← Christiane Amanpour Presents: The Ex Files
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- [00:01]
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Jamie Rubin
This is a global production.
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Christiana Manpur
I mean, it was an absolute disaster. You'd have thought the United States would have learned that it's really hard, if not impossible in modern times to put a leader in a foreign country, an American leader, and say, you go run it. But that's extraordinary, isn't it? It's like pocket money to the kids. I'll take your export revenue and give it back to you how I best see fit.
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Jamie Rubin
Viceroy is a term that' says we own this place, we run this place. That is completely against everything the United States has said it believed in.
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Christiana Manpur
This model of might makes right, or even humanitarian intervention is more likely to fail than not. What the actual heck? I mean, seriously, I want to tear my hair out. Hello, everyone. It is the latest episode of the X Files and we thought we'd look back to look forward and back only as far as January with the removal of Nicholas Maduro by the United States. And then what the US Suddenly decided was its might makes right policy. And you're going to hear that exact statement from Trump's Bain czar, who is Stephen Miller. You'll hear about what exactly he said and how is that might make right thing working out for everybody. I'm Christiana Manpur in London.
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Jamie Rubin
And I'm Jamie Rubin in New York.
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Christiana Manpur
You know, Jamie, I just do want to say that I'm sitting here in London broiling the fifth heat wave of recent weeks is going to. Is being declared. And you know, if I was a swearing person, I might go on a real tirade right now because I just cannot believe it. As we're broiling because of fossil fuels and the inability of the United States and others to, to, to combat this. I read that Trump is paying various countries and companies to not put their wind turbine plans to realization and that he wants to pay them off. Don't put up your wind turbines. Nowhere here in the United States anyway. And here's the money for it. And please invest in US fossil fuels. I mean, honestly, it's no wonder nothing good is going on in the world. Not to mention American leadership. What do you think of that?
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Jamie Rubin
What I would mention about that is since, you know, I have a little bit of a knee jerk when it comes to China, what worries me about all this is that the Chinese have started to dominate the electric car market and they're dominating it globally. They've been preparing for a time with less fossil fuels, even though they are a great emitter of fossil fuels. They have husbanded their resources, they're not suffering as much from the lack of oil and they're trying to dominate the Chinese, the electric car market. So it's not good for democracy and it's not good for those of us who would not like to sweat all day.
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Christiana Manpur
Exactly. But I'm saying to China, bring it on, please. Give us your best effort and your best products when it comes to mitigating this catastrophe that nobody is really dealing with seriously, certainly not in the United States. And maybe that's a good way to start with, you know, as I said, going back to go forward because Venezuela pretty much was also all about oil. Right. The idea of, you know, removing Nicolas Maduro, putting a pliant Maduro light government in place that the U.S. can, can, can, can govern and rule and dictate to, in the end, everything you hear from the Trump administration is that we want to direct their oil reserves and make sure Americans get the best deal when it comes to more capacity on fossil fuels. But Jamie, let's talk about that being the kickoff for Trump 2.0. Worldview of might makes right.
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Jamie Rubin
Well, you're right and we'll get to Stephen Miller in a moment. But look, people don't like this phrase because it sounds goofy. Rules based order. What does that mean? It means that the states, the countries of the world, have agreed on some basic principles of how to operate. Whether that's related to trade, whether it's related to law, whether it's related to the use of military power, and that they have forums like the UN Security Council or NATO or other ways to try to enforce this rules based order so that people can go about their business, of doing business, thriving, improving people's lives. That rules based order, that underlying structure, is what has brought peace and prosperity at least until recently to Europe and Asia after thousands of years of warfare. And it's that rules and the United States that is being, and the United States that is being challenged by this administration's thinking, argumentation and in some cases their specific words, which we'll get to in a moment.
