← Christiane Amanpour Presents: The Ex Files
Christiane Amanpour Presents: The Ex Files
The Ugly American: the real cost of Trump and Musk's aid cuts
00:42:03
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- [00:03]
Christiane Amanpour
This is a Global Player original podcast. How do you like my East Hampton tan? Is it showing up?
- [00:09]
Jamie Rubin
And my France and Italy tan?
- [00:11]
Christiane Amanpour
I haven't.
- [00:11]
Jamie Rubin
I. I found my phone, guys. I found my phone. So we're back.
- [00:15]
Christiane Amanpour
What the hell happened to your phone?
- [00:16]
Jamie Rubin
You don't want to know. I'm so angry. It's. It's island. Island life. Hello, everyone. You may have just heard us kind of joking about our holidays, but frankly, there's nothing funny what's going on in the United States where a whole bunch of young kids were on their holiday in a camp in Texas, a holiday camp, and they were swept by a wall of water. And most of those have not been found, certainly not alive. And there is a terrible, terrible dilemma about why this happened. Why about the forecasting. What about the emergency rescue? What about the emergency signaling? And some people, even meteorologists in the United States, are now on the air saying that they have no confidence in predicting the upcoming hurricane season because in part due to all the cuts that the Trump administration has made to critical forecasting and science. So that's one thing we're going to talk about, but we're going to talk about it in the bigger picture of what? All these cuts to science, but also to usaid, in other words, America's foreign aid program and humanitarian aid, not to mention Britain's and Europe's as well. What does this all mean in terms of soft power? And do we have to get used to a world where we who live in these rich, affluent and democratic countries with values are now gonna cut off those values and refuse to help people in the rest of the world? What does it mean not just in terms of humanitarianism, but also in terms of who steps in, who begins to take charge of our world. Because soft power is not just for the faint hearted. Soft power is real. Hello and welcome to the X Files with me, Christiana Manpour and Jamie Rubin. So I'm a longtime correspondent and anchor.
- [02:18]
Christiane Amanpour
For cnn and I am a two time senior diplomat at the State Department under Presidents Biden and President Clinton, to.
- [02:25]
Jamie Rubin
Be honest with you. There's a lot that we've seen on both sides of journalism and government in this humanitarian and foreign aid space. So let's get started. We're going to first talk about basically the breaking news and that is the ongoing tragedy in Texas and what's happened to all those little children, little girls who are in a special camp, Camp mystic, it was called summer camp and already bodies have been found. And there's many others who've been touched in other parts of that same area by this terrible flood of water. So, Jamie, do you feel comfortable linking what just happened with the cuts that President Trump has enacted from day one in all the executive orders?
- [03:14]
Christiane Amanpour
Look, it's probably not possible, nor really we should be pointing a finger like that. And so directly, because who knows whether a better prediction would have yielded a better preparation on the part of the people at this camp. But what we can say is that to cut off our nose, that is the ability to predict climate, predict weather, because scientists came up with the conclusion, verified by everyone in the scientific community, that climate change has a man made component. That's what motivated the Trump and Musk people. And think about that. Musk claims to be this great environmentalist who has electric cars, and yet he allowed the Trump administration and his people, allowed them to cut at the weather service precisely because they don't like the conclusions the weather service goes to. Someday, somehow, some way, those cuts will hurt or harm or kill people. Whether it happened in this case, whether it's gonna happen down the road, it's hard to know. And I don't think that finger should be particularly blamed at a time like this. But we know that cutting science, cutting knowledge, can kill people.
- [04:29]
Jamie Rubin
And he has rolled back so much in the climate space, you can't even name all the departments, but it's essentially complete. It's almost, as somebody said, we are now sleepwalking into climate catastrophe and nobody right now is paying a huge amount of attention because there's so much else coming at us. But it is the world's global existential threat. So this is not all about climate, this episode, but it's about what happens when vital agencies are cut. And Jamie, I'm just gonna add that Trump and Musk and you know this, we're gonna cut fema. So FEMA is the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In other words, it's jumps into full gear, full tilt when there's this, when.
- [05:11]
Christiane Amanpour
There'S an emergency, a hurricane, a situation.
