Today, Explained - The World in 2018

Episode Date: December 18, 2018

The North Korea summit. Brexit chaos. The brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi. The hosts of Vox's Worldly podcast look back on the biggest international stories of the year. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for today explained comes from EverQuote. They're kind of like Cupid, but for auto insurance. They want to help you find a better deal on your auto insurance by matching you with insurers in your area that will get you the right coverage at the right price. You can find out more about EverQuote right now if you call 833-641-EVER. That's 833-641-EVER, E-V-E-R. That's 833-641-3837. So we've got the whole cast of the Worldly Podcast here to talk about the year that the world had. Welcome. Hello. Hi. Hey, yeah, Alex Ward. Let's start off with you. What is the first moment in U.S. foreign policy we should remember from this year? What's the big

one? Definitely that we did not go to war with North Korea. That's true. We didn't, did we? We didn't. And it looked like we might this year. It did, didn't it? It was looking that way a lot at the end of last year. And so the fact that we're not in a nuclear hellfire, I think we can call that a success. Okay. So how did that go? How did we not nuclear hellfire? Was it the summit? Because that didn't work or did.

Give us the deets. So you may remember, you may not, that Kim Jong-un gave a speech on New Year's Day saying, I'm basically done with testing. I'm all about the economy now. And on top of that, would really like to be involved in that Olympics you got there going on in South Korea. And so the fact that Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, was like, hey, would love to be involved in the Olympics, that started to open the door to some sort of rapprochement to some possible ties with South Korea. And it worked.

You had North Korea officials meet with South Korean officials. That cracked the door open. And then Moon Jae-in, the president of South Korea, was kind of like, hey, what if we sort of start working with the U.S. too? Like, let's make this happen, leading to what was by far the most dramatic moment of this year in the U.S.-North Korea relationship, the Singapore summit on June 12th. There you had Kim and Trump meet privately on their own with some translators. It's very unclear everything they said, but what the summit

was, was amazing. I mean, it was a one day wondrous affair, right? These insane images of Trump and Kim next to each other, shaking, embracing, meeting, eating, just everything we hadn't seen in decades of the U.S.-North Korea relationship. Generations, right. Unbelievable. And so this was supposed to set a course for the relationship to improve. They signed a declaration and it had four main points, but what you really need to know is kind of two of them. First, that North Korea would like hostilities between the powers to end. And then if that were the case, then North Korea would like to see what it calls the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. That wording is important because it's not necessarily that they give up their nuclear weapons. It's that the U.S. stopped

protecting South Korea, that it have no ability to really strike North Korea with a nuclear weapon, or that it's not really going after it. And then that maybe North Korea may dismantle parts of its arsenal. So it's not exactly as the U.S. has portrayed it. And how did it go? Did it work? No. We're still seeing intelligence that North Korea is improving its missile bases, its arsenal, still building more weapons. But what's interesting here is that Trump is not that upset about it, right? Because one thing that's true is that North Korea has not tested a missile since November 2017 when it tested the missile that could likely hit most of the United States, if not all of it.

And so since that moment, Trump keeps pointing back to it. He's just like, look, things are better with North Korea. We don't have those tests flying over Japan. They're not really threatening anybody right now, or at least aren't actively doing so, doing anything majorly aggressive. So we're good. We've got time. So what does this mean for 2019? Is President Trump going to ask anything else of North Korea or is he pretty much good with the status quo? Well, the administration keeps insisting that North Korea said it would give up its nuclear arsenal. It didn't. Right.

And the problem then is if that angers Trump down the line. It does look like we might have Trump-Kim too early in 2019. But what's actually leading to tensions between the two at the moment is that they just have made no progress in Singapore. And the sticking point, going back to what I mentioned earlier, is what I reported, is that in that meeting with Kim, Trump promised that he would sign a peace declaration, a non-binding agreement that the U.S. won't attack North Korea, it won't be hostile towards it. And that gives Kim a political space to maybe dismantle his nuclear arsenal.

