← Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar
Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar
11/20/24: Ryan Presses Israeli Journo On Endless War, The Real Reason Kamala Lost To Trump
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With.
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Krystal Ball
Millions of books on Amazon, there's a reading feeling for everyone. For example, Juan's as he drifts away to nirvana after only the first chapter is different to Maya's when she discovered the narrator was in fact the evil twin, which is also different to Noah's.
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Saagar Enjeti
Aw.
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Krystal Ball
Anytime the cute cyberpunk is mentioned, even.
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Though in reality he'd be totally out.
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Krystal Ball
Of his league from to Amazon books, that reading feeling awaits. Hey guys, Sager and Crystal here.
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Saagar Enjeti
Independent media just played a truly massive.
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Krystal Ball
Role in this election and we are.
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Saagar Enjeti
So excited about what that means for.
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Krystal Ball
The future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else.
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Krystal Ball
To our full shows unedited ad, free.
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Saagar Enjeti
And all put together for you every.
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Krystal Ball
Morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the.
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Future of independent news media and we.
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Krystal Ball
Hope to see you@breakingpoints.com joining us now is Times of Israel journalist Haviv Retiger. Haviv, thank you so much for joining us.
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Saagar Enjeti
Thank you for having me.
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Krystal Ball
And so the audience understands kind of where you are in the spectrum when it comes to Israeli politics. I had said at the top of the show that you were a couple ticks to the right of Netanyahu, but correct me if I'm. Where would you say that you are kind of politically just so people have the proper context for evaluating.
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Saagar Enjeti
I'm a journalist, I'm objective, from Mars, obviously.
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Krystal Ball
Same same right here. Yeah.
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Saagar Enjeti
I am a big fan of some ideas on the left. I am still think 2 state solution is doable. I think in fact everything else that I've ever heard is less likely and less doable. And on a lot of social issues and cultural issues, I'm pretty liberal, specifically on the question of Iran and on the question of Israeli capabilities and on the question of how this war has been handled. It is my view that the Biden administration's humanitarianism, constantly pressuring the Israelis to slow down has hurt everybody. Mostly Palestinian civilians, definitely the hostages in the dungeons in Gaza. And Israeli soldiers have died because for periods of four months or more the Israeli army had to stop in Gaza because they couldn't go into Rafah. Things like that. There is a way to prosecute this war and to do it slowly is the worst possible way. Israel has escalation, dominance vis a vis Iran and the only way to avoid a destructive war in Lebanon, I argued 10 months ago, is to have an exchange with Iran. So where does that put me? I'm very hawkish in that sense, but I don't think I'm actually on the right.
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Krystal Ball
All right, let's go with that. So we put up this first element report over at Dropsite News. But there's been a lot of reporting in the Israeli press and elsewhere about the kind of rise of looting going on in Gaza at the hands of gangs. The as we report over at Dropsite, the kind of Hamas led security forces are now launching kind of a counterattack. Ambushed, ambushed a group of hijackers who at killing at least 20 of them it appears. And so the argument that's being made by, and you've seen the reporting in Haaretz, I'm curious if Times of Israel has done some reporting on this as well. But the argument that Hamas is also making is that ever since Israel took over Rafah, looting within the looting within that area has dramatically increased and that the IDF calls it the looting zone. The United nations yesterday said that Kogat urged a last minute shift in the route that these 109 aid trucks took and it put them right into the sights of the. The hijackers. So there's. There are a lot of suggestions both in Israeli media and from Gazans that there's some collaboration going on between Israel and these. And these gangs, these well organized gangs are now hijacking trucks. What's your understanding of what's going on there?
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Saagar Enjeti
Well, it's. There's so much to unpack there. Yeah. The United nations lost something like 97 trucks. The United nations, out of a convoy of, I believe, 109. The United nations cannot distribute aid in Gaza. There are 900 truckloads worth of aid sitting on the Gazan side of the Kerem Shalom crossing that they simply can't distribute. When the UN is asked by journalists what it would take for them to distribute, they say Israeli protection. And when they then say to them, well, why doesn't the Israeli army accompany the convoys? They then say, well, they can't accompany the convoys because that'll make the convoys a target of the other side. There is no force, no criminal gang, no clan, no family, no. These are all these terms used to describe a real social reality on the ground in Gaza. There is no force big enough to take 97 trucks out of the hands of the UN except Hamas in the certain areas where the Israelis aren't operating. So the very idea that 97 of these trucks are lost, the UN says something about. It doesn't say who it is, doesn't say who it suspects it is, doesn't say if these items have shown up on the black market in Gaza being sold by certain parties or other parties. It's all very, very strangely vague. And then there's this argument that in fact, it's not Hamas. It can't be anyone but Hamas. Hamas is still sufficiently strong in Gaza to not allow anyone else to come in. The irony is that a few months back, I think probably five months ago, something like that, the Israeli army tried to build out a separate aid distribution system, working with these clans, which are just an important social structure in Gazan society that also sometimes built out organized crime syndicates. And the two aid convoys that worked with the Israeli army publicly, this is known, and this is something that nobody has hidden, were intercepted and massacred by Hamas forces. And so Israel hasn't actually trusted the clans to be capable of actually doing the distribution and holding their own in Gaza. There is no one in Gaza who could have taken those trucks except Hamas. Therefore, my conclusion, I have not heard evidence. I've seen a lot of this desperate speculation, hoping to avoid the very idea that Hamas might be the bad guys in any scenario, but I haven't actually seen any evidence that suggests that anyone else even remotely has the capability. And so falling back on these conspiracies of the Israelis, the Israelis would love the aid to get distributed in ways that totally bypass Hamas. It would get a lot of pressure off of them, and nobody quite knows how because Hamas is sufficiently strong to continue disrupting the aid.
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Krystal Ball
Emily has a question. A second one. I'm just curious. Yasser Abu Shabaab is the leader of the hijacking group that Hamas claims to have sent its security forces to ambush and attack. He was killed in this attack. What's the theory for why the security forces launch this ambush of these. Of these hijackers, if the hijackers were.
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Saagar Enjeti
Actually Hamas, that there's some chance that they were piecing together some kind of an organization that was capable of working with the Israelis or that they needed somebody to massacre to make this case. And that's. It's more likely. It's more likely than that 97 trucks were taken by those 20 people. It's more likely than that there is a Klan nobody's ever heard of before.
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Haviv Retig Gur
You just mentioned something interesting in your answer about how Hamas is still. I think he said sufficiently strong. And I think that's a really important point. And I want to ask. I probably disagree with the argument, but is that part of. Because I think there are some hawkish people who will say, you know, Hamas has been basically vanquished and destroyed. And that seems to me a dishonest argument. There has been a lot of destruction, but Hamas has reconstituted itself in, like, northern Gaza, for example, and is still there. It's still in dealing with infrastructure and all of those sort of a vacuum, obviously. So who else would fill it but Hamas? Is this part of your argument as to why the humanitarianism, as you put it, of the Biden administration is insufficient and has been cruel, as you put it earlier, to the people of the Palestinians, the people of Gaza, because it sort of drags the conflict out longer than otherwise it could have been.
