The Ricochet Podcast - International Relations

Episode Date: April 6, 2017

We’re all over the globe for this show: Mexico, North Korea, the Middle East, the well of the Senate, and more. That’s in part due to the news cycle but mostly due to our great guests, the WSJ’s Bret Stephens, and the EPCC’s and National Review’s Ed Whalen. We talk military action, diplomacy, nukes (both parliamentary and real), filibusters, and more. Also, what was the deal with that Pepsi ad? Source

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It's the only way to be sure. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lileks, and today from the Wall Street Journal, Brett Stevens, and from National Review Online's law blog, Ed Whelan. Let's have ourselves a podcast. Bye-bye. Welcome, everybody, to this, the Ricochet Podcast.

It's number 347, and we didn't get there on our own. No, we had fine sponsors that brought us this far, like Casper Mattresses. You can try Casper for 100 nights risk-free in your own home, and if you don't love it, they'll pick it up and refund you every single penny. Visit casper.com slash ricochet and use the coupon code ricochet as your promo. And we're brought to you by HelloFresh. HelloFresh is the meal kit delivery service that makes cooking fun, easy, and convenient. And for $35 off your first week of deliveries, visit HelloFresh.com and enter Ricochet35 when you subscribe.

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keep it going in the future thank you james thank you uh listen if you're listening to this podcast that means you are already are part of the ricochet family. Here's the problem. It's really hard to get this thing going and make it work without your membership. So we would love for you to go to Ricochet.com and become a member. That will help support these podcasts. It will help support the fastest-growing, most interesting, most civil conversation on the web. Strike a blow for the free market and also join in with a lot of other people across the country and supporting what we're doing here um and we really do need you to do that i i know i kind of always sound kind of insistent but i mean it it's getting a little tight um be quite honest with you

we fell short of our goal last year and so we're already starting on our back foot if you're listening and you've been putting it off please please do not put it off any longer. We need you. We really do need you. That's it. Thanks. Thanks, James. Well, that'll do.

And Peter Robinson is also with us. Peter, we understand that the signs of spring in California are such that your neighbor's leaf blower is going again. So you've shut the door. You've muted yourself. No, I say open it up. Let me open up my window so you can hear the planes overhead. Let Rob open up his window so you can hear the klaxons of New York. Let you open up your window so you can hear the annoying sound of lawn maintenance guys destroying the earth with carbon exhalations from their leaf blowers.

I don't know. But here we are all together. Interesting week. Where to go? International, national. Let's take a look at the thing that was bouncing all over the Interesting week. Where to go? International, national. Let's take a look at the thing that was bouncing all over the web yesterday, Bannon out of the NSC. And people were wondering if the knives were out for him, if Jared had shouldered him aside.

Peter, let's have your take on the whole thing. Too early to say quite what's going on. You're no fun. I want to snap judgment and I want to know. Here's what seems clear. What seems clear is that Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, who is Mike Flynn's successor as head of the National Security Council, is working his will. And the press is making a little bit too much of the Bannon story. He was never a member of the National Security Council. He was given the right to sit in, as I recall. In any event, he's been denied that right now, and there's a general in charge. Looks good to me. On the other hand, I have a certain,

I don't know. If you have, you want at least one guy in the White House staff who represents the president's deepest impulses. And that – on the other hand, I'm not sure you do want that in this case. So all I know about Bannon is it seems very clear that H.R. McMaster, lieutenant general, brilliant man, tough guy, know him a little bit because when he was a colonel, he was with Hoover Institution for a year. H.R. McMaster is in charge. Rob, Bannon himself said that he'd be out by June or July. He sort of expected to turn him into chum. But does this mean that there's – well, of course it means there's some sort of factional strife.

There always is. But does this foretell a – what should I say – wiser, cooler heads in the Trump administration? Well, I think we could drive ourselves crazy trying to read the tea leaves of this administration. I mean, the one thing that we can say about the justification for one of the justifications for voting for Donald Trump, which is that he was a businessman. He knew how to run things. He's going to run like a business. That has turned out to be utterly false.

This is a complete mess, disorganized mess of an administration. Look, it may turn out to be fine. It may turn out to be utterly false. This is a complete mess, disorganized mess of an administration. Look, it may turn out to be fine. It may turn out to be good. It may do a lot of great stuff. I'm not arguing whether ideologically or in terms of policy it's right or wrong, but it is not a well-oiled machine. And I think we don't know why he was on there in the first place, and I don't know why he was um i don't know why he was on there in the first place and i don't know why he's off of it now so these are two irrational decisions i'm sure have some kind of

basis in something but by the way um i i do believe that i do believe that uh every week that passes and trump who we know pays attention to poll numbers we know he reads the press and we know he's obsessed with his uh the general feeling about him in the hinterlands which is getting sinking lower and lower and lower um he's gonna have to make some changes and the changes are going to be to probably i guess to return to sort of more establishment figures and more normal and more normal kind of administration one indication of that is you take the ideologue out of the national security apparatus and you replace it with people who are conversant in national security. Imagine that. By the way, so I agree completely that one large element of what's taking place

here is that it turns out, as people knew, a lot of people knew, but it turns out that the skills you develop in business are not transferable to politics. Something like this, not this, but something like this would have happened if Mitt Romney had won. I'm convinced of it for a couple of reasons which bear dwelling on for just a moment because they say something about the way the federal government operates, the way politics is by its nature different from business. And the first is you've got a couple of million federal employees and then two to three million, depending on how you count them, people in the military who are also, of course, receiving a federal paycheck. The businessman comes in expecting that he can hire and fire.

