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Mixed Signals from Semafor Media
Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer on turning foreign policy into a podcast
00:48:01
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- [00:00]
Jake Sullivan
You know, AOC was asked a question about whether the US would come to the defense of Taiwan. This is the hardest question that there is, I think, because, and we've dealt with this up close and personal with the President who, you know, we advise, maintain strategic ambiguity. He went out and was just like, I'm going to answer a hypothetical question with a straight yes or no. And he said yes.
- [00:29]
Max Tawney
Welcome to another episode of the Mixed Signals podcast from us here at Semaphore where we are talking to all of the most important and interesting people shaping our new media age. I'm Max Tawney, I'm the media editor here at Semaphore and with me as always is our editor in chief, Ben Smith. This week on the show we are talking to Jake Sullivan and John Finer. These days they are lowly podcast hosts just like us. They host a show called the Long Game, which is a podcast about foreign policy for Vox Media. But before that they had slightly more important jobs. Jake was the national security advis for Joe Biden, also worked under Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. And John Finer was the deputy national security advisor for Joe Biden and also was formerly a journalist for the Washington Post. Had a previous life in media. Ben, you know both Jake and John pretty well through your times covering Washington. What are you interested in asking them about on the show today?
- [01:24]
Ben Smith
Yeah, you know, I think they. And you know, Jake was really running American foreign policy at this moment of just such dramatic change in media and communications. And whether it was, you know, the run up to the Ukraine war or the Israel Palestine conflict, a lot of what he wound up thinking about I think was media and then, you know, got to watch Donald Trump who has a rather different communication style. But I am very curious what he's learned and of course like why he's making a podcast. What are we doing here?
- [01:51]
Max Tawney
Yeah, you know, it is pretty interesting going from being one of the people shaping global events and outcomes across the world to, you know, doing host read ads and doing collaborations with shows such as ours. I think that that's a, that's an interesting care trajectory.
- [02:08]
Ben Smith
Are you saying it's a downward career trajectory?
- [02:10]
Max Tawney
No, I said it's interesting. I didn't say it was downward at all. I think that what we do is very important and very much on par with making global decisions that impact the outcomes of countries all over the globe. That's why we do this show, naturally. So it's worth mentioning also that because this is a media focused show, we really wanted to ask Jake and John mostly questions about the media. You know, there's a lot of questions that could be asked about various foreign policy decisions that, you know, look good, maybe that don't look so good, depending on your perspective. And they've given interviews and talked about that on, on other shows just for the, for the purposes of this show, we wanted to keep it really focused on media. Well, we have a lot that we want to get to with John and Jake, but we have to take a short break and we'll be right back with the hosts of the Long Game right after this.
- [02:58]
Ben Smith
Hey, mixed signals listeners. If you have, like me, spent a bit of time listening to marketing podcasts, you will know that many of them are just a bit too on message filled with PR fluff and recycled talking points. That's why I'm excited by a new from our generally quite blunt friend Josh Spanier, Google's VP of marketing. It's called Frontier cmo. It's from Think With Google. Josh is hosting unfiltered, honest conversations with the most disruptive minds in marketing and tech about what's really happening, what's failed, what's next, and the truths you need to know to stay ahead. These are your notes from the Frontier search for Frontier CMO from Think With Google, wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube. Jake, John, thank you so much for joining us.
- [03:45]
Jake Sullivan
Really excited to be here. Thanks for having us.
- [03:47]
John Finer
Yep, great to be here.
- [03:48]
Ben Smith
Welcome to the podcast trade. It occurs to me that it used to be that kind of officials like you, senior government officials would leave office and would have some prestigious chair at a think tank or would like write like a thick biography of Winston Churchill or something. Two years ago this time you were basically running the world, Jake. Now you're hosting a podcast. Is that kind of a letdown?
- [04:10]
Jake Sullivan
Well, I'll tell you, it's a big weight off the shoulders, that's for sure. Cuz I can say just whatever I think without having to worry too much as to whether it conforms to the President's policy or is gonna move markets or anything else. So obviously it's very different to be a podcaster than to be sitting in the seat as National Security Advisor. But there are some definite advantages and the medium, as you guys know, gives you an opportunity to really go deeper on issues and also to talk like an actual human being as opposed to a talk talking points machine. That's actually been a bit of an adjustment for me especially, but for John, I think he can speak for himself to a certain extent as well. And getting to Grapple with these issues and talk about them in absolutely plain English actually gives you, I think, a little bit of a healthier perspective on them and maybe will make us better practitioners and policymakers one day in the future.