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Saagar Enjeti
Yeah. You know, the best way, I think, to think about this is to distinguish the Lebanon situation from the Gaza situation. In Lebanon, the Israel's supreme interest is at some point pretty soon to end it. And the reason is that it achieved a tremendous amount in Lebanon in terms of weakening Hezbollah, shattering Hezbollah, and at incredibly low cost. And as it sticks around and as it expands the war and as it maybe goes deeper, and as Leban itself has no other, Israel will start paying higher cost and for much lower return. And so right now, there is a real ceasefire negotiation process that the Israelis are interested in. Hezbollah took such a blow that Hezbollah is interested in. Hezbollah's patrons in Iran feel like they're on their back feet and they're interested in. So there's a real likelihood and every one of the parties wants it, but they're trying to shape how it looks and how they define the story of it for a ceasefire. The problem that Israel has in Gaza, the security problem Israel has in Gaza is very, very simple. There rest of Gaza, other than Hamas, in other words, in Lebanon, there's a lot of other factions and groups and political organizations and even kind of militias. And there's the Lebanese army, which has refused to engage the Israelis because they know Israel's at war with Hezbollah and not with Lebanon. All of that other rest of the polity that can step in to fill the vacuum doesn't exist in Gaza. There is only Hamas. And Israel adopted a doctrine kind of learned from Afghanistan, the American mistake in Afghanistan. Part of the American mistake was something called the clear and hold doctrine, which is that they cleared, you know, a valley, they took the valley, they cleared the valley, and then they held it with a Marine detachment or an army detachment so that the Taliban couldn't regroup there. What that ended up creating was many, many thousands of targets to the for the guerrillas all over Afghanistan. It ended up being a major source of pain and a major obstacle to the America achieving its goals in Afghanistan. So Israel has something that Israel has the opposite of that in Gaza. Hamas is buried underground in 500km of tunnels it spent 17 years building. And it's the single biggest thing Palestinians have ever built. And Hamas bent Gaza's entire economy to building these tunnels. And in 13 months of war, not a single civilian has been documented being allowed into the tunnels for safety. And so Israel's goal is to get Hamas out of those tunnels, to engage them and to destroy them. How do you do that? You take an area with Hamas and then you pull out and Hamas comes back, and then you take that area again. And so literally everywhere in Gaza, you've seen three, four or five Israeli entries, and each time an Israeli pull out to kind of reverse the clear and hold problem. So right now, what we're talking about is a Gaza in which Hamas has sections of its organization still underground, sections of its organization that come up and take and retake control. No one else who can fill that gap. There's no serious organization with guns and popular support. Of any kind, even in small areas of Gaza, that can fill the gap. There is only Hamas. I haven't described to you the solution. I've just described to you the problem that nobody has a solution for. Not Biden, not the left, not the right, not Netanyahu, not progressives in America. Nobody quite knows what takes over Gaza after Hamas. And let me just say one last sentence about that, because this is fundamental. If Hamas can't be removed from Gaza, nobody knows how to rebuild. Nobody knows how to push the ceasefire forward. You can't dump $100 billion on Gaza and actually have it rebuilt if Hamas is the one passing out the money. So Gaza is a huge problem and Hamas is the name of that problem, and there's no perfect solution for it. What the Israelis are hoping for is a long degradation war. It's going to be two years, three years, and eventually Hamas will slowly be degraded enough that other solutions can come to play.
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Krystal Ball
So the United States eventually said, you know what, why don't we just withdraw from Afghanistan? Hamas is saying that if Israel withdraw from Gaza, they will release the hostages. Why not take that deal?
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Saagar Enjeti
Why not take the deal that you end the war and release the hostages?
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Krystal Ball
Yeah.
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Saagar Enjeti
Hamas has not ever said that. It said this, by the way, the week after October 7th. I mean, it said it immediately. No, no, no, no war. We're fine. We're totally fine. Here's all your hostages back. But totally end to the war. There are simply two points. First of all, that's not true. Hamas has always added massive other stipulations having to do with the west bank, having to do with prisoners, including prisoners who are mass murderers in Israeli prisons and by the thousands. There's never been a Hamas statement that it said, just let's end it. Just let's end the war. Go back to October 6th. Nothing happened.
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Krystal Ball
Well, they've said they'd accept the Biden. They've said they would accept the framework that was put through by Netanyahu's war cabinet and then announced by Biden in July. Right. Didn't they say they would accept it?
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Saagar Enjeti
Interesting thing. First of all, that's a very temporary, tiny little deal that leaves a great most of the hostages still in Hamas's hands. That's first of all. Second of all, and that they have occasionally leaked to the. Secondly, we don't actually know. We know a lot of things the Qataris said they said. We know a lot of things the Egyptians claim they might have said at some point. Probably. We know all this stuff from sort of Unsubstantiated leaks that actual officials won't confirm. There has never been. I'm a huge critic of Netanyahu. I think Netanyahu's fundamental strategy led to October 7th, and I think he has led since October 7th, fundamentally, while politicking. He launched his political survival campaign on October 8th, and I feel betrayed by him as my prime minister. But there has never been a Hamas deal for him to say no to on all the hostages. There's been a deal on 30 hostages in exchange for 42 days if you pull out of the Philadelphia corridor. Big complicated question. Happy to get into it if that's interesting. But this idea that there's an end to the war and all the hostages come back, there has never from Hamas been a deal like that on the table. And even things that come, even in the general ballpark of that have been Qatari statements that nobody has ever been able to confirm. When Hamas had a working, functioning leadership, namely Sinwar, it would have been entirely possible to produce that Hamas statement. It no longer has. That is Mohammad Sinwar, his brother, the guy in charge. Nobody quite knows. So there simply isn't such a deal on the table. And the idea that you would pull out and let Hamas come back in and just retake Gaza now and by the way, have this war again in three years or five years and never rebuild Gaza, I mean, truly, you can think the Israelis are monsters. It doesn't change the fundamental problem of Hamas. It really doesn't change it. So if you can't, if you don't have a solution to how to install something after Hamas or how to remove Hamas sufficiently or degrade it sufficiently to put something else in, it doesn't really matter what the Israelis do. There is no day after until that can happen.
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Krystal Ball
It feels like the Israeli plan. And tell me if you think this is an accurate description of it. It feels like the Israeli plan at this point is this kind of ongoing, what you'd call occupation intervention in different areas. Go into particular areas, push the people out, leave there, people come back, go back in, combined with watching and maybe facilitating Gaza turn into a warring faction of clans against clans and gangs against gangs, which then divided Gaza, then is less of a threat to Israel and that you just live to fight another day endlessly rather than kind of settle on a long term solution of coexistence. Is that what you see actually happening? Put aside what people want? It just feels like that's where it's going.