He can't. He doesn't hire them. Firing them is virtually impossible. Firing the federal employees is virtually impossible. Moreover, you can't nick their income when they're doing badly or give them a bonus when they do well. Really, you have only one lever when it comes to the federal employees and to large numbers of the military. You have to inspire them. You have to persuade them. And that's all you've got. Second aspect, second to I'll stop at this, but the second really big difference between being a businessman and being president is that if you're a businessman and a deal goes wrong, you say've got 100 members of the Senate, 435 members of the House, and maybe tweeting that Chuck Schumer is a clown

feels good one day, but there will soon come a day when you're going to have to have some of Chuck Schumer's support or at least eliminate him as a firm opponent. So these relationships have to work. You don't get to walk away from people after a deal goes south. Something like this was bound to happen. I sort of agree with that. I think there's a difference between having a privately held corporation. I mean, to give the man his due, he ran a family business.

He didn't have to report to anybody. Having a publicly held company, everybody I know who's been involved in a public company, either at the top or even in the middle, knows that you're you're constantly trying to massage a perception in the marketplace that you're on track, even if you're not. And you're and anybody who's run a large company will tell you that they feel the same. The big one. I mean, I'm sure Rex Tillerson, if we could look him right in the eye, would say, hey, this is just like what I came from. I didn't i couldn't hire well i didn't know i didn't know what was going on rex jillerson got to fire people right rex jillerson did get the fire he got to fire his direct reports but a big sprawling company like

that there's a lot going on there you weren't aware yes yeah yeah right right right yeah agree completely at the at the upper reaches of the very big public companies where you're concerned about politics to the extent that you're hiring lobbyists, yes, yes, there's some similarity. Even Jack Welch said when he's running GE that most GE employees knew what the strategy of the company was and what his personal philosophy was by reading what he would say in the business press. Right. Well, now we're talking about things like carbon taxes and VATs and the rest of it as we see the inevitable leftward drift that a lot of us were expecting to happen anyway. And talking about making deals with the Democrats on health care, on taxes, bringing everybody in, which is going to upset an awful lot of people who thought that the point of this was to drain the swamp and not deal with those people. Wasn't it the problem that the rhinos of the past were too easy to cut deals and now we got somebody who's going to cut deals and that's a great thing

it takes a malleable mind sometimes to take all of the things the administration is doing and find a coherent theme or thread in it i was listening this morning to a radio talk show host who's not a particularly bright fellow at all and uh he regard i I mean, he's been strongly, stalwartly pro-Trump from the beginning and believes him to be an avatar of political, moral, and intellectual achievement. I mean, he really respects the guy. And he's one of those people who will tease out of Trumpian remarks a thread of gold that the rest of us see only burlap. So in his hopeful way, he was trying to figure out exactly what the president was talking about when he was referring to the the lines and how there are lines for him

now in syria and how now he feels this way and he was saying that because he believed that trump was elected because he said we weren't going to get involved in other people's problems but here he was he was being human being human about this and responding to this. And it's this, it was the sound of somebody who didn't know exactly where he's supposed to fall yet. There you go. There you go. Some moment he's going to have to say, well,

since Trump is right. And since to criticize him is to do the work of the Democrats, then I'm going to go along. Then this is the right thing to do. And it's not a question of rationalizing it in terms of politics or expediency or new information. It almost is turning around and saying that, well, you know, yes, we're at war. We've always been at war with Eurasia. And that intellectual malleability on behalf somehow of conservatism just astonishes me.

Yes, it astonishes me too. But the bit that where I was, Jack, to go back to what Rob was saying and why your radio show announcer was so confused this morning, Jack Welch could say that most employees at GE, a gigantic company, know the strategy of the company

because they've been reading what I say in the press. Because Jack Welch actually had a strategy for GE. He was consistent over many years. We're going to be number one or number two in every industry that we're in, or we're going to get rid of that division. Perfectly straightforward. Ronald Reagan in the federal government, everybody knew. By the way, it's an achievement in the White House staff alone, if everybody understands where the president is going. But with Reagan, the Hill, you may have disagreed with it, the federal employees,

everybody knew where he was going by listening to his speeches. The difficulty that this and this, this I don't know what you do. This is not a question of hiring different people. Nobody knows where they're supposed to come down when they listen to Donald Trump because nobody knows where Donald Trump himself is coming down. So yesterday he said what Assad has done is terrible. Well, right up until he had said that, as best I could tell, as best informed people, colleagues at the Hoover Institution could tell, it had become the policy of the United States to leave Assad in place, bad as he is, to defeat ISIS first. And then Trump says yesterday, the chemical weapons attack has changed my view of Assad. And if we felt this way, all kinds of people felt this way. Is that a new policy or is it just the Donald mouthing off? It's just very hard to know with this guy what he's thinking, where he's going,

what the policies are. And that's Trump world. We're stuck with that part. And that's the guy who voted for him. Rob, you hate his guts. What do you think? Well, I don't hate his guts. I'm kidding. But I do feel that when you don't have a consistent policy, people, there's an upside to that, right?'re george hw bush and you say no new taxes read my lips that's a policy then when you at live score bet we love cheltenham just as much as we love football the excitement the roar and the chance to reward you that's why every day of the festival we're giving new members money back as a free sports bet up to 10 euro if your horse loses on a selected race that's how we celebrate the biggest week in racing cheltenham with live score bet this is total betting sign up by 2 p.m 14th of march bet within 48 hours of race main