- [05:00]
Max Tawney
Has the process of being a podcaster, has that given you more respect for your friends in the media who, when you're in a position of power, you think, gee, these guys are just saying whatever and they have the freedom to do so. But now you actually are kind of seeing how hard the technical nuts and bolts are. You know, those ad reads aren't as easy as maybe they seemed when you heard them versus when you have to read them yourself.
- [05:21]
John Finer
I'll just say I actually started my career in the media. I came to government in large part from the experience of having covered what I considered to be either failed or bad policy decisions and got very curious as to how they were made. Mostly I was. I was working overseas, so I think I came in with some inherent sympathy or empathy for what the media tries to do. I then, you know, like every other government official, got massively frustrated when coverage seemed to be inconsistent with what I. What I thought it should be, and probably took it out on my reporter friends too often. But, yeah, it's nice to be back on the other side of the firewall here.
- [05:56]
Jake Sullivan
Can I just say on that point, one of the things that I have a better appreciation for now is that a big part of the job of being a journalist or a commentator, an observer, is trying to make sense of events. Not just the what, but the why. And then the what then, okay, so why should people care about it? And actually, that's kind of seemingly obvious when you're making policy, but when you're on the outside trying to interpret policy decisions, it's more challenging and actually is a really interesting intellectual exercise. That is something that we've come to over the course of the weeks, but we've been doing the pod.
- [06:34]
Max Tawney
You mentioned a second ago that it's kind of changed your thinking on some. Some of these issues. Obviously, these are things that you've thought very, very deeply about. But can you think of any specific examples where, you know, you've changed your mind, you know, now having to be an interpreter rather than a player in some of these decisions. Are there any specific examples that kind of come to mind here?
- [06:54]
Jake Sullivan
I guess for me, it's a little bit less have I. Have I flipped on a policy issue like gone from believing X to believing Y and more that the discipline of having to explain to people why something matters to a broad general audience makes you have to sharpen your thinking about what are American interests, What are the stakes? How do I make this real and not just something that's kind of received wisdom or natural muscle memory? And we've done pods on everything from the use of US Military force. And how do we sharpen our thinking about what are the criteria for when we should and should not do that to US China relations? And how do you explain to people why do these semiconductor export controls actually matter? That wasn't. We just kind of were going with that in a way when we were in government, not just riding a wave or whatever, but you didn't have to stop and say, how do I explain this? How do I contextualize this? And in so doing, am I really pressure testing the ideas and the priorities that we're putting on things?
- [08:01]
John Finer
I think it's actually an exercise that makes for better policy or will help us make for better policy or at least policy communications going forward. Because one thing that people like us, I think, have not done as effectively as we should have, not just over recent years, but over recent decades, is stop taking for granted that people in the United States see things the way we do or understand the importance of things the way the way we do, especially things going on in the world. And one of the things that I think the Trump phenomenon has taken advantage of is a disconnect between people making policy and people who. Who are digesting policy just out in the world, who aren't marinating in this stuff all day, every day. And so he's been able to come in and say, well, why are things working this way? Why does the United States do these sorts of things in the world? Why does the United States care about things like these abstract terms like the international system or alliances and can drive a truck through the gap that we and others have left between what we consider to be just fundamentally important and the appreciation of that by many of the American people. So it does kind of force us to be disciplined about explaining why these things matter.
- [09:12]
Max Tawney
Yeah. Is that the reason why you guys decided to do this? And also, just to take a step back, how did you decide to do this podcast together? Who approached. Did Vox approach you guys? Had you guys thought, you know, during your time in office? Man, I can't wait to get out of here so I can do a podcast explaining foreign policy from the outside to people. How did this actually come about?
- [09:33]
Jake Sullivan
Well, Max, when I was a young man growing up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, I thought, one day I will be a podcaster I saw it coming long before does actually. I don't know if John has the exact same recollection I do, but after we left, like a week, 10 days after we left, we went skiing out west with some friends and then we went hiking in Bryce Canyon in winter hiking, late January, early February. And it was on that hike that we were like, hey, maybe we should do a podcast. We kind of talked through a. That we thought there was room for a foreign policy podcast that wasn't about hot takes and wasn't super partisan, but that was actually just trying to explain the why it put things in context. And the title of the podcast is the Long Game. Talk about a Longer Term View, a Longer Term Perspective. So we both thought there's a place for this and we thought this will be fun and we'll learn a lot and stay fresh on these issues along the way. So normally when you cook things up on hiking trips, you don't actually do them, but somehow we ended up doing it. Do I have that about right, John, or is my memory playing trick something?