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Christiana Manpur
Okay, let's just do it. That's Q Stephen Miller. Now, who is Stephen Miller? He is the deportation czar. He's also deputy, I think deputy chief of staff. But nonetheless, a very senior advisor to President Trump in the White House has his ear all the time. After the US did that lightning raid on Venezuela at the dawn of this new year and lifted Nicolas Maduro basically from his bed, marched him first by helicopter and then in chains to prison in New York where he is still languishing awaiting, I guess, some kind of trial. We'll see. But this is what Stephen Miller, full of brio and bravado, told CNN's Jake Tapper just days afterwards. The United States of America is running
- [06:20]
Jamie Rubin
Venezuela by definition, that's true, Jake. We live in a law or, sorry,
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Christiana Manpur
we live in a world in which you can, you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else,
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Jamie Rubin
but we live in a world in
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Christiana Manpur
the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.
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Jamie Rubin
These are the iron laws of the world. But are you saying since the beginning of time.
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Christiana Manpur
So Stephen Miller talking to Jake, Jake Tapper of CNN and laying down the law. Now, Jamie, with more than six months between that statement and including a new war that is Iran, which we're going to get to later, how is it looking for this new worldview, this doctrine that they laid out?
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Jamie Rubin
Well, look, that doctrine I think is relevant because it does seem to underlie the way the president thinks about foreign policy. And in our system, the president has extreme power when it comes to foreign affairs and the governing of international relations. And this president has been not spent much time on what we would call values issues, democratic issues, human rights issues, international law, all of those things that previous presidents, including George W. Bush, believed were important parts of America's foreign policy leadership. Instead, he has cozied up is the right word to the likes of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, the leaders of Russia and China, who are authoritarian leaders, who don't believe in a rules based order, who want to gobble up, in Putin's case, Ukraine without anybody being able to do anything about it, and in the case of China, possibly Taiwan, who don't believe that every country has the same rights. China itself has said we're a big power, we get more influence, more power, more role in East Asia than anyone else because we're the biggest country. That's not the way rules based order, however bad it sounds, is supposed to work. And that's what this theory is challenging.
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Christiana Manpur
So that's Russia and China. Let's bring it right back home to the Americas. And President Trump has been loudly musing about a number of 51st states. I mean, soon they're going to be 55. He keeps talking about, you know, first it was Canada, Greenland, Panama, do you remember? And Venezuela. He has actually mused that Venezuela, which they now govern, could also be a 51st state based entirely on the issue of oil, as far as I can determine from all their public statements on it. Now, the New York Times, one of our favorite newspapers, did a very interesting profile on the nature of America running Venezuela, which it is run by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who's also the National Security Advisor and who apparently is the Viceroy of Venezuela. Let us just first say what a viceroy is. So Viceroy, you heard it used in Southeast Asia by the Brits. You've heard it used in Latin America way, way a couple of hundred years ago when, you know, Spanish territories were run by viceroys until the Latin Americans, you know, completely rebelled and demanded their freedom back in the early 19th century. But Viceroy is a title that is being thrown around about Rubio because President Trump basically said he should be leading Venezuela. How is that good for America? And do you think Rubio is doing a competent job? What is a competent job?
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Jamie Rubin
Well, let's start with this idea. In invading Venezuela and grabbing Maduro and declaring Rubio the Viceroy, the Trump administration overthrew dozens, if not hundreds of years of America's foreign policy and its diplomacy, which was specifically designed to change the perception of the United States, which used to do things like that in Latin America in the 1800s, which used to invade and control small Caribbean states or places in South America, and worked very, very, very hard over the last 50 years during the Cold War and afterwards, to change the perception of the United States as a Yankee imperialist. So let's get down to it. Viceroy is an imperialist term. It was used for the Viceroy of India when the United King ran India as part of its kingdom. Viceroy is a term that says, we own this place, we run this place. That is completely against everything the United States has said it believed in, going back to, let's say, Woodrow Wilson's 14 points in World War I called self determination, namely, that the country itself should determine who rules it. So by declaring himself Viceroy, by behaving as a viceroy, by being comfortable with the term Viceroy, we've undermined this perception that that used to exist. And I want to give you a concrete example and not go on too long. You know, during the Clinton years, the same problem arose. We had a situation in Haiti. But we didn't believe that it was the United States job to run Latin America. So we got a vote in the United Nations Security Council. All the countries of the world supported the United States leading a military intervention in Haiti. It was a remarkable moment that was rejecting imperialism because we were saying that the United States was going to get support and a vote from Russia, China, from all the Latin American countries, including Brazil, to intervene because it was in the interest of everybody in the region. That's the other extreme from where we are now.