market excluding specials and place bets terms apply bet responsibly 18 plus gambling care.ee these taxes then now you don't have a policy and people will punish you for that. So there's a downside to having a clear policy. But there's also an upside to it, which is that people know people don't have to rely on your likability. They don't have to like you and want you to succeed. You can have a high approval rating and be unpopular. Richard Nixon was an effective president for almost six years with exactly that kind of makeup. And, you know, popularity goes up and down. And all presidents spend some time in the in the high 40s or even the mid 40s. No one's really spent this much time in the 30s, but whatever. But a policy, a clear policy, a clear direction can get you out of scrapes. It's just a matter of pure politics. And it's just surprising to me that we're already in April and this learning curve is just not starting to kick in. I want to go back to something Peter said,

something about what Rob said when you were talking about GE's strategy, when he said that GE said it was going to be the best in whatever business it was in or get out. Rob, Peter, do you remember at a certain point when you went to the movies and the Paramount logo, instead of being the beautiful thing of computer-generated graphics it is today, was just a blue screen with the Paramount mountain? Yes. And there were words below it that said something else. Do you remember what they were? The Gulf of Western Company. I don't remember very well.

Of course, Rob. I was there. I was there. Right. Or mel brooks called it in one of his movies in gulf of devourer it was the the sort of prototypical conglomerate what yes that we that we experienced in the 70s in the early 80s when companies would just would go on these sprees and buy up things that had nothing to do with them so you would have have GE saying, for example, let's make pinball machines. Buy that pinball machine company. Or you would have oil companies that would say, now we're going into the record business. And that seems to have faded for a while.

Everyone is sticking to their core businesses, right? It's a wise idea. It's coming back a little bit, largely because Warren Buffett has been so successful. He started with an insurance company and now just owns all kinds of things. I see it coming back a little. But yes, the 70s were the high watermark

of conglomerates that made no sense whatever. Rob, you saw where I was going with this, didn't you? Oh, oh, oh. Robby, I mean, I'm just saying, I want to know that Rob was just waiting for the moment to spoil it, as opposed to Peter, who just cluelessly walked into the wet cement. No, I knew where you were going with it. I thought I would surprise you and have you and Jedi mind trick you into interrupting yourself. Yeah, interesting, which I just did.

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And my wife announced yesterday that she had booked us at a hotel that advertised Casper mattresses because she loves ours that much. That's wonderful. And that's just shows you that that's all you have to say sometimes because people understand that, whoa, it's like the, you know, the old places that had radio or television. You would go to that before you went to that place. Just, you know, you can play whist with a, with a clerk in the front room. Let's get to our first guest with alacrity, Brett Stevens. He writes the global view, the wall street journals, foreign affairs

column for which he won the Pulitzer prize for commentary in 2013 the paper's deputy editorial page editor responsible for the international opinion pages of the journal and a member of the paper's editorial board he's also a regular panelist on journal editorial report a weekly political talk show broadcast on fox news channel welcome to the podcast sir brett it's rob long thank you for joining us um i guess i should start with it with the with the news of the day Welcome to the podcast, sir. Are we coming to grips with an old policy, or do we have no policy or every policy? No policy in every policy, I think, comes closest to it. We want to get rid of ISIS as quickly as possible. We are ambivalent about the Assad government, alternatively saying earlier in the week that we did not have a policy of getting rid of Assad until, of course, he

used gas against innocent civilians. And now Trump seems to be changing his tune. In fact, some word is that military action might be in the air, literally, as well as figuratively. American, Brett, or Israeli? The Israelis took action yesterday, didn't they? The Israelis took action on a fairly regular basis. I see. And you usually learn about it either through the Syrians or through secondary or tertiary sources. They take action whenever they feel that significant forms of weaponry are being transferred from

Syria to Hezbollah across the border with Lebanon. But the problem is that I don't think that anyone has sat down in this administration, maybe McMaster has, and done a really deep think about what it is we want out of Syria. What is it that we want to end? Do we simply want to end ISIS? Because if that's our policy, then we're going to still have to confront either the son of ISIS or other ISIS-like jihadi groups that just haven't quite gotten our attention yet, like the Nusra Front. How do we feel about the Assad government staying in power? And what do we think the future of Syria itself ought to be? I mean, I've argued, Rob, that we need to consider

a future of a partitioned Syria, much as we recognize that the only salvation for the people of the Balkans was the partitioning of, the formal partitioning of Yugoslavia. If you don't do that, if you say that Syria must remain a unitary state, then it's going to be a zero-sum game, a struggle for power in which one side has to win absolutely and the other side loses absolutely. And this is going to continue forever. But isn't the Putin strategy, and I think that's probably one of the things that Trump and Putin share rightly or wrongly, that, yeah, Assad's an SOB, but he's our SOB. This is just basically the Cold War again, where our existential enemy is ISIS and radical Islam, and we're going to have to make common cause with a lot of bad guys in order to do bad, in order to get rid of the worse evil or the worst evil.