- [10:43]
John Finer
I think you do. I think the only thing I'd add is somewhat serendipitously, we got outreach from someone saying that VOX was actually looking for content in this space and had initial conversation. And I think they agreed with the theory of the case that we were cooking up on this hike and the rest is at least recent history.
- [11:05]
Max Tawney
Who is listen to the show so far? Are you hearing from foreign officials? Are you hearing from, you know, diplomats, people you used to work with directly? Who are you guys hearing from? What's the reception been?
- [11:16]
John Finer
So I think both of us have had the experience of, you know, bumping into people as we move around the world or around the country, doing other things that we do and having them walk up to us and say, hey, I've been listening to your podcast and either here's some, here's some constructive feedback or I like this or I don't like this. All of which is great and totally welcome now. You know, I think it's also the kind of thing people say when they see you and they know that you have a podcast, whether they're actually listening to every episode. I don't try to everybody listen.
- [11:43]
Max Tawney
Everybody who comes up to me and who compliments me on the podcast is a full time listener and they've listened to all of the episodes.
- [11:49]
John Finer
By the way, Max, we love your podcast.
- [11:51]
Max Tawney
Thank you. Yes. You guys are huge listeners every week,
- [11:55]
John Finer
but I think it actually is you've hit on something that we're Very curious about because, you know, we don't spend every day scrutinizing the data and the numbers. We're trying to get them the content right and do as well as we can at this. And I am kind of curious beyond the people who walk up to us or email us or text us, like, who out there is actually paying attention, I don't have a particularly granular understanding other than I think our goal is to reach beyond the people who we see, interact with, used to work with every day to others maybe who have not been as much plugged into this content. And if we can do that, then I would consider it a successful.
- [12:33]
Jake Sullivan
Yeah, we definitely hear from current and former government officials around the world. We also just get a mailbag. We hear from people across the US Parts of Europe, other places, people writing in, responding to things, asking questions, suggesting topics and the like. We keep thinking about doing like a mailbag segment where we take some of the listener questions and kind of go through them. We haven't done that yet, but at some point here we will. But that's kind of an unscientific way of getting some sense. And I think there's a lot of listeners who follow Foreign Policy Digest, the major newspapers, the international sections of the major newspapers, but aren't like living it day to day, who are just looking for decent content on the topic. And that's the audience we're gonna continue to try to grow.
- [13:21]
Ben Smith
Your sort of description of why you're doing this, you're delivering that with a certain amount of discipline. But it occurs to me that during the Biden years, Jake, I think you in particular had this idea and talked about rooting foreign policy and the issues of the middle class rooting foreign policy in domestic issues in some sense. And I think, I don't know if you would accept this, but I think that fundamentally kind of didn't land it sounds like that's some of what you're reworking now and thinking about. Is that right?
- [13:45]
Jake Sullivan
Well, look, I do think that kind of across the board, as the communications and information environment changes, finding a way to make real the kinds of issues we work on for everyday people, for working people in this country, is not an easy thing. And I'm not going to claim that our podcast is going to solve that, but giving us the opportunity to test out how to think about, talk about, frame issues, I think is an important part of being someone operating in this space. It's not good enough just to think about the ideas. You've got to try on a constant basis to speak about them, to communicate about them in a way that can reach a broader audience. Because ultimately, trying to get greater buy in or greater understanding for what the United States is doing in the world is really important. I do agree with you that on some issues it was hard to break through or communicate. On other issues, I disagree a little. I think Ukraine is a fascinating example of a case where for people from across all walks of life, all corners of the country, folks instinctively, intuitively got it. And actually, the media pretty consistently underestimated the American people on this. They kept saying, oh, the American people are going to abandon Ukraine, they're no longer going to want to support it, they don't want to fund it, et cetera. But even in the Trump administration, support for Ukraine and support for the United States providing aid to Ukraine has stood up pretty well on a bipartisan basis. So I agree with you to a certain extent, it didn't land, and I think. But, but I think that was more differentiated across issue areas.