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Christiana Manpur
You know, it's interesting. I covered that, and I remember spending hours and hours and hours on the roof of the main hotel there while Americas are. Diplomats and military chiefs were there. You know, there was. I think Jimmy Carter came for the. For the Clinton administration.
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Jamie Rubin
Certainly Colin Powell and Sam Nunn.
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Christiana Manpur
Yes, yes. Colin Powell was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs back then. Sam Nunn was a big.
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Jamie Rubin
No, he was. It was after he was chairman, but he would. But he was brought in as a special envoy.
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Grainger Advertiser
Okay.
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Jamie Rubin
He was just in private citizen brought in by Clinton for, you know, bipartisanship.
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Christiana Manpur
Okay. And Sam Nunn was a big wig in the Senate. Maybe he was head of the Senate. I don't know. Probably not. But anyway, he was a big wig in the Senate, the Georgia Democrat. And I just remember watching all that. The Marines landed in the end. It was not a contested landing. They thought it might be, but it wasn't. They had managed to convince the Haitians that actually they didn't stand a chance against the US Military. And then, you know, a lot of American and international UN Help started to arrive. And in the end, Jamie, it didn't really work. They came to bring back a leader called Aristide to get rid of the military dictator who was called Raul Cedras. But it didn't really work. And I keep going back to Haiti as an example of using all that American might, whether it's force or not, and it just didn't work. But let's just bring it back to Venezuela and actually soon to Iran. It essentially means that this model of might makes right or even humanitarian intervention is more likely to fail than not. I know there are exceptions. Kosovo, Bosnia and others are exceptions, even Sierra leone in the 90s. But it's very troubling. I read Jamie with. With some irony that wasn't reflected in the. In the Times that this viceroy business about Rubio, who. He doesn't call himself that and nor is he officially called that. It's just. That's what he's looking like it's unseen, they say, since Paul Bremer in Iraq after the 2003 intervention with no PS and that was a disaster. Everybody. Does anybody remember that Paul Bremer was the hand plucked by the Defense Department, by the Pentagon, essentially governor of Iraq after the invasion, and literally took it from bad to much, much worse. I mean, it was an absolute disaster. You'd have thought the United States would have learned that it's really hard, if not impossible in modern times to put a leader in a foreign country, an American leader, and say, you go run it. Yeah. I don't know what they, I don't know what Trump is thinking.
- [15:02]
Jamie Rubin
But let me just remember, in Venezuela, we don't, we don't have hundreds of thousands of troops either. So it's all being done by the telephone. Basically, Rubio and the president threatened to use force again and that convinced the vice president, Ms. Rodriguez, to cooperate with the Trump administration. And he, she apparently cooperates with Rubio on various personnel appointments and decisions. And American officials are traveling there and trying to, to restore some form of oil industry to deal with the earthquake that recently hit. But if you're asking me, is Venezuela a markedly better place today than it was before Maduro, I think the average Venezuelan would probably say no. Is it better to not have Maduro running the place? Maybe, yeah. But who's running the place? Basically, Maduro's system is running the place. And there's no evidence that the United States wants to see what we call self determination. In other words, elections where Venezuelans would decide who runs them when the subject of elections comes up. We don't hear much from the Trump administration about the importance of elections. And that's the problem. Either you're going to make it work practically and forget about democratic values, or at least you should get the people whose country you're in, let them make their own decisions and if they're going to fail, fail on their own terms, having elected their own leaders.