- [05:13]
Jamie Rubin
Like this and all these things. And Trump has talked about cutting it. I don't know whether he already has, but this is what he was asked about. You know, right now with this horrible tragedy going on in Texas, this is how he responded.
- [05:26]
C
It's a horrible thing that took place, absolutely horrible. So we say, God bless all of the people that have gone through, through so much and God bless, God bless the state of Texas. It's an incredible place. Any questions?
- [05:40]
Jamie Rubin
Mr. President, are you still planning to phase out FEMA?
- [05:44]
C
Well, FEMA is something we can talk about later, but right now they're busy working, so we'll leave it at that.
- [05:52]
Christiane Amanpour
Go ahead.
- [05:52]
Jamie Rubin
You see, Jamie, you know reality when it hits you in the face. And by the way, can I just say that sitting here in Europe, the whole highfalutin and incredibly important build back green, of course, I don't have the actual name, but green infrastructure and green economy that Europe proposed after Covid and all the rest of it, that's like, in tatters. We don't know where that's headed either. It's not good. None of this is good. And people don't seem to, well, care enough, frankly. Go ahead.
- [06:23]
Christiane Amanpour
Well, let's just detail a few of the examples. I've been following this in the news very carefully, and I'm just flabbergasted. I'll give you a few examples that will appeal to different constituencies, but it shows you the absurdity of this. As I grew up in America, the biggest, most controversial issue in our country was the existence potentially of POW or missing in action in Vietnam. And this drove people bananas. Families were ruined by it. You didn't know where everybody was, and everyone thought there were conspiracies. And it led to huge tension in our country. There's a program now using the latest DNA technology to answer the question for these families of what happened to their loved ones in Vietnam during the war. They cut that program. More broadly, we can prove that hundreds of thousands of starving or sick children have been affected by the cuts to the Agency for International Development. There's no question about it.
- [07:21]
Jamie Rubin
That's usaid, right?
- [07:22]
Christiane Amanpour
That's usaid. And this one I just find appalling. You know, the US Withdrawal from Afghanistan was obviously very painful for those of us in the Democratic Party who, you know, had conflicted views about it. But nevertheless, after we pulled out, we provide food support, food aid for 700,000 people in Afghanistan and Yemen. And this musk guy, the richest man in the world, they wipe out these programs without a thought for the poorest people in the world. And why'd they do it? Well, they said, well, it's Afghanistan, it's Yemen, maybe it will fall into the wrong hands. 700,000 people's food aid is cut at the stroke of a pen by these rich entitled people who don't do their homework. That's what's sick about it. They just make these rabid decisions.
- [08:13]
Jamie Rubin
But let's just try to break this down because what they've done is seriously unconscionable. They talk about waste, corruption, and no Need I need you to tell me from a government position why a little bit of reform is obviously never goes amiss, but how this overnight destruction and complete dismantling of humanitarian aid is absolutely not the way to go. What in your time in government were the warning signs or reasons people talked about humanitarian aid disparagingly?
- [08:48]
Christiane Amanpour
Jamie, When I started my first job in the executive branch of the U.S. government in 1997 as the state Department was an assignment by Madeleine Albright to see how to answer Jesse Helms, the most right wing senator in America, famously really extremely conservative. I don't think there's ever been anybody more conservative. Wanted to get rid of three foreign policy agencies, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, the United States Information Agency and the Agency for International Development. The very one that Elon Musk has just destroyed, whatever that is 30 years later. So this has always been in the bullseye for the extreme right wing thinking that this aid agency somehow is wasting American money and not pursuing American policy. And let me just say, I just read this morning the Inspector general of aid. That's the guy whose job it is to find waste, fraud and abuse. And he found it at aid, but he said it was no worse at AID than any normal government agency. Government has waste, fraud and abuse. Sometimes it's a small percentage. But what we're talking about here, and you mentioned this to me on the phone the other day, let's take this fundamental question. When they ask Americans how much they spend on foreign aid, it's one of the great statistics of all time. When you ask them how much they think they spend, they come up with some number like 25% of the budget. And they think that's too much and that is way too much. And then you ask them, well, what do you think we should spend? And they say 10% of the budget. Well, what do we actually spend? 1% of the budget. So if we actually connected what average Americans say to pollsters, granted what we should spend, it would be 10 times what we were spending before Elon Musk and his chainsaw destroyed the reputation of my country. For the purposes of showing off, I hope it's the first line of his obituary. The richest man in the world most memorable act was to take away food, medicine and health care from the poorest people in the world.