- [15:22]
John Finer
I personally am pretty surprised by the degree to which the Ukraine issue has landed with the American people and stayed consistent and front of mind. I started my career covering a war that the United States was fighting in as a journalist, the Iraq War. And I found during that time, when I came home, trying to get people to talk about what was happening over there was often like pulling teeth. People just did not want to engage on it. In part because I think it was a highly unpleasant issue, in part because I think there were real doubts about whether the, the purpose, the morality of the actual decision to go in was the right one on Russia, Ukraine. I think part of what I underestimated is how people are drawn to a narrative where there is a clear perpetrator and a clear victim, as is the case in this conflict. And it made it much more digestible to the average person, as opposed to the complexities of weapons of mass destruction or energy markets or some of these issues that have led to conflicts in the past. Even though we were not a direct, they stayed, stayed on it.
- [16:27]
Max Tawney
Because this is a media show. I wanna ask a kind of specific media question here. There was one thing that happened kind of early in the war that you guys did that I think was seen by a lot of folks here as savvy, which is that you declassified a lot of these Russian disinformation efforts. You kind of put them out there before they were able to kind of fester and take hold as kind of conspiracy theories. It showed a kind of interesting savviness about the ways in which disinformation in the new media worked. But I'm kind of curious how much time you spent thinking about media and the ways that foreign media was shaping some of the things that were happening abroad. How often was was kind of the interpretations of U.S. actions in foreign media being factored into you guys decision making processes?
- [17:08]
Jake Sullivan
Well, particularly when it came to Russia it was very front of mind because for Putin, owning the information space, being able to define what was happening was critical to his strategy. And what he wanted to be able to do in the Ukraine context was say Ukraine was the aggressor, Russia was under attack, Ukraine was starting the war, Russia had no choice, they got dragged in. And so to defeat that strategy it became essential for us to essentially narrate the war. Basically to say Putin is planning to invade, he's planning to do it in a couple months time, he's going to throw up all this chaff about how it's the Ukrainians provoking him. That's all going to be bs and we needed to lay all that down in advance so that Putin could not successfully own the narrative of that war. And then equally in other contexts we learned a lot from that. In dealing with the US China relationship, China actually puts a lot of energy and effort into trying to shape the global narrative. One example of that in this whole question of semiconductor export controls. They really want to sell the story, this can't work. They keep keep seeding in the Western press that China's had another big breakthrough which just once again proves that the export controls don't work at all. Meanwhile, their diplomats are demanding that we lift the controls which suggests they are working. And there's a lot of evidence to suggest they are. That's another area where I think the centrality of being able to be engaged publicly in a back and forth in the global media has an impact on the actual policymaking and the actual shape of the strategy that great powers are undertaking. And I think that that is going to be a feature of the landscape going forward. And anyone sitting in the National Security Council is going to have to think a lot about that.
- [19:01]
John Finer
Normally in a crisis something happens in the world and then you are responding to the thing that happened, some bad act somewhere. This time. Jake and I walked in one morning and the first page of the President's daily brief, which sits on our desk every day, when we basically that the intelligence community believed that Russia was very likely to invade Ukraine and we were like, huh, you know, that's a pretty big deal. And it would have Been nice if somebody maybe given us a call to say this was coming. But, you know, it looks like we've got a few months and we've got to figure out what to do. And so that was the advantage. The disadvantage was when we went around and started talking to our friends out in the world, by the way, including our friends in Ukraine, Ukrainians. Yeah. Nobody really believed that we were right. And, you know, there's a checkered history of US Intelligence predictions not always playing out the way we say. And so we were up against a pretty steep hill to convince our partners, our allies, the Ukrainians themselves and the public that this was likely to happen. And it led to us pushing the envelope a bit with the intelligence community. But we did it in a way that was hand in glove with them, rigorous in the sense of protecting the sources of that material and the methods by which we obtained it. Because obviously, you don't want to just undo your ability to collect intelligence by revealing this stuff. And it allowed us to be ready. And the Ukrainians, ultimately, once they were persuaded to be ready when the war began, began because we surged a bunch of weapons in that they could use to defend themselves right off the bat. And we got our European partners ready to impose sanctions on Russia not months after the first day of the invasion, but days after. And had we not been able to kind of present them with this pretty ironclad information, Russia would have been able to do this with impunity in the early days, which they couldn't.