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Saagar Enjeti
Yeah, I mean, you phrase that in a way that suggests this Is the Israeli plan that might be kind of what everything defaults to, because nobody.
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Krystal Ball
Because maybe we can make progress in thinking about it by setting aside what the plan is and just talking about what's actually going to happen.
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Saagar Enjeti
What is actually happening is that when you remove Hamas, half of the Gazan population is under 18 and Hamas ran the schools for 17 years. When you. The idea of removing Hamas from Gaza is a much deeper and more profound problem than the strict military problem which Hamas built Gaza into a battlefield for. A war in which it would be impossible to remove it at a scale never before seen in the history of warfare. There's nothing like those tunnels. The Vietcong built quite a few tunnels. I don't think it's 20% of what Hamas built in Gaza in a much smaller area. And so Hamas produced a situation in which getting it out requires essentially this kind of war. I don't mean to suggest that every single Israeli airstrike is legitimate. I'm just saying there isn't fundamentally a different kind of war if you actually want to remove Hamas from Gaza. And Hamas made sure of it. And then there's the deeper point, which is the educational, religious sort of narrative point. Hamas tells Gazans that they are not suffering for nothing. They are suffering because they are the vanguard of a great Islamic restoration after centuries of weakness. And the great war against the Jews is that fundamental war for the restoration of all Islam. To a lot of Gazans who hate Hamas, there's also a deep appreciation of that story of dignity. And so when you actually start to map out what it would mean to remove Hamas from Gaza, it turns out to be this immense military problem, an immense cultural problem, an immense religious problem, a problem that Jews can't do. Jews are not going to go into Gaza and talk to Gazans about their religion. But that's also fundamental to removing Hamas from Gaza. And so there has to be in Gaza a much larger sense of the scale of the problem and of the desperate need for the problem. If Hamas remains in Gaza, Gaza will remain destroyed no matter what Israel does. Truly, I mean, if the Israeli prime minister becomes the head of the most far left progressive party in the Israeli Knesset, there is nothing you can do for Gaza as long as Hamas rules it. And so how does that day after look, what is the role of the Arab states? What is the role of the Muslim world? What is the role of building out a Gaza? That's different. Lebanon has a much better future ahead of it, because even though it's been taken over by Hezbollah in the name of Iran. If Israel can can sufficiently weaken Hezbollah, there is the rest of Lebanon that can come in and fill a gap. Who is that in Gaza? How do you build that in Gaza? And that's we're talking here about the best case scenario that everyone actually wants that. I hope everyone wants that. I hope it isn't just, you know, in the west moralizing and in the Muslim world just hating Jews. I hope it's actually about Gaza and we can put together some kind of an international coalition that frankly moves in and massively seriously builds and de radicalizes Gaza. And then there's a real powerful argument for the Israelis getting out as fast as possible. But until there's even that awareness, you're just asking the Israelis to hand Gaza back to Hamas. And that's just something that the Israeli public won't allow to happen. Never mind the politicians.
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Haviv Retig Gur
Well in control room, I'm about to queue up E3 which we can put up on the screen and then E4 so Bernie Sanders and Ryan will probably have something to say about this as well. Is pushing to block US Arms sales to Israel. There's going to be a vote in the Senate on that today, right Ryan? That's what Bernie is queuing up today. And on that note, I want to turn to this clip of Tulsi Gabbard on CBN Christian Broadcast Network talking about some of the ideological, deeper ideological questions that we were just talking about here. Let's roll this clip. It's E4.
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Saagar Enjeti
You mentioned American taxpayer dollars. Is there a difference between funding Israel and funding Ukraine? Like how do you see that exactly? I'm just curious about that.
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Tulsi Gabbard
Yes, there is a very.
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Saagar Enjeti
Because radical Islamic extremism is what Israel is on the front lines of every day.
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Tulsi Gabbard
There is a very real difference and there will always be. With every unique challenge that we face and that unique decision that must be made using those two examples, are we better off increasing and escalating tensions and waging this proxy war war against Russia of which Ukraine has never had any shot at winning? When you look at what's happening in the war between Israel and Hamas, and it is a war between Israel and Hamas, a radical Islamist terrorist group. This is just the latest front of this war that's been waged for a very long time between these radical Islamist terrorist groups that have been waging it militarily and ideologically. This is in our best interest as well as all freedom loving countries and civilization to take on what is the greatest short and long term threat to freedom. He's afraid of being called an Islamophobe. And it's the same reason why he is not taking seriously the need to defeat Hamas.
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Haviv Retig Gur
Gabbard obviously recently nominated to be Donald Trump's Director of National Intelligence. And the host asked her, Joe Biden, just recently pausing weapons shipments to Israel, how do you see that he's on the side of Hamas at this point? And obviously this comes, we're talking about this clip as Bernie Sanders is pushing to block US Arms sales to Israel. And so I guess my question is, with this perspective that there's a deep ideological root to what we see in Gaza and sort of Hamas filling this leadership vacuum, infrastructure vacuum, over and over again, is the response to that further military action? If, I mean, I understand obviously why that's an option, but is that ultimately, Is it worth. Is it continuously justified if the root problem is a deep ideological. Is a deep ideological commitment, conviction that is like, worsened by the military action? In some ways, that's obviously arguable. But how do you see that sort of dynamic between one and the other?
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Saagar Enjeti
Look, for the last 150 years, there's been a debate within Islam, and it's a big and profound and powerful debate that's shaped the Muslim world today, certainly the Sunni Arab world in which we are embedded. And it's a debate about Muslim weakness, the sources of Muslim weakness, and what we do about Muslim weakness. And out of that debate grow some, you know, pietistic peaceful movements and also jihadi movements. And out of that debate, you get the kind of ideological movements of Hamas. You also get in the Shia sphere, this Iranian regime, this ideology that says that Islam has been weak for a long time. And this is something that really becomes a problem Muslim theologians talk about because of Western imperialism of the 19th century. But this ideology then says, well, if Islam is to wake up, the first obstacle it has to overcome in order to show that it is returning into history as a powerful agent in history and therefore redeeming Islam and therefore redeeming, ultimately the world is overcoming the Jews, is overcoming the smallest, weakest thing that ever pushed Islam back, the Iranian regime. This is my message to Bernie Sanders. Doesn't fit in a little quip. It doesn't fit in a sound bite. We don't need American missiles in Gaza. That's not the kind of war. Gaza is the American arsenal. The American help is about Iran. And if Bernie Sanders can't explain to us why Iran wants to destroy Israel in the first place, why does Iran care about Israel? Why is Iran spending a double digit percentage of its GDP so far, with sanctions, with wars, with the billions it doesn't have invested in all these proxies, especially Hezbollah, the jewel in its crown. Why is it trying to destroy Israel? It has no border with Israel, it has no interest in Israel. And the answer is it takes these ideas of Islamic restorationism and as the Jews being the first thing Islam has to overcome absolutely seriously. And if we don't take it seriously, we're going to be surprised when they carry out on October 7th, by the way. We know, we know because Hezbollah has announced and Hamas has talked about that Hezbollah was planning on October 7, that was much larger, and are very angry at Sinwar for ruining the surprise, so to speak. So we face enemies who will come at us no matter what. And if America chooses to then disarm us, the war is still going to come. It's just going to be worse because we're not going to have precise weapons. We're going to have blunt weapons we can build ourselves. That's my message there. You have to have that understanding of what the enemy actually wants when you're planning about, when you're planning that, to face them down, to have that conflict.