- [10:57]
Jamie Rubin
We're going to get into that because that also goes to how it is that governments and successive governments have completely and utterly failed to tell the story. Sorry, it's true. And you used to be at the podium, so it's a good one to ask you later in the program. The question is, and this is a kind of a brutal question, do people today care? Do people understand? Do governments give a flying, you know what, when they have so much else like Trump telling them about trade tariffs and this and that, like the COVID like the war in Ukraine, is this it? Are they just hoping that nobody pays attention and they can just cut this vital soft power and humanitarian life saving aid without anybody noticing or anybody caring?
- [11:40]
Christiane Amanpour
Well, I certainly hope not. And that's why we're doing this podcast and that's why a lot of reporters have spent their time looking into this. I mean, think about it. About Secretary of State Rubio, who had a pretty good reputation, often talked about the great work that aid the.
- [11:55]
Jamie Rubin
Let me stop you because we have that sound bite. We are going to play it because it is the height of hypocrisy.
- [12:02]
Christiane Amanpour
Anybody who tells you that we can slash foreign aid and that will bring us to balance is lying to you. Foreign aid is less than 1% of our budget. It's just not true.
- [12:11]
Jamie Rubin
Wow.
- [12:12]
Christiane Amanpour
And it's more important than he is.
- [12:14]
Jamie Rubin
Now a convert to cutting it.
- [12:17]
Christiane Amanpour
Well, of course he's a convert to whatever Donald Trump wants. That's what's so sad about Marco Rubio. He had a great reputation as quite a quality thinker in the Senate on foreign affairs, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. I thought he was one of the brightest stars in the Republican Party. How do you justify these things? One after another, Musk cut aid, destroyed it. While Rubio was on a trip in El Salvador working with one of the most right wing dictators there, and they were cutting probes, programs that were holding that dictator to account. So Marco Rubio has a lot of questions that he's going to face for the rest of his life about what he did in his time in government. You know, I always remember when I was growing up and you always said to yourself, when you learned about great moments in history, World War II, the Holocaust, all that, you know, what would you do if you were in power? How would you behave? Would you just go along? Would you fight? Would you quit? Would you be an honorable person? And that's what made me fight so hard for Bosnia and Kosovo when I was in government. As you know, know, I was prepared to get fired because it seemed that important.
- [13:23]
Jamie Rubin
I just want to end this little segment by, you know, by quoting yet another acronym. It's pepfar, and that is was implemented by President George W. Bush, a conservative Republican, in 2003, and even those sainted Bono and Bob Geldorf, Sir Bob Geldorf, who's, you know, Live Aid and all the stuff they've done, things that save people's lives. And it's now the, I think it's the 40th anniversary this year. And here in the UK, there's a lot of programming around it and people should watch it. Because what two people were able to do and persuade a government and persuade the global community to save lives was absolutely incredible. They praised an otherwise conservative president who they didn't like very much, George W. Bush. For pepfar, it's a program to send antiretroviral drugs to mostly Africa and to prevent HIV turning into aids and specifically also especially to stop the transmission of mother to fetus infection. And it was huge. And all this is at risk now. It saved 26 million lives and the cost was literally almost nothing in terms of GDP and in terms of the value of what it provided. And just before you get in, because Rubio says it's going to be saved, but there's no indication that in this chaos it can be saved. Here's one story. A doctor in South Africa, having got the, you know, executive order, part of these trials, got the Trump executive order. Now, months ago, she and her nurses in their clinic dispensing with PEPFAR programs and drugs, they had to make a decision whether to follow their medical code, Hippocratic code, and to bring women in who'd been fitted with particular devices in their vaginas in order to take part in a trial which was AIDS related. But they had been told to cease and desist work immediately and they had to decide what to do. Well, of course, they did the right thing. They brought the women in, they removed these devices, they told them, you know, what was happening. And right now, these people don't know what's going to happen to their lives if they're still alive. You read Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times. I mean, chapter and verse of huge warehouses of American aid, you know, medicines and this and that, getting dusty, not being delivered, people desperate for them, and then laying out in very clear order why this, all the actual aid programs makes economic sense and cutting them makes no sense because all of these millions of dollars of aid is now sitting, going rotten and going past their sell by date in warehouses. It's really a sad thing.