Yeah. Trump has yet to sign that. And the North Koreans are pissed and they don't really want to negotiate anything else or dismantle anything until they get what they were promised. And that's led to months and months of stalemate in these talks. All right. So North Korea from Alex. Zach Beecham, you're next up. What's your big foreign policy moment of 2018? Donald Trump's withdrawal from the Iran

nuclear deal really stands out to me. And I feel like that happened so long ago. When exactly did that happen again? Yeah, the actual withdrawal happened in early May. It's hard to remember that far back given the kind of year that we've had. But then after that, that led to the U.S. reimposing sanctions on Iran and generally the U.S. falling out of compliance with its end of the historic nuclear agreement. Yeah. And what might this mean for the future of our relationship with Iran and Iran's relationship with the Middle East? The question really is whether Iran restarts its nuclear program, right? Because the way the deal is supposed to work is the US and the international community take off their sanctions, which allows investment to flow into Iran in exchange for them freezing their nuclear program and rolling it back in large parts, making it much harder for them to get a nuclear weapon. OK. They haven't significantly restarted their nuclear program, as far as we know. They're banking on continued cooperation from the Europeans, who are also in the deal, to make it worth their while to stay in. But that could change basically at any minute. U.S. sanctions make it much harder for European

companies to do business. In Iran, not entirely impossible, but more difficult for a lot of them. So Iran might decide that it's not worth the trouble to keep doing this. And if they do that and they restart a bunch of their nuclear stuff, then we're back where we were before the nuclear deal was with a choice of either letting Iran get a nuclear weapon or really close to it or else having to go to war. And those are both really, really bad outcomes. And we're more likely to get one of those bad outcomes than we were before the Trump presidency. What exactly is the United States' relationship with Iran at this point? The Trump administration clearly sees Iran as its number one strategic enemy in the Middle

East. This isn't a surprise. Iran really is a strategic rival of the United States, but the Obama plan was to try to tame that through diplomacy when it could. Trump seems to think that there's now a need to do full-on military political economic containment and rollback of Iranian influence, which ranges from pulling out of the nuclear deal to supporting Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen, which is tangentially related to Iran. Basically, it's just full-on enemies now. Okay, and Jen Williams, what is your moment in 2018?

So mine is the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Of course. Jamal Khashoggi is this journalist. He's a dissident. He was living in the U.S. as a resident. He had fled when he saw kind of other journalists and other kind of dissidents in Saudi Arabia starting to get like thrown in prison, rounded up and threatened by the crown prince regime, essentially. So he flees.

He goes to Turkey, where his fiance is from. He goes into the consulate because he needs to get some documents from the Saudi consulate there in Turkey. Never comes out. And it turns out that he was basically brutally murdered and maybe dismembered. So it was a horrific killing. Right. And it really sparked this kind of huge outcry where people were like, look, this is just brutal. Like, you can't do this. And it really shined a light on Mohammed bin Salman's just complete disregard for any sort of like international law norms or just like basic humanity. And what repercussions will his death have? I know there's been movement in the United States

and all over Western Europe to hold Saudi Arabia accountable here. Will anyone actually do that? Well, it remains to be seen. So, you know, like you mentioned last week, the U.S. Senate passed this resolution that essentially demands that the Trump administration stop all U.S. military support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. Where that goes, you know, Trump can still veto, things like that. We don't really know for sure if that will actually end up with the U.S. actually pulling out of the war effort. But if that does happen, that would be a really huge development. So, you know, just kind of looking forward, the Saudi-backed government in Yemen and the Houthi rebels are actually in peace talks right now. Whether that's going to develop into like an actual peace agreement, you know, that's a little bit far down the road. But people are hopeful that it could, you know, potentially produce an actual peace agreement, which would be amazing to end this horrific war. But, you know, I think the bigger takeaway here,

honestly, and to bring it back to Jamal Khashoggi, is that this man, right, like he was a Saudi dissident. He was writing columns and calling on his government to make changes. And he was killed. And the irony is that his death may actually do far more than his life and his writing was ever able to accomplish, which is tragic and awful, but also his death may have bigger meaning. After the break, world events that had almost nothing to probably be worried about how much i spend on car insurance everquote wants to help you make sure you get the best deal on your car insurance if you haven't shopped around for car insurance in the past six months you very well might be missing out on on newer