So, yeah, let's put Assad back in charge, and then we won't have this problem. I mean, isn't that – it's certainly the Russian calculus, right? I mean, the Atlantic Council undertook an exhaustive study last year, and what they discovered is that Putin hardly ever touches ISIS. Putin's bombing campaigns are mainly against the more moderate rebels in Syria, the ones that the U.S. has had occasion to back or that the Turks have backed. Putin, I think, is playing a different game in Syria. The first thing that Putin wants is he wants to use Syria as a leverage point in order to extract concessions over financial sanctions on account of his invasion of Ukraine, which is,

I can help solve a problem for you here in the Middle East, of course, the problem that he created, if you relieve my problem over Ukraine. That's an old tactic going back to the days of Romico, if not earlier. Another thing is he wants to show that the United States is a paper tiger, that Russia is a serious and, in fact, perhaps even a dominant player in the Middle East. He wants to show that Russian weapons are good. One of the things that's happening now in Syria is that Russia is demonstrating to a client like Iran that it's cruise missiles, other forms of weapons, or things they might want to pay for. The Egyptians are also potentially interested clients. And then it's a historic goal of Russia to have a secure and powerful base in the Mediterranean. And I think that's the third act.

So it's not that Putin is on our side when it comes to fighting Islamic terrorism. He has an Islamic terrorist problem of his own, but I don't think that's his central goal. His central goal is to once again play the great game, just as Russia played it against Great Britain in the 19th century, against the U.S. in the 20th, and now against the U.S. again. All right, so I just want to get your thoughts on this. I take your point on that.

Assuming that's true, are we better off with a Putin playing the great game once again, basically conducting his own air show? Are we better off with President Trump or President Obama? I don't know. Do you prefer cholera to malaria? Right. Well, malaria, actually, because, you know, you drink gin and tonics and everything's fine. Well, if only it were that simple. But look, no one, I think, was more astringent in his criticism of Obama's Middle Eastern policies or most of Obama's policies than I was. And so far, we don't really have a trump policy we have a series of kind of grunted instincts tweets uh half-baked thoughts um all of

which seem to suggest at least in the early phases kind of a continuation of of obama it's terrible uh but it's not we don't want to get involved there, and Assad is bad, but at least he's a known quantity, and ISIS is the worst thing. So the one aspect where there's hope with Trump is that clearly he hasn't made up his own mind. And clearly, judging from his press conference the other day, the attack on the latest sarin gas attack seems to have had an emotional impact on him that might get him out of this kind of intellectual rut that Obama was in. I mean, part of the problem with Obama is he was just so sure of himself. He was so sure he had adopted the right policy in Syria when it was becoming increasingly clear that his policy was disastrous.

I mean, what Trump should do is he should say, we have two problems in Syria, just as we had two problems in World War II, and we've got to get rid of them both. Because ISIS and Assad are, in a sense, symbiotic enemies. So long as ISIS exists, Assad has a reason to exist. And so long as Assad exists, ISIS has a reason to exist. Both of them have to go. We're going to find ways to destroy to go. We're going to attack.

We're going to find ways to destroy them both. We're going to partition the country. We're going to reward our friends, the Kurds, who have fought on our side. And we're going to reward our friends, the Israelis, by recognizing Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights. We are going to tell the Alawites that if they get rid of the Assad family as their rulers, we will work towards an independent Alawite state, basically centered along Syria's Mediterranean coast, around the city of Latakia, the traditional Alawite strongholds. And then we're going to have our friends, the Saudis, our friends, the UAEE and our friends, the Egyptians, help us put troops on the ground so that we can contain the Sunni heartlands in Syria. And basically, think of this as a cancer tumor

that we're going to shrink as we create safe zones, as we create less reason for ethnic groups to fight each other to the death. We're going to shrink this tumor because otherwise it's a metastasis that spreads throughout the Middle East and actually reaches Europe, reaches Orlando, reaches San Bernardino, and so on. Hey, Brett, Peter Robinson here. The president of China visits the president of the United States at Mar-a-Lago this weekend. Yeah. For sure, some sort of more diplomatic language might be used. the leader of North Korea, or we will go in and take military action, the most limited action we can, but we will have to take military action to cripple their nuclear capability.

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Sign up by 2pm 14th of March. Bet within 48 hours of race. Main market excluding specials and place bets. Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie. Version of what I proposed in a column the other week, which is, you know, we've always been saying...

I'm stealing from you shamelessly. You put the idea in my head. The only thing, the only place I differ is I suspect that there isn't, when we really examine our options, when Jim Mattis really examines his options militarily, our military options against North Korea are fairly limited. We don't know where all of their nuclear program lies. It's a sufficiently robust nuclear program has to be dispersed. It's not like the Iraqi program in the early 1980s when the Israelis could take it out with, you know, seven or eight F-16s and one

target. Secondly, even a limited artillery barrage by North Korea against Seoul would kill thousands of people. And I don't think we would take this kind of action without at least consulting with the South, which is in the middle of an election season political upheaval. However, this is where I think you're right. I think we all agree that nothing gets solved in North Korea unless the Chinese help us with it. The Chinese have an interest in maintaining North Korea as an independent buffered state for a variety of reasons. They don't want a free, prosperous, democratic Korea on their border, among other things. And North Korea provides them with that kind of leverage. But I think the argument that Trump should make to Xi is to say,

you are more likely to lose North Korea as a buffer state with the Kim family in power than out of power. What you need is to engineer a transition in North Korea in which the Kim family goes, you get reformists in North Korea who will move the country in the same direction that Deng Xiaoping moved China after the death of Mao Zedong. We will then recognize North Korea as an independent state. We will abandon unification as a goal of American policy. Yes, the South will be sad, but really it maintains a status quo that they've lived with prosperously for 60 years,

and it means relief for the people of North Korea from the extreme totalitarian tyranny. Granted, you're replacing a totalitarian tyranny with an authoritarian government, but it would alleviate our biggest problem with North Korea, which is this particular guy's possession of nuclear weapons. I mean, the reason we're scared is that Kim Jong-un displays none of the sort of crazy rationality of his father or grandfather. But one more question. James Lilacs wants to get in. One more question. You mentioned Jim Mattis. I'm not even quite sure how to formulate the question, but I'll give it a try. I'm sure you'll get what I'm trying to drive at.