- [16:08]
Christiane Amanpour
Let me give you a few numbers just to fill out what you said, which was quite powerful. PEPFAR, as you said, saved 26 million people and it prevented 8 million children from getting AIDS. That's what you mentioned. That number is 8 million. It's already been established that at least two African countries, PEPFAR programs are not going to be able to continue under the current plans. So that's two countries where AIDS can run rampant and where many, many people will die or get sick because of the callousness of the president and Elon Musk and his team.
- [16:41]
Jamie Rubin
I think we're going to take a break now and when we come back, we're going to talk about why is soft power, that is, you know, all the science stuff we've talked about or the USAID and other government foreign aid programs and the information war, which is so, and the information war in the, you know, Voice of America or BBC World Service or whatever you might call it in Europe, it's Radio Free Europe. All of these things, why they matter and why cutting them back is simply absolute catnip for all the people who you don't want to help, all the dictators, all the authoritarians, all the competitors in this mad dash for political and global influence. We're going to talk about that when we come back.
- [17:29]
D
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- [18:32]
Jamie Rubin
Okay everybody, we're back. This is the second part of our conversation and we want to get to the heart of why soft power is important. I guess I was reminded of the value of soft power when I was at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. I gave the graduation address in May. And of course it was John F. Kennedy who started usaid, the American foreign aid program, because he had read this book called the Ugly American which was about America, the arrogance American, the imperialist America, the mendacious and the you know, mercantile, incompetent and. Okay and incompetent. Especially at the height of the Cold War, where the Soviet Union, for all its tyranny, somehow managed to be winning hearts and minds around the world because it said that it was for the workers and the working class. So it was for magnanimous humanitarian reasons, but also for, you know, absolute soft power was something that would strengthen and make America more secure around the world. So, Jamie, you tell me from your perspective, from your governments that you served in, why it was important.
- [19:40]
Christiane Amanpour
Well, soft power is part of the answer why America was a different world leader. Because John Kennedy and others realized that if we're going to confront the Soviet Union worldwide, we needed to show that, that our help and our support is not just about military games of global chess, but is actually about helping societies grow and thrive and become more democratic, if possible, and more successful, for sure. And that that battle that we're now going and enter into with China, which is going to be for the rest of my life, and I know we're going to get into that in a second, continues, and we need to understand that when we do it right, it really works. And I want to give one great example of that, of when it works. When we left the Clinton administration In the late 1990s, we started a program called Plan Columbia. Columbia was a failed state. They had a civil war.
- [20:37]
Jamie Rubin
It was Columbia in Latin America. Is that right?
- [20:39]
Christiane Amanpour
Latin America. And Marco Rubio was a strong supporter of that plan because it put together all the pieces of the puzzle in a coherent way. Tom Pickering, one of our great diplomats, honchoed, we had the Drug Enforcement Agency, we had the Agency for International Development, we had the Justice Department, we had the refugee work, and we had diplomacy, and we had the military aid, and we put it all together, and we helped return a failed state to become a thriving democratic country in Latin America. And I think everyone agrees, from the far right to the far left, that Plan Colombia worked. And that was a combination of hard power aid, military aid, and soft power, where you used all the tools of government and you transformed a country and you did it. And it cost us some money, not very much, as we learn compared to what people think. And we changed Colombia's trajectory from a failed state to a successful leading democracy who's now part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the elite countries of the world. In Paris, where I worked for a year, and I couldn't believe that after coming back after 25 years, a country that was a failed state in the late 90s for Zovitz Civil War was now a member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the elite of the elite of the world. And that shows you what you can do. And it was bipartisan, as I said. Marco Rubio and those who believed in work in Latin America supported it. So where is that Marco Rubio now controlling the aid, controlling the State Department and controlling the National Security Council when all these programs are collapsing and the winner is China.