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Christiana Manpur
Yeah. And on that note about the elections, clearly many, many Venezuelans and certainly the DIASP diaspora hoped that there, this would lead to a democratic transition. And even Rubio has apparently said that the whole earthquake has set that idea back, that idea of transition back for who knows how long. And the Trump administration has also fallen afoul of the main democratic leader, Ms. Machado, who actually won a Nobel Prize, then decided to hand it over to President Trump, thinking that he would help the transition to democracy. And as yet, she's the one on the outside of Trump Inc. And Delsey as You said Delsey Rodriguez, Maduro's vice president, is the one on the inside. Just a note, Jamie, which sounded to me so paternalistic. One of the things that the United States is doing, according to sources both in Venezuela and the US Telling the Times that Rubio controls the finances. Obviously the government distributing natural resources, as we know, trades tax in Spanish with Delsey. But the US treasury receives Venezuela's export revenue and then distributes it back through the banking system there. Obviously always promoting deals that favor US Companies. Also obviously trying to cut Venezuela off from its dealings with Russian companies and Chinese companies. But that's extraordinary, isn't it? It's like pocket money to the kids. I'll take your export revenue and give it back to you how I best see fit. Is there any good side to that? Could it be? Could it be to, I don't know, end corruption?
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Jamie Rubin
If it was an international system that everybody agreed to, that the Venezuelans were voluntarily allowing, say, the IMF or the World bank or somebody to make sure that money was distributed properly and not corruption and that the money was distributed fairly and that it wasn't going towards favored people, you could imagine that that might be a good way to help Venezuela get its feet back on the ground. But that's not what's going on here. What's going on here is what I would call a minimal effort by the Trump administration to control Venezuela to make sure that, as you say, that at least the Russians and the Chinese and the Iranians and others who were playing a role there are no longer playing a significant role. That's fine with me. But it's not going to fix the problem. It's not going to get Venezuela's economy back on its feet. It's not going to persuade oil companies that they're going to have, you know, a transparent rule based system from which to rebuild their facilities. Because let's face it, oil is a very complex instrument. It needs an elaborate system of extraction and distribution, and it needs the confidence that oil companies need to have to spend the billions of dollars necessary to revive that industry. And unless I'm missing something, there's very little sign that that's really happening.
- [19:22]
Christiana Manpur
And meantime, unfazed by all of this, the Trump administration apparently continues to squeeze Cuba, which Venezuela has been with oil until Trump pressured them not to. There's a massive oil embargo on Cuba. Electricity is very, very spotty. And that would be, you know, overstating the matter very much. It's very difficult. And they're trying to find a local Cuban Delsey. And they have not come up with it, but they haven't given up this idea, this format.
- [19:54]
Jamie Rubin
Well, I think this does come back to Rubio. Let's remember there's never really been in an official who has had so much, at least power on paper as Secretary of State, national Security Advisor and quote, Viceroy for Venezuela. And really what it means is that he has Latin American policy in his hand. And Rubio comes from a specific tradition that has seen the Cuban revolution and everything that it stood for as the guiding light for his views of the world. And Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and other countries in the region have sort of been part of this former communist group of recalcitrant states that have worked together and helped each other. Rubio is trying to break that up. I think they hoped that Venezuela would be the first domino to fall and then somehow Cuba would fall as well. But Cuba and Venezuela are very different places. Cuba is a revolutionary state that has worked over, I don't know, whatever it is now 60 years to lock in this one party system led by Castro, while Venezuela is a much more complicated place which had a strong man who was a socialist, which is why Rubio hated him. I mean, it's ideology ultimately that Rubio is trying to change. But sometimes facts get in the way. And the fact is that the Cubans don't seem prepared to capitulate. And that's one of the problems here. There's this sort of black and white approach that somehow Cuba's going to one day just announce they're going to capitulate or the Iranians are going to announce they're going to capitulate to American demand. And unfortunately that's not the way the world works.
