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slash podcast free Welcome
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back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor.
1:00
I'm Ben Rhodes. Great to see you. Back, back
1:03
here. You're the world tour. You really were on
1:05
a world tour. Where'd we hit? Are we willing
1:07
to share at this point? I mean, I shared
1:09
where it was Hong Kong, Taipei, Sweden,
1:13
Copenhagen, Italy. So,
1:15
you know, I made the rounds. A
1:18
quick side tour into Burma where
1:20
you grabbed a rifle and fought with a resistance. I
1:23
thought about it. I thought about it, but, you know, that's the
1:25
next trip. They're doing well, by the way. It's an exciting story.
1:28
It's an insane story, actually. We should come back to it.
1:30
But yeah, like that's the thing that it's like one of
1:32
these things that in normal times, we get a lot more
1:34
attention that the junta is losing
1:36
the civil war. But
1:39
alas, we're not normal times. Alas, it is not
1:41
normal times. Ben, did you know that
1:43
while you were gone, we were nominated for a Webby Award? I
1:47
did. I saw that. That's
1:49
very exciting news. You know, I am a recipient
1:52
of a Webby Award. Nice Webby Award winner.
1:54
For Missing America. Oh, nice. I remember that,
1:56
of course. But this
1:58
is like, that's like a... Best Supporting
2:01
Actor category. This is
2:03
like the big kahuna here. Best
2:06
News in Politics Podcast. Look,
2:09
that's it guys. So if you
2:11
want to vote, right? I mean, this is... The
2:14
cynic in me, like, you know, doesn't
2:16
feel great asking for people to do this. But the
2:18
hardest thing in podcasting is to get people to find
2:20
your show because the discovery is just so bad. And
2:22
these awards really do help. They'll help us grow and
2:24
they'll help us do more and make it better. So
2:27
thanks to anyone who nominated us. I don't
2:29
know how that process works. Thank you. Thank
2:31
you. If you consider voting, go to vote.webbyawards.com.
2:34
Search for Crooked Media and you can vote
2:36
for Pate of the World and
2:38
for some fun social media stuff
2:41
that we did here as well.
2:43
But it's again, vote.webbyawards.com. We'd really
2:45
appreciate it. Yeah. And make it count. It's
2:47
easier than writing a review and giving us
2:49
five stars on Apple. Also do that. That
2:52
also helps people find the show. We
2:54
have a great show today. We're going to talk
2:56
about the latest from Gaza, President Biden's spicy
2:59
call, prickly call. Sounded
3:02
like it was an unfun call. Full and frank. Full
3:04
and frank. Yeah, what did this mean? President
3:06
Biden reportedly read Bibi Netanyahu the riot
3:08
acts and demanded a bunch of changes
3:11
for the way the war in Gaza is going.
3:14
We'll talk about that. We'll also talk about the
3:16
sea change in political opinion in the US on
3:18
this war. And we will talk
3:20
about this sort of anxious wait and
3:22
see to see if Iran retaliates militarily
3:25
to the Israeli military assassinating much of
3:27
its top generals in Syria last
3:29
week. We're also going to cover
3:31
a diplomatic crisis in Ecuador that is
3:33
spilling into all of Latin America. That is a crazy
3:35
story. I can't wait to talk about that one. I
3:37
read a lot about that. Yeah, me too. Trump's secret
3:40
plan for Ukraine. There was an
3:42
election in Slovakia. Japan has a state
3:44
visit in Washington this week on Wednesday.
3:46
There's also a fun update on our
3:49
favorite boondoggle in Saudi Arabia and some
3:51
more sad, embarrassing Tory party news Ben.
3:54
It's the best kind. Best kind of Tory party news. Then
3:57
you did our interview this week. What are folks going to hear? David
4:00
Miliband, former labor, a foreign
4:03
secretary for the UK, but talked to him
4:05
as the head of the International Rescue Committee,
4:07
the IRC. The IRC is one of the
4:09
eight organizations on the ground in Gaza. They-
4:12
Given the Lord's work. Yeah. And they'd previously actually
4:14
had one of
4:16
their guest houses that their personnel were sitting
4:18
at, you know, hit by an Israeli- Jesus.
4:21
So, they, you know, we talked about the
4:23
aftermath of the World Central Kitchen strike, obviously,
4:27
the need to get
4:29
more aid into Gaza. And Miliband was pretty
4:32
clear that they have not seen any change since
4:34
this call that Biden had. We can talk more
4:36
about that. We talked about the difficult
4:38
trade-off that they have to make about, you
4:40
know, wanting to perform their mission, but also wanting
4:43
to protect their people, because they have to make
4:45
those kinds of hard calls. What
4:47
kind of needs to happen in Gaza immediately,
4:49
but also kind of what is on the
4:51
horizon in dealing with this humanitarian crisis, you
4:55
know, in terms of if there is a ceasefire, what
4:57
still needs to happen. And then also they've
4:59
been very active in Sudan. So, we
5:01
talked about the one-year anniversary of the
5:03
civil war in Sudan. Miliband was recently
5:05
in South Sudan, and talked a little
5:07
bit about the UK and what changes
5:09
we might want to see if there
5:12
is a labor government. So, it was a good, you
5:14
know, full and frank conversation. I was going to say,
5:16
that's a great conversation. Positive one, but people should actually
5:18
listen because he gives kind of some real ground truth
5:21
in terms of like what it is like to be
5:23
a humanitarian organization in Gaza. What is
5:25
the risk of famine? What does that look like?
5:27
So, people should really stick around for the
5:29
interview. Yeah, and to your point, I mean, the risk
5:32
of famine doesn't go away the day that shelling stops.
5:34
That's what he said, actually. It was interesting, you know,
5:36
famine- It's precarious. It
5:38
emerges slowly, but then once it hits,
5:42
it's really hard to address both
5:44
the immediate life-saving needs, but then also the malnutrition
5:47
needs. So, we talk about that. Yeah, so it's
5:49
going to be a long-term effort. Okay,
5:51
well, let's turn to Gaza because, you know,
5:53
last week we talked about the Israeli drone
5:55
strike that killed those aid workers with World
5:57
Central Kitchen, which is that great relief
6:00
organization. funded by Jose Andres. So in the
6:02
wake of that airstrike, President Biden called
6:04
Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. He reported to be
6:06
right in the riot acts with a list of
6:09
demands that included opening up more
6:11
crossings into Gaza to get into Gaza.
6:14
And he called on him to drastically increase
6:16
the amount of aid getting into the current
6:18
access points into Gaza. And so it sounds,
6:20
according to the reports about the call, Biden
6:23
also wanted those changes to be announced
6:26
immediately. And he told Bibi that if
6:28
they didn't happen, there would be consequences
6:30
that could include losing US support
6:32
for the war or maybe the US conditioning
6:34
aid to Israel. It's not entirely clear what
6:37
was said. So we do know that Netanyahu
6:39
quickly announced there would be new crossings for
6:41
aid to allow aid into Gaza. They seem
6:43
to have allowed more aid at the existing
6:46
crossings. So on Tuesday, April 9, Israel
6:48
says 468 aid trucks were
6:51
inspected and transferred into Gaza on Monday, 419,
6:54
on Sunday, 322. That is
6:56
way up from the February average of 98 trucks a day. In
7:00
other Gaza news, the CIA director Bill Burns
7:02
was in Cairo for the latest rounds of
7:04
talks about a ceasefire and hostage-released deal. There
7:06
have been reports that the
7:08
negotiators on the Israeli side were mad at
7:10
Netanyahu for not giving them enough flexibility to
7:12
make a deal. It sounds like that
7:14
has changed a bit at least. According
7:16
to Axios, Israel's latest proposal includes
7:19
releasing 900 Palestinian prisoners in
7:21
the deal. That's up from 700. Netanyahu,
7:24
though, is still promising to launch a ground
7:26
invasion into Rafa, the city in southern Gaza,
7:28
where over a million Palestinians are sheltering.
7:31
He says he has picked the date. Saved
7:33
the date, I guess. It's a weird thing to
7:35
do. The defense minister, by the way, says there
7:37
is no date. It's Marben Gevir. The right-wing national
7:39
security minister says he will withdraw support from the
7:42
governing coalition if a Rafa invasion doesn't happen. So
7:44
that's the politics. It's probably why I figured out
7:46
the thing about the date. Yeah, that's why there's
7:48
a fake date on the calendar. The
7:50
US still says this is a terrible idea. We
7:52
haven't seen a plan to protect civilians. So
7:54
hope it doesn't happen. So that's the big ticket
7:57
policy disputes, Ben. I do want to get into
7:59
the broader. changes in U.S. political opinion
8:01
on the war in a second. But I'm wondering
8:03
how much do you think these,
8:05
I don't know if it was quick action
8:07
or quick announcements from Netanyahu at this point,
8:09
stems from the fact that Biden finally laid
8:11
down the law on this call, or how
8:14
much of it is like six months of
8:16
public opinion turning against them, and just
8:19
knowing that this like airstrike on aid
8:21
workers is indefensible? I
8:24
think, and first of all, there's an interesting, you know, you
8:28
and I were talking before about Miliband's, you
8:32
know, what he's hearing from people on the ground, not
8:34
seeing changes versus some of these trucks getting in. But
8:36
part of that is that there are also supposed to
8:38
be these additional crossings, where
8:40
there may not be changes yet. I
8:42
do want to say though, and I
8:44
know you hit this on PSA, you
8:47
know, well, those were just
8:49
like you, I listened to
8:51
positive America on my drive in today.
8:53
But it bears emphasis
8:56
that the
8:58
strategy as articulated was always like you
9:00
got to hug BB, you got
9:03
to only disagree in private, we
9:05
can condition aid. We should recall
9:07
Tommy that you and I way back in the 2020 campaign, we're
9:10
trying to get every candidate on the record about would
9:12
you condition assistance, right? Shut up, Bernie, shut up. Bernie
9:14
was a peat peat. Well, remember, it was more narrow.
9:16
It was like, would you condition aid if it's used
9:19
to annex the West Bank? It was hard to get
9:21
people to agree to that. So
9:24
what we've learned is that strategy
9:26
is bullshit. It doesn't work. It's
9:28
so self evidently wrong to
9:30
say, we'll never say that there'll be
9:33
any conditions and expect you to change.
9:35
The first time that Joe Biden
9:37
reportedly directly said, if you don't
9:40
do X, we might consider Y.
9:42
So he didn't even, they weren't
9:44
even specific about we'll cut off
9:46
military assistance or offensive military assistance.
9:48
Just him saying that at least
9:50
led them to announce this change
9:52
in policy and to get some
9:54
trucks in. So we have learned
9:57
we now have a data set
9:59
what happens. when you say, we're
10:01
not going to condition anything, but we'll counsel you in
10:03
private. That didn't work for six months.
10:06
Then there's one phone call in which he
10:08
said that, and guess what? They changed. And
10:10
so the lesson that should be taken, not
10:13
just for the next few weeks and not
10:15
just until there's a ceasefire, but forever going
10:17
forward. Forever. Forever, is that if you have
10:19
leverage, you need to use it. And this
10:21
idea that we say that we'll use leverage
10:23
with every other country, but
10:25
not Israel, is an insane way of doing
10:28
policy. Not since the George H.W. Bush administration,
10:30
where they very clearly used leverage. As did
10:32
Ronald Reagan, by the way. There were threats.
10:34
There was public shaming. There was lots of
10:37
criticism of Israeli government policies at the time.