- [20:42]
Ben Smith
One of the aspects of the Israel Palestine conflict is the media war. How much do you think the public should accept Israeli government claims about the conflict? And on the other side, how much should they accept? Accept Palestinian claims? I saw there was recently a report that the Israelis now accept the Palestinian death count.
- [20:57]
John Finer
I guess my general view is, you know, when a country is a combatant in a war, it's incentivized to present facts that are advantageous to its position. That's true of any country, including, by the way, the United States, in the wars that we've fought. So I think a good general proposition is not to take any presentation at face value, to sort of seek independent corroboration, whether from media, from other governments, from international organizations. And so, you know, I think that is true of the government of Israel, frankly, true of the United States government in the current moment, you know, given some of the presentations that are being made about world affairs, whether in the Munich Security Conference recently or, you know, going forward. So I think that's just a good General rule as a consumer of media to follow.
- [21:47]
Jake Sullivan
And just to follow up on that, John Khan started his career, he mentioned he was in media as a war correspondent, actually riding in with the U.S. military into Iraq in 2003. And the U.S. embeds journalists when we send forces into combat, whether it's in Iraq or Afghanistan or elsewhere. And those journalists are able to get firsthand accounts of things, see them, and report on them. As things stand today, I still believe it's the case that Israel's not allowing foreign journalists into Gaza. And that is a significant problem because it means that you're not getting independent eyes and ears on the ground there. And to John's point, that's true of any combatant in a war, whether it's Israel or Hamas. And the lack of access for international journalists to Gaza, I think, is setting back the cause of transparency. And we should be able to get the full picture by having independent media in there, being able to report on it.
- [22:45]
Max Tawney
On the one hand, we've seen a lot of investment in kind of Israeli propaganda, particularly on social media. We know that there's been paid influencers in the United States who've carried some of this. And then on the flip side, we're curious how important Al Jazeera remains as far as kind of supporting the Palestinian side. How did you guys think about both of those kind of entities here?
- [23:05]
Jake Sullivan
I think there's a larger issue here that even goes beyond this particular, very tragic conflict where you're seeing a lot of different governments around the world think about how they invest in sources of, for lack of a better term, propaganda. And I think we have seen the Israeli government take steps to try to press its narrative through a whole bunch of different channels. And we have seen supporters of the Palestinian cause. And Al Jazeera is, I think, an example of an outlet that makes no bones about its perspective in this war. What it thinks of Israel, what it thinks of the Palestinian cause, and has, I think, has had a huge impact on the narrative because of its ability both to generate images and have access that a lot of other people don't get. And that goes way beyond just this conflict. For Al Jazeera, I think Al Jazeera remains an incredibly potent platform to drive a variety of narratives across the region, some of which upset other countries in the region because, of course, it's based in Qatar, and Qatar has had its challenges with some of its neighbors. But this is something in the US Government we had to watch, but we had to watch it not just with respect to these. These countries and these players, but with many others as well. And going back to previous administrations, there have been efforts to engage the Qatari government on Al Jazeera as it relates to various U.S. policy actions. We didn't really, in our administration have that kind of engagement. We, you know, weren't trying to shape or change Al Jazeera's coverage in any way, but we were certainly cognizant of it as we watched the information environment unfold around, you know, the set of overlapping conflicts across the Middle East.
- [24:49]
Max Tawney
Well, we have a lot that we want to get to with John and Jake, but we have to take a short break and we'll be right back right after this.
- [25:02]
Ben Smith
This week on our branded segment from Think with Google, I talked to Google's VP of marketing, Josh Spanier, about a conversation he recently had on his own podcast, Frontier cmo, with this colleague who oversees ads and commerce. Josh, you've been spending a lot of time on the Frontier lately talking to people, transforming marketing, or inventing entirely new industries. And you recently sat down with Vidya Srinivasan. What did you take away from that conversation?