- [22:24]
Jamie Rubin
Well, I can't help smiling, not because of what you've just said, but because of Colombia, because I interviewed later President Santos of Colombia, because he was the one who also perhaps aided by all of this American help, who brought the farc, you know, their left wing guerrillas into, you know, a peace process. And it was remarkable. So here's a few of my little stories. I mean, obviously when I was in Bosnia and there was the longest siege in modern history, created Sarajevo and the rest of Bosnia, America plus other countries, delivered their humanitarian aid by airdropping it into a besieged airport. It wasn't perfect and it wasn't actually good because they legitimized the siege if you like, but at least they gave aid. Frankly, I don't know why they haven't been doing that in Gaza. We can talk about that another time. It's a disgrace. But they did actually. And every sack that I saw said, I think gift of the people of the United States of America. So whether it was Bosnia in this terrible and unjust siege or whether it was in Somalia where President Bush, the first President Bush intervened, based, and I will say this on incredibly compelling storytelling from American broadcast networks who over and over again told the story and showed the pictures of, of Somalis dying of famine. And this was a man made famine. It was not about the climate or anything like that. It was man made by the warlords. And President Bush in the end of 92 decided to intervene. And I was there watching the Marines come on shore, watching the milit military, you know, distribute aid around the country, watching the great aircraft, you know, cargo planes dropping with all this stuff. And they stopped a famine now to go to Afghanistan.
- [24:10]
Christiane Amanpour
So look, everyone supported the war in Afghanistan because it was a response to 9, 11, the Taliban allowing us Osama bin Laden to operate. Ironically, President Biden quickly realized that the right approach to Afghanistan was not try to rebuild Afghanistan, not try to make it into a modern economy or a modern democracy democracy, but rather let the Afghans deal with that themselves and keep our military focus solely on counterterrorism. That's what he proposed. During the Obama review in 2009. But instead President Obama, for whatever reason, surged our forces, tens of thousands, but then pulled them out under a deadline. So the Taliban just waited for that deadline to come. And then they began slowly taking back the country.
- [24:55]
Jamie Rubin
And then President Trump negotiated it away with the Taliban, just gave it back.
- [25:02]
Christiane Amanpour
And then President Biden implemented that plan. That's correct. But Meanwhile, over that 20 year period from 2001 to 2022, when all this was going on, we did spend an enormous amount of money on foreign assistance in Afghanistan and it was widely supported by both parties. President Bush did it for his eight years, President Obama did it for his eight years. And much of it continued under President Trump actually, until he pulled out. And some of those programs, programs were mistakes. They were done because foreign contractors would come in and say, I want to build a plant for this kind of production, which would have been appropriate in a modern western country, but was inappropriate in Afghanistan. Or they wanted to choose which crops the farmers would build. Or they tried to wipe out the opium crop, not realizing that that was the way these people made their money. So they tried to impose western values, Western approaches, Western economic statistics, economic analysis on a society that wasn't ready for it. And much, not much, A substantial amount. How much exactly will never be known, but was in the, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars that was spent in Afghanistan. And that was the part reason why people thought it was a forever war. That's what gives foreign aid a bad name. The right wing, since the Jesse Helms days, as I mentioned earlier, has had a thing for aid. It's true that a lot of the people who you might call international do gooders, but some of them are Christians, you know, devout Christians, some of them are from all walks of life, do tend to flock towards programs like agencies like aid. So they became the, the perceived target for, you know, cutting these programs. And it's a shame because, you know, you have one problem and instead of fixing the problem, you think throw the baby out with the bathwater.
- [26:55]
Jamie Rubin
Exactly. And that's where we are now. And just to remind, I mean, you know, I've seen that USAID and other international humanitarian aid is not just food and medicine, it's about saving women's lives. It's also about giving children sometimes their first ever school books. And just there's a whole lot that goes around it that is such a.
- [27:15]
Christiane Amanpour
Tiny percentage of our budget when you think about it.
- [27:18]
Jamie Rubin
But hold that thought. Infuriate because we're going to take, take a break and when we come back, we're going to talk about the cuts to essentially the global information. So how the global information war is changing because of cuts in the United States, cuts here in the UK regarding BBC World Service that's being resisted. But what does this all mean and why, finally, why haven't governments been able to sell the value of international aid and soft power to their constituents? When we come back.