You're Jim Mattis. You're H.R. McMaster. You're a deeply versed, thoroughly trained professional. You're Rex Tillerson, new to government, but not at all new to the art of negotiation, to dealing with foreign governments. Exxon under Tillerson had deals with – the number was something upward of six dozen different countries. You're used to being on the road, dealing with leaders, negotiating, and so forth. So we've got three people in the administration with responsibility for this who, broadly speaking, know what they're doing. How do you – let's take – if you were Jim Mattis or Adrian – if you were one of those three, how do you operate in an administration where you have colleagues who know what they're doing, but the White House just plain doesn't know what it's doing, not yet?

How do you operate? Yeah, well, look, that's a great question. I mean, look, I grew up in Mexico, and so I learned a little bit about the politics of New Spain. One of the famous sayings of the viceroys who governed from Mexico City or from Lima, Peru, was a statement in Spanish, Obedezco, pero no cumplo. I obey, but I do not comply. That's to say that the king of Spain would send some edict. It would take three months to cross the ocean. And by the time it got to Mexico City, it was completely irrelevant.

So you'd say to the king, yes, your majesty, we will do this. And then you'd actually pursue a rational policy. And I think they need, I think these guys need a kind of a similar motto with Trump. Obviously, there isn't the communication. But you've seen it, you know, Trump says something like,

we're going to have a military operation along our border. And the next thing you know, you have Secretary Kelly going down to Mexico City saying, we're not going to have any kind of military operation. Trump says, we're going to take Iraq's oil. Jim Mattis goes to Iraq. We're not taking any, you know, we're not going to seize any of their oil. Trump keeps saying NATO is obsolete. Mike Pence goes to Munich, says, you know, nothing is more vital than NATO and so on. So all of that has been a kind of example of obelisco pero no cumplo. And, you know, you can flatter the president by saying, you know, you can flatter the president by saying,

you know, Mr. President, the president's a great man. He's cultivating a team of rivals just like Abe Lincoln or George Washington or whoever. The next thing you can do is you can take sort of the broad outlines, the kind of the cliches that are coming out of the White House or the sort of broader statements, which are sort of blustery but vague, and in giving them definition, you know, change their definition. I mean, take something like Trump saying, you know, I don't care if it's one state or two states when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians.

Well, how do you finesse something like that? You say, well, look, here's the deal. In theory, the U.S. is for a two-state solution. The problem is the Palestinians are nowhere near ready for statehood, and a lot of that has to do with the way the Palestinians choose to govern themselves. Half of the Palestinian Authority is in Gaza. The other half is run by Fatah, and Mr. Abbas has been in power for 12 years of his four-year term.

These things have got to change. So while the United States is going to work to ameliorate the situation, we are realists and we know that a two-state solution isn't going to come about until some basic changes take place within the Palestinian Authority. So you kind of stick to the broad outline of what Trump has said at some press conference, and you give it shape. In the form of clarification, you transform a statement that sounds like bluster or ignorance into something else. Now, there are limits to what Tillerson or Mattis can do, because ultimately the president is the president, and he's going to get his way. But at least on a lot of these points, they're going to be able to give sort of reasonable

intellectual shape to what Trump says. And I suspect, given what I've been hearing about the White House, I think Trump knows he needs this. I think he's aware that the first three months of his administration have been a kind of a nonstop disaster, that he needs professionals, that this can't be a Breitbart operation. And I think he might be hungry for it. Brett, James Lollix here in Minnesota. Of course, it's always North Korea. It's always the Middle East. But there are other areas of the world that deserve Trump's attention and a policy.

You look at South America. Venezuela is finding new and fascinating ways to fail all the time. Brazil, which was touted, of course, as one of those powerhouses that was going to overtake the West with this and commodities and the rest, is seemingly having a political and economic disaster in its future. Is there, as far as you can tell, a discernible policy towards South America in the Trump camp, or is it, as previous administrations seem to be seeing, they're doing fine down there, whatever. We'll get to them if we have to, but we probably won't. Yeah, I remember an Obama interview with, I don't know whether it was Tom Friedman or one of these guys, about a year or two ago when, you know, I think Friedman said, you know, Mr. President, the world seems to be kind of trending towards disorder. And Obama said, no, I think everything

is going, you know, pretty much well, okay. The Middle East is a mess, but when has it not been? And look at South America, it's doing great. A classic Obama statement in which you thought, this guy is almost as disconnected from reality as his successor is. Perhaps sometimes I wondered even more. South America is doing very badly. In Ecuador, you've just had an election, which seems, I don't know whether it was stolen or not, but seems to be extending the Correa, Rafael Correa-style kind of left-wing authoritarian politics for another term. Venezuela, as you put it, more closely resembles Central African countries during their agonies than it did the prosperous Latin American country of, you know, 20, 25 years ago that used to produce, you know, beauty queens. And you have a worrying situation also in Mexico because I think that Trump's policy toward Mexico might give encouragement to a kind of Chavista government in Mexico itself. If this character, López Obrador,

who's contested two previous elections and nearly won them, becomes the next president, we're going to find a very different Mexico along our southern border. I think Trump has to understand that America has a vital stake in a successful Latin America. Not least because if part of his goal is not to have this flood of illegal immigrants, as he claims there is, then you want people to have a reason not to flee. Why does Europe have a refugee crisis? Because Syria became what it became. We don't want to create conditions, political conditions or economic conditions in Mexico that will lead to new waves of people trying to come across the border, new humanitarian crises.