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Christiana Manpur
Exactly. And that's a brilliant place to just take a little moment to then discuss Iran because everybody remembers that when Trump started to talk about Iran, he kept referring back to Venezuela. That's why we've spent time talking about what Trump and co did in Venezuela and how it's turning out, because it really does reflect on what's happening in Iran, which is nothing good for the United States. Right. Look back to look forward. Look right now, Iran is still a giant mess when it comes to how to get out of this war. Jamie, I just want to read you a couple of quotes as we record this. The latest from Trump on Iran to Axios Barack Ravid, who seems to have a direct link to Trump's mobile, saying Trump, we are low keying it and only semi negotiating with them. What the actual heck? I mean, seriously, I Want to tear my hair out. So we're trying to squeeze them economically rather than militarily. What is going on? They are actually squeezing them. They are actually squeezing the Hag island oil terminal. And according to U. S. Intelligence, for the last last couple of weeks at least, there has not been any oil, you know, crude, Iranian oil put on these tankers to leave Hag. And Iran does have a massive economic problem. But, you know, these negotiations are going nowhere. And I guess you and I were both completely flummoxed when this past week we read and heard that even the Iranian negotiators don't know whether they can deliver. They're hardliners who've been empowered since the war.
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Jamie Rubin
Well, that's right. There's obviously deep splits in the Iranian government about how to deal with the United States. And the latest is they seem to have worked out with Oman a system for ships going in and out of the Strait of Hormuz. But the Iranians are not prepared to let that open unless they get concessions from the United States along the lines of the previous memorandum understanding. What does that mean? That means the United States needs to end its blockade that prevents oil from coming in and out of Iran and prevents them from earning hard currency. The United States will lift sanctions of some kind, that the Iranians will let them sell oil. All the things that were going on during those first weeks when the memorandum was in operation. And so what's happened here is President Trump has had these two ways of getting the Iranians to capitulate, and it's always described that way, which I think is one of the problems, and capitulate either by threatening to use military power in a dramatically new way. Go back to the early days of the war with thousands or tens of thousands of bombs being dropped on Iran, or economic pressure, sanctions squeezing them economically. The problem here is that the Iranian leadership is built on the premise of resistance. The whole Shiite revolution was built on the premise of resistance. It's not clear to me that the people that run the place are suffering in such a way that they will be the first to want this economic blockade to end. And that's why we're in this pain war where we're seeing who can take more pain.
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Christiana Manpur
The Wall Street Journal says that basically, quote, Trump's options for walking away from the conflict have again narrowed because they say, and we know that he had been ready to accept the reopening of the straight as an off ramp and somehow a victory in itself, that he would then pitch to the American people. That, as we've just discussed, appears to be, for the moment, off the table. Now, as you know, Jamie, it's not just about ideology. It's the Iranians. And Vali Nasser, our friend and a phenomenal analyst, has basically said that for pretty much 46 years of this revolution. Is it 46 years, something like that? Or is that when CNN started? It's 47 years of the revolution? He basically said, close enough, yeah. The Americans, for many, many reasons, including the hostages, the death to America, all of that stuff from the beginning, have confused an Islamic theocratic state with Islamism as a policy instead of nationalism as a policy that is being enacted by a theocratic Islamic state. And by that, he means that Iran is acting in a way to project its own power, not religious power, its power. And one of the things it wants to do now that this war has happened is also to kick out the US Military presence from that region. And, boy, has it been going after the US Military in the region throughout this war that started at the end of the day of February. But I want to do something now, Jamie, because as I said, and you know this better than others, no president has done very well with Iran at all. It's flummoxed almost every president except for Obama, who found a sliver of a window with the JCPO poa, the nuclear deal. But I first want to play Hillary Clinton's latest, basically, comments on Trump's diplomacy that she made on the podcast Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway. Here's what Hillary said about Trump's Iran diplomacy.