10:39
Yeah. And what I'd say
10:41
is, we in the Obama administration, I think could
10:43
have done more, particularly in the Palestinian issue, to
10:45
exert that leverage. I frankly would have liked it
10:47
at times. But on
10:49
the Iran deal, where Netanyahu came
10:52
and gave a speech to Congress opposing
10:54
it, well the leverage was, we just did. You
10:58
can also take actions that are contrary to what
11:00
Netanyahu wants. So that to me- And win those
11:02
fights. Yeah. That to me is
11:04
like the headline of this last week. And
11:07
again, we still haven't even seen a specification
11:09
of what the consequences would be. It
11:11
seems like it's offensive military aid, but
11:14
this is a sea change in the
11:16
Biden administration's approach if
11:18
they follow through on it. And if
11:20
Israel doesn't follow through on their commitments,
11:22
then we do really need to see
11:25
some conditionality, not just announced, but actually
11:27
imposed. Yeah. Ben, the other quick
11:29
point I wanted to make on this is, it
11:32
seems unclear whether these new aid
11:34
crossings have been opened yet or not.
11:36
But it does seem clear that, at
11:38
least by, according to the Israelis,
11:40
about 4x the number of trucks got in the
11:43
last couple of days this week, then got in
11:45
on average in February. I wanted
11:47
to read for you a tweet from a guy
11:49
named Ron Dermer. He's a top Netanyahu aid. Friend
11:51
of the pod. Yeah. And by,
11:53
on March 26, he tweeted the following, those
11:55
who suggest that Israel has a policy of denying
11:58
food or basic assistance to the people of God.
12:00
Gaza are simply spreading falsehoods.
12:02
It's a blood libel against Israel.
12:04
Well, it turns out that one
12:06
phone call from Joe Biden can quadruple the
12:08
amount of assistance allowed into Gaza through the
12:10
existing crossing. So I don't know that that
12:12
was a blood libel. It seems like it
12:14
was a policy choice. Yeah. Well,
12:17
it's a policy choice too that they announced in the first
12:19
days of the war. Right. Like the
12:21
defense minister was saying, no food, no water, right? I
12:23
mean, this is something that they went out and announced.
12:26
And look, this is not to excuse anything
12:28
about Hamas. The reality is
12:30
Hamas does not control those crossings.
12:32
Israel does. That's just basic
12:35
fact. I'm sorry. It's
12:37
the case that we can see with
12:39
our eyes that Israel controls everything
12:41
that gets in and out of Gaza. And
12:44
sure, there may be difficulty in getting aid to
12:46
some areas if Hamas is operating there. But if
12:48
you talk to Miliband, the other point he makes
12:50
that's really important is that this
12:52
isn't like charity. This is
12:54
international law. Israel is
12:57
internationally legally obligated to let this assistance
12:59
get in. That's common practice
13:01
in war zones. And so also
13:03
to say it's too hard because it's a war zone,
13:05
that's not how this works. And all
13:08
war zones, the warring parties have an
13:10
obligation to allow for assistance to get
13:12
to civilian populations here. And
13:14
so that's what needs to happen now. Yeah.
13:17
There isn't like a siege in the Middle Ages. This is a
13:19
modern warfare. Yeah. Before we move on to the
13:21
politics in the US, I did want to play a clip from Jose
13:23
Andres from ABC News over the weekend
13:25
talking about this devastating attack on his staff and
13:28
what it meant to him and the organization. Your
13:31
CEO said this was
13:33
unforgivable despite
13:37
what happens with the investigation, despite
13:40
however more is done. Is
13:43
this unforgivable? It
13:46
is unforgivable. I
13:48
will have to live with this
13:50
the rest of my life. We all will have to live with
13:53
this the rest of our lives. I
13:55
see firsthand what has been
13:57
happening in Ukraine. and
14:00
cities being wiped out by Russia and by
14:02
Putin. But Prime Minister
14:04
Netanyahu is doing exactly the same. We
14:07
both have been lucky enough to meet Jose, not just
14:09
in the context of his restaurants in D.C., but also
14:11
just through the humanitarian work he did. And you can
14:13
hear that the guy is just devastated
14:15
by this. Yeah, and I met
14:17
him a number of times, including he won
14:19
with us to Cuba. Actually had a very
14:21
memorable dinner in Cuba with
14:24
Jose Andres. That
14:26
was a special event. I
14:28
think he's emerged as an important moral voice
14:30
here. And
14:32
I think he would agree with the
14:35
fact that it is unforgivable that
14:37
these World Central Kitchen aid workers are
14:39
killed. It is also unforgivable that over
14:42
15,000 Palestinian children have
14:44
likely been killed. It's unforgivable that
14:47
food has been used as a weapon
14:49
of war. It's unforgivable, not just that
14:51
these Westerns were killed, but that
14:53
we've been seeing this... I
14:55
mean, again, as Miliband said to me, there's
14:58
not another time in recent history where a
15:00
population went from no risk of
15:02
famine to the doorstep
15:05
of famine this fast. This
15:07
is not normal. It's
15:10
just not something that we can sit
15:13
and watch and think that this is just
15:15
how things work. This is not
15:17
how things work. And I think he's a
15:20
good sign of... To
15:22
take a positive from this, Tommy, a
15:25
lot of people out there feel like world
15:27
events are going in this bad direction, politics is
15:29
going in this bad direction, there's nothing I can
15:31
do. This guy was a chef. Yeah,
15:33
he had a couple really great restaurants.
15:36
We were in DC, he had a
15:38
few good restaurants, OML, Haleo, whatever. And
15:40
he looked at the world and was like, I'm going to do
15:43
something. I'm going to try to help feed some people. And
15:45
over a course of years, that grew into this
15:48
massive, sprawling humanitarian institution. It is a
15:50
sign that people can step up and
15:52
do something. And so that's the example
15:54
I hope people take from Jose Andres.
15:57
Yeah, and look, Jose has changed the politics
15:59
on this war. Washington personally. More than any of
16:01
us. More than any of us, yeah. But also, it's
16:03
hard to overstate how much the politics were at large
16:05
have changed in the last couple of days or weeks.
16:08
According to Haaretz, a quarter of House Democrats
16:10
now back conditioning aid to Israel. Congressman
16:13
Gregory Meeks, the ranking member on
16:15
the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said
16:17
on CNN that he wants to
16:19
see Israeli assurances regarding civilian casualties
16:21
and how weapons are going to
16:23
be used before he's willing to
16:25
greenlight future weapons sales, including items
16:27
like F-15 fighter jets that wouldn't
16:29
be delivered for years. We've got Nancy
16:31
Pelosi signing onto a letter with 40
16:33
House Democrats asking Biden to
16:36
withhold additional arms transfers until there's
16:38
an investigation into the World Central
16:40
Kitchen airstrike. And Senator Elizabeth
16:42
Warren said that she believes
16:44
Israel's war will be considered
16:46
a genocide. So that's
16:49
incredibly, you know, she's leaning very far forward
16:51
on this. But in case you hear
16:53
that, listen, think like, oh, that's just a bunch of liberal Democrats.
16:56
Please listen to this medley
16:58
of comments by the former
17:00
Council of Foreign Relations chairman or
17:02
president Richard Haas, Joe Scarborough and
17:05
Democrat Chris Coons. These attacks are
17:07
continuing. And yet so
17:09
are U.S. arms transfers to Israel without
17:11
conditions. They have been going on for
17:13
six months. Why does Israel need 2,000-pound
17:16
bombs to be used in high-density populated
17:18
areas? Then 10 days ago, what does
17:20
Israel do? It expropriates 2,000 acres
17:23
of land in the West Bank for
17:25
settlement construction. Where is the White
17:27
House reaction to that? Let me ask you this.
17:30
Why did Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald
17:32
Trump know in 2018 the
17:35
sources of Hamas's illicit
17:37
funding and they
17:39
still did nothing? They
17:41
wanted that money to get the Hamas. I'd like
17:43
to know why, because we don't know in America.
17:46
Have there been any investigations in Israel at
17:48
this point? If Benjamin Netanyahu,
17:50
prime minister, were to order the IDF
17:53
into Rafa at scale, they were to
17:55
drop 1,000-pound bombs and send in a
17:57
battalion to go after the IDF. Hamas
18:00
and make no provision for civilians
18:03
or for humanitarian aid that I would vote
18:05
to condition aid to Israel. I've never said
18:07
that before. I've never been here before. So
18:10
Richard Haas worked in the Bush administration, both
18:12
of them actually. Joe Scarborough was a Republican
18:14
congressman. He was in that clip, was ripping
18:17
into the Israeli economy minister.
18:19
Chris Coons is a moderate Democrat. He's
18:21
very, very close to President Biden. So,
18:23
Ben, as you were saying a minute ago,
18:25
I'm very glad that the D.C.
18:27
foreign policy consensus is moving to a better
18:30
place. It is very gross that it took
18:32
the killing of a bunch of white Western
18:34
aid workers to get us there. I don't
18:36
know. Let's talk about that. What do you
18:39
think that tells us about U.S. foreign policy
18:41
or maybe lessons learned to kind of speed
18:43
up this evolution in the future? And for
18:45
people who are tearing their hair out saying
18:47
like, how did reports of thousands of kids
18:50
dying not move the
18:52
kind of D.C. blob faster? Yeah,
18:55
I have a lot of thoughts and feelings
18:57
about this, Tommy, because it is
19:00
important and I'm glad it's happening. But before
19:02
I get to that piece of it, this
19:04
was all obvious months ago. So I'm
19:07
glad, Richard Haas, I'm sure who eats at Jose Andres
19:09
restaurants. I'm really glad he's out
19:11
there saying what he's saying, but like,
19:13
you know, why was the 2,000 pound
19:16
bomb that was dropped on
19:18
a refugee camp early in the
19:20
war? That was in November. It was in November. We
19:22
talked about that at the time. We talked about the
19:24
time and we were talking about conditioning aid. And so
19:26
that's just to say, I wish
19:29
this happened earlier and I wish it didn't
19:31
take Jose Andres' people getting killed for it
19:34
to happen. And I think that
19:36
that's important to note because a lot of people now
19:38
are looking at where this is going and
19:40
they're trying to get on the right side of history.
19:42
They're trying to get on the right side of public
19:44
opinion this time. And again, that's good. And
19:47
actually part of what that shows is that the pressure that
19:49
young people in particular and that Arab and
19:52
Muslim communities have put from the bottom up
19:54
is now being manifested from the
19:56
top down because these are kind of the the
19:59
pinnacle of the kind of DC world expressing these
20:01
views. And that is very good. And to
20:03
speak to the people in Congress, Chris
20:05
Coons, not exactly, you know, someone, you know,
20:08
he's been very close to Israel over the
20:10
years, Greg Meeks. These
20:12
are not the squat, right? These are, this
20:14
is a sea change in kind of the
20:16
middle of Congress now being for conditioning assistance.
20:19
And that, that's a massive shift
20:21
that we're watching take place. I
20:24
think, again, the question is the same thing with the
20:27
Biden call. The question is,
20:30
does that continue as
20:33
the memory of this strike
20:35
on the world central cushion fade? If Israel
20:37
does make some announcements, but continues to
20:39
do what they're doing, does that pressure
20:41
stay up? Does the muscle memory of
20:43
like political fear of AIPAC. Yeah. Does
20:45
it return? Stick around. And also like,
20:48
cause another thing that's important to note
20:50
is that a lot
20:52
of this has become kind of personalized to
20:54
BB, which is understandable. Like we personalized a
20:56
lot of criticism to BB on this show.