or improved rates or improved coverage even and that's where everquote comes in they're kind of like like cupid but but for car insurance. They match people like you with insurance in your area to find you the right coverage at the right price. And it turns out the data shows that users who find their auto insurance through EverQuote save an average of $536 per year. You can find out more about EverQuote right now by calling 833-641-EVER. That's 833-641-3837. I wonder if EverQuote can do bike insurance because I bike places and could use some insurance on my bike, on my body. Get at me, EverQuote. All right, Alex, Zach, Jen, we talked in the first part of the show about international events that the United States was involved in. But I thought for the second half, we could talk about things that had nothing to do with the United States in the world. And what were the most important examples of those? Jen, let's start with you. What do you got? So mine is Brexit. I've heard

of it. You may remember that Britain voted to pull out of the European Union, right? That process not going so well. No, no's there's a lot of great gifs online of like my impression of brexit and it's a guy taking like a a swing on a golf ball on a frozen lake and then missing the ball and falling into the lake stuff like that right or like throwing a bottle against the wall and it bounces and hits him in the face yeah like essentially it's an own goal right like the british people and it's not necessarily their fault uh they were promised Yes, exactly. economy in the foot. Yeah. So right now we're currently in the process of Prime Minister Theresa May is trying to sell this Brexit deal, basically this deal with the European Union that outlines the terms of the divorce. Right. And her own party is such a fan of this deal she's negotiated

that they almost voted her out of office last week. Yeah. So they nobody likes her plan that she's worked out with EU. She's trying to sell it back home now. And pretty much everybody hates it, uh, for different reasons, including a lot of people in her own party. A lot of them are what we call hard Brexiteers, meaning they wanted a much stronger, fuller break with the EU than what her plan currently is. So they called no confidence vote, which is essentially her own party saying we don't have confidence in her ability to lead our party. Uh, she managed to scrape by, by the skin of her teeth currently is. So they called a no confidence vote, which is essentially her own party saying, we don't have confidence in your ability to lead our party. She managed to scrape by the skin of her teeth and won. So she's going to stay in power, at least through the rest of the Brexit negotiations. But it's not a ringing endorsement, right? She's trying to sell this deal

and it's clear that her own party doesn't even support her. It doesn't seem like she's going to get any movement on that. And the EU has been really, really clear that like, well, it's this deal or no deal. Like we're not going to renegotiate this just because you can't get your people to sign off on it. And the actual Brexit deadline is looming. And if they hit that deadline without having a deal that everybody has signed off on and agreed to and you know put the bows on there's going to be what's called a no deal brexit which means they just straight up like plummet out of the eu stores are literally like starting to stockpile food because they don't know if like shipments of food from other parts of the eu are going to be allowed in because

of customs rules can they just 86 the whole thing before that happens? So there's a growing movement of people who would like to do a redo, basically, Brexit redux, and have a second referendum and say, look, we wanted, you know, now that we know how this has gone, now that we kind of have a little clearer sense of what this could do to our economy, what if we call another referendum and just vote again on whether to stay or leave? There is support for that among some people in the UK. There are also plenty of people who point out that that's kind of undemocratic. Like we had this vote already once, you know, sorry, you didn't like the result, but that was the result. And you don't get to just keep doing do-overs until you get the one that you want. Like that's not how democracy works. So from the US perspective, it's kind of like, you know, we're watching going, holy shit, this country is just like spiraling into chaos before our eyes. And it's kind of like, ha ha, oh my God, look what's going on in Britain,

ha. But like, this is a very serious issue for like tens of thousands of people. And like real human lives are being impacted. So the GIFs are about to get a lot less funny. Yeah, the GIFs are going to be a lot less funny. Although the Brits have, you know, a famous sense of humor. So, you know, I don't know. They'll probably still take it with a stiff upper lip. So, Zach Beecham, you're next. What's something that happened in the world in 2018 that had nothing to really do with the United States that you think was momentous? Brazil's election of Jair Bolsonaro, a politician who openly sympathizes with the country's not-so-long-ago military dictatorship, has to be in the top list.

