Today, Explained - Vatever you vant, Vladimir

Episode Date: February 20, 2025

Kremlin defender Tulsi Gabbard is the US’s new spy chief, while the US and Russia are holding peace talks without European and Ukrainian officials at the table. The vibe has officially shifted. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Russian President Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump at the G20 Summit in Osaka in 2019. Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Alright, it's officially been a month now, and to his credit, President Trump waited almost an entire month before doing a 180 on US-Russia relations. Trump had a nice long phone call with Vladimir Putin about a week ago. Ukraine was not invited. My call was perfect. And then on Tuesday Trump blamed Ukraine for being invaded by Russia. And then to top it off, on Truth Social yesterday he called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a dictator without elections.

Shortly thereafter on that same website Trump called himself a king. Totally cool, normal stuff. But you might be old enough to remember the United States being on Ukraine's side of this war. On Today Explained we're getting used to this new normal, being BFFs with Russia. And we're going to start with the person Trump has put in charge of US intelligence, a Russia sympathizer with no intelligence experience to speak of named Tulsi Gabbard. What's up besties?

On this week's episode of Net Worth and Chill, I'm sitting down with Lexi Alford, AKA Lexi Limitless, the youngest person to have been to every single country in the world. We chatted about how she turned her passion for travel into breaking a world record and transforming that momentum into a seven figure business. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on the Your Rich BFF YouTube channel. This week on The Gray Area,

why are we so afraid of our own ignorance? If someone refutes our argument, it feels like something quite intimate has been touched. That is an incentive to build up all sorts of defenses to remain convinced of your own rational capacities and your independence. Listen to The Grey Area with me, Sean Elling. New episodes every Monday, available everywhere.

This is Today Explained. not shy. This is Today Explained. Vladimir Putin got his start as a spy, and now our top spy in the United States has a soft spot for Vladimir Putin. In fact, some people sincerely believe she's a straight-up Russian operative. That is a charge that's been leveled against her. She's a favorite of the Russians. She once sued Hillary Clinton for $50 million for saying something along those lines. I will not stand quietly by as Hillary Clinton or anyone else tries to smear my character. I think that goes too far, but she has expressed sympathy for Putin's dilemma. You hear President Biden say, well, this is Putin's war. This is Putin's fault.

It's Putin who's the one who's solely responsible. Well, the United States and some of these European NATO countries are fueling this war. And for dictators like Bashar al-Assad, the former dictator of Syria. Do you think Assad is our enemy? Assad is not the enemy of the United States because the United Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States. She has called for a pardon for Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who exposed illegal surveillance of Americans.

You've celebrated Snowden as a quote, brave whistleblower. So she sounds more like a progressive politician sometimes than a establishment spy chief, and I think she would say that's kind of the point. We need a different perspective on top of the American intelligence system. Steve Call is a senior editor at what I'm told is a leading magazine, The Economist. And he's here to help you understand who's just been put in charge of US intelligence

and how that might shift the course of US foreign policy. Well, she grew up in Hawaii in somewhat unusual circumstances. Her parents were members of a religious community called the Science of Identity Foundation, which was derived from the Hare Krishna branch of sort of meditation and yoga teaching. And the community that her parents belonged to and that she had considerable exposure to as a child was led by a charismatic guru named Chris Butler, who was a former surfer and college dropout who had lived on the streets as a Hare Krishna follower, but then started his own community.

So one of Chris Butler's most adamant views, at least in the 80s and 90s, was an opposition to homosexuality, which she regarded as an abomination, but also to the establishment of rights for gay and lesbian couples. And as a teenager, Tulsi Gabbard found herself on the streets of Honolulu protesting alongside her parents against the establishment of gay marriage rights in Hawaii. Don't open the door to weird marriages. Don't let homosexuals force their values on the people of Hawaii. Vote yes on the marriage amendment.