20:59
But you know, if there's a Benny Gonson
21:01
there, we should have the same
21:03
concerns about settlements in the West Bank
21:06
and violence against Palestinians and obviously about
21:08
the situation in Gaza. So
21:10
I do think that this is, I've
21:12
never seen anything like this in my life as
21:14
it relates to the US relationship
21:17
with Israel. There seems
21:19
to be a tipping point
21:21
that was reached and that
21:23
has put even Joe Biden in this
21:25
position where he's shifting. When
21:27
Joe Biden is backgrounding, she wants the war
21:30
to end. Like something is changing. That
21:32
is an interesting piece of this. Folks haven't seen, there's some
21:34
reports that the first lady was pushing Biden the hardest behind
21:36
the scenes to change positions on the war. Yeah.
21:40
Yeah. Which says a
21:42
lot again about where this
21:44
is. And it does, again,
21:46
it really matters because I
21:49
just don't think that these really
21:51
government could sustain what they're doing in
21:53
Gaza if the US were
21:55
to withdraw support and withdraw offensive weapons.
21:57
Not just practically that they want the
21:59
deliveries. of those weapons, but the degree of
22:01
isolation that they would find themselves in. Netanyahu's whole
22:03
case, as we've talked about, it's always been like,
22:06
I'm the guy that can basically speak smoothly
22:08
to the Americans and just do what the right wing
22:10
in this country wants to do. And
22:12
that is now no longer the case. Yeah. Trump
22:15
was on Hugh Hewitt's show, friend of the pod,
22:17
Hugh Hewitt. He was asked about Gaza again.
22:20
Trump, we talked a week or two
22:22
back about how Trump did this interview
22:24
with Sheldon Adelson's newspaper in Israel. He's
22:27
like, I think they're actual
22:29
settlers. They were super far right wingers conducting
22:31
the interview. Trump's answers freaked them
22:34
out. They interpreted it as him cutting off support
22:36
for Israel. So Hugh would ask him again, here's
22:38
a clip of Trump's response. Well, that's all the
22:40
advice you can give. I mean, that's the advice.
22:42
You got to get it over with and you
22:44
have to get back to normalcy. And
22:47
I'm not sure that I'm loving the
22:49
way they're doing it because you got
22:52
to have victory. You have to have a victory.
22:55
And it's taking a long time. And
22:57
the other thing is I hate they put out
23:00
tapes all the time. Every night they're releasing
23:02
tapes of a building falling down. They
23:04
shouldn't be releasing tapes like that. They're doing
23:06
that's why they're losing the PR war. They
23:08
Israel is absolutely losing the PR war. That's
23:11
how I read your interview. I read your
23:13
interview as saying they're losing the PR war.
23:15
They've got to stop releasing bad video and
23:17
win the war by going into Rafa. They're
23:21
releasing the most heinous, most
23:23
horrible types of buildings falling
23:25
down. And people
23:27
are imagining there's a lot of people in
23:29
those buildings or people in those buildings and
23:32
they don't like it. And I don't know why
23:34
they release, you know, wartime shots like
23:37
that. I guess it makes them look tough. But
23:40
to me, it doesn't make them look tough. They're
23:42
losing the PR war. They're losing it big, but
23:45
they've got to finish what they started and they
23:47
got to finish it fast. And
23:49
we have to get on with life. So
23:51
I think, I mean, every Trump interviews a
23:53
Rorschach test, you know, he says nothing. He's
23:57
like finish it, the war, but end
23:59
it. He's not complaining about the
24:01
death toll. He's complaining about the PR
24:03
around the death toll. Nevermind
24:06
that Israel is not actually allowing reporters into
24:08
the Gaza Strip to cover what's happening. So
24:11
I don't know. Maybe he's mad about
24:13
social media that's being released by the
24:15
IDF soldiers on the ground. I don't know what he's tough to
24:17
stop. I find it kind
24:20
of interesting, Tommy, because you heard
24:23
Hugh Hewitt, who once he's blood thirsty.
24:26
So Hugh Hewitt comes in, he's like, I hear you
24:28
saying that they should go to Rafa. And
24:30
Trump's like, no, they shouldn't
24:32
release tapes. Trump didn't ... What
24:35
I hear there, and I think Democrats should
24:37
hear this as a warning, right?
24:40
Donald Trump doesn't know much about this. He
24:43
probably doesn't know what Rafa is, right? But
24:45
he knows this is hurting Joe Biden. He knows
24:47
it's dividing Democrats. And he's trying to do the
24:49
same thing that he did on
24:51
abortion, right? In the
24:54
sense that he'd
24:56
be worse than Joe Biden on this issue. Like he wouldn't
24:58
be trying to get any aid in. He wouldn't give a
25:00
shit. But he knows politically
25:02
that this is bad for Joe Biden. So
25:05
he doesn't want to be out there. I
25:07
mean, he's actually been pretty restrained. He's not
25:09
saying go in there and kill them all
25:11
and stuff. He's trying to
25:13
step back and stay out of it and
25:16
let Biden just be in this political box
25:18
that he's in. I think
25:20
that's a big warning, right? That they
25:22
smell a problem for Biden and they
25:24
don't want to let Biden out of
25:26
that box by saying the
25:28
difference. He doesn't want to articulate
25:31
a difference from Biden on this thing.
25:33
And he doesn't want to get Bebe's back, I think
25:35
in part because of the politics he described. And he
25:38
knows that it's bad for Biden, but also he's still
25:40
pissed in it in Yahoo for not going, why would
25:42
he election? I remember right after October 7th, he was
25:44
like, oh, you know, Bebe's terrible.
25:47
He didn't go along with the Cosmo
25:49
Soleimani assassination. He said, husbandless
25:51
smarties are attacking the Israelis. Well, yeah. So
25:54
again, I want to be clear. I think Trump would be worse,
25:57
but I'm just saying this to me as a
25:59
political warning more than anything else
26:01
that when Donald Trump has not
26:03
taken the bait that he or
26:06
you is offering to try
26:08
to say, yeah, I would be tougher, I'd go on a Raffa. He's
26:12
trying to keep a step back on this thing.
26:15
Yeah. A couple more quick things on just Gaza.
26:17
By the way, what tapes is he... Anyway.
26:20
I'm not sure. I think there are
26:22
videos from the IDF of them hitting
26:24
targets and shit that's probably being released
26:26
to domestic Israeli media to show how
26:28
tough they're being in their response. Yeah.
26:31
But it's weird that that's what surfaced to
26:33
Trump. Out of all of them. Out of
26:35
all of the things. The PR. The PR.
26:37
We mentioned this at the top. We are
26:39
still waiting to see if Iran retaliates to
26:41
the Israeli airstrike over the last week that
26:43
killed a bunch of top Iranian generals in
26:46
Syria. There were a bunch of scary stories
26:48
over the weekend about an imminent attack. The
26:50
Israeli government was scrambling GPS service across
26:52
the country to try to protect
26:54
themselves. The AP reported that
26:57
Iran's foreign minister said that the US's failure
26:59
to condemn the attack on the IRGC generals,
27:01
quote, indicates that Washington had given the green
27:03
light to Israel to commit this crime, end
27:06
quote. The US denies having advanced knowledge of
27:08
the strike. Other news outlets have reported that
27:10
Iran has said to the US that if
27:12
we can broker a ceasefire in Gaza, they
27:14
won't respond militarily. So I guess we'll just
27:17
all wait and see here. HuffPo
27:19
had a fascinating interview with two top Hamas
27:21
leaders. It's worth reading in full, but
27:24
one important takeaway was that one
27:26
of the Hamas guys, Abu Marzouk
27:28
said Hamas would reject and fight any
27:30
force in Gaza, including an Arab-led
27:32
force, which complicates that path
27:34
as sort of an international Arab-led peacekeeping
27:36
force. And then finally, Ben, this
27:39
magazine, Plus 972 magazine, they published
27:42
this extensive investigation into the IDF's
27:45
intelligence collection and targeting in Gaza. It is
27:47
quite disturbing. It's this long piece, but some
27:49
takeaways are, one, that the IDF
27:51
was using artificial intelligence to select targets and
27:54
selecting enormous numbers of them, two,
27:56
that they were intentionally bombing the
27:58
homes of low-level ISIS. fighters and
28:00
killing their families because they knew it was easier
28:02
to find them in the home. Three,
28:05
that the acceptable number of civilian casualties
28:07
for a strike involving a low-level Hamas
28:18
operative was as high as 20. And
28:21
in one instance, the army authorized killing 300
28:24
civilians in a strike targeting a senior commander.
28:28
That's the total disregard for civilian casualties.
28:31
So look, I haven't seen anyone
28:33
else confirm the anecdotes in this
28:35
report, but pretty disturbing dystopian stuff here
28:38
that would help explain that staggering death toll. But look,
28:40
anything else jump out at you before we move on
28:42
from the Gaza section? Well, on
28:45
the... Well, the AI stuff is chilling
28:47
and at some point we should have a longer
28:49
conversation about the need to develop some norms around
28:51
the use of AI and war. This
28:54
degree of tolerance, war
28:57
does something to obviously, above all the civilians
28:59
who are impacted by it, but it
29:01
also does something to the countries that
29:03
are carrying it out. I
29:05
don't think it's been healthy for the United States to
29:07
be in the war on terror for two decades. And
29:10
yet, one of the
29:14
reasons we didn't take a strike at the bin Laden
29:16
compound but sent in a SEAL
29:19
team at risk was to
29:21
avoid the civilian casualties of bin
29:23
Laden's family. Their
29:26
tolerance is 20 for a low level person and
29:28
300. That's
29:30
just... That's not,
29:32
again, it's not normal. That's not rules of engagement
29:35
at all. It's not going to happen. There are
29:37
civilian casualties in the war. The US has caused
29:39
all men are civilian casualties in the war. I'm
29:41
not suggesting that Israel is the only country that...
29:45
This degree of tolerance, it's
29:48
not good for Israel to be
29:51
in a place where they think that's okay. On
29:53
the regional conflict, I think, look,
29:56
the Iranians, this
29:58
does feel like... We'll have to wait and
30:00
see what they do. There were
30:02
reports of them getting more involved in the West
30:04
Bank and trying to get more military
30:07
assistance in there. They clearly
30:09
intend to do something. The one point I'd make
30:11
while we wait for this is this
30:14
can get worse. It seems like
30:17
the war is somehow peaking and on the way
30:19
to a ceasefire. Rafa would
30:21
be a massive escalation in Gaza. If
30:23
Iran hits Israel proper, it's likely that
30:25
Israel would feel the need to hit
30:28
Iran proper in return. Then,
30:30
all of a sudden, you could have literally a
30:32
war between Iran and Israel. Or
30:34
Hezbollah could do it, and it's a war between Israel
30:36
and Hezbollah. This can
30:39
get worse. It's all the more reason to get this
30:41
to a ceasefire because the worst
30:43
case outcomes that we've already seen could
30:46
pale in comparison to the scale of
30:48
suffering in Gaza with Rafa going forward
30:50
or the scale of instability in
30:53
the region if the Iranian
30:55
response precipitates an
30:57
even wider war. Let's
31:00
take a quick break. When we come back, we're going
31:02
to talk about this crazy diplomatic crisis in Ecuador. Pod
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33:50
All right, so we have
33:52
this wild story out of Ecuador that has created a
33:55
diplomatic crisis all across Latin America. Here
33:58
is the backstory, Ben. So last week, Ecuadorian
34:00
police broke into the Mexican embassy in
34:02
Quito and arrested a guy named Jorge
34:04
Glass. He is Ecuador's former
34:06
vice president. Glass is a leftist.
34:08
He served with President Correa from 2007 to 2017.