And we did an episode about him, but remind listeners who he is. Right. So the too simple line is that he's the Trump of the tropics. But the actual reality is that this is a guy who's been a longtime political figure in Brazil, but rose to power in this year's election on the basis of dissatisfaction with the country's economic performance, frustration with corruption inside its elite, and a general sense that the current parties are just not up to the task of fixing the country. And comparing him to Trump feels unfair to Trump because he actually will just walk around and like threaten to punch female politicians and stuff like that, like stuff that Trump probably couldn't get away with. Setting that aside, right, he's also openly pro-authoritarian, not just like, wouldn't it be great if I could prosecute my enemies? But he has said the problem with Brazil's military dictatorship is, and I'm paraphrasing,

that they tortured instead of killed. He said they brought prosperity to the country. He genuinely seems to be an opponent of democracy, like straight up, like someone who has considered views on this and is basically a neo-fascist. I know I said this wasn't going to be about the United States, but to just bring it back to our relationship with Bolsonaro, I wonder. I think the Trump administration said vaguely positive things about him, right? Yeah, unsurprisingly. They have this tendency to congratulate authoritarians when they win electoral victories. Like when the Turkish president managed to consolidate a bunch of

powers in his office, Trump congratulated him when everybody was like, no, you can't do that. This is an authoritarian move. It's bad. B-A-D. And it's a similar situation in Brazil? Yeah, pretty much. Trump seemed to praise him. Bolsonaro seems to like Trump back. And this could lead to a kind of weird authoritarian axis in politics in the Americas and in sort of Pan-American organizations. We'll see how that works. All right.

Alex Ward, we started with you. Let's end with you. What is the last thing we should think about the world as we head into a new year? It should be that there will be a dictator for life in China. Right. We did that one too. Yes. Xi Jinping, arguably the most powerful leader in China since Mao Zedong, had his party give him the authority to rule forever. They got rid of term limits. And this guy is no joke. This is a guy who wants to reestablish China's dominance,

both militarily and economically, does not see the U.S. really as a friend, is getting closer to Russia, to Iran, to a bunch of America's quote-unquote adversaries. And so regardless of whether it's Trump or whoever else is in the White House, they're probably going to have to deal with Xi for many years. And not only just Xi,

but what looks like a growing and more aggressive China. And what is Xi going to do as China grows, as his relationships with our adversaries strengthen? What he's going to do is form alliances with countries that probably aren't super pro-American, right? Russia, Iran, et cetera. relationships with our adversaries strengthen? What he's going to do is form alliances with countries that probably aren't super pro-American, right? Russia, Iran, etc. He's going to try to unleash his economy primarily through technology firms, try to get other kinds of industries up and going. He's already modernizing the military, trying to make it look actually more American in structure. And on top of that, buying new weapons and improving weapons that they have to keep U.S. boats from coming near it in case of a war,

which seems very unlikely at this point, but also to threaten countries around the area, which are American allies like Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, et cetera. The three of you focus so much on the world, but oftentimes on national security. Do you feel better about the world at the end of 2018 than you did at the end of 2017? As far as security, harmony, something like, I don't know, peace is concerned? I feel that the world has gotten worse security wise, but I feel it's gotten better in terms of not getting nuked. That's a win. How do you feel, Jen? Not so well. You know, people are being lifted out of poverty and, you know, rates of diseases are declining globally. And that's great. But there are also horrific wars and people being repressed. I think this is like the highest number of journalists in

prison right now that we've seen in like decades. But, you know, people have the will to change things and I still have hope. And how about you, Zach? How did we do in 2018? In terms of peace, you know, we're living through one of the best times in human history. Violence is down relative to the historic average. Life expectancy is up. War deaths are at some of the lowest points in history, not the absolute lowest, but pretty damn low.

And that to me suggests that we're still in a good place. Now, there are developments in 2018 that bother me, that threaten this kind of long-term trend, most notably the things that uphold peace and stability, nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, international institutions, the US as a global leader. These things are all fraying. So the question is not 2018 versus 2017, I think, in the best frame. It's are we doing enough to prevent a massive deviation from a historically great time? Or are we going in the wrong direction in the long run? And on that scale, we might be.

You like made it not bleak for a second and then brought it back to bleak. Fucking Pollyanna up in here. I think the phrase we have for that of Vox is dupe him with hope, slam him with truth. Alex Ward, Jen Williams, and Zach Beecham are the three hosts of the Worldly podcast from Vox. I'm Sean Ramos for them.

This is Today Explained. One last shout out to EverQuote. EverQuote wants to find you your perfect, ideal car insurance. What they do is they find out what you need and they match you with insurers in your area to find the right coverage for you at the right price. You can find out more about EverQuote right now at 833-641-EVER. That's 833-641-3837.