And it was in that time when she was very young, I think just 20 or 21 years old, that she and her father simultaneously ran for public office in Hawaii. She was elected to the state legislature and her father was elected as a city councilman initially. So she was in politics, but she decided after 9-11 that she wanted to join the military. I enlisted in the army because of the horrific terrorist attack on September 11th and volunteered to deploy to Iraq in 2005 where I served in a medical unit. And she has described this experience of war as transformational in her outlook on the

American government, on American power. I mean, it was something every day that we all experienced firsthand, the terribly high human cost of war. We have to honor our service men and women by only sending them on missions that are worthy of their sacrifice. She did eventually come back to politics after establishing her military career

as a part-time reservist. And she found an opening first on the Honolulu City Council and then in 2012 a seat in Congress, one of the four that Hawaii has, opened up. I'm Tulsi Gabbard. I approve this message. I'll work to end tax loopholes, end the war in Afghanistan now, protect Medicare and Social Security. She arrived in Washington and Nancy Pelosi took her under her wing. She was seen as maybe the next Obama, another Hawaiian politician,

a woman of color, military career, what's not to like, good speaker, telegenic. Come on, man. And then very quickly, as these things go in Washington, it kind of started to come apart. Partly, she didn't play the game and she started to pick fights with the leaders of her party, including Barack Obama, who she called out for not being sufficiently tough on Islamic terrorism. Our administration refuses to recognize who our enemy is. And unless and until that happens, then it's impossible to come up with a strategy to defeat that enemy.

We have to recognize that this is about radical Islam. So, by the time the 2016 presidential cycle arrived, By the time the 2016 presidential cycle arrived, she was starting to drift away from the party that had embraced her. What you can see by 2016 is the beginnings of what some people have called the horseshoe shape of American political populism, where the farther you go to the left, the closer you get to the left, the closer you get to the MAGA right. By 2019, she's still a Democrat and she can be critical of Donald Trump in public. What is happening right now is a very clear consequence of a command having a commander

in chief who doesn't know what he's doing. She was already part of the MAGA conversation. She knew Tucker Carlson went on his show on Fox News, and she won praise from some ardent Trump supporters in the Manosphere and podcasting landscape and so forth. And so she, in 2022, she left the party to become an independent. I can no longer remain in today's Democratic Party. It's now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness. And in 2024, she campaigned with Donald Trump, and then she endorsed him.

I invite you to join me in doing all that we can to save our country and elect President Donald J. Trump and send him back to the White House. And then finally, toward the end of the campaign, she announced that she was becoming a Republican. I'm proud to stand here with you today, President Trump, and announce that I'm joining the Republican Party. Good for her. How does she go from becoming a Republican to becoming one of the most important players in our intelligence community? If not the most important player. Well, you know, it really is a puzzle because Donald Trump could have nominated her to be

Secretary of Veterans Affairs or something and everyone would have said, oh, what an innovative choice and she would have gotten confirmed with no difficulty. Instead, he named her the top spy of the US system. Now, she has no experience of these bureaucracies. She has not been an intelligence analyst or a synthesizer of complicated information. Indeed, a lot of her takes over the years on the foreign policy questions that she was most interested in

were a bit garbled or a bit puzzling in different ways. She sometimes aligned herself with misinformation and propaganda that was coming out of Russia or serious dictatorship. She seemed kind of an uncritical thinker. She clearly had strong policy views, but she would select facts as if she was just cruising the internet and making her arguments out of what she found.

And so it left me initially, as I was working on her biography, kind of puzzled like why this job? But the answer reveals itself in her own speaking and writing and her own convictions. And she brought some of this even to her confirmation hearing. Chuck Schumer admitted a few years ago, quote, you take on the intelligence community,

they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you. And so this is, in fact, why Donald Trump, I think, is attracted to her leadership and why she's aligned with Donald Trump's agenda in the intelligence community, which is that her first job includes carrying out two executive orders that the president signed fairly early on that basically designate the director of national intelligence for a period of a couple or three months to conduct a review of people who are disloyal and to take disciplinary action against them people who had

quote-unquote weaponized intelligence in the previous administration or who were otherwise unreliable politically and so she's going to lead that review and What you can say is that she's motivated to do it. She thinks there is a really deep-seated problem in the intelligence communities that she will now have the power to do something about. So those are her first tasks from her boss, but obviously a big part of her job will be countering US adversaries. China comes to mind.