So that, I think, in a sense, to the extent that the wall is a metaphor, the wall with Mexico is a metaphor. It's precisely the wrong policy. The policy that was smart was the policy of George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, which was we need a prosperous Mexico in order to have a safe and secure border. And that goes also throughout the region. One quick thing at the end there. I have to point out that where are those leftists, Sean Penn, Naomi Klein, the Hugo Chavez cheerleading squad, Jeremy Corbyn in Great Britain, now that Venezuela is experiencing the kind of agony that it's in? When was the last time I would like to know that Naomi Klein has gone outside

of the Venezuelan embassy in Ottawa or wherever and protested the jailing of opposition leaders, the lawlessness, the attempts to seize the government by Maduro. If I'm mistaken, I'd be the happiest person to know that someone like Naomi Klein is trying to make amends for her support for this dictatorship, but I haven't seen the evidence. Brett, you know as well as I do that the problems that Maduro faces are the result of capitalism and its reliance on carbon-based fuels. Yes. I'm sure there's some elaborating but in the meantime unfortunately while socialism

is the best possible system of economic management so far it hasn't had a single successful there hasn't been

a single case of success in its next time next time we'll get it next time they'll get it

absolutely perfect and you'll be there to write about their failings to which we would look forward to. And we enjoy reading you in the Wall Street Journal when you pop up. Brett, thank you very much.

Thanks for having me on. Thanks so much. Thanks, Brett. The reason that I asked about South America and Central America is sometimes you get weary of talking about Korea and the Middle East and the rest of it. Somebody woke up after a 26-year coma and said, what's going on in the world? You said, well, we're worried about war on the Korean Peninsula. There's strife in the Middle East

between Israel and its neighbors. And the person would, oh, and Twin Peaks next season is starting in a couple of weeks. There's a new Star Trek show coming out and a Star Wars movie due at Christmas. The person would sink back in his pillow and say, oh, I was only sleeping for a couple of days then. You say, no, no, you're out for 27 years.

Prove it. Prove it to me. Prove to me that 27 years have passed. And you'd say, look at this. Look at this. Look at this razor. Two bucks a blade. Can you believe it?

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No particular reason. Well, it's because their industry, like so many, has been changed, disrupted for the better by Harry's. Now, Harry's is just a great blade. I love to shave with it. It feels smooth. The emollients of the lathers and the foams and the aftershave balm,

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It's that quality of shave. You can't go to that place anymore because maybe there isn't one around the corner, but you can get just as good a shave with Harry's. Two guys, Jeff and Andy, were fed up with being overcharged by the razor companies, started their own, bought their own factories, and 100 years of blade making experience has given you the Harry's blade. Here's what's great about it. Five German engineered blades, a lubricating strip, a flex hinge for a comfortable glide,

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Ed Whelan is the president of Ethics and Public Policy Center. He directs EPPPC's program. Did I get enough Ps in there? He directs their program on the Constitution, the courts, and the culture. His areas of expertise include constitutional law and the judicial confirmation process. My, that's relevant today, isn't it?

As a contributor to National Review Online's Bench Memos blog, he's been leading a commentary on the nominations at the Supreme Court and the lower courts and constitutional law and all those things which are always particularly relevant. He's written essays and op-eds for leading newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Opinion journals, academic symposia, law reviews. He's done it all except perhaps talk about Gorsuch on the podcast.

And here he is to do exactly that. Ed, are we going to see a change in the filibuster and should we? It sure looks like we will. I think within minutes of our conversation, Senator McConnell has already appealed the point of order ruling by the chair. I don't mean to get into too much parliamentary jargon here, but the next action, once Schumer is through with his dilatory motions, is to have a vote on McConnell's point of order. That is the vote to abolish the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees. It will be wonderful if and when that happens. Among other things, the filibuster has never been part of the traditional toolbox for opposing Supreme Court nominees.

There has never been a partisan filibuster of any Supreme Court nominee. The best way to restore the Senate's tradition on Supreme Court nominees is to abolish the filibuster, especially when you're facing a situation as we do now, where Democrats are abusing it promiscuously. Even better, if and when the filibuster is abolished, the pathway will be clear for easy nominations of the next Supreme Court nominees. Now, that, of course, will cut both ways. It'll be true for Democratic presidents in the future. But frankly, I think Republicans are giving up a tool they would never use. And Democrats are losing their best weapon against conservative nominees.