- [27:57]
D
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- [29:00]
Jamie Rubin
Jamie okay, this is the last segment of this episode and we want to talk about a bunch of questions including who benefits from the West's, you know, retreat. Let me just first play a sound bite from the much touted White House spokeswoman Carolyn Levitt. She was trying to show, oh, terrible wanton waste and fraud and you know, inappropriateness in USAID, the US international aid program. Here's what she said.
- [29:29]
Christiane Amanpour
Doge and OMB also found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condom in Gaza. That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer money.
- [29:40]
Jamie Rubin
Honestly. Of course, when I first heard it, I went, holy cow, Seriously. But then when we do the tiniest little bit of scraping, not even digging, we find out that actually it's not Gaza. In Gaza, it's not part of Mozambique. In Mozambique. And it was a family planning program. So this is the kind of nonsense that gets spewed from the White House podium. And Doge, of course, she was mentioning Doge, which is much they found this.
- [30:08]
Christiane Amanpour
Great bit of waste because they have these 12 year olds who don't know anything about the world, some of whom haven't graduated high school.
- [30:16]
Jamie Rubin
They're not really 12 year olds, but.
- [30:17]
Christiane Amanpour
I know what you mean. I know. But they're. They're really junior officials who don't know anything, have never done anything in their lives other than sit in front of their computers and they give these facts to Elon Musk, who doesn't do any fact checking. I mean, one thing that's absolutely clear about Elon Musk is the man doesn't do fact checking. He just says the first thought that comes out of his mouth. And when they're wrong and they have these consequences, he should be paying a price for it. Yes, I'm sorry that he doesn't.
- [30:44]
Jamie Rubin
You remember Jamie Shea? Jamie, right. He was at the time NATO spokesman during the Kosovo era. Right. The late 90s. He recently wrote the Soft Power suicide of the United States will be incomprehensible to future historians who will be dumbfounded in their attempts to explain why the global leader deliberately wrecked one of its greatest national assets. Personally, I think that's a great sentence, beautifully written.
- [31:12]
Christiane Amanpour
Well, Jamie's can say beautiful things. He was a great colleague of mine during the Kosovo war. He and I were the two Jamies during the Kosovo war. Speaking from the podium, he's right on the mark. There's what I would call offense and defense. Offense is the voice of America, the BBC, the Radio Free Europe, the way in which you tell the world what's going on in, in dangerous parts in the United States, you give them real news, you tell them the truth. It's also when we speak about American policy and we project that around the world, that's the kind of programs that they've eliminated because they don't like. Sometimes these news broadcasts tell stories that Trump people don't like, so they cut the whole news program. But there's a defense side that I was part of in my time in government. This last round called the Global Engagement Center. And we managed to do some path breaking work in what I call active defense. We were able to use highly classified intelligence information. We were able to get it downgraded by the appropriate agencies and make it public. And we were able to destroy attempts by Russia to use disinformation lies to promote their version of history and to undermine the United States. And to connect this to what we were just talking about, one of the most successful things we did was to downgrade intelligence information about a Russian program in Africa specifically designed to get at what they hated. That America was beloved in many African countries for the health programs, like the President's anti AIDS program, like the work of aid that was so effective in making African countries and their people respect the United States, that they tried to destroy that respect by inventing conspiracy theories about such health work, claiming that these were bioweapons and being tested secretly on Africans. We downgraded that information. We made it public before the Russians could spread this news wide and we eliminated their program. And even as recently as the last two months, we found out that one of their African news services designed to spread these conspiracy theories was shut down because of the work the Global Engagement center did in putting sanctions on the Russian Television network and its parent company, Novaya Rossiya, its unilateral disarmament. And during the Cold War, the worst thing you could be accused of was being in a unilateral disarmer. You were going to give up your weapons without getting something from the Russians. This is unilateral disarmament. We're not doing the offense to tell the truth to the world and we're stopping our own defense to prevent Russia from attacking us and undermining us. It's one of the single stupidest, self defeating things I've ever seen in my lifetime.