34:12
Then he spent nearly five years in jail
34:15
for corruption charges and was about to be
34:17
arrested again when he entered the Mexican embassy
34:19
back in December. According
34:21
to Financial Times, Glass was finally
34:23
granted asylum on Friday and was
34:25
reportedly about to flee the country
34:28
with the Mexican ambassador when Ecuador
34:30
security forces finally raided the embassy. Now,
34:32
folks just know forcibly entering a foreign
34:34
embassy is a huge deal. It's a
34:37
violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic
34:39
Relations, which is the foundational
34:41
legal framework for all global diplomatic
34:43
relations. We discussed this a bit
34:45
last week in the context of Israel bombing
34:48
Iran's diplomatic ability. Yeah, sure we did. And
34:50
we said we were kind of concerned with the new norm. New
34:52
norm. Pretty big violation. As
34:55
we noted, embassy grounds are legally considered to be that country's
34:57
foreign soil, so you could consider it as an act
34:59
of war. No one can enter
35:01
an embassy without the ambassador's permission, so this
35:03
raid kicked up a shitstorm. Mexico
35:06
severed ties with Ecuador. They withdrew their diplomats.
35:08
The US condemned Ecuador's actions as did
35:10
a bunch of countries in Latin America
35:12
and Europe, the LIS, a lot of folks.
35:15
Daniel Naboa, Ecuador's president, is only 36 years old.
35:19
He took office in November of last year. He's
35:21
the son of this billionaire, you know, banana tycoon
35:23
guy. He was elected in a snap election to
35:25
serve out the rest of the last president's term,
35:27
so he's going to face elections again in 2025.
35:32
Much like Naive Bakkali in El Salvador,
35:34
Naboa has launched a war on
35:36
drugs and on crime. He's authoritarian, but that
35:38
has made him popular. So Ben, it
35:41
sounds so squishy and dorky to complain about
35:43
violations at the Vienna Convention. You know, it's
35:45
like Diplo speak, but it is hard to
35:48
convey how big of a deal this is.
35:50
And also, you know, so two questions for
35:52
you. One, take a swing at, you know,
35:54
explaining that. Two, I wonder how much
35:56
of this is also a
35:58
fracture along ideological lines. because
36:00
you have Glass, he's a leftist like Amlo,
36:03
who is the most outraged about not only
36:05
the breach of his diplomatic facility, but also
36:07
sort of a fellow traveler getting caught up
36:10
in raids, and even Neboa, who's conservative, and
36:12
you know, sort of an ideological opponent. But
36:14
what do you think? It's
36:17
just generally not a good thing to have this
36:19
norm. I know the word norm sounds
36:21
squishy. I know the Vienna Convention sounds squishy. This
36:24
just doesn't happen, though. This isn't like the
36:26
kind of thing that periodically happens. We
36:28
went to the Cold War, like the Soviets
36:31
didn't, you know, go into the US Embassy
36:33
in Moscow, same thing, vice versa. The
36:35
US didn't do that in our
36:38
country. We had a whole podcast on this feed
36:40
about a Chinese dissident who went into the
36:42
US Embassy in Beijing. Like
36:44
they didn't come get him out of there. The Ecuadorians,
36:47
ironically, hosted Julian
36:49
Assange. People will recall
36:52
in their embassy in London. And
36:54
when the Brits suggested they might try to go in to
36:56
get him, there was a huge
36:58
international uproar, and rightly, the Brits backed off,
37:00
right? So this kind
37:02
of allows for countries to
37:05
have embassies in hostile
37:08
or confrontational adversarial places. And
37:11
so if all of a sudden you can kick down the door
37:13
of the embassy, it becomes almost
37:15
impossible to have an embassy somewhere other than like
37:17
an allied nation, you know? And
37:20
then how can you conduct diplomacy? I
37:22
mean, diplomacy, the ability of countries to
37:24
sit down and negotiate things, or just
37:26
have an embassy that you can help
37:29
facilitate visas and services for your citizenry,
37:31
it depends on this norm being protected.
37:34
And I think that what is disturbing is
37:36
this Bukele model, right? You put your finger
37:38
on it, that this guy is probably, Naboo
37:40
is probably more popular for having done this.
37:44
I mean, it'd be interesting to watch that, what's the Ecuadorian
37:46
public reaction, but Bukele is kind of
37:48
like this new guy, young guy comes
37:50
along, and just breaking every rule makes
37:53
him seem like he's getting the shit done. And
37:55
I worry about a world in which the political
37:57
lesson is, oh, that works. So,
38:00
the way for me to be popular is to
38:02
come in, break rules, kick down embassy doors, arrest
38:05
my own parliament, just
38:08
do extrajudicial things to show that I'm the man
38:10
of action. That's
38:13
a slippery slope here, and not
38:15
one that I think is good
38:17
for Latin America or for ... And
38:19
I should say, Argentina's right-wing government,
38:22
they did condemn this. Yeah, how do you me
38:24
like condemn it? The anarchist. Yeah, the anarchist. It
38:27
does kind of show that there's
38:29
not ... It's not just the leftist in
38:31
Latin America who are upset about this. Yeah,
38:34
and we're obviously talking about this in a
38:36
diplomatic context, but imagine ... Ecuador has a
38:38
corruption problem. Glass got concurrent
38:40
sentences totaling eight years. He served
38:42
five. He allegedly had a
38:44
drug trafficker bribe a judge to get him
38:46
released early, and that's what he was about
38:48
to be re-arrested for. The former president, Daniel
38:51
Correa, was sentenced on corruption charges in absentia
38:53
and is currently chilling in Belgium, hiding out.
38:55
Clearly, there's a problem, and clearly, there's probably
38:58
some resentment among elites, but we're talking about
39:00
a diplomatic sort of problem.
39:03
Imagine if this kind of principle was applied
39:05
in the US. It would have been great for
39:07
Barack Obama to kick down a door on Wall Street
39:09
in 2009, grab a
39:11
fucking banker, throw him in jail for a
39:13
long time, just to show how tough we
39:15
were on corruption. A lot of us would
39:17
have loved to have done that. It might
39:20
have benefited the country, but you can't just
39:22
act extrajudicially whenever you want in service of
39:24
your politics. He's like, that's what's happening. You're
39:26
like, Bukele, when he stormed troops
39:29
into the parliament building. Yeah, if
39:31
Donald Trump wins, and
39:33
he starts kicking down doors and arresting people.
39:35
That might be super popular with his base,
39:38
but mid-cooking media, the
39:41
difficult workplace. He's in the new locker. We're
39:47
in such a dangerous, populist moment because people are
39:49
right to be pissed. I'm
39:51
sure this guy is corrupt, but that doesn't mean you
39:53
kick down the embassy door. The
39:56
question is, is this populism going to be a wave
39:59
that crashes? it's shocking to me
40:01
that these boundaries kind of held, by
40:03
and large, I mean, all across the board, through like
40:05
the Cold War, you know? But
40:07
in this kind of weird world where now, it's like,
40:10
no, all bets are off. Crazy
40:12
story. This guy's now sitting in like a super max
40:14
prison. Yeah, the pictures, I mean, the pictures of
40:17
this guy getting dragged away by like super armed dudes. It
40:22
looked like military, like special forces. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they
40:24
roughed up the Mexican sand. I shouldn't laugh. I
40:27
know, it's crazy. I'm laughing just
40:29
because it's so crazy. I know, I know.
40:31
You bust in, you beat up some, oh
40:34
God, what a world. But again,
40:36
I think this is the Bukele model, you
40:39
know? This is what's happening. Mexico clearly like
40:41
the bigger fish in this fight too. Yeah,
40:43
yeah. Anyway, okay. Well, they got cartels. I
40:45
mean, there's a cartel problem. It says, you
40:48
know, the Mexican cartels are
40:50
very active in Ecuador, so. Yeah,
40:52
Ricardo explained that to us. Okay, a
40:54
lot of updates on Ukraine, which we haven't talked
40:56
about in a minute. So Ben, the first is
40:58
that the Washington Post got a hold or a
41:01
window of Trump's secret plan for Ukraine, such as
41:03
it is not really a plan. It is also
41:05
kind of exactly what we expected. Trump,
41:07
according to the Post, would force Ukraine to
41:10
cede control of Crimea and the Donbas region
41:12
in eastern Ukraine, limit NATO
41:14
expansion, and then there's some nonsense in
41:16
this story about quote, "'Enticing Putin to
41:18
loosen his growing reliance on China.'" So
41:20
that's part of the brand. The
41:23
big ramachand. Yeah, it is a big ramachand. Yeah,
41:25
so basically it's capitulation. It's freezing the lines where
41:27
they were. It's giving Russia another win on NATO,
41:29
and it's pretending Putin would agree to stop working
41:31
with China. No explanation for how
41:34
you actually do any of this, how
41:36
you actually force Ukraine or Europe to
41:38
stop fighting. Back here in reality, President
41:40
Zelensky signed a law that lowers the
41:42
military conscription age in Ukraine from 27
41:44
to 25 and gets rid of some
41:46
draft exemptions. The AP quoted an analyst
41:48
saying that the change would add about
41:50
50,000 troops to the Ukrainian military, which
41:52
is about a 10th of what Zelensky said he
41:55
needed, I think in December of last year. Also,
41:57
the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant was... damage
42:00
and a drone strike over the weekend. So
42:02
add nuclear meltdowns in Ukraine back to your list
42:04
of bedtime anxieties. I remember that
42:06
one early on. Finally, The
42:09
Washington Post reported on leaked internal
42:11
Russian documents that detail their PR
42:13
campaign to influence US lawmakers and
42:16
prevent the US from giving more support to Ukraine.
42:19
Here's a clip of Republican Congressman Mike
42:21
Turner, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee
42:24
on CNN, talking about it. We see
42:26
directly coming from Russia attempts
42:29
to mask communications that are
42:31
anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of
42:33
which we even hear being uttered on the House
42:35
floor. I mean, there are members of Congress today
42:38
who still incorrectly say that this conflict between Russia
42:40
and Ukraine is over NATO, which of course it
42:42
is not. Vladimir
42:44
Putin having made it very clear both
42:46
publicly and to his own population that
42:48
his view is that
42:50
this is a conflict of a much
42:52
broader claim of Russia to Eastern Europe,
42:55
including claiming all of Ukraine territory as
42:57
Russia's. Now, to the extent
43:00
that this propaganda takes hold, it makes
43:02
it more difficult for us to really
43:04
see this as an authoritarian versus democracy
43:06
battle, which is what it is. So
43:09
Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, has reportedly
43:12
told donors that he wants to get Ukraine
43:14
funding passed, but the political reality
43:16
is that Marjorie Taylor Greene has
43:18
threatened to oust him as Speaker if he
43:20
moves forward with Ukraine funding. So she
43:23
could be the one who ultimately decides whether
43:25
the US supports or abandons these guys. What
43:28
a world. Yeah. And she's the
43:30
kind of person that repeats ... It's not just
43:32
the NATO point. I mean, there's been cases of
43:35
Republican members of Congress literally
43:38
retweeting Russian propaganda.
43:42
Yeah, you had David Cameron, the
43:45
foreign secretary and former prime minister of
43:47
the UK, flying to Mar-a-Lago to try
43:49
to unlock the supplemental.
43:53
That's weird. Oh, he was lobbying for this. He
43:56
was lobbying Trump to
43:58
Tell Johnson that it's okay. The letters pass, you
44:01
know, interesting images show you where we're an
44:03
interesting night and how strange this is. And
44:05
in the thing about Trump, it. He.
44:07
Or this plan is is nonsensical, right?