- [25:27]
Josh Spanier
Vidya is the person who's really thinking about ADS winning 365 days a year, all the year around in her role, really doing all the ads for Google, ads for YouTube ad ads and all our commerce capabilities. She's inventing the future of marketing. She publishes an annual letter. It's a must read. I also got to sit down with her and talk to her for my Frontier CMO podcast. I was really interested in her thoughts on agentic commerce. Nvidia was making this point that shopping has had these trade offs. You buy something on impulse. It might not have been the right decision, but you get it immediately or you research a product. It might take you hours, days, days or weeks of planning before you buy the product. It's kind of slow. And with agentic commerce, we're seeing those trade offs come together where you can make a fast decision and know it's a smart decision. And the tools that she's building are really enabling this trade off to collapse and actually speed up. If you haven't read it yet, Ben and anyone out there, you need to understand the ucp, the universal commerce protocol that Video announced earlier this year about how agentic commerce is really going to scale in 2026 and 2027 and transform shopping and the shopping experience for everyone.
- [26:38]
Ben Smith
And where can folks find that letter?
- [26:39]
Josh Spanier
You can head on over to thinkwithgoogle.com and you can find the letter and it's also on the Google Keyword blog.
- [26:44]
Ben Smith
All right, thanks, Josh.
- [26:55]
Max Tawney
A lot of the things that we've been talking about here are a little bit backward looking. I want to kind of look forward. You know, one thing people in the 2016 election and afterwards was the power of digital misinformation as a kind of a political and a state tool. The new force in information, the major player, is obviously AI and LLMs that are increasingly a part of people's daily lives and how they get their information. How do you see LLMs kind of shaping the information people get? And how is the US Government going to try and kind of reckon with the fact that most people across the world are probably going to be getting their information from AI within the next 10 or 15 years?
- [27:36]
John Finer
I think one thing probably everybody has experienced is just the deluge of AI generated content in their various feeds wherever they consume information. And that creates a couple of problems. One obviously is a disinformation problem. Some of this is just false or information generated to push a particular viewpoint, even if it's not grounded in fact. But it also exacerbates another problem, which is people already kind of come to this AI phenomenon with a deep skepticism about facts that they are presented by media. And now you often see even content that's generated by established news organizations. If you look at the comments underneath it, you have people saying, oh, this is clearly AI or this is clearly fake news or whatever. And so I think we have a societal problem. That is, we no longer have a common factual basis on which we develop our opinions and analyze the issues we face. We used to always have wildly divergent views about policy or, or things that were happening in the country. But at least we started from a common set of basic facts. We don't even have that factual foundation anymore. And so on the one hand, while AI enables people to obtain all manner of information that was not available to them previously, I worry that it is going to deeply make even more difficult this challenge of being able to function as a cohesive society, because people disagree even about the basic building blocks of information that they are presented. I think that's going to make things harder, not easier.
- [29:10]
Jake Sullivan
And Max, one of the things in the Biden administration that we pursued with the major AI companies, US AI companies, was a set of voluntary commitments that they would make, one of which had to do with watermarking, which is essentially to take any piece of digital content and say, this is human generated versus this is AI generated. There's been pretty uneven implementation of that. But I Think we are going to have to come up with technical tools to help consumers distinguish between that which is real and that which is AI generated. Especially since the AI generated stuff is so damn good, both video and audio, as well as the more traditional kind of text based digital content. So technical solutions are going to have to be a part of this and figuring out how to play defense against what will be a deluge of this stuff coming forward. And by the way, not just foreign state directed. I mean, this is going to be bubbling up in terms of trying to shape the political discourse in the United States. And there's a real question as to whether democracies, which do have to be rooted in a common base of information and facts, as John just said, are going to be able to withstand this flood. I think we can, but it's going to require some pretty creative work, both on the technical side and just in terms of public education and resilience to be able to deal with what is, I think, a really severe systemic challenge.
- [30:32]
Max Tawney
I want to shift to some stuff in the news today which we're really curious about. I'm sure you guys were paying close attention to the panels and some of the speaking that was happening over the weekend at the munich security conference. AOC's comments were pretty highly scrutinized. I'm really curious what you made of in particular Newsom and AOC speaking at Munich and of course also kind of separately, what you thought about Secretary of State Marco Rubio taking a slightly different tone than J.D. vance when he appeared at Munich last year. I realized that those are two to three very specific questions. You guys are pretty good at this. Your podcast pros. You know, I'd be curious to hear you on, on both of those.