- [34:00]
Jamie Rubin
And government again, soft power suicide, according to Jamie Shea, the other Jamie, but listen to back up what you just said, these incredible quotes and really, I think governments should read them. When all this was going on, you know, and, and VOA is threatened and all the other ones you were talking about, you know, the question of course is who benefits? The head of RT Russia today, she was like crowing about it, talking about Trump's awesome decision, saying that today is a holiday for us. China, their spokesman called it gratifying and hopefully irreversible. Orban of Hungary couldn't be happier, says one of his aides on X. So we know who's benefiting from America's, as you say, unilateral disarmament. But mostly America used to use all these to transmit and to broadcast. It was the megaphone for its cultural and moral and values and all the rest of it around the world. So, so what does America lose by handing over the megaphone now to these countries who I've just quoted, my friend.
- [35:01]
Christiane Amanpour
Rahm Emanuel has a column in the Washington Post today about what China's goals in the world are. And they are.
- [35:08]
Jamie Rubin
He's hardlined like you are.
- [35:10]
Christiane Amanpour
Yes. He was ambassador in Japan and he saw firsthand the threat from China to the world militarily, economically and diplomatically and politically. They want to displace the United States as the world leader. They want to eliminate the, what we call the rules based Order, meaning you can't invade your neighbors. Big countries don't get to dominate their neighbors. And he wants to eliminate America's leadership role. And they have a long term plan and they have the capability to launch long term plans. And one of the ways they'd been doing it was by helping countries around the world build infrastructure, by helping them choose China rather than the United States to be their friend economically, politically and sometimes militarily. And this whole unilateral disarmament in the information space, this whole cutback in the soft power is a victory for the Communist Party of China. They are chortling and raising champagne glasses in Beijing because of the decisions of Marco Rubio and Donald Trump. And those individuals and the whole group.
- [36:18]
Jamie Rubin
Of them, they're all in it together. Vance Hegseth, everybody.
- [36:22]
Christiane Amanpour
Yeah, it's a band of bozos and.
- [36:24]
Jamie Rubin
Congress, by the way.
- [36:25]
Christiane Amanpour
They don't have any idea what they're consequences of their actions. They're not able to think more than one day at a time or one hour at a time. And the long term damage to our country, as Jamie Hsieh pointed out, and as many have pointed out, redounds to the advantage of China. We are in a global competition with China. They're going to win if the bozos of the band of bozos around Donald Trump get their way.
- [36:50]
Jamie Rubin
Okay, that's the offense by them, but, or the defense or the, whatever it is. But you guys have not played a good offense or defense or whoever. I never know whether it's an offense or a defense. But here's the thing. I just read a really, you know, it's a lament, but also pride by a head of comms for usaid, the American international aid outfit, explaining how they had staved off the worst of a drought and by, you know, their programs had managed to get people in Africa, in East Africa, between between 2020 and 2023 through it. And yet there was no storytelling about it. Okay, USAID is 60 years old. Maybe people don't think there should be, but there should be. Just like you all say the Democrats lost because they didn't have a good narrative. All these other people say that we need to do storytelling. I know a little bit about storytelling. And you can't bring people along unless they see it. So I want to know why you think, and you were at the podium. Governments didn't do a better job not of saying how many, you know, targets they had bombed in Afghanistan or whatever, but how many lives they had saved here, there and everywhere. And this gentleman also said he was really bitter because all their efforts, okay, they didn't direct them to the, to the people of America, but to the Congress people of America who would come and praise them and would be very happy about them. And now, now these people are just letting it go to hell. And so why wasn't it something that you and others at various podiums would talk about to the American people? I mean, does the taxpayer know how many lives he or she saves every day, every year?
- [38:34]
Christiane Amanpour
Well, look, you've raised a good question. I don't have a simple answer for it. I'll try to answer it as best I can. There's a lot of reasons for it. I think as a society during the Cold War, we had a unified sense of our purpose in the world. And we understood that Soviet communism was dangerous to the world, to the United States. And we had a sort of a basic bargain amongst ourselves that we would try to tell as much of the good news as possible as well as the bad news. But unfortunately, when it comes to foreign assistance, I think there's blame to go around. I think in Hollywood they have have enjoyed writing about the conspiracies and failures of government for too long, ever since the Kennedy assassination. And how about journalists, Christiane?