44:09
as the the Ukrainians would never agree
44:11
to a sudden. America doesn't have
44:14
the capacity to like deliver Eastern Ukraine
44:16
and Crimea to prudence and the idea
44:18
that that Russia is gonna get any
44:20
less close to China, when in fact,
44:22
Rush has gotten much more. Dependent
44:24
on China throughout. this works for
44:26
all their technology and all their
44:28
economies. Enjoy it just shows like that
44:31
are living this other planets. I do
44:33
just wish like something has disappeared which
44:35
is some regard for the Ukrainian
44:37
people. I. Mean the people that are
44:39
living in Russian occupied territories particularly in in
44:42
the Donbass, the of their children being stolen
44:44
and sent into Russia the receive reports of
44:46
war crimes. So this isn't just like a
44:49
casual game of risk you know where sites
44:51
where I will move our piece off this
44:53
part of the board. I mean it's their
44:55
their real lives at stake here and I
44:58
do worry with the you saw these yolk
45:00
with as the front lines frozen you know
45:02
the nuclear plant as extreme case buds The
45:04
Russians are now trying to essentially. Decapitate.
45:08
Ukrainian energy that the Ukrainians hitting Russian
45:10
refineries and this war could continue to
45:12
kind of escalate in strange ways in
45:15
in the coming months. Here Jamie this
45:17
week was the two year anniversary of
45:19
the Russians finally pulling out of butcher
45:21
know that city near t of where
45:24
there were just horrible atrocities, committed war
45:26
crimes by Russian troops, indiscriminate massacring of
45:28
the opposite training civilians of that speaks
45:31
to why would be politically impossible for
45:33
as Lenski death to to say I
45:35
absolutely you could have the Donbass. And
45:38
also not your point about. like what
45:40
is to undecideds, the average soldier on
45:42
both sides is over forty. The Ukrainians
45:44
are worried about lowering the draft age
45:46
because basically say take too many young
45:48
people out of. Their. economy out
45:50
of the workforce the country just won't be
45:53
able to continue going they didn't want have
45:55
an economy anymore yes in russia me while
45:57
says sixteen thousand people signed up for them
46:00
in the wake of the Moscow concert
46:02
call attack. So they're not having these
46:05
problems of recruiting, or at least recruiting
46:08
in air quotes, conscripting soldiers
46:10
into their armed forces. Yeah.
46:13
But the Russians have their own problems. I mean, there was
46:15
a great report in the New York Times of the weekend
46:17
about all these convicts that they brought
46:20
into the Russian military in
46:22
the Wagner group offensive. Some
46:24
of them have now returned back to communities and
46:26
guess what they're doing. They're killing people. I mean,
46:28
these are people that are already killers or criminals
46:31
before, and God knows what kind of things
46:33
they saw on the front line.
46:35
You're going to have deeply traumatized
46:38
communities in both
46:41
countries, and obviously our sympathies are with
46:43
Ukraine because Russia is the aggressor, that
46:46
are going to reverberate for years
46:48
and decades to come. Yeah. Two more quick
46:50
things. So again, Marjorie Taylor Greene might be
46:52
the one who decides whether the US supports
46:54
Ukraine or not. On April 5th, the day
46:56
of the DC earthquake, she tweeted, God is
46:58
sending America strong signs to tell us to
47:00
repent. Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things
47:02
to come. I pray that our country listens.
47:04
So good to know this is in her
47:06
hands. Also, Ben, here's a clip from
47:09
the new Republican National Committee chairman,
47:11
Michael Watley, from some
47:13
TV show. Look, I think that we
47:15
are seeing right now that this election
47:18
truly, truly matters on national security, on
47:20
every one of these issues. When America
47:22
is weak, the world is a far
47:24
more dangerous place. And right now, Joe
47:26
Biden's specless leadership has shown China, has
47:29
shown Ukraine, has shown Iran that they
47:31
can feel free to be much more
47:33
aggressive on the world front to the
47:35
point where even they will try and
47:37
meddle with our elections here. So
47:40
maybe that was a Freudian slip, or maybe he
47:42
really thinks Ukraine is an aggressor that needs to
47:44
be confronted, not a country that was invaded. It's
47:46
what they, I mean, it's what they think. I
47:48
mean, they remember the
47:51
whataboutism on Russian interference, was it the
47:54
Ukrainians that actually interfered? Remember they had
47:56
the DNC server? I mean, there's like
47:58
a broken brain. on
48:01
the right about the Ukrainians that
48:03
that is totally bizarre. Yeah, and
48:05
they think they're anti-Christian. There's just
48:07
this... Yeah, there have been all
48:09
these conspiracy theories about Zelensky and,
48:11
you know, like he's persecuting Christians
48:13
and he's persecuting journalists. Like
48:17
there's a weird information stream. Whatever
48:19
their information sources, it's not this podcast. Yeah,
48:22
it does explain why Mike Turner, the Republican
48:24
chairman of the House Intelligence Committee went on
48:26
CNN to say some of his colleagues are
48:28
repeating Russian propaganda. I think we just heard
48:30
a couple of them there. Okay,
48:32
so Ben, we've also been watching how the war
48:34
in Ukraine impacts politics across Europe. And
48:37
there's some bad news out of Slovakia,
48:39
where a pro-Russia candidate named Peter Pellegrini
48:41
won the presidential election on Sunday with
48:43
nearly 54% of the vote.
48:45
The position of president doesn't have much
48:47
power in Slovakia, but he's an ally
48:49
of the pro-Russian prime minister, Robert Fico,
48:52
who halted Slovakia's arms shipments to Ukraine.
48:54
Pellegrini says Slovakia is going to stay
48:56
the course. They're going to be in
48:58
the EU. They're going to stay in
49:00
NATO, but it is an indication of
49:02
the strength of the argument, the nationalist,
49:05
isolationist message in parts of Europe. So
49:07
not great for the Ukrainian side. And again,
49:10
just like a data point we're watching as
49:12
we head into these European parliamentary elections in
49:14
June. Yeah, and I was in Bratislava, the
49:16
capital of Slovakia, a few months ago, right
49:18
after the prime minister was elected. And there
49:20
was a real sense of foreboding there. And
49:22
part of what happens is you have Bratislava
49:25
is a kind of more urban globalist, if you
49:27
will, capital of the country.
49:32
But then out in these rural areas, you have
49:35
right wing Russian-backed media. You've got
49:38
a lot of forces coming in
49:41
to support this. It's happening in part. Yes,
49:43
there's some fatigue or fear about supporting Ukraine,
49:45
but there's also a lot of effort being
49:47
put into kind of turning segments
49:50
of these populations to this kind
49:53
of urbanist worldview. And Slovakia, bordering
49:55
Hungary there, if they become kind
49:57
of part of a growing block of country, countries
50:01
that are in the kind of more pro-Russian
50:03
camp, more hustle to the EU,
50:06
that gets really complicated. And the reality
50:08
is too, the EU depends
50:10
on kind of consensus decision-making. As
50:13
does NATO, by the way, which we saw Erdogan
50:15
holding up the session of Sweden, if enough of
50:18
these countries start just kind of throwing sand in
50:20
the gears, it could also really mess up the
50:22
functioning of Europe. So this is not a,
50:24
it's not an unexpected development, but it's not a good
50:27
one. Yeah, I know if Orban can screw up the
50:29
EU for everybody. Imagine if there's a bunch of- A
50:31
bunch of Orban. A little mini Orban. Yeah. Not
50:34
great. Let's turn back to the US, Ben,
50:36
because President Biden is hosting Japanese Prime Minister
50:38
Fumio Kishida for a state visit on Wednesday.
50:40
He will also host a trilateral summit with
50:42
the US, Japan, and the Philippines on Thursday.
50:45
Japan is Biden's fifth state visit. The
50:48
US and Japan, they're going to talk about military
50:50
cooperation, space cooperation. Apparently, Japan wants to put an
50:52
astronaut on the moon, so- Do it. Let's
50:54
do it. Let's do it. Japanese
50:57
company is going to be allowed to take over
51:00
the US Steel Corporation. Let's see about that. The
51:03
trilateral meeting is going to- It's like, I
51:05
don't know. Do we care? In an election
51:07
year? Yeah, probably not. The trilateral meeting will
51:09
focus primarily on China. Ben, so the Biden
51:11
team has put a lot of time into
51:13
bolstering these alliances in Asia Pacific, the US,
51:15
India, Australia, Japan, they call it the Quad.
51:18
I remember there being another Quad, but whatever.
51:20
Yeah. They also did a
51:22
bunch of work trying to calm tensions between Japan
51:24
and South Korea. How are you
51:27
feeling about the Indo-Pacific these days? Bolstered, robust,
51:29
renewed? I feel like there's a
51:31
series- What's your flow words? I think there's
51:33
a series of robust partnerships that are creating
51:35
synergies and a network among our alliances in
51:37
the region that have never been stronger. This
51:39
is hard because it's really important, but it's
51:41
so boring. What's
51:44
interesting is two things. One is
51:47
they clearly want Japan,
51:49
and Japan wants to play this
51:51
more assertive role. You
51:53
saw the Japanese prime minister talking
51:55
about bolstering defense spending, and this is
51:58
a country with a fundamentally pacifist- constitution,
52:00
largely written with an
52:03
American looking over their shoulder after
52:05
World War II. And you feel
52:07
like Japan is now looking
52:09
at the threat from China and North Korea and
52:11
saying, hey, we're going to get more
52:13
on our front foot here in terms of defense spending
52:16
and being a defense partner, not just
52:18
to the United States, but the Philippines
52:20
meeting is interesting, right? Because the Philippines
52:22
has this maritime dispute, which
52:24
is essentially China claims all
52:27
of the South China Sea that includes, you
52:29
know, islands that are Philippines territory
52:32
under international law. And
52:35
so the fact that Japan is talking to the Philippines,
52:37
what the US is clearly trying to do is take
52:40
these different security partners and allies
52:42
we have, Japan, South Korea, the
52:44
Philippines, Australia, and get them working
52:46
more closely together with us, but
52:49
with each other as well. They'd
52:52
like to pull India into that. That's why the
52:55
United States seemed to have renamed the
52:57
Asia Pacific region, Indo-Pacific. Yeah, it's rebranding
52:59
things. But it is worth watching this
53:01
defense buildup in Japan and what that
53:03
does in the region. It shows you
53:05
that the concerns about China are not
53:07
limited to the United States, frankly. Right.
53:10
You know, some long-term risk to a military buildup
53:12
in Japan. Yeah, it's- You don't hear it considered
53:14
out- You've seen that. You've seen where that goes
53:16
in the South. Well, it could go wrong. Yeah,
53:18
nothing could go wrong. It's interesting that you swap
53:21
out President Duterte in the Philippines who would just
53:23
massacre people and call it a drug
53:25
war, just killing innocent people. Now we've
53:27
got Bong Bong Marcos, son of a
53:30
dictator. Yeah, just kind of more normalized.
53:32
Like, Marcos is just like extreme
53:35
corruption and authoritarianism without the kind
53:37
of extreme rhetoric and extrajudicial killing
53:39
of Duterte. It's interesting how much
53:41
they have kind of embraced Marcos.
53:45
That maybe embraces a strong word. They've
53:48
definitely saw- More palatable. More our
53:50
pallet in Washington. Yeah,
53:52
exactly. Yeah, yeah. Corruption classic.