- [31:08]
Jake Sullivan
Well, I'll make one observation. You know, AOC was asked a question about whether the US would come to the defense of Taiwan. This is the hardest question that there is, I think, because, and we've dealt with this up close and personal with the President who, you know, we advise, maintain strategic ambiguity. He went out and was just like, I'm going to answer a hypothetical question with a straight yes or no. And he said yes, you know, so as far as I'm concerned, that Taiwan question is almost necessarily going to generate an answer that people can pick at because the right answer is some mashup of ambiguous statements that kind of leave you nowhere. So that stood out to me. It was a flashback to many, many times sitting in rooms where that question was posed to the President of the United States. And he would Continually say, yes, we're going to fight them, and then we want to go out and say our policy hasn't changed, and so forth. I thought on Rubio's speech that there was a big disconnect, interestingly, between in the room, him getting a standing ovation. And I think people actually appreciated a civil tone, if nothing more, especially after what J.D. vance did last year. And then immediately the way in which I think the European press covered the speech, which was essentially, this is a velvet glove over the same policy that is still a policy that fundamentally disrespects and undermines the transatlantic relationship and is very aggressive towards Europe. And I think that that's fair. And to double down on that message, Rubio went on to stand next to Viktor Orban and basically endorse his candidacy in Hungary to be reelected as prime minister. So it was unmistakable that Rubio was saying things in a pleasant way. But fundamentally, Italy was reasserting a quite hostile policy from the Trump administration to Europe. And the Europeans are saying, basically, we have to take what you're saying at face value and de risk from the United States, hedge against the United States. And I think that that is really problematic because I think that that relationship, that transatlantic relationship, has been a huge asset to the United States.
- [33:19]
John Finer
The way I think about the Rubio speech, which was received exactly as Jake described it, is he's almost the designated driver of the Trump administration. He's not smashing the guardrails or sort of swerving down the lane, but he's going to the same destination as JD Vance and Donald Trump. And so there was nothing other than the tone, other than the respectful presentation, like, he didn't just walk in and track mud on the floor of their house. He was polite. But nothing in the substance of the presentation that should give Europeans much reassurance. And if anything, it sort of ratifies what they were already, I think, completely convinced about, which is they just cannot depend on the United States for the foreseeable future. And I think AOC deserves a lot of credit, frankly. I mean, for presenting a coherent worldview in terms of foreign policy and a set of objectives that she will stand for on the world stage or as a campaign for some higher office, if she chooses to do that. Most people come and try to just memorize a few safe answers to these questions and get out looking like they've at least learned the catechism of foreign affairs. And she tried to do more than that. And whether people like that worldview or dislike that worldview, we may find out going forward, but she took a bigger swing than most people do for their first time in these settings.
- [34:38]
Ben Smith
Who do you think are heavyweights on foreign policy in the 2028 field? And ultimately, does that even matter anymore?
- [34:43]
John Finer
I would just start off by saying I think Jake and I have worked with for two presidents, one of whom I think he would acknowledge came to the job without a ton of foreign policy experience, Barack Obama. The other, Joe Biden, who probably came to the office with more foreign policy experience maybe than any other president, at least in recent history. You could make the case about George H.W. bush having been pretty steeped in foreign policy when he became president, too. So totally different experiences in that way. And I will say, you know, for Barack Obama, quite quickly, he became one of the most fluent, if not the most fluent person in all of the issues the country faced. In the discussions that took place with his national security team, he was an incredibly quick study and developed a very coherent theory of the world and tried to take on big challenges in a significant way that was not necessarily what you might expect for somebody who was new to all this. I'm sort of dodging, I guess, you know, who's going to.
- [35:39]
Max Tawney
I was gonna say that's a very dogmatic answer. Yeah, exact.
- [35:44]
Jake Sullivan
I'll take any of them over what we got. So, you know.
- [35:47]
John Finer
Hear, hear.
- [35:48]
Max Tawney
All right. Fair. Fair enough. Very. Yes. Very, very artful judges. One of the things that I think really works in the format that you guys are doing this works both for political and, you know, policy podcasts and also for sports podcasts, is like hosts who have done the job before, interviewing people, but then kind of using that as an opportunity to get into really interesting stories or things that happen have happened, using the kind of personal experience to reveal interesting kind of information. I was thinking about that when I was list you guys episode that you did with Evan Osnos on China. Do you worry that there's a potential that you guys might reveal information that you're not supposed to reveal? Are there still things that you kind of can't talk about that maybe you want to talk about? Because you're doing a podcast about the things that are, you know, happening in the world.
- [36:32]
Ben Smith
Are you at risk now on a podcast of revealing something that maybe you shouldn't?