- [39:23]
Jamie Rubin
Yeah, well, hey, I agree with you.
- [39:25]
Christiane Amanpour
Let me give you another example that you'll get a kick out of. Do you remember who the worst journalist in Bosnia was? He worked for the New York Times. And I spent a week at the podium defending the United States because of a story that said the Bosnian government, government. And the New York Times put it on the front page leading the paper had stolen a billion dollars of foreign assistance. And he made it up, pieced it together from potential tax revenues. It was a joke story. They printed a correction, but I heard it in the dentist's office. We were, I think, married by then. And I was so infuriated by it that I did what I rarely do, which is argue with the newspaper or media outlet. I got a 20 page legal memo put together to show what was wrong with the story. So journalists us find it easy to write about waste, fraud and abuse. You know how many stories were written from Afghanistan by the New York Times, the Washington Post and all the news organizations about waste, fraud and abuse in Afghanistan? That's easy to sell. It gets on the front page so people think aid, aid is, is a waste, fraud and abuse. Now, did we fail in our part to make the case for why soft power is important? Yeah, of course we failed. It's hard. Everyone wants to spend money on the military. The military industrial complex has support in every district in America and they get more money for military bans than we do for the diplomatic corps. All right, so this is a real problem that hasn't been solved. But to just blame the government I think is a mistake. Journalism has its own.
- [40:54]
Jamie Rubin
The government needs to.
- [40:55]
Christiane Amanpour
Hollywood has its share. Everyone has their share of the story.
- [40:58]
Jamie Rubin
We all have our share and I take it seriously and I tell these stories all the time and many of my colleagues do. You're right. Sometimes you can't get the good news sold. But listen, we're going to end now. I just want to say a few things. Europe is obviously aware of needing to keep up with the soft power and the information war. They are trying to add more to keep radio free Europe. The BBC World Service parliamentarians are desperately trying to keep that properly funded because for decades and decades that has given help and truth to people all over the world, including dissidents and revolutionaries and future democratic leaders who are imprisoned. And furthermore, and I found this interesting and goes to your point, the BBC commissioned a poll of 8 in 18 countries. It was a few months ago. They found that people who watch rt, the Russian state, Associated TV and cgtn, which is a state, Associated TV in China, listen to this. They were far more likely to say they viewed China and Russia favorably and to hold non democratic views. These are people in, you know, not in those countries alone, but in 18 different countries. So I'm going to end and I'm going to say are we back to the ugly American that JFK tried so hard to kill off with his soft power, his usaid, his Peace Corps? And our government's going to perhaps take a chance and a moment to think about what really helps them in this competition for, you know, not just global ideas, but global power and authority and morals and values.
- [42:34]
Christiane Amanpour
As long as we have this ban running the government, we are the ugly American. American.
- [42:44]
Jamie Rubin
That's it for this episode of the X Files with me, Cristiana Monpour and Jamie Rubin. We are back every Tuesday with a new episode and as you know, on Thursdays are bonus episodes where we answer your Q and A's. Next week we have a very exciting episode because it will be a conversation between my, myself, Jamie and his former boss, the former Secretary of State Antony Blinken. And there are a lot, a lot.
- [43:11]
Christiane Amanpour
Of pointed issues, a lot to talk about.
- [43:14]
Jamie Rubin
Gaza, Iran, Ukraine. I think he's going to make a lot of news and I think it's going to be a really interesting conversation.
- [43:20]
Christiane Amanpour
I hope so.
- [43:21]
Jamie Rubin
And of course, you know that you can always listen to the X Files with me, Cristiana Manpour, and Jamie Rubin on Global Player or wherever you you get your podcast. Do subscribe if you haven't already. Bye. Bye, everybody.
- [43:34]
Christiane Amanpour
Bye. Bye. I'm cutting off these sounds that I forgot to cut off when I'm setting up the damn thing.
- [43:50]
Jamie Rubin
Jamie, you're still not a techie. This is episode nine.
- [43:53]
Christiane Amanpour
All right, all right. I just did it.
- [43:55]
Jamie Rubin
I just lost my phone, everybody. And I just got reunited with it.
- [44:01]
Christiane Amanpour
This is a Global Player original podcast.