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shopify.com/podcast free shopify.com

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slash podcast free Welcome

0:58

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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Madison Phoenix Philly in Ann Arbor We're also gonna be

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1:04:37

scream crime, maybe throw up Pods America is

1:04:39

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1:04:41

of what's going on and points when we

1:04:43

for no matter where you have the Democracy

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1:04:47

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other toward a can get your tickets no

1:05:04

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

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1:26:53

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1:27:03

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