And if the Republicans were to have attempted to use the filibuster, the Democrats would instantly have changed the rule on them, correct? Absolutely. filibuster, the Democrats would instantly have changed the rule on them, correct? Absolutely. Leading Democrats, you know, from Harry Reid to Tim Kaine, bragged about that back in October when they were expecting a President Hillary Clinton and were worried about obstruction by Republicans in the Senate. It was Senate Democrats led by Harry Reid, who back in 2013 abolished the filibuster for lower court nominees and executive branch nominees. This is a cleanup step that Senate Democrats didn't take back in 2013, only because abortion groups said, please don't do this in the abstract. It could come back to hurt us concretely.

Wait until you're in the middle of a fight where you know it will help us. So there's no point of principle that explains why they didn't do it back in 2013. And this step now actually serves to have consistent treatment of nominations, and thus distinguishes nominations from legislation as the Senate has traditionally done. So I think those who are concerned that this step might hurt the legislative filibuster are undermining their cause by positing a linkage between the two that has never existed. That's not to say the legislative filibuster will be secure forever, but it arose and persists for reasons having nothing to do with nominations

and nothing that happens today changes its prospects in the future. Ed? Oh, go ahead, Rob. I was going to ask, Ed, how would the Supreme Court be different today Oh, go ahead, Rob. 42 votes, it was 58 against, but Clarence Thomas was – I had this written down and I can't find it.

Clarence Thomas was confirmed with 52 votes, I think. I believe that's right, yes. So if you – go back in time for a minute and eliminate the filibuster. Would we be looking at a significantly different court or are we looking at basically the same kind of court? Well, look, if we go back in time to the 80s and early 90s, the filibuster was not regarded as a legitimate partisan weapon. So, as you point out, Judge Bork was defeated by a majority vote, and Justice Thomas was confirmed by a majority. Obviously, if the filibuster had been viewed as a permissible weapon back then, Justice Thomas would not be on the court.

The point I want to emphasize is that when things escalated in recent decades, President Bush first and President Trump now had to take into account the threat that the filibuster would be resorted to. I have it on very good authority from someone who was very involved in the process that there were folks in the White House back in 2005 who were saying that John Roberts was too controversial a pick and that he you never get through. There's a great deal of timidity among folks in the White House over political battles on Supreme Court nominees. No one wants an extended battle that ends up consuming capital. I think a lot of folks don't understand that some battles can actually increase capital. But the point is that with the filibuster gone now, if that's what happens in the next hour or so, those concerns are gone and the president can decide who is the best nominee that can obviously secure a Republican majority and obviously win public acclaim.

There are these political constraints that will continue to shape whom presidents pick. Fears that the next Democratic president might pick, say, Lena Dunham, I think are unrealistic. I had a mild stroke right then, but you could hear that. Yeah, but that's, you know, presidents don't pick extreme nominees because they're constrained by political considerations not to do so. And Democratic presidents, you know,

don't have to worry about the filibuster from Republicans because instead of picking Lena Dunham, they can pick someone with objective legal qualifications who will reach whatever result the left wants and whatever the cases are. And Republicans will be cowed by the media into not filibustering. Go ahead, Peter'm a really quick one assuming the filibuster is eliminated and gorsuch is confirmed um who what who's the next justice on the court to retire to drop off uh and are they more likely or less likely to do it knowing that there's no filibuster uh to rely on to worry about, depending on which side they're on? Well, look, I don't think the likelihood of any justice dying is particularly affected by today's vote, though who knows how upset some people might be by it. So I think Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer are going to stick it out for as long as they can or as long as they think they're able. Justice Kennedy is the most likely prospect for an imminent retirement. I think he ought to be delighted by the selection of Neil Gorsuch

as Justice Scalia's successor. I think he ought to take comfort from knowing that if he steps down, there will not be a never-ending battle over his replacement, and indeed that it's very likely that someone will be picked whom he respects. So, you know, I do not think today's action will have any negative effect on another vacancy arising. Ed, thanks. Everybody can go to National Review online and read what Ed's been writing

about this in the bench memos. It's fascinating stuff. He knows the drill. We'll see what happens. They've just put on the court a man with no empathy, a man who does not use his feelings but actually looks at the Constitution to say what it says. Dark days ahead.

Thanks for joining us in the podcast today thank you guys thanks yeah it's rare we have a guest and while the guest i guess we were like queuing him up the the my little cnn alert hit it's kind of cool you know what i mean like like right at that moment we we discovered that they were going to dump the filibuster. Well, yes, and things moved quickly. And so I was surprised to see that they actually did it because we're so used to them, aren't we? Just rolling over at the end. Yeah.

And talking about process and tradition and not wanting to do it. But apparently things have changed. Things have changed. Hey, what was that? There was a sound there as though some sort of hell maw had opened and some bees were... That might have been me. I thought I was on mute, but go ahead. Are you

hungry? Is that what we're hearing, Rob? No, no, it was me. It was me. I'm fighting a cold. So it was my upper respiratory tract, if you must know. Because if you are hungry, you know what you could do. I don't know what I could do. Oh, you have to go shopping.

You have to go pick the stuff. You have to make. Cooking for a family, James, is an incredibly irritating thing to do. There's just no way to make it simple. Let's say you have a recipe and it calls for capers. And you've got to go buy a lot of capers when you just have five capers. I hate that you got capers everywhere. You just got capers sitting around and they're not even fresh capers. What would you do? You'd call up HelloFresh. Of course you would, because if you're a busy professional couple or you're a large family that's going at a breakneck pace or you're just

somebody who wants to cook better and learn about cooking, if you wish, well, HelloFresh makes it all easier, tastier, and healthier than ever to enjoy the experiences of cooking new recipes and eating together at home. It's one of the things that I've imposed on my child since she was a zygote, that we will all sit down and have an evening meal together. And it's fun now that we cook together because when you get a HelloFresh meal kit, everybody can participate in putting the meal together and learn about that too. It's a great life skill for kids to have or adults for that matter. Now, from creating the recipes and planning the meals to grocery shopping and even delivering all the pre-measured ingredients, HelloFresh delivers right to your door so you can skip the trip.