Russia historically would have come to mind, but what does putting Tulsi Gabbard in charge of our national intelligence say about where we're heading with Russia and about what Trump wants to accomplish with Russia? Well, she never appeared to regard Vladimir Putin as an enemy of the United States.

She tended to express herself indirectly about this by criticizing the democratic elites for demonizing Putin. And she would mock them for calling him the new Hitler. And she blamed NATO for provoking Putin. So in that sense, she was aligned with President Trump's assessments of Putin as someone he could do business with, as someone he should try to do business with. Perhaps there are people around President Trump who see grand strategy in

this. They might say that U.S. policy has driven Russia and China closely together, complicating America's great power position, and that the U.S. has to pull one of those two away, and Russia is the better choice. That seems to be the hypothesis that has brought hawks and non-interventionists together in this early period of the Trump administration. But for Tulsi Gabbard, I don't hear anything on the chessboard like that. I think she just has an instinct that the elites have gotten it all wrong and that Vladimir Putin has been

unfairly aligned Steve call economist comm whatever you want Vladimir Vladimir, ahead on Today Explained Show and I've got some news you can use. We're taking Vox Media podcasts on the road and heading back to Austin, Texas for the South by Southwest Festival. March 8th through 10th, we'll be doing special live episodes of hit shows, including our show, Today Explained. Where Should We Begin with Esther Perel, Pivot, A Touch More with Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe, not just football with Cam Hayward,

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Ladies and gentlemen, presenting a video address by Ms. Sean Rames from Today Explained, here now with Matthew Luxmore. He covers the war in Ukraine for the Wall Street Journal, a war whose end the United States wants to accelerate with Russia the victor. It all started around a week ago last Wednesday when firstly Trump's new defense secretary Pete Hegseth announced quite surprisingly that NATO membership for Ukraine is off the table. The United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement.

He later walked back some of those comments, but it's been quite a clear line for the Trump administration ever since. And then the same day, Trump announced that he had had a phone call with Russia's president, Vladimir Putin. We had a great call and it lasted for a long time, over an hour. Essentially bringing the Kremlin leader in from the cold after three years of isolation by Biden's administration. And then in a press conference, you know, batting away criticism from reporters, he said that the only way to fix this is to start with talks directly with Russia.

We ultimately expect to meet. In fact, we expect that he'll come here and I'll go there. And he announced that a meeting would take place in Saudi Arabia between the US side and the Russian side, which of course left the Europeans and the Ukrainians, most importantly, scrambling for a response since they had thought all along that they would be key players in any negotiation over the end of this war. What sense do we have of what exactly the peace deal might be, the one that the Trump administration is shopping around for? Well, it's very unclear at this stage. Of course, we had this meeting between the US and the Russian side in Saudi Arabia.

Trump has all along said that the war must be ended, that Ukraine is a huge killing field, many lives being lost, which is all correct. But he's driving towards a peace without really explaining how this peace would be negotiated. The main problem is that Russia's position and Ukraine's position completely don't overlap. Ukraine until recently was saying that it's going to regain at least a large part of the land that it had lost. Russia was saying that it's going to keep all the territory that it's taken.

And it's been calling for a complete disarmament of Ukraine and a kind of neutered, neutral version of Ukraine that is not allowed to participate in any international military coalitions and would certainly not be a member of NATO, which is a key aspiration for Ukraine written into its constitution. for Ukraine written into its constitution. So Trump, of course, is talking a good game about fixing this war. He's met with the Russian side. Ukraine says there's going to be no deal that it accepts unless it's involved directly in negotiations. So I think we're very short on the specifics at the moment. All we know at this stage is that talks have begun

and presumably Ukraine will be involved in those talks soon when, you know, all sides come to the table, but it's very unclear whether the Europeans will be. And that too is contentious. Yes, Trump, members of his team have suggested that the Europeans will not be at the table. As I said, I'm a school of realism. I think that's not going to happen. Even though, of course, it's the continent that sits closest to Ukraine that will be directly impacted by whatever peace deal is made over Ukraine, but they cannot agree on the specifics of what their version of a peace deal would be.