- [26:36]
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- [27:23]
Krystal Ball
Now.
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Krystal Ball
I feel like the clash of civilizations stuff though, is actually a cover for not talking about the conflict in simpler, just territory or nationalistic terms. You can go back to the decline of the Ottoman Empire, but it's much simpler to explain the rise of Hamas by pointing to a couple acute things. One being, you know, the inability of Arafat, who had, you know, who had, who recognized Israel and you know, like recognized the existence of the state of Israel and was engaged in, you know, long negotiations and Hamas argued, you're being played by Israel here. Israel does not have, through the Oslo accords or any other way, any serious commitment to actually reaching a two state solution. And what they would point to is that immediately after Oslo San, more settlements are built, more settlements are built, more settlements are built. You have elements of the not, including Netanyahu himself, saying that the existence of Hamas is extremely useful to the position of blocking a two state solution. And so I don't think you need the ideological stuff and the Ottoman Empire talk when you can actually say like no. The idea here was that there is a faction within the Israeli political system that opposed the creation of a Palestinian state and had the power to put obstacles in the way of the creation of that state and is now since the election, talking about simply annexing the west bank fully and even talking further about southern Lebanon being northern Israel and on and on. So can't you talk? Can't you consider this in a much more kind of simple way than needing to go back to the clash of civilization stuff.
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Saagar Enjeti
They're not mutually exclusive. I didn't talk about clash of civilizations. I talked about the single biggest theological discourse in the Muslim world in the last century and a half. I can give you specific names and specific theologians and organizations they founded that produce this and the politics they're born from. Hamas was founded in 1987. Hamas doesn't go back a century and a half, but it's born on the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood. And it talks that way. If you go to its mosques, you will hear those speeches. That's the first thing. The second thing is I'll tell you why. What you call clash of civilizations, which is it's such a Western discourse. That's not how Muslims think of it, it's not how Jews think of it, it's not how Middle Easterners think of it. But the reason that these religious ideas matter is that I'll give you an example. You were talking about the Palestinian argument. And it's not an argument argument made by Hamas. It's an argument made by Palestinian diaspora elites who are trying to explain away everything that Hamas has done for 30 years to Westerners. But the argument that Israel never intended for Oslo to ever actually work out for the Palestinians. Robin is assassinated in 1995 by an Israeli Jew opposed to the peace process. And that actually puts the left. The left was about to lose that election because people were really afraid that Yasser Arafat, this arch terrorist who had hijacked airplanes and launched terror attacks and massacred kids, was now going to take over the West Bank. And Rabin's assassination increased the left's standing in the polls and they were set to win the next election and the next election because the assassination comes in 96. And Hamas launches a series of suicide bombings in Jerusalem in the week leading up to the election that tilt the election by the narrowest margin in the history of an Israeli election. I think 30,000 votes to Netanyahu. That's Netanyahu's first victory as a function of Hamas terror attacks. Barak comes back, the Labor Party comes back. He's already talking about a Palestinian state. He's at Camp David with Bill Clinton. They're negotiating shared sovereignty on the Temple mount. There's a 95% of the west bank kind of Palestinian state. And that's when 140 suicide bombings over the next three years, the second intifada begin. And not only Hamas also.
- [33:27]
Krystal Ball
Yeah, there's definitely a real symbiosis crisis between the kind of Palestinian.
- [33:34]
Saagar Enjeti
The Israelis are not angels in this story. There are different camps. They fight constantly. And by the way, we don't have the kind of winner takes all election system that you have. You're going to be a Republican for four years. Everything is going to be Republican unless Congress switches halfway through. In Israel, every government in the history of Israel, there's never been a majority party, has been a coalition. And therefore the Israeli government always works across purposes because different ideological groups are. By the way, the Italian government, we're seeing this now, if you're following Italian politics, the Polish government, and we see this in these kinds of parliamentary systems. We had a government. The last government that Netanyahu ousted actually had the left wing minister of housing and, excuse me, a right wing minister of housing and a left wing minister of transportation, which means that the right wing minister of housing was encouraging the building of more settlement homes and the left wing minister of transportation was refusing to pave roads to those settlement homes. The Israeli government is multiple forces operating in different directions. If the argument is, if there's an Israeli right winger in the room, then Israel doesn't mean it, then you're missing the fact that there was a culture war, the defining political civil war of the 90s. And even after the 90s, the withdrawal from Gaza was also part of this. In 2005 was about getting out and creating space for the Palestinians and separating and not having an occupation anymore. And it failed miserably in rivers of blood and it failed miserably in rivers of blood because of these religious ideas on the other side. So at some point, you're going to have to deal with these religious ideas from the other side on October 7th. Again, let's imagine the Israelis are the worst people in the world. On October 7, Hamas didn't just massacre Israelis. It had built these tunnels for 17 years. And it had built them for one tactical purpose so that anyone coming for Hamas has to cut through cities to do so. October 7th was two atrocities, not one. And the larger one wasn't committed against Israel. It was committed against Gaza. And it was Hamas's literal strategy. And so if you don't address why is Hamas willing to destroy Gaza? It's willing to destroy Gaza because it thinks that so much more is at stake. The redemption of Islam. Well, if you don't address that, if you don't deal with that, you're not going to fix the problem. You're not going to end the war.
- [35:43]
Krystal Ball
Israeli commentators often say that the Western progressives don't take into account Palestinian Agency. They don't give Palestinians enough agency and judge them accordingly. But what about Israeli government agency? It's true that Hamas set up an enormous number of a gigantic tunnel network, and that destroying the entire tunnel network could require destroying all of Gaza and tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of civilians along with it. What about Israeli agency? They didn't have to do that, Right?
- [36:23]
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah. You're asking me, is this Israeli government or the last eight Israeli governments massively at fault for thinking that you could hand money over to Hamas, watch it build those tunnel systems? We reported on those tunnel systems for 10 years, that that was something you could just turn a blind eye to and sit around. Yeah. The Israeli crime, other than, you know, if you're running a country and you make a terrible strategic mistake at that scale. As I was waiting to come on, I heard the commentary about the Iraq war and Trump talking about the. That's a. When you lead a country and you make a mistake at that scale. Let's imagine it's in good faith. Let's imagine you believed what you were saying. You, you own it. You own that mistake. And this, this, this leadership owns that mistake. And that most Israelis will tell you to the face, and most Israelis still want it gone. And I don't have it. Doesn't cost me anything to give that to you. I scream it in Hebrew. But the fundamental mistake they made was not believing Hamas. And the great tragedy for Gaza is that the Israelis absolutely believe Hamas now. And so when Hamas says, we're going to destroy all of you and there'll be more, October 7th, which it still says, the Israelis believe it, that is a disaster for Gaza and has to end or Gaza can't be rebuilt.