53:55
Okay, two more things. So the
53:57
regular listeners to the show have heard us talk
53:59
about- Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman, his
54:02
massive development plans for Saudi Arabia in
54:04
particular. We covered some of this
54:06
on the latest episode of The World Corrupt, by the way, which
54:08
is available on the PADSE of the
54:10
World Feed. Please listen. But some of MBS's
54:12
ideas are smart. They do need to diversify
54:15
the country's economy away
54:17
from fossil fuels. Others are
54:19
ridiculous boondoggles. My favorite such boondoggle
54:22
is a project called The Line,
54:24
which is conceived of being one day
54:27
a 105-mile-long linear city. So
54:31
imagine a building longer
54:33
than the distance between New York and Philly
54:35
that is taller than the Empire
54:37
State Building. So Ben, you'll be shocked to
54:39
learn that this project
54:42
is behind schedule. The
54:44
government wanted to have 1.5 million people
54:46
living in The Line city building
54:48
by They've scaled
54:50
back that ambition to less than 300,000. And
54:53
now only 2.4 of the planned 170 kilometers will be done by 2030. So
54:59
very sad news for consultants everywhere
55:01
who want to get paid for
55:04
this thing. This is just
55:06
the, it continues to be the craziest story out
55:08
there in a lot of ways. Because
55:10
it is just clearly like Mohammed bin Salman, you know,
55:13
like he's a Roman emperor who wants to just like
55:15
leave some physical manifestation of
55:17
his greatness behind. I
55:19
don't know what on earth he saw, what
55:22
sci-fi movie or- PowerPoint presentation.
55:24
Yeah, PowerPoint presentation. This
55:27
is a $1.5 trillion project, I think,
55:30
when you add up the whole cost.
55:32
At budget, yeah. At budget. At budget.
55:35
Like there'd be no overruns to actually build this
55:37
vision. And to what purpose does this
55:39
serve? Like, you know, there are air
55:41
conditioning questions that come to my mind.
55:44
But I want to know, Tommy, is like, what
55:46
do you think the meeting was like where they
55:49
had to go in and tell him- Oh my God.
55:51
That, hey, this isn't going to be ready in 2030.
55:54
And we got to downsize. Like who gets
55:56
nominated in the pre-meeting to be the one
55:58
who has to go to the- hotel,
56:00
MBS, hey, that cool
56:02
model we showed you is actually
56:04
going to be one third
56:07
the size of that.
56:09
You pick the guy with the Kevlar vest
56:11
on, go from there. Yeah, I wouldn't
56:13
want to deliver that news. You're right
56:15
though, it is pyramid-like. It's crazy.
56:19
We interviewed Ben Hubbard about this,
56:21
New York Times writer, Istanbul bureau chief,
56:24
wrote one of the best books I've read on MBS.
56:26
It's like, yeah, well, you know, cities like Jeddah or,
56:28
you know, they just like don't have
56:30
good sewer systems. I mean, you could
56:32
improve the quality of life of citizens
56:34
so easily just by refurbishing the things
56:37
you have instead of this NEOM project,
56:39
which also includes a plan to create
56:41
man-made snow on mountains in
56:43
Saudi Arabia so that you can ski
56:45
three months a year. Yeah, so MBS
56:47
and, you know, rural family types can
56:49
go ski. It's
56:51
just, yeah,
56:53
you could spend a trillion dollars making people's lives
56:55
a lot better, you know, and they have a
56:57
large young population in Saudi Arabia, but, or you
57:01
could build NEOM or whatever it's called. He's
57:03
also like, MBS seems like a smart enough
57:05
guy. Actually, I think he is a smart
57:07
guy. How do you not know this is
57:09
a bullshit idea? He had it
57:11
pretty, like, you know, he, there's
57:13
just a pyramid aspect to it. There's this, like,
57:15
I'm going to leave something behind. It's
57:18
got to be- Are there autocrats who tried this,
57:20
right? Like in Burma, they built an entirely new
57:22
city because some astrologer told them it was unsafe
57:24
to live in the current capital. And that city's
57:27
like, might be the weirdest place
57:29
I've ever been. And completely vacant, then. Yeah. I
57:31
remember coming in from the airport and
57:34
it's like miles and miles of road because
57:36
nobody actually, but nobody lives there, right, to
57:39
the government buildings from the airport. And we were driving
57:41
like a hundred miles an hour or something because it's
57:43
like a, it's like a 20 lane
57:46
highway. I can't tell you why this thing is. With no
57:48
cars on it, you know? Not
57:51
the best- in a country where people are
57:53
starving, you know? I got a
57:55
feeling there'll be like a one kilometer of
57:57
line building that will live in the desert
57:59
forever. I mean Emirati's like like they
58:01
when they're not kind of financing the RSF
58:03
in Sudan like they're building Dubai and Abu
58:05
Dhabi I mean, I guess they don't have
58:08
a lot of land to use but I
58:11
mean build up riyad or Jeddah I mean, I don't know
58:13
I don't get it man And then
58:15
finally been a British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's
58:17
Tory party is once again being ridiculed Thanks
58:20
to a truly stupid now deleted Tory
58:22
party tweet So this was there
58:24
was a subtext in an image the image they
58:26
put out looked like Kind of
58:28
like a garage sale poster you might have made
58:30
in high school with like clipart on your you
58:32
know home computer It
58:35
said quote Britain is the second most
58:37
powerful country in the world. It
58:39
included photos of Rishi
58:42
Sunak King Charles wearing his crown with
58:44
his like sausage fingers up in the air England
58:47
soccer team some fighter jets and
58:49
Aston Martin a director
58:51
whose name is escaping me. So People
58:54
on social media pointed out that one of
58:56
the fighter planes featured was an f-35, which
58:58
is made by the US That
59:01
the poster was supposed to be about the United Kingdom
59:04
But it only includes the English soccer team and
59:07
the photo they used of the team was from
59:09
a game They just lost to Brazil. So I
59:11
guess in fairness that does fit well at the
59:13
number two narrative There's no women
59:15
featured Despite the fact that the
59:17
UK has some of the most powerful and famous
59:19
women leaders in history You have Margaret Thatcher in
59:22
there the queen on there, right? It
59:24
included an image of a container ship that
59:26
some reports say was built in South Korea
59:28
Others say is owned by the Swiss I
59:30
don't know why it was there and then
59:32
the text that accompanied the image said don't
59:34
let the doomsters and naysayers Trick
59:36
you into talking down our country, but that
59:39
too was deleted then I Did
59:42
so many thoughts and questions here
59:44
for the second most powerful? I guess are
59:46
we number one is that the
59:48
kind of soft power? Justin first of all
59:52
Nothing in this picture like
59:54
not a thing in this picture even the American
59:56
plane to me projects
1:00:00
Power in any way like Rishi
1:00:02
Sunak like like giving like what
1:00:04
was that looking? shit,
1:00:07
oh steel yes Like
1:00:12
Throwing a little blue steel with a skinny tie a
1:00:15
Containership that could literally be anywhere any fucking port
1:00:17
in the world like that could be anywhere like
1:00:19
and it looks like a child Cut them all
1:00:22
out and then pace of them on like a
1:00:24
poster board and like I'm just be say right
1:00:26
here I actually love the UK. I love Britain.
1:00:28
I love England But I'm just
1:00:30
gonna compile on here a little bit the English soccer
1:00:32
team which gets bounced every World Cup Earlier
1:00:34
than there's a little right then one in
1:00:36
a while some guy looking through a
1:00:39
camera that looks like he's making a movie in like 1952
1:00:42
or something I forget with it's a famous British
1:00:44
direct. I'm sure he's a great director, but it
1:00:47
doesn't like exude You know I mean
1:00:50
and like King Charles Nolan, it's cuz we're no oh,
1:00:52
you know what I take that back Okay,
1:00:54
I did my second. I give him one I'll
1:00:57
give them Nolan because I did my rewatch of
1:00:59
Oppenheimer on the flight home. I gotta watch that
1:01:01
movie fucking bang And
1:01:05
honestly it bangs on the rewatch cuz you
1:01:07
see what this genius You know let's just
1:01:09
take Christopher Nolan out of it and like
1:01:12
like cuz I full respect to that guy
1:01:15
Someone said the Aston Martin is actually owned by
1:01:17
a Canadian I wasn't sure what they meant tweet
1:01:19
at me if you'd also like it's not that
1:01:21
cool anymore the Aston Martin I'm sorry that in
1:01:23
fact if I wanted to make the case for
1:01:25
Britain I'd have an entirely
1:01:27
different keep Christopher Nolan and
1:01:30
then every other thing I'd have on this would
1:01:32
be different You know you and you could have
1:01:34
a bunch of you do a lip it could
1:01:36
be on there right like we know What
1:01:38
else could we get here Tommy like? You
1:01:41
know I guess it's Harry Potter. It's Harry
1:01:43
Potter cancelled if we're doing the UK like I think so
1:01:45
You could have Harry Potter on there. Yes, you have some
1:01:48
corgis on there What
1:01:50
else is what is that like what else is
1:01:52
popping these days cricket? Listen
1:01:57
all I said we need
1:01:59
to brainstorm this So today yeah, yeah benefit
1:02:01
from a brainstorm better for a brainstorm Also,
1:02:03
did you see that the British in the
1:02:05
French did like a freaky Friday style palace
1:02:08
guard switch? They had a bunch
1:02:10
of French soldiers do the changing of the guard
1:02:12
of Buckingham Palace and the the Brits did it
1:02:14
the Elisee Palace it was ostensibly to celebrate the
1:02:16
120 year anniversary of some agreement
1:02:20
or thing that you've never heard of but
1:02:22
I think it was just kind of like a We're
1:02:24
still friends after Brexit kind of sad thing
1:02:26
again. I'm not bringing this up to knock
1:02:29
friends in UK This is a Tory party tweet like
1:02:31
yeah, I'm really not actually cuz I I give him
1:02:33
a bit of an angle file I'm
1:02:36
just this is not this is not the you
1:02:38
can do better thing. I put forward here. Yeah,
1:02:40
do better Yeah, good. Yeah, come on
1:02:42
if the if the labor gets in there like
1:02:45
let's see a different let's see It's just a
1:02:47
different thing. Nolan will keep him Let's
1:02:50
the rest, you know the rest grab it much, you
1:02:52
know speaking of I'd rather see one of those big
1:02:54
red buses in the f-35 I like that like that.
1:02:57
I like that. Yeah, Mike is well, it's all soft
1:02:59
power. You don't need a fucking fighter jet on Yeah,
1:03:01
not blowing people up. It's soft power. Yeah, speaking of
1:03:03
Brits Ben We're gonna get to your interview with David
1:03:05
Miliband in a second But quick reminder positive America is
1:03:08
going on tour later this year going to Brooklyn Boston
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1:03:12
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1:03:14
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other toward a can get your tickets no
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equity. Coms Louis events before they
1:05:06
say is. I'm
1:05:15
very pleased to welcome back to the
1:05:17
podcast: David Miliband, the head of the
1:05:19
International Rescue Committee, former Foreign Secretary of
1:05:21
the Uk, and of a leading voice
1:05:24
on all manner of international issues. Or
1:05:26
David. Thanks so much for joining us
1:05:28
of course been playing Spencer Meal. So
1:05:31
want to start with the ciders
1:05:33
in Gaza Ayers He's obviously been
1:05:35
active eyes when reading, he, mentoring
1:05:37
or decisions in the world Before
1:05:39
we get into some of the
1:05:41
specific issues that have obviously been
1:05:44
fun center. Just what is your
1:05:46
sense of the current state of
1:05:48
the humanitarian crisis in Gaza? and
1:05:50
how is the I or See
1:05:52
on the ground trying to address
1:05:54
some of these needs? of
1:05:56
sadly it's very simple to describe it's
1:05:58
a catastrophe the sky worse. And
1:06:03
what we know is that there's
1:06:05
no precedent for a country
1:06:07
that had no famine to
1:06:09
turn into a situation where half the population
1:06:11
are facing literally famine in the space of
1:06:14
six months. But that's happened in
1:06:16
the Gaza example, you'll have seen two or three
1:06:18
weeks ago, the international phase classification,
1:06:20
which is a very conservative, small c
1:06:22
conservative, technical technocratic institution
1:06:25
that has assessed half of the
1:06:27
population are at international phase classification
1:06:29
level five, which is catastrophic levels
1:06:31
of hunger. And
1:06:33
the rest of the population are at levels
1:06:35
three and four, which are a crisis and
1:06:37
emergency. And the situation is getting worse,
1:06:40
because famines
1:06:42
happen slowly. But
1:06:45
they then are very hard
1:06:47
to turn around. And it's
1:06:49
beyond awful,
1:06:52
that there were announcements on Friday that
1:06:54
there would be a new crossing opened
1:06:56
in a res, that
1:06:58
there'd be a new access from the
1:07:00
port of ash dog, but
1:07:02
there's been no benefit. I checked with our teams
1:07:04
overnight, there's no benefit of that. And
1:07:07
so what you're seeing is
1:07:09
famine, death on
1:07:11
a very large scale, 33,000 people
1:07:14
directly from the fighting, desperation.
