian Dean Wright. Your morning intel starts now. The brief you're about to hear is in the same spirit of the actual President's Daily Brief, which is a top secret summary of the most critical events in the past 24 hours, all delivered to the President each day by the nation's spymasters. And so, ladies and gentlemen, I am your spy, and this is your special brief. Here's what we're going to be talking about this morning. We're going to do something a little bit different today. I'm going to give you three briefs, all updates, on critical events that we've spoken about before. And as a heads-up, you might want to pull out that map that we used previously, either the one that was in your mind or on your computer screen. So first up, there's Ukrainian wheat getting out of the Black Sea this morning, but the ships aren't being sailed by Ukrainian captains. They're Russian.

We have satellite imagery that we need to discuss. Second, the intel community failed to predict what would happen in Afghanistan. I briefed you on that last week. There's an update on what went wrong. Finally, Joe Biden said yesterday that if China ever invaded Taiwan, America would step in to protect its island ally. I'm going to give you an update on what that deadly war might look like. All up next on the president's daily brief.

First up, there are four very big ships at sea this morning and all have Ukrainian wheat inside them. And that should be a good thing. And that's because, as I briefed you on last week, there's a global shortage of wheat. millions of people from around the world are at risk from starving because of those shortages. So we should be celebrating that Ukrainian wheat is being shipped out into the world this morning, but there's a problem. None of those wheat ships are being sailed by Ukrainian captains.

Instead, they're Russians, carrying wheat stolen from Ukrainian farmers. Satellite imagery has confirmed the first ship sailed to Egypt, which, as you recall from our brief last week, is a country in desperate need of grain. 80% of its wheat supply is imported, mostly from Russia and Ukraine. So when this ship arrived about five days ago, Ukrainian and American government officials called up the Egyptians and said, bad news, you can't have it, it was stolen. To their credit, the very hungry Egyptians turned the ship away.

From there, the Russian thieves sailed north to the country of Lebanon. You may remember from my brief that Lebanon, like Egypt, needs foreign wheat to feed itself. about 80% of its supply, however, is gone because the war in Ukraine. Mills are shutting down throughout Lebanon. They have less than 20 days of wheat in reserves. They also have over a million refugees to feed. Once again, Ukrainian and American officials called up Lebanese diplomats and said, sorry, the wheat was stolen, you can't have it.

And quite incredibly, the government of Lebanon turned the ship away. Now, unfortunately, the Russians did find a home for that stolen wheat in Syria. That's a country that's very close to Vladimir Putin and the Russian regime. Satellite imagery confirms that the wheat was unloaded, unfortunately, a week ago in Syria. We also have a second ship being sailed by the Russians full of Ukrainian wheat. We know this because they tried again to go back to Egypt, but didn't work. They were turned away. And like before, the ship continued on to Syria, where it unloaded the stolen wheat.

We know this morning that there are two more ships at sea. satellite images showed that they loaded their wheat on the 19th and the 21st of this month, just a few days ago. Of the two ships, the furthest out is in the Aegean Sea, claiming to be on its way to Lebanon, obviously a second attempt to entice the desperate Lebanese government. The final ship is just leaving the Black Sea this morning. No intel just yet on where it's attempting to go, but the best guess is back to Syria. The bottom line, ladies and gentlemen, is that Russia is allowing Ukrainian wheat into the global market, yes, but only to faithful friends like Syria. And even though they're trying to win over new allies by bribing them with these stolen products,

so far it's not working. You should expect to see more of this in the coming days and weeks as the Russians are quite clearly engaging in a new form of battle. And that is a wheat war. Your second brief, America's intelligence community failed to predict that Afghanistan would fall to the Taliban so quickly. We discussed that last week. To recap, analysts thought that the Afghan military could hold the country for at least a year. After all, the Afghans had airplanes and tanks, advanced weaponry, and the thinking wind, they had a decent will to fight. And it's that piece, the will to fight, that intel analysts were unable to capture accurately in their assessments. Because, as we all know, Kabul fell after a few weeks of fighting, not a year, which is what the analysts had predicted.

Well, we have new information on this debacle, and it is very sad and very alarming. The Pentagon Inspector General released a 70-page monstrous report a couple days ago that explained why Afghan fighters gave up. There are lots of very complicated moving parts to his analysis. So let me use a very simple and imperfect analogy to explain what happened. I want you to envision yourself on a bike for the very first time. I want you to think about your mom or your dad putting on training wheels and place you. in a steady hand on your shoulder and maybe another hand on the handlebars. And then they pushed you.