- [37:44]
Krystal Ball
One question I've been really curious of from the Israeli perspective, and I know you've got to run. Pretty soon we can put up E6 here. This is just one example. A reporter who does work for us and some other publications. Last night it posted on Twitter just what was becoming his nightly routine. So he's saying that, like in an apartment right next to him in Gaza. Yeah, in Gaza, in Daribala, there's a baby that the mother. He hears the mother saying to the baby, I'm going to get you food. I'm going to get you fed tomorrow, I promise. And by the end of the night, there's still no food. And I don't know if, if people can even hear this, but he just took a little recording of what he hears constantly. And it's a baby who's just hungry. And tired, but can't get fed and can't get the sleep that the baby needs. And I'm curious, from the Israeli perspective, does any of this penetrate. We're talking about 2 million human beings who are living. Living through some of the most abject torture, you know, imaginable, and people who have absolutely, you know, nothing to do with October 7th. Is any of this breaking through at all?
- [39:06]
Saagar Enjeti
Do Israelis know that the Palestinian civilians are suffering?
- [39:10]
Krystal Ball
Do they know? And how does. How do they think about that? And how do they think about their role in that?
- [39:15]
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah, that's a critical question. Many things are true all at once. There is a very clear knowledge that there is tremendous civilian suffering. Absolutely, crystal clear. That's not something anybody's confused about. There is an absolute belief among Israelis that the world's moral emotions about this are not fake so much as fundamentally driven by bigotry against us. And the reason we think that is that it's worse in Sudan right at this minute, and none of you know enough. None of you care. And that's something you hear from a majority of Israeli Jews, certainly, and also, I think, quite a few Israeli Arabs, probably not a majority. There's a sense that some of the discourse around Palestinian suffering has simply been untrue. There's been too much talk of starvation when there hasn't been actual starvation. And that doesn't mean they're not suffering disastrously. Families are literally for 13 months now moving between tent encampments in order to avoid airstrikes. There are no summer camps. There's nothing for kids to do. There's no schools. There's no. This is suffering at a serious and dramatic scale. But the invention around it of some kind of systemic system of atrocities that is purposeful and is not true and is meant to satisfy and to catalyze a kind of moral, religious feeling that simply has nothing to do with the reality and has a lot more to do with Israel than with the suffering of the civilians. Because, again, it's not the what about us? Argument. It's the simple. It's the selective outrage argument. You can't. You can't only think that way and only about these things. So, first of all, they are suffering. They're suffering disastrously. And so I want to say they're not suffering as much as you think, but I don't want that to mean they're not. They're suffering at 8. I'm just arguing they're not suffering at 13, which is just simply not happening. They're not dying en masse There isn't mass starvation. There are major problems in some places. And those problems are a huge problem. I have been very. I needed to say that before saying I've been very critical of the Israeli government. I, by the way, think that there's such easy ways. Easy, complicated, difficult, painful ways. But we could solve a lot of these problems. For example, if we have to move them out of harm's way, we can move them into Israeli territory. There's a great fear in the Arab world that if you push them out of Gaza, it's the next Nakba, it's the next displacement. So just push them into the Negev and then what are they arguing? That we're moving them into Israel and not to. There are solutions. There are Israeli Arabs who volunteered for the war effort. After October 7, Hamas kidnapped and killed 50 Israeli Arabs. A Muslim girl, 18 years old, Aisha, who is. We still don't know where she is and what's going on with her. There was a coming together of Jews and Arabs and Arab Israelis, Arabic, Palestinian. They also. Their identity is this complicated intermingling of identities, but they include a layer that is absolutely Palestinian. And what if they ran some of that, some of that humanitarian aid on the Israeli side of a border for people displaced? And once you move them in, you can also check them, you can pull them out, and there are so many ways to solve it. This is a government that in many, many ways has been incompetent. I'll give you just the tiniest example. Soldiers, veterans of the war. After 150 days, they missed a school year, an entire college year they just missed because they were off fighting a war. They come back and discover that they have back debt on the tuition payments for their dorms and something the government was supposed to pay for but never did. This is a government that has proven incompetent for Israeli civil society. 60,000 Israelis were fled the north. The bombardments of Hezbollah in the north over 13 months that shattered and destroyed cities entirely like 12 kibbutzim. And a third of two cities are literally demolished to the point where they have to be destroyed before being rebuilt. And this government hasn't properly followed these people and provided them education for their kids and social support. We are facing a government that a lot of what you're seeing in Gaza, a lot of the reasons they haven't filled in with easy solutions. You know, I don't mean to excuse it. This doesn't excuse it. It's just a different kind of a crime is incompetence. Is just incapacity. So there are so many ways to deal with this better that I desperately wish Israel was dealing with it better. At the same time, I share the general Israeli view that I don't entirely trust the world's moral emotions because give us a better way to fight this war.
- [43:39]
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- [44:25]
Krystal Ball
Now.
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- [46:07]
Krystal Ball
I'm sure you saw these comments from the Jordanian foreign minister where he said, look, create a Palestinian state. Every single Arab nation will recognize Israel tomorrow and we will coexist peacefully. Just create a Palestinian state. And so you're saying, give us a way to fight the war differently. It feels like Israel feels like its only way to survive is to fight forever. That it is in a dangerous neighborhood of people who will want it gone, driven by bigotry until the ideologies were good. They want them gone, they want them driven into the sea. And so they have to fight forever. Despitedespite countries like the uae, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, on and on saying, create a Palestinian state. We're done with this. We want to move on with this. We'll recognize Israel. But why this clinging to the belief that war is the only path forward? And can war, sustainable, endless war, really be the basis for a safe and secure livelihood in a country that wants to be kind of Western? You want to have cafes and startups and clubs, and doing that under a constant war feels kind of unsustainable.