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Grainger Advertiser
Right now, I don't have any confidence that it's a good deal, but it may be the best deal Trump can get, because he doesn't really understand. I mean, he. He approved of a ceasefire agreement a few months ago that was a terrible deal for the United States and the region and international shipping, and, you know, the list goes on. So he really doesn't understand what is happening and what the stakes can be. A lot of our allies have watched this in total confusion. I mean, the lack of strategy, the lack of effective implementation, the lack of results that were trumpeted as what was going to be achieved. And people are gonna not just start. They have started hedging their bets. I mean, how are you going to look at the United States at least so long as Trump is there with any kind of confidence at all? So I think it's a major loss, not just for Trump, sadly, but for the United States.
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Christiana Manpur
So, Jamie, take that. Take what's the most important thing she
- [28:13]
Jamie Rubin
said, well, I think it's what she said at the end that, you know, as angry as you can be at the current administration, which, you know, we all have our own view of it. It's the United States that's lost here because prior to this war, even after the Iraq war and the mistakes that were made there, there was a level of admiration, of respect for the United States that still existed in the world. Allies wanted to be allied with us. They wanted to respect us, they wanted to trust us to help them deal with a complicated world with all of its multiple problems. And America was a respected leader. It was the country that many people turned to when problems came. President Trump has not brought any confidence to his military operation in Iran. And the result is that our allies don't know what to do. They don't know where to turn to. And it's really been a boon for Russia, for China, for those who don't believe in American leadership in the world, because the United States trust has been lost. And I think, think, look, however this thing ends, it's going to be worse than when it started.
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Christiana Manpur
I know that people do clearly have problems with the Obama. JCPOA didn't deal with missiles, it didn't deal with terrorism, it didn't deal with proxies. But it did have a arms control component that limited Iran's nuclear program. And they were abiding by it until Trump pulled out of it. It was, in that regard, a perfectly satisfactory deal that would have gone on for years into the. Into the future, despite all its sunset clauses and all rest of it. But I want to ask you, because it is incredibly difficult. No American president has ever met an Iranian major leader. Nobody's met any of the religious leaders, whether the Khomeini or the Khamenei brothers and sons, not even the presidents. President Clinton, though, did depute his secretary of state at one point to try to make things a little bit better under the Khatami presidency. Right. Madeleine Albright apologized for the 1952 coup, and then there was some sanctions lifted. What did that lead to?
- [30:27]
Jamie Rubin
Well, it was a hopeful time. Remember, this was the late 90s. A lot of things were changing in the world. Democracy was on the ascendancy. America was at the peak of its power. It was being called the hyper power by the French because we had such control and respect and admiration, and people were afraid of the United States. And Hatami was elected in a relatively free and fair election, and he indicated he wanted to change the relationship with the United States. So President Clinton, Madeleine Albright responded and did something they had asked for, which was to show something real. And it's small, but it was real. Sanctions were lifted on caviar carpets and pistachios as a signal that we were serious about it and an attempt was made to begin a dialogue. This was well before the nuclear issue was as prominent as it is today. Unfortunately, that was killed, I think, by the Iranian side, which wasn't ready for real change. And then we got to Obama. Obama had a nuclear agreement that I think was perfectly sensible. The only criticism I would have of it is that it was probably oversold as a way to resolve the Iran problem. And people around him started talking about this is the same as Nixon going to China. We're going to open relations with Iran and we're going to solve all of our problems on terrorism and Israel and not just the nuclear issue, but also their control of Hezbollah and their regional aspirations. That was too much for the critics. And I think had they just kept it to the simple goal the way we had with the Soviet Union, let's do an arms control agreement that improves both sides situation, but not give it the burden of resolving the U. S. Iranian relationship, that it might have had a better chance. Chance.