France is not preparing to send ground troops as belligerents in a conflict to the front line. I'm prepared to consider committing British forces on the ground alongside others if there is a lasting peace agreement. It is completely premature and completely the wrong time to have this discussion now. I'm even a little irritated by these debates, I have to say. This is highly inappropriate, to put it bluntly and honestly. And this is one of the things that Trump's team has expressed very publicly, that Europe

is divided and there is no cohesive narrative in Europe about how to end this war. A lot of people are upset right now because it seems like the United States is taking a rather sympathetic view towards Russia's side of this war, towards Russia's arguments around this war. Do we have any idea why that is? Well yeah of course here in Europe, in Ukraine as well, people have been quite shocked by statements made by Trump on Tuesday suggesting that Ukraine had started the war. But today I heard, oh, well, we weren't invited.

Well, you've been there for three years. You should have ended it three years. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal. Which, of course, is not the case. Three years ago, Russia sent, you know, hundreds of thousands of troops over the border into Ukraine and tanks and armored vehicles

and planes in a full-scale invasion of the country. So this is obviously ruffled feathers in Ukraine. And there is very broadly a sense that the Trump administration, if it doesn't outright favor the Russian narrative on things, it seems at least to be sympathetic to it in a way that was almost impossible to expect from a US government a year ago when Biden was in power.

Right. I mean, I think the new director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has said that Ukraine and NATO provoked Putin into starting this war. Donald Trump has said similar things. Is the general vibe that the United States is sending to Europe, to Ukraine, to Russia, that Ukraine bears some responsibility here and thus will have to pay for it. Yeah. I mean, there's the transactional nature of Trump's approach to this conflict, of course.

There's also the statements that you referenced that have been made publicly by members of his team, which to anyone in Ukraine sound very much like the statements that Russian officials have made since the war started. So people are very, very concerned that Russia has swayed the Trump administration. And just on Wednesday, Ukrainian President Zelensky suggested in his most forceful statements about Trump so far that President Trump, who we have great respect for as the leader of the American people,

whom we respect very much, who supports us constantly, unfortunately lives in this disinformation space suggested there should be more truth coming from the Trump administration. As far as the kind of transactional nature of all this is concerned, the US position is that it has sent billions of dollars in military and financial aid to back Ukraine since the war started, as have the Europeans, of course, and that the US side deserves to have something back and it will give no more, as Trump puts it, aid for nothing to Ukraine. It wants something in exchange.

And one of the things it wants in exchange is access to these so-called rare earths in Ukraine, mineral resources that Ukraine has in abundance, many of which are on Russian occupied territory and very, very difficult to dig out of the ground. But it's one of the ways in which Trump is saying that Ukraine needs to pay the US side back for the help that it's supporting and basically keeping Ukraine as a sovereign state. It's quite an incredible turnaround from the situation a year ago. Ukraine kind been kind of scuffling with the country that has been instrumental in keeping it alive, essentially keeping it surviving over the past three years since Russia invaded. You're in Kiev right now. When you talk to Ukrainians about what's happening here, what's

the feeling on the ground? I think it's kind of a mixture between defiance, resignation, caution over what this all means. When you walk the streets of Kiev today, I think you definitely do sense this kind of tension, this mood of experiencing a calm before the storm. And Zelensky, the president, he, since the beginning of the war, has been recording each evening

a video address to the people. And this week he's suddenly kind of stopped recording these addresses. Now, maybe this is not something that we need to read too much into, but some people, I think, almost feel like things are more unstable than they used to be and that Zelensky does appear to be frustrated and frustrated because I think he's struggling to understand how to respond to this whole situation. And Ukrainians I think are just as confused as he is.

Matthew Luxmore, known at today explained as DeluxeMatthewwsj.com, Avishai Artzi produced, Amina Alsadi edited, Laura Bullard fact-checked, Patrick Boyd and Andrea Christensdottir mixed. The rest of the team includes Hadi Mawagdi, Amanda Llewellyn, Peter Balanon Baby, Miles Bryan, Travis Larchuk, Victoria Chamberlain, Devin Schwartz, Jolie Meyers, Miranda Kennedy, Noelle King, and welcome, Gabrielle Burbae. Believe it or not, we use music by Breakmaster Cylinder. Today Explained is distributed by WNYC.

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