- [47:27]
Saagar Enjeti
We, I feel like we're on different sides of some of these divides and that's producing very, very good questions. So thank you for that really fundamental question. I don't mean that sarcastically. I mean it absolutely seriously. The simple point on the west bank, the Israeli political left hasn't won an election since the second intifada, since 140 suicide bombings ended the Oslo peace process. And it hasn't really been able to tell Israel Israelis a new story. And what you're asking, what the Jordanian foreign minister wishes, was that the Israeli public public debate had another story. The Israelis currently believe that if we pull out of the west bank, it'll go the way Gaza went before six, five years before pulling out of Gaza. We pulled out of south Lebanon after 18 years. That was basically our Afghanistan. We moved in to take care of terrorists and then we ended up getting stuck for 18 years and bogged down and pulled out badly and the bad guys took over when we left. That has turned into a disaster for us. Every single unilateral withdrawal turned into a disaster. And the attempt at a multilateral or bilateral peace ended in the second intifada with 140 suicide bombings. So the Israeli public, and I mean left voting Israeli public that to this day wants A Palestinian state genuinely believes that if we pull out of the west bank for a Palestinian state, it'll end disastrously in rivers of blood and we're going to have to retake it. The west bank is the highlands that overlook all of our major cities. The west bank shrinks us down to nine miles wide in the middle. You know, people hear about this place so much, I don't know if they understand just how tiny this little land in which Israelis and Palestinians live actually is. And so it feels existential, the question of pulling out of the West Bank. And again, to left wingers who want a Palestinian state, to right wingers there's even more. So and so the question of just found a palace Palestinian state in Gaza. Sure, why not? It's easy. If there wasn't a Hamas there, it would have happened and it would never have not happened in the West Bank. It's a whole different question. I still think a two state peace is possible, ironically, if we do something that the Jordanian foreign minister mortally opposes and absolutely hates, which is a kind of confederation between that state of Palestine and Jordan. What if, you know, three quarters of the west bank, the Israelis can't be in the valley nine miles wide, so we push in a quarter of the West Bank. That's roughly what's going on in the Golan Heights. Israel doesn't control the Golan. It controls about, about a third of the Golan. To push back in 67, the Syrian artillery out of range of the towns in the valley that they were shelling freely throughout the 50s and 60s. So what if the Israelis push up the mountain range? They actually hold the high ground with the Palestinian state. But then three quarters of the west bank plus Gaza, all within a Jordanian confederation, that leaves the Palestinian Jordanian border wide open. They have an international border. The Jordanians are now the custodians of the holy site in Jerusalem that they actually care about. Al Aqsa, very little would have to change. Palestine wouldn't be this tiny little fractured state surrounded on all sides by this massively powerful Israel. As soon as you start seriously thinking about solutions, as soon as you solve the ideology problem that you don't want to deal with, and I understand why you don't want to deal with. It does sound like an Israeli escape hatch. Forget for a second the Israeli escape hatch. It might actually be the obstacle to everything. You might be able to yourself become Prime Minister of Israel. This will still stand in your way. And it will stand in your way. If the Israelis are evil. This still stands in the way. And so if we can solve the fundamental ideological problem, it's unbelievably easy to imagine actual political solutions on the ground that solve everybody's security problems, policy problems. We spent 30 years trying to finagle our, you know, trying to sort of wind our way through the technicalities of the policy problems, because that's how diplomats think. And we never figured out reconciliation, and we never figured out narratives that actually allow the other side to come in. You want to know the big problem of the Israeli Palestinian conflict? There are wonderful polls of Israelis and Palestinians with some of the best polled people in the world. And there was a poll about six weeks ago, they pulled both Israelis and Palestinians with an Israeli firm and a Palestinian firm. And they asked the same question. Do you think the other side wants to exterminate us? And Both sides responded 90%. Yes. I mean, literally, one side was 89, the other side was 92. Both sides think the other side simply wants to destroy them. That's the problem, and that's what makes solutions impossible. First has to come the reconciliation. Then the political solutions are easy. As for fighting forever, look, we're speaking English. Every conversation in English about Israel is mediated through the sense that Jews are kind of like American Jews. We're not American Jews. I went to high school in Wisconsin. I apologize for the accent. I was born.
- [52:07]
Haviv Retig Gur
Hey, hey, we can bond over that finally.
- [52:10]
Saagar Enjeti
Glendale, Wisconsin.
- [52:12]
Krystal Ball
Oh, nice.
- [52:12]
Haviv Retig Gur
All right.
- [52:15]
Saagar Enjeti
We're not American Jews. We are not people who have discovered over the last 120 years the promise of liberalism coming true. We're the other half of the Jews. We're the actual survivors of the Holocaust. We're the actual survivors of 1300 per grums. We are the millions. We are the quarter million Jews stuck in DP camps three years after liberation America liberated Dachau and Buchenwald in 1945. There's still Jews living there that nobody will take in anywhere on earth, including the United States in 1948. They only start emptying out in 48, in May 1948. And those DPs are a quarter of the IDF in the 48 war. We're the Jews who had nowhere else to go in the world. And we are the Jews for whom the experience of living on our sword. Your question to me is, can you fight forever? The UAE wants to not fight. That's wonderful, by the way. We've never fought with the uae. There's never been a war. The Saudis, Wonderful. I'm a big fan of peace and normalization with everybody, but that they want it. And therefore it's possible. Iran wants us destroyed. We are the Jews who came out of a history of the 20th century in which the moment we stopped dying was when we could fight for ourselves. To the Israeli experience, everybody's living grandparents come from Iraq and Tunisia and Poland and Germany and Yemen. We are the Jews for whom the privilege of fighting for ourselves, of being able to fight for ourselves, is what redemption feels like. And so it's a great question from a Western perspective, can't we end the war? That's not an option open to us. No Jew can live in Iraq. No Jew can live in Yemen. We are surrounded by societies with an ideological commitment to our destruction. I wish we weren't. But if they say it out loud, then if it affects their policy, and if Yemen is at war with Israel, really, because of Palestinian rights, everything you know about the Houthis and the terrible civil war in Yemen and the 85,000 children starved to death, reach a ceasefire.
- [54:10]
Krystal Ball
In Gaza and see if the Houthis lift the blockade. Right.
- [54:14]
Saagar Enjeti
But it's about saving Hamas. Hamas, it's not about Palestinian rights. It's about the ultimate destruction of Israel. And they'll be there at Hamas's side in the next war, too. And so we have to. We are willing to fight because we don't have another option. If the other side gives us another option, I promise you, this incompetent government being what it is, and despite what you might hear, we'll take that other option.
- [54:37]
Krystal Ball
Well, I do think that was clarifying and I appreciate you coming on. Havig Retegar is a prominent Israeli journalist over at the Times of Israel. Love to have you back. We didn't get to get into the kind of politics of Netanyahu and Jinbeh and all that. That's fascinating and kind of broiling Israel, hopefully.
- [54:56]
Saagar Enjeti
Oh, you'll like what I have to say about that a lot more, I promise.
- [54:58]
Krystal Ball
We'll do it again. We'll get you back after Thanksgiving.
- [55:01]
Haviv Retig Gur
It will be a good Friday show, actually.
- [55:03]
Krystal Ball
Excellent. Thanks so much.
- [55:05]
Haviv Retig Gur
Thank you.
- [55:05]
Saagar Enjeti
Thank you.
- [55:07]
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- [55:52]
Krystal Ball
It'S better.
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- [57:33]
Haviv Retig Gur
Ryan, I'm really excited about this monologue that you've written. What have you got for us?