- [32:17]
Christiana Manpur
Well, whatever it was, it was better than this. It was better than Trump pulling out with nothing to put in its place. And look where we are right now, which is bad for the region and bad for the United States and frankly, bad for all of us, bad for the whole global economy and everything else. And just one other P.S. which I think is super important. Jamie, you know better than I, that America's war fighting doctrine is to be able to fight two wars at once. Well, apparently, according to official statements and the Pentagon and everybody else, that is a very, very unsure bet right now because, and you're hearing it now, you know, louder and louder, the United States is running out of all sorts of munitions that it absolutely needs for these kinds of war. And it's, it's being said publicly that's bad for the US in fighting its wars, but it's also bad for Ukraine, which also is running out of the interceptor, the missile interceptors that the US And Europe were basically providing. So all of this is incredibly bad. You know, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, who wrote Regime Change, they said that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Dan Kaine apparently told Trump that, quote, America's capacity in any future conflict could be seriously compromised by an Iran war, which would inevitably deplete America's stockpiles of weaponry and I personally find that very, very worrying indeed. And I just want to say for the people of Ukraine, it's a disaster because they are getting pounded nightly now. Odessa, Kyiv, all over the place. And civilians are really being killed in a way that they had not been as much over the last previous months before all of this. I mean, I mean, they're running out of. They barely have any interceptors now, the Ukrainians. It's absolutely a nightmare. And for us in Europe as well,
- [34:14]
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- [34:47]
Jamie Rubin
All right, recommendations? So everyone's talked about this movie, the Odyssey, and everyone has a lot of opinions about it. And I'm not a filmmaker and I could criticize different pieces of the puzzle. I didn't love Matt Damon's beard, but I think underlying this long three hour movie was a very, very important theme. And it's a theme that goes to the heart of what we've been talking about for the last half hour and that is a rules based order. What makes people behave, what makes them follow laws or regulations or norms or, or just what keeps society together. I think in a way the movie was about the fact that breaking what they called back then Zeus's law, when the Trojan horse was left as a gift of peace and then turned out to be the mechanism for the ravaging of Troy, was what Matt Damon's character was ruining for all those 20 years that he was on before he came home, that he realized that he had broken this law, Zeus's law of hospitality and peace. And I think one of the problems in our world right now is that those basic rules and those basic laws have been challenged. And when President Trump and his administration change perceptions about the rule of law, which to me is almost more important than democratic elections, in fact, it is more important that our society is undermined. Some commentators have said that the movie is about the fact that deep inside the barrens of the tech world, they don't believe in this rules based order. And so the movie is about following a fundamental law. Some people would call it do unto others as others would do unto you. Every religion has its version of this. But without some basic rules of the road, some basic expectations of how people will behave, it is very, very hard to make our countries work well to give children a better future. And that's what I think the movie was really about.
- [36:55]
Christiana Manpur
Well, I like that because I'm definitely a rule based order kind of person. I'm sure it goes back to my convent school upbringing, but I'm very, very, very big on rules based international order because we've seen and we've lived through the disorder. Look, mine are very different. Mine are two TV series. One is the final series, final season, the film, the fifth season of Hacks, which is simply superb. It's on Sky Atlantic and I guess HBO in the United States. It's absolutely fantastic. And it's basically the fabulous. Jean Smart plays Deborah Vance, an aging female stand up comedian. All three words are very rare. Aging female stand up comedian, Sorry, that's four words. And it's just fantastic the way she goes through her, you know, her comedy, her routines, her, you know, sort of insecurities, her wit, her brilliance, hardness, brittle as nails. And then this wonderful younger assistant of hers who's brilliant, you know, writer, writes her jokes and things for her, turns her into a human being and it's phenomenal. The fifth season is great. And then of course, I am dying to get stuck into the new Ted Lasso on Apple, which is this time about Ted Lasso coaching a women's football team. So in the aftermath of the World cup, well worth a visit. Okay, so that's, that's it for us now. Thank you for listening. Thank you for watching. You know, you can always listen for free on Global Player and you can always Watch us on YouTube by subscribing to our YouTube channel. You search. Christiana Monpour presents the X Files and Jamie and I will be back on Thursday as ever with with the Q and A episode. We love to hear from you. So keep those questions coming and you know how to reach us, as ever, on our social media and by email. Jamie, bye bye from London for now.
- [38:54]
Jamie Rubin
Goodbye from New York. This has been a global production.
- [39:07]
Christiana Manpur
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