1:07:18
And then of course, all of the
1:07:20
illness that goes with those kinds
1:07:22
of conditions, because it's a public health emergency.
1:07:24
And those factors produce
1:07:26
massive disorder as well. And so I
1:07:29
listened to or I think it was
1:07:31
in The Economist this week, some
1:07:33
that there was a quote of someone who's just gone
1:07:35
back to their house in carn units, a Palestinian civilian.
1:07:38
And he said, we are, it's life as if we
1:07:41
were dead.
1:07:45
And I think that brings home a fight. What a
1:07:48
humanitarian catastrophe this is. Your teams
1:07:50
have not seen any change in
1:07:53
delivery since the announcement after the
1:07:55
Netanyahu Biden call. That's exactly
1:07:58
right. Yeah. And we saw that. The
1:08:00
president had an impact on the words
1:08:03
coming out of the Israeli Prime Minister's office, but
1:08:05
the deeds on the ground have not yet changed. Before
1:08:08
we get into the policy too, just in terms of
1:08:11
the IRC, give us a
1:08:13
sense of what the IRC has been doing
1:08:15
in Gaza, but also like how
1:08:17
do you make judgments as the leader of
1:08:20
this organization? We saw what happened to
1:08:22
the World Central Kitchen with their people
1:08:25
getting killed. I know you guys
1:08:27
have had some of the Israeli military operation come your way.
1:08:30
How do you make decisions about, obviously, the
1:08:32
whole purpose of your organization? You want to
1:08:34
help people, but you also have responsibility to
1:08:36
not put your people at risk. What
1:08:39
are you doing in that? How do you think through those tradeoffs?
1:08:41
Yeah, that's a great question. Obviously,
1:08:44
we think about a lot and fear a lot. And
1:08:47
there's no world where we work where
1:08:49
there isn't heightened risk. And the question is,
1:08:51
do you have the systems to manage the risk? We
1:08:54
are now into our fifth emergency medical team,
1:08:56
which we run with medical aid for the
1:08:58
Palestinians who are a UK-based charity. We
1:09:01
have between eight and 15 doctors
1:09:03
who go and work at various
1:09:05
hospitals in Gaza. We
1:09:08
also partner with a range of
1:09:10
local NGOs who are trying
1:09:12
to distribute
1:09:14
non-food items, who are
1:09:17
trying to do child protection and women's protection work
1:09:19
around the Gaza Strip. We
1:09:23
did have an Israeli missile hit our guest
1:09:25
house on the 18th
1:09:27
of January. And we said at the time
1:09:29
that this showed that the so-called deconfliction system,
1:09:32
the system by which NGOs tell
1:09:35
competence, tell the Israeli authorities in this case
1:09:38
where they are and what their movements are going to be,
1:09:40
we said it's not working. And it's a threat to life
1:09:43
and limb at the time. I think the death
1:09:45
toll among aid workers was around 150. As
1:09:48
you'll know, the death toll is now over 200. And
1:09:50
the deconfliction system simply doesn't work. So
1:09:54
we've had to, more and more, our medical team has been working on this.
1:10:00
team to take that as an example, that they
1:10:02
find a place to sleep in the hospital. They
1:10:04
don't leave the hospital. So even
1:10:06
guest houses that have been deconflicted, which
1:10:08
I was turned out not to be
1:10:10
safe. And all
1:10:12
to say that the most basic
1:10:14
legal rights of an aid worker
1:10:16
to stay alive and a civilian
1:10:19
caught up in war to receive
1:10:21
aid are not being honored in
1:10:23
this conflict. And so it couldn't
1:10:25
be more serious. That informs our
1:10:27
call for a ceasefire
1:10:29
on humanitarian grounds, a sustained and
1:10:32
immediate, but also sustained ceasefire to
1:10:34
allow us to do humanitarian work.
1:10:36
But it also informs the calls that
1:10:39
we're making in the
1:10:41
absence of a ceasefire without any way diminishing our
1:10:43
call for a ceasefire for aid to
1:10:45
flow in massively greater
1:10:47
quantities, because it's human decisions,
1:10:50
sometimes bureaucratic, sometimes political that are preventing
1:10:53
the flow of aid, but also more
1:10:55
protection for aid workers. And
1:10:59
you just spoke to a piece of
1:11:01
this that I think is important to highlight,
1:11:03
which is, you know,
1:11:05
I remember when I was in government, you
1:11:08
have deconfliction set up to facilitate the delivery
1:11:10
of aid in conflict zones. There
1:11:13
are legal requirements, international legal requirements
1:11:15
that go along with that, right? I mean, what
1:11:17
is the interaction between the
1:11:20
obligation to facilitate aid and
1:11:23
to pursue deconfliction measures with
1:11:25
international law? Well, there
1:11:27
are, I mean, international law, as you know, has four
1:11:29
elements to do with military necessity,
1:11:31
to do with proportionality,
1:11:34
to do with distinction
1:11:36
between civilians and competence,
1:11:39
and to do with humanity.
1:11:43
And that is a well-developed case
1:11:45
law. What I would say is that we
1:11:48
need an absolute paradigm shift, 180 degrees
1:11:50
shift, in the way we understand
1:11:53
the rights of civilians and aid
1:11:55
workers and their rights to receive
1:11:57
aid, which is that their participation is
1:11:59
not a good thing. Protection from
1:12:01
danger and damage and
1:12:03
their right to receive
1:12:06
aid is not a gift of
1:12:09
conflict parties. We've got
1:12:11
ourselves into a mindset where we should be grateful
1:12:13
that aid is allowed to get through. No,
1:12:16
no, no, no. It's the opposite. There
1:12:18
is a responsibility on conflict parties
1:12:21
to enable aid to go through. And
1:12:23
a long time ago, we said that the conduct
1:12:25
of all parties to this conflict was
1:12:28
not honoring those most fundamental
1:12:30
commitments. And it's
1:12:33
very, very important that they are,
1:12:35
because we know it's not just in
1:12:37
Gaza that impunity is reigning. It's much
1:12:39
more widely spread. And this idea that
1:12:42
somehow the protection of civilians or
1:12:45
the distribution of aid is something that is a
1:12:47
gift, a generous gift, is just wrong. Yeah.
1:12:51
And one more piece of this is, obviously,
1:12:53
you've called for a ceasefire. You've
1:12:56
talked about these different prongs, the need for
1:12:59
a ceasefire, the need to get aid in, obviously,
1:13:01
the need to comply with international law. It's
1:13:03
not, though, like even if you got to a ceasefire,
1:13:05
that the needs would immediately go away. Have
1:13:08
you been able to think through it all, the
1:13:10
medium and longer term challenges in Gaza
1:13:12
that might be confronting the IRC in
1:13:14
the international community if we
1:13:16
do get to a ceasefire? I mean, I
1:13:19
think that the short answer is obviously no,
1:13:21
because there are so many imponderables. I mean,
1:13:23
the scale of destruction is absolutely massive. The
1:13:28
psychological damage matches the physical damage.
1:13:30
We don't know what security arrangements
1:13:32
will be in place. You're seeing
1:13:34
in the north how difficult that
1:13:36
is. And
1:13:38
obviously, we're still in a situation where we don't
1:13:41
know if this Rafa offensive is
1:13:43
going to go ahead. And so all
1:13:45
of those factors make it very, very hard.
1:13:48
What we know is that if
1:13:50
you think about it for those two million people, what
1:13:54
they face is the biggest reconstruction job that
1:13:57
has existed for generations. It's
1:13:59
not necessarily largest number of people who
1:14:01
are affected by conflict. I mean the
1:14:03
conflict in Sudan has 25 million people
1:14:06
in humanitarian need, but it's
1:14:08
an absolutely massive challenge. What we know is
1:14:10
something that's important which we're trying to spread
1:14:13
at the World Bank Spring meetings and elsewhere. Effective
1:14:16
humanitarian aid is the first step on the
1:14:18
road to development. Stopping people dying is the
1:14:20
first step on the road to development. Basic
1:14:23
early childhood interventions to
1:14:25
help tackle the trauma that's
1:14:27
being faced by young people is step
1:14:29
one. The tackling of malnutrition. This
1:14:31
is why I started this interview by talking
1:14:33
about the famine and malnutrition. That's the apex
1:14:35
of the pyramid if you like. We know
1:14:37
that in humanitarian emergencies where there's
1:14:39
famine or malnutrition, everything else is going
1:14:41
wrong as well. Obviously, Gaza
1:14:44
is very unusual in that no one can
1:14:46
get out and it's actually impossible to get
1:14:48
aid in, but
1:14:50
we know that these conditions
1:14:52
have long-term consequences. Yeah,
1:14:56
I mean one other thing that comes out
1:14:58
of your question. You mentioned Rafa. I mean
1:15:02
it's almost hard to imagine. People
1:15:04
keep not being able to envision how this could
1:15:06
get worse, but I kind of can't get
1:15:09
my mind around what the situation might look
1:15:11
like in the Gaza Strip if that Rafa
1:15:13
operation goes forward. I mean it
1:15:15
would exponentially complicate everything from aid
1:15:17
delivery to immediate needs to
1:15:19
freedom of movement for organizations like
1:15:22
your own, right? From a humanitarian
1:15:24
point of view, it's clear that there's a
1:15:26
million plus people who have all
1:15:30
been moved already once, twice, three times.
1:15:33
The scale of loss already is very, very
1:15:35
high. There was a story today that 40,000
1:15:37
tents have been procured, but there's a million
1:15:39
plus people in Rafa.
1:15:42
So that's why there's
1:15:45
such grave, grave trepidation,
1:15:48
fear about what's next. Well,
1:15:53
pulling back the lens, obviously the rest
1:15:55
of the world doesn't stop suffering from
1:15:57
conflict and humanitarian crises in the midst
1:15:59
of... what's happening in Gaza. I
1:16:01
know IRC has been quite active in Sudan, a
1:16:04
situation that I think in more normal
1:16:06
times would be getting a lot of attention. How
1:16:09
would you describe for people what the needs
1:16:11
are there? What have you seen and heard
1:16:13
about what's happening in the civil war in
1:16:16
Sudan, and how that's kind of spilling over
1:16:18
into places like South Sudan? Yeah, there's a
1:16:20
couple of things to say, actually, which speak
1:16:22
to the wider global sense of, I
1:16:25
call it a flammable world, in the world on fire
1:16:27
in various places, and it's very flammable. And
1:16:29
we produce an annual emergency watch list.