I still go to the grocery store for this and that, but there's no experience really like getting that box with all the things in it that you need and knowing you're going to make something you probably might not have made on your own. Now, HelloFresh currently offers customers a classic box, a veggie box, family box. You can order two, three, four, or five different meals per week designed for either two or four people. So if you're an empty nester, it's a great way to perk up your meals as well. New recipes created every week. HelloFresh, as you might expect me to say,

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Our thanks to HelloF fresh for sponsoring this, the ricochet podcast before we go. No, Rob has to jet. I have to jet, but Rob's got a good deal. No, actually I have to prop Rob in his high prop.

Yeah, I'm just going to prop and people will glide of course, with his usual custom style, but let's end with the one thing that just, uh, apparently broke the internet phrase that I hate that I hate, that I hate, was burning up social media as though there's this solid things that exist. But united, supposedly, the Internet in that everybody hated an ad by Pepsi, the Jenner Child ad, which co-opted the Occupy movement. And it just insulted absolutely everybody on the face of

the earth peter i know that you but you you study that ad frame by frame for its semiotic things you know me so well i have absolutely no idea what ad you're talking about so you two be your genuine witty pop culture savvy selves i'll just listen ah pepsi's pulling is widely mocked i'm reading up on it now go go go talk among yourselves i'm trying to figure out well james do you think it's a do you think it's a sign of the you know the one way to look at is that the mob speaks another way to look at it is that uh who on earth at pepsi thought this was a good idea to begin with and then uh the good news i guess is that the people still believe that in order to endorse a product or be a celebrity, you have to have done something, right? It's all of those things.

Yes, I don't know. I don't follow this Jenner person except to realize that she's Jenner spawn and she's got an Instagram thing. Then she's known for whatever. I haven't the faintest idea. But the whole ad itself was so awful. Uh, I mean, I love bad ads. I love ads that reach for something and fail. And you like overproduced ads that are capsules of the time. What I enjoyed about this was seeing all of these, these reverential icons supposedly that are, that, that, that the modern generation would connect to why there's a person of this religious persuasion that we approve of this religion,

and she's in this. And there's a cello player who's got art, and there's a woman who sees that they're all coming together to protest something. Something. And we don't know what. There's even this poorly drawn peace symbol there as though we're back in the holy days of 68 and 69. Oh,

if we could just go back to that wonderful era of peace, love and protest again, it'd be marvelous. Uh, but there's this line of police, which already has apparently shown up to beat them with clubs. I mean, the whole thing romanticizes and trivializes this, the idea that this is Germany circa 35, 36,

that protest is this great no-bullying act that is bringing a generation together and then tries to sell you sugar water. And they didn't realize how this was going to appall absolutely everybody from the people who consider themselves woke and part of the movement and the people who see this romanticized view of street protests as nonsense. So, yeah, Pepsi no longer has a professional ad agency. Apparently, they're doing it in-house.

This is what you get. Speaking of in-house, your house should have a Casper mattress in it. Your bathroom should have Harry's shave in it. And your kitchen and your fridge should have HelloFresh in it. Those are the things in-house you need to do. You can support us by supporting them and vice versa. And you can support us by becoming a member. Rob had to shoot that in, and he's quite right to do so.

If you like the show, by the way, you can go to the iTunes place and give us some reviews. That's a great way to surface the podcast, as they say, and helps other people find the show. And according to here in my closing copy, I've got something to tell you that I know it's going to be a surprise. But at the end of my closing copy, it says, next week, Rob Long returns. Rob, that's great. I've been phoning it in. I've been phoning it in for the past two times. We look forward so much to having Rob Long back.

We've had the best Rob Long impersonator the industry's been able to supply. Ladies and gentlemen, this week, Alec Baldwin has been Rob Long. Wow, that'd be great. How flattering. Thanks for listening. Thanks to our guests. Thanks to you for joining Ricochet. Thanks to everyone who listened.

And we'll see you in the comments at Ricochet 3.0. Next week, fellas. Next week. Just let me be the judge Of what you've done and if I find You guilty, I'll erase you From my heart and from my mind Talk is going over town

That you, my love, have let me down I don't believe what people say I still love you I don't believe that you're to blame I don't believe you brought me shame I just can't believe that you have been untrue You say I should go on alone That you've done something very wrong,

that you're not worthy of the love I have for you. But I won't believe a thing they say until you say it's true. Just let me be the judge of what you've done

and if I'm fine, you tell me how to raise you From my heart and from my mind You tell me that the things they say Are true that I should go my way You ask me to forgive you For the wrong you've done You say although you've been untrue

I still mean everything to you That you only meant to dance with her And have some fun Then the jukebox played our favorite song you knew that you were doing wrong you closed your eyes and made believe that i was there and now you think it's better that we end our love affair. But let me be the judge of what you've done and if I'm fine. You've dealt it all, you've raised it from my heart and from my mind.

Ricochet. Join the conversation.