Slowly with time, your parents decided that you were ready to steer. And then as they saw progress, they encouraged you to pedal. And then the training wheels came off. They probably put their guiding hands back on you pretty quickly to help you through that transition. But eventually, though, after a few spills, you got it. You could balance on your own. You could steer and pedal and all that came with it. Well, in Afghanistan, what the report says is that none of that has. We gave them a bike, as it were, weapons, planes, two decades of training, but we never let them use it all on their own. We never took any real incremental steps to let them eventually take control. Instead, one morning, we just took off the training wheels, slapped them on the back, and we said,

good luck, and then we flew away. Let me give you a very specific example of this. We taught Afghan ground forces that they should rely on air power. In other words, soldiers on the ground would call in fighter jets to clear enemies in front of them, or at least reduce their numbers, because that's how the U.S. works. That's how we fight. But then the U.S. withdrew. And when we did, we took the airplane mechanics with us.

There were virtually no Afghan mechanics who could fix their own planes. So those planes sat part. And with those planes out of commission, the ground forces didn't know how to fight. They got slaughtered, or they panicked and fled, because we trained them to fight with planes. Now, there are other elements to the collapse in Afghanistan that we could talk about,

but that's really the heart of the matter. There was no slow withdrawal with incremental responsibilities handed off, all so that the Afghans could learn how to fight on their own. All right, let's put aside what we think of the withdrawal. Instead, let's focus on the fact that the intel community never saw any of what I just described coming to pass. In other words, they didn't realize that the Afghan-n-lawful, military was like a bunch of kids trying to learn how to bike, and that Uncle Sam had spent 20 years with his hand on their back and never let them bike fully on their own. And then one day, Uncle Sam

just disappeared. Now, the analogy is imperfect, but the point remains. How did the intelligence community miss that big of a development after 20 years of collecting intelligence? That's the question that if you were in the White House this morning, I'd encourage you to ask and demand answers on. Because if you were the president, you'd be going back to these same analysts for their assessments on Ukraine, on a potential war with Russia, or how to defend Taiwan during a war with China. So those are the stakes this morning, and it's something that the president should be thinking about. Your final brief, China is keeping an eagle eye on the war in Ukraine, and what they've seen so far has led them to be very concerned. When I briefed you on this a few weeks back, I explained why they're so concerned,

and that they've learned three big lessons from the war. Today, I've got a fourth. But before we get to that, let's recap what we know and why we care. Let's first talk about that last bit, why we care. Because it just got very real with a statement made yesterday by Joe Biden. He's in Asia this week. And he said that if China were to invade Taiwan, then the United States would be obligated to join the fight to stop China.

So whatever lessons China is learning in Ukraine, we better pay attention. because it'll shape how bloody our involvement might get when we join the fight. Okay, so let's unpack the three things that we know China has already learned. First, Beijing has been shocked by Russia's terrible performance. They're worried that they're going to suffer the exact same fate because their military and Russia's have been training together for many years. So without getting into the weeds here, the point is that China has copied a lot of what Russia does and who they are militarily.

And so if Russia is weak against a smaller opponent like Ukraine, so too might the Chinese be against a smaller opponent like Taiwan. All right, here's the second lesson that China has learned, the importance of shock and awe. The Chinese now believe that they must fight with an overwhelming use of force from the very first moments of invasion. That means a massive loss of civilian life. I mean, we're talking about a death talk here in the millions, if not the tens of millions, all within the first few days of a war with Taiwan. All right, here's the third lesson, propaganda. Simply put, Ukraine has been amazing at propaganda. Russia has not.

And that's meant that many countries from around the world have rallied to Ukraine's side and not Russia's. The Chinese know that, and they believe that they must be better, especially to navigate or avoid any economic sanctions. And that brings us to the fourth new lesson that China has learned. I can report this morning that China's communist. party is now demanding that its senior officials move all of their financial investments from outside of China back into the country. And that's because China has seen how the West has moved against Russian business people and officials. By freezing their bank accounts, seizing their houses

and their yachts, it's all been fair game. So Beijing obviously took notice. And by instituting this new rule, which basically says you've got to bring it home or you're not going to get promoted, well, China is clearly hoping to insulate the regime from any crippling financial tax levied by the United States or Europe. And by the way, this rule, it's working. We have Intel this morning saying that the most senior Chinese officials are, in fact, selling houses abroad, they're divesting from foreign stocks, they're dumping ownership in foreign business ventures. Now, none of that's going to change our trade war with China, but it will protect the VIPs at the very top of China's coming party. So if you were president this morning, I'd counsel you on how to read this development. And it's actually pretty straightforward. Beijing is preparing for war. We don't know when,

but we do know that the reason for them clawing back all these foreign resources is really clear. China believes that a war will come and they want to be ready. They want to lessen that financial blow at least on their senior communist leaders. To use a gambling analogy here, this is a tell. And it is not very subtle. And that, ladies and gentlemen, concludes your morning brief. A quick thank you for sending all those great emails about your solutions for the Black Sea standoff. I'm going through them right now, and we'll report back in the next few days. And as always, we close out the show reminding each other of why we are here, talking about our country and our world. It's the creed of every good spy and every smart American.

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