1:16:32
Gaza was number two, Gaza was number
1:16:34
two, Sudan was number one. As I
1:16:37
said earlier, 25 million people in humanitarian
1:16:39
need. It's the one-year anniversary of the
1:16:42
start of this civil war. And
1:16:45
I was in South Sudan in
1:16:47
February, and I met a couple who I
1:16:49
went to the border or near the border,
1:16:51
and a couple of fled 700
1:16:54
miles from Khartoum, 700 kilometers from Khartoum. She
1:16:57
was a hairdresser, he was a shoemaker,
1:16:59
the kids were meant to be going to
1:17:01
university. And now they're wondering whether they'll ever
1:17:03
go back to their country. I
1:17:07
think there's a couple of aspects of it that are
1:17:09
very striking. One, this is not just a
1:17:11
Sudan crisis. It's a Sudan, South Sudan,
1:17:13
Chad, it's the whole of Northeast Africa
1:17:16
crisis. And
1:17:20
the second is that those who are much
1:17:22
more expert than I, in what happened in
1:17:24
Darfur 20 years ago, will tell you that
1:17:27
there are very, very dark and chilling echoes
1:17:29
in what's happening now, of
1:17:31
what happened then. So you've
1:17:33
got number one, it's affecting the
1:17:35
neighbors massively, Sudan, South
1:17:37
Sudan. Secondly, the Darfur element
1:17:40
of this. Thirdly, every humanitarian emergency
1:17:42
is a political emergency. And
1:17:44
the political emergency in this case, is
1:17:47
that you have different regional powers,
1:17:50
supporting different sides. You
1:17:52
have the situation where authority for
1:17:54
peacemaking has been devolved from the
1:17:57
UN Security Council to the African
1:17:59
Union. So
1:18:01
you've got a different set of plays
1:18:04
there, which is
1:18:06
very involved with different strands of African
1:18:08
politics, tying into Middle Eastern
1:18:10
politics because of Saudi Arabia and United Arab
1:18:12
Emirates, both very involved, Egypt. And
1:18:15
so this political emergency is creating this sense of
1:18:18
vacuum where people are really asking whether the country
1:18:20
is going to exist after this.
1:18:23
And I mean, you've written and talked
1:18:25
a lot about a kind of culture of impunity
1:18:27
here. And oftentimes we
1:18:30
end up focusing on the worst
1:18:32
actors, right? The people, the militias
1:18:35
or the warlords or the warring parties in
1:18:37
the civil war. But
1:18:40
as you mentioned, there's also these regional
1:18:42
powers that are arming different sides, backing
1:18:45
different sides. And
1:18:47
some of those are actors like the Emirates, the
1:18:49
UAE that are very
1:18:51
plugged into global politics. I mean,
1:18:53
how do we try
1:18:56
to align some sense
1:18:58
of accountability or some sense of pressure or
1:19:00
some sense of incentive for these
1:19:02
kind of regional parties in a conflict like Sudan
1:19:05
to take more responsibility for their own
1:19:08
choices here? I mean, to turn off the spigot
1:19:10
of weapons and get to the table of
1:19:13
negotiation rather than to just kind of let
1:19:15
these fires burn. Yeah. Well,
1:19:17
I think the starting point is actually getting our own
1:19:19
house in order. Now in this one can actually
1:19:22
point to something that the Biden administration done
1:19:24
that's very significant and very positive, which is
1:19:26
their own new Department of Defense guidance on
1:19:29
civilian protection and military operations does actually set
1:19:31
a very high standard for what should be
1:19:33
expected, not just of the US, but of
1:19:35
all its security partners. And
1:19:38
that's, I think, really important. Secondly,
1:19:40
to get active on the diplomatic
1:19:42
front. Now there is now a
1:19:44
new special envoy, Tom Pierrillo is
1:19:46
the special envoy for the
1:19:48
crisis. It's good because it needs
1:19:51
the weight of the US if there's going
1:19:53
to be any diplomatic progress at all. Thirdly,
1:19:55
it's back to our old friend leverage.
1:19:59
And it's about... prioritization and leverage and the
1:20:01
extent to which that is used, the
1:20:03
US has a number of allies who
1:20:06
are engaged in this conflict.
1:20:08
The internationalization of this civil war
1:20:10
is symptomatic of something that's happening
1:20:12
right around the world with civil
1:20:14
wars that are burning longer with
1:20:16
more ferocity because
1:20:18
of external sponsorship. And
1:20:21
so the US needs to use its leverage. I
1:20:23
would argue the West needs to use its leverage more generally.
1:20:26
Well, and I wanted to ask you, you have
1:20:28
a piece out in The Guardian recently that people
1:20:31
should check out about the role of UK. And
1:20:34
this is an interesting point for the UK.
1:20:36
We're out of Brexit a couple of years or a
1:20:39
few years now. You also
1:20:41
have an election coming up there. David
1:20:43
Cameron's flying off to Mar-a-Lago. It's just me
1:20:45
with Donald Trump that's a little peculiar. He
1:20:47
survived. I think he survived. He said there'd
1:20:50
been sightings of- He
1:20:52
said, okay, he's out. The
1:20:56
UK is not part of the EU
1:20:58
anymore, obviously. It's
1:21:00
kind of floating in this new
1:21:03
space. I
1:21:05
mean, break down for people kind
1:21:07
of the role that you see that the
1:21:09
UK should be playing in this world of
1:21:12
increasing disorder, of increasing risk in
1:21:14
a post-Brexit foreign policy and maybe post-Tory
1:21:17
foreign policy. Well, fingers crossed.
1:21:21
There are many of us who warned that
1:21:23
Brexit would be an act of unilateral
1:21:25
political disarmament. And I'm
1:21:28
very, very sad that in all sorts of ways that's
1:21:30
proved to be true. However, Brexit
1:21:32
is much worse than
1:21:34
even I predicted on the foreign policy
1:21:36
front. It's actually very
1:21:38
bad on the economic front as
1:21:40
well. And I think
1:21:43
the UK now finds itself in a
1:21:45
position where it has
1:21:47
effectively no relations on the foreign policy and
1:21:49
defense front with the European Union. And
1:21:52
it's got all of its chips in
1:21:54
the NATO basket. Now on Ukraine, the UK has actually
1:21:56
played a good and positive role, but
1:21:58
it's doubly- stupid to have
1:22:00
no relations on foreign defense and climate
1:22:03
policy with the EU, given
1:22:05
that EU NATO divisions have been
1:22:07
so bridged by the Ukraine
1:22:09
crisis. The EU, despite having islands in
1:22:11
neutral, but it hasn't stopped weapons being
1:22:13
shipped, there are six million Ukrainian refugees
1:22:15
in Europe that have
1:22:17
rights to residents and to work. The
1:22:20
EU is a global trade and climate
1:22:22
actor. And so I think the
1:22:24
first order of business is a structured,
1:22:27
serious relationship between
1:22:29
the UK and its closest allies,
1:22:32
geographically, who are in the European Union, 27
1:22:34
of them. Obviously
1:22:37
there's a second aspect to this, which is that traditionally
1:22:39
the UK has leveraged
1:22:41
its relationships in the
1:22:44
US for its European
1:22:46
engagement as well and vice versa. Those
1:22:50
remain very important relationships. But as you know
1:22:52
better than I, every country
1:22:54
in the world is hedging both on the
1:22:56
outcome of your election. And
1:23:00
even if the Biden administration is reelected
1:23:02
on whether or not your
1:23:04
divided government is going to be able to deliver the
1:23:06
kind of patient, strategic,
1:23:09
informed, deliberative, international
1:23:11
leadership that's necessary. And
1:23:13
so the UK is going to have
1:23:15
to adapt what I call, or not
1:23:17
my phrase, but the phrase of Shashi Thoreau,
1:23:19
the multi-aligned world. And
1:23:22
it's a much more transactional, much more
1:23:24
fluid set of arrangements, where
1:23:26
I think the North Star, just to finish the
1:23:28
third point and go back to something you
1:23:30
said earlier, the North Star for our international engagement
1:23:32
as the UK, I think, has to be to uphold
1:23:34
the rule of law and to fight impunity. Because
1:23:37
that is the great danger, both to our interests and to
1:23:39
our values. Yeah. Well,
1:23:42
we'll hope that we get to see
1:23:44
a new government in the UK
1:23:46
committed to that. I want to just end, I mean,
1:23:48
I know that the
1:23:50
IRC is, you have local partners, you
1:23:53
have staff around the world. What would
1:23:55
you want people to know about what
1:23:57
your teams are doing in places like Gaza
1:23:59
and Sudan? like, what give us a window
1:24:01
into kind of who the
1:24:03
people are that are on the front lines of
1:24:05
these conflicts? Yeah, I'd love
1:24:07
people to listen to the testimony of
1:24:10
people like our head of
1:24:12
our emergency health unit, Sima
1:24:14
Jilani. She did an excruciating
1:24:16
interview in the New
1:24:18
Yorker about her experience as a doctor
1:24:20
in Gaza, which I really recommend that
1:24:23
people read look the face of the
1:24:25
IRC is now 25,000
1:24:27
plus employees in 330 field sites in 45 countries
1:24:29
around the world, and 3000 staff in
1:24:36
30 US offices because we're working
1:24:38
to support refugees and asylum seekers here
1:24:40
in the US. We're an organization that's
1:24:43
unusual because we have this focus not on poverty
1:24:45
per se, but on people whose lives are shattered
1:24:47
by conflict and disaster and are left in poverty
1:24:50
and desperation. And
1:24:52
our effort in the
1:24:54
humanitarian sector is to be the solutions NGO.
1:24:57
And if you're interested in malnutrition, we've got a
1:24:59
different way of tackling malnutrition. If you're interested in
1:25:01
early childhood development, with Sesame Workshop, we've got a
1:25:03
different way of tackling that. If you're interested
1:25:06
in how can the tech sector
1:25:08
help provide information to
1:25:10
refugees and asylum seekers about where's safe,
1:25:12
signpost is our solution
1:25:15
for how that's taken forward. If you
1:25:17
care about sexual violence against women and
1:25:19
violence against kids, we've got very interesting
1:25:21
program about how to tackle co-occurrence. And
1:25:23
at a time when people
1:25:26
get accused of being a globalist, rather than thanks
1:25:28
for being a globalist, it's
1:25:30
I think really important to
1:25:33
assert these vital This
1:25:35
vital work needs support. I'd love people
1:25:37
to visit our website, rescue.org, to learn
1:25:39
more about what we're doing. Great.
1:25:43
Well, David, thanks so much for joining us
1:25:45
and taking us through a lot of issues there. Thanks
1:25:47
a lot, Ben. Thank you. Thanks
1:25:52
again to David Miliband for joining the show. Welcome
1:25:55
back. Thanks to
1:25:57
Christopher Nolan. Holding it down
1:25:59
on that poster. I
1:26:01
like the Rishi put himself in the center. Well,
1:26:03
nobody thinks that about Rishi. Nobody
1:26:06
thinks that this guy powers
1:26:08
above Britain and it's soft
1:26:10
power. Also, you're not supposed to put the
1:26:12
king on political things. What
1:26:14
do you think Rishi's name idea is outside of
1:26:16
the UK? Like
1:26:19
0.0? That's
1:26:22
pretty soft power. That's soft. And
1:26:26
we're done. Talk
1:26:28
to you guys next week. See
1:26:30
ya. If you
1:26:32
want to get ad-free episodes, exclusive content
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Pod Save the World is a Crooked Media production. Our
1:26:56
executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor, Ben
1:26:58
Rhodes and Reed Turlin. Our producer is
1:27:01
Alona Minkowski and associate producer is Ashley
1:27:03
Mizzuo. It's mixed and edited by Andrew
1:27:05
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1:27:07
Charlotte Landis. Our studio technician
1:27:09
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