- [57:37]
Krystal Ball
All right, so yesterday Krystal talked about the way that revulsion at the ongoing slaughter in Gaza may have played a role in shaping how and whether people voted for Kamala Harris. As she described it. For many people it is not exactly a straight line from I oppose this genocide to I'm not voting for Kamala. But I think she's right in saying that it effectively colors the way you see the other arguments made on Kamala's behalf through a different prism. You need the moral high ground. If you're going to run a campaign based around democracy and morality, and it's reasonable for people to conclude that killing tens of thousands of women and children means you've ceded a bit of that moral high ground, I think her point is a correct one and you can actually take it even further, which I do in a new piece over at Dropsite News. I'll put a link in the description and here's a reminder to sign up for our newsletter@dropsitenews.com now. In her monologue, which I'll also link down in the description, Kristol accurately noted that very few voters say they made their decisions based on foreign policy, something like 4% or so. But to many voters, the time, energy and money that politicians spend on foreign war stands in as a proxy for their lack of concern for people here at home. At the same time, the four years of the Biden administration saw a disconcerting outbreak of violence around the world. Trump himself is a mercurial and unpredictable figure, whereas Biden is even keeled, at least in public. Yet Biden's four years were a bumpy ride of chaos, fueled significantly by the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Sharing the campaign stage down the stretch with Liz Cheney was a signal to voters that Democrats was a signal to voters that Democrats felt the cost of those wars was worth it and that we'd get more of the same in a Harris administration. In the postmortem so far, the Democratic Party's embrace of a more quote, muscular foreign policy, as they like to call it, has almost entirely escaped notice. But it didn't escape the eye of voters. In mid October, as Kamala Harris began to do interviews with friendly audiences, she visited the breakfast studio of radio host Charlamagne Tha God, where she took questions from callers. The first to come through was one of those questions that is often top of mind for voters, but dismissed in Washington as a naive misunderstanding of how the world truly works. Go to the talkback feature.
- [60:00]
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- [60:25]
Krystal Ball
That's, that's one of the reasons the America first rhetoric resonates, because nobody in America would complain about where money was going if American citizens every day needs were being met. So what do you say to that?
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- [60:47]
Krystal Ball
So interestingly, this was all a callback to the debate in Washington. The last time a Democratic president had pushed through a sweeping new social spending agenda, LBJ's Great Society, but coupled it with ramped up spending on the Vietnam War. At a press conference in the summer of 1965, one reporter told President Lyndon Johnson the day after a bombing of North Vietnam, quote, Mr. President, from what you have outlined as your program for now, it would seem that you feel that we can have guns and butter for the foreseeable future. Do you have any idea right now, though, that down the road a piece of the American people may have to face the problem of guns or butter? LBJ said that the American people would be willing to bear the burden. He said, quote, I have not the slightest doubt, but whatever it is necessary to face, the American people will face, he responded. Now, he was wrong, of course. And the runaway inflation produced by the war spending broke the back of the New Deal coalition, shattering organized labor and ushering in neoliberalism and the Reagan revolution. But according to Harris, not only could the American people have both guns and butter, they already had it. And it's good. Democrats, as they hunt for the culprit that cost them the election, are getting some of it right. Dramatically expanding the social safety net. At the beginning of Biden's term, letting people know that a better world actually is possible and then letting it all lapse as prices stayed high turned out to be a political handicap. Then, instead of attacking the price hikes as the rotten fruit of greedy CEOs with too much economic and political power, the White House shot down the entire notion of greedflation, which has since confirmed as a driving factor in those price increases. And instead they outsourced the fight against inflation to a Republican Fed chair who jacked up rate rates and with it the cost of mortgages and rent. Also, even James Carville says that maybe Bernie Sanders had a point. I think Bernie Sanders has some of a point here, and that is there were things we could have run on harder that have effective the minimum wage, it passes everywhere by 70%. I mean, I know that President Biden was fired and Harris was fought, but we didn't put it front and center. Democrats are also blaming wokeness, whether it's trans girls playing girls sports or the word Latin X or generally the rise of a more dogmatic approach to identity politics that became popular on the left over the past decade. Now, I don't think they're actually wrong to examine that dogmatism. And I wrote a widely read piece in 2022 on how the phenomenon was destroying progressive institutions while a culture of fear and silence reigns. But it misses a key factor in order to fend off the rise of economic populism in the form of Bernie Sanders. In 2016, it was those same party leaders themselves who turned to identity politics, portraying themselves as the true champions of progressive values and deriding Sanders as a single issue candidate. That issue being the economy. Here's Hillary Clinton going after Bernie Sanders.
- [64:01]
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- [64:05]
Saagar Enjeti
If we broke up the big bangs tomorrow, and I will, if they deserve it, if they pose any systemic risk.
- [64:11]
Haviv Retig Gur
I will, would that end racism?
- [64:15]
Saagar Enjeti
Would that end sexism?
- [64:16]
Krystal Ball
No.
- [64:17]
Saagar Enjeti
Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community?
- [64:21]
Krystal Ball
Now, suffice it to say, we did not break up the big banks and we did not end racism. My book, the Squad, goes over this chapter in painful detail, so I won't belabor it here. But now that Democrats have lost again, it's the very same identity politics they are blaming. It's an impressive two step. In 2016, cynical wokeness was wielded to fend off a challenge to corporate power. Now wokeness is being thrown overboard to save the Democratic Party elite from a deeper critique of their failure. But there's a more fundamental issue. Democrats are ignoring, the one brought up by the first caller to Charlemagne by continuing to think of American foreign policy and American domestic policy as distinct. The former the purview of experts in Washington, and the latter the concern of regular people. Rather than thinking of those things in tension, Democrats are missing the way that their shift into a more war happy party is alienating them from voters and fueling the perception that they have no intention of addressing people's needs. It's apparently easy to forget that the working class drifts away from Democrats that was Underway in the 1980s and 1990s was reversed in 2008 by Barack Obama, who ran as an anti war candidate against a party shredded by its spearheading of the disastrous invasion of Iraq. Eight years later, Trump bested Bush's brother and every other Republican contender this way.
- [65:46]
Donald Trump
On Monday, George W. Bush will campaign in South Carolina for his brother, as you said tonight. And you, you've often said the Iraq war and your opposition to it was a sign of your good judgment. In 2008, in an interview with Wolf Blitzer, talking about President George W. Bush's conduct to the war, you said you were surprised that Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi didn't try to impeach him. You said, quote, which personally I think would have been a wonderful thing. When you were asked what you meant by that, you said for the war. For the war. He lied. He got us into the war with lies. Do you still believe President Bush should be impeached? Should have been impeached.
- [66:19]
Mike Pence
First of all, I have to say, as a businessman, I get along with everybody. I have business all over the world. I know so many of the people in the audience. And by the way, I'm a self funder. I don't have. I have my wife and I have my son. That's all I have. I don't have this. So let me just tell you, I get along with everybody, which is my obligation to my company, to myself, etc. Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big fat mistake. All right? Now you can take it any way you want. And it took Jeb. It took Jeb Bush, if you remember, at the beginning of his announcement, when he announced for president, it took him five days. He went back. It was a mistake. It wasn't a mistake. It took him five days before his people told him what to say. And he ultimately said it was a mistake. The war in Iraq, we spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives. We don't even have it. Iran is taking over Iraq with the second largest oil reserves in the world. Obviously, it was a mistake. So George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes, but that one was a beauty.
- [67:24]
Krystal Ball
And he also beat Hillary Clinton by portraying himself in the same way as having opposed Bush's war.
- [67:30]
Saagar Enjeti
Mr. Trump, a lot of these are judgment questions. You had supported the war in Iraq before the invasion. What makes your judgment question?
- [67:37]
Mike Pence
I did not support the war in Iraq, 2002. That is a mainstream media nonsense put out by her.
- [67:44]
Krystal Ball
Now, when liberals see America first, they read it as xenophobic and anti immigrant. But Trump's supporters scan it as a promise not to waste money on wars and nation building while our own country crumbles. But the critique in that slogan and expressed by that Charlemagne caller makes an emotional link between issues that are treated as disparate and distinct by political operatives. The jarring price swings at the grocery store and at the pump combined with the out of control wars and the surge of migrants at the border combined to produce a visceral sense that our leaders in Washington were sacrificing the needs of regular people here in the United States. People's sense that the economy was being handled poorly by Biden was Colored by the chaos overseas. And his rapt attention to Ukraine and Israel, left little room for confidence that he cared what was going on back here. By pretending that the US could do it all, but then only delivering on the foreign wars, Democrats set up ordinary people to view it as a zero sum competition. When Harris says, quote, we can do it all, and we do, she is offering a version of conventional wisdom in Washington which loves to point out whenever people raise complaints like this, that wars are paid for out of different accounts than schools, or that much of what we're sending to Ukraine is in the form of weapons, not cash, which means we then get to make, make new weapons and everybody gets even richer. But even if that's true, most people don't consider themselves inside the we that's benefiting from all that. We just see money going towards war and our bills getting harder to pay. Think about how the overseas conflicts and the chaotic economy interacted with each other over the last four years. Now, one of Biden's most courageous moves, in my opinion as president was going through with the withdrawal from Afghanistan in the face of fierce military and media opposition. It wound up costing him badly. Thirteen U.S. service members were killed amid the retreat, and the airwaves were filled with the images of Afghans fatally swarming American cargo planes. It was chaos, and Biden never recovered from that. Now that chaos, which played on repeat, hit just as prices were rising in the COVID 19 pandemic was easing. People were tentatively emerging from lockdown, and crime surged, which in many people's minds merged with and was blamed on the George Floyd protests from the year before, many of which had turned into riots. Now kids who'd spent more than a year out of school never recovered. Then in February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Biden assiduously resisted a negotiated end to the conflict. In June, the conservative justices on the Supreme Court undid generations of precedent and overturned Roe v. Wade. The war in Ukraine raged on as the body count piled up and the US shoveled ever greater sums of money into the trenches. Wheat and energy prices fluctuated wildly. Prices eventually began rising at a slightly lower rate, but they rose nevertheless. And the response of the Fed to continuously raise interest rates and keep them high arguably contributed to the problem, raising the price of mortgages and rent. The migration surge at the border became too great to ignore. That too, had a Foreign Policy link. U.S. foreign policy in general has produced an unstable hemisphere with heavy out migration flows to the United States. During his time in office, Biden tightened sanctions and penalties on Cuba and Venezuela and intervened to fuel chaos in Haiti. The three countries combined sent the bulk of migrants at key moments. Moments. Then came October 7th, and the horrifying images it produced. Weeks of a relentless and indiscriminate Israeli response turned into months. Biden and his administration took a public posture that the US Wanted a ceasefire. Yet the attack only ratcheted up as the death count reached shocking numbers and US weapons and financing went up with it. Biden's stated goal was to contain the conflict, unquote, but it periodically broke out into regional wars. Shipping was effectively halted. And in October, Netanyahu, with the aim of defeating Biden, launched assaults on Lebanon and Iran, which launched their own assaults in retaliation. And the Ukraine war, with its ever present threat of nuclear catastrophe, grinds on. Does that sound like we can do it all? So I think if, Emily, as you think back over the last four years, you can imagine why, when confronted with Trump versus the status quo. But like, well, what I liked about Trump was that wages were going up, prices were pretty flat, and we weren't, we didn't have a whole bunch of wars going on. What I didn't like about Trump was that he's an unpredictable madman, kind of a lunatic personally. But if your alternative is all of these wars breaking out around the world and no certainty about prices and the economy here at home, immigration and immigration, then you're like, you know what, I'll take that in hindsight. So I think the good news for Democrats is that if they want to make a comeback, just stop doing all the wars. That's a big step in the right direction.
- [72:52]
Haviv Retig Gur
And I mean, even just changing, like I wouldn't, I hope they don't do this because I think it's cynical, but it's so telling that they don't even frame the wars in a way that is a pitch to the American people outside of Washington and New York. I think Joe Rogan recently was replaying this clip of Tucker Carlson confronting Mike Pence when Pence was running for president in the primary about how he sees all of this decay in America and wants to keep sending weapons and resources to Ukraine that could be spent on Americans. And Pence says almost exactly what you said at the the last part there, of course, the opposite. He says we can do it both. Anyone who tells you we can't do it both, we can't be the policeman of the world and take care of our own people has a very small minded vision of the United States, but it's not a small minded vision of the United States. It's exactly what's happening. And Democrats are incapable of responding to what Trump taps into, which is telling people exactly that, saying, we are not doing it both right now. We cannot have it all right now until we start cracking down on this adventurism abroad and until we start treating immigration like it does have economic implications for people, we can debate what they are. But Democrats don't even talk about it. Don't even talk about it in economic framing unless it's to say it's making us all better.
- [74:15]
Krystal Ball
All right. Well, that'll do it for us today.
- [74:17]
Haviv Retig Gur
That was so interesting.
- [74:18]
Krystal Ball
Enjoy your Thanksgiving. Well, thank you. I'm glad you liked it.
- [74:20]
Haviv Retig Gur
And you'll be in Vermont for the.
- [74:21]
Krystal Ball
Next year, I think. We think we're going to go to Vermont for Thanksgiving, maybe do a little skiing if it snows, hopefully. Whoa.
- [74:26]
Haviv Retig Gur
All right. That'll be a lot of fun. I'll be back here with Crystal. Stockers headed off to Japan on his honeymoon. So Crystal and I will be holding on the four girls shows tomorrow, Monday and Tuesday.
- [74:38]
Krystal Ball
Wonderful. All right. See you guys soon. See Gladiator 2 only in theaters November 22nd. This film delivers action, an emotional and compelling story, and performances in spectacle on a scale unlike anything else. Gladiator 2 stands out with its immersive visuals and a gripping character driven narrative. The film stars an extraordinary cast, including Paul Mezcal, Pedro Pascal, Denzel Washington and Connie Nielsen. Reprising her role as Lucilla. Get ready for an epic experience made for the big screen. Gladiator 2 only in theaters on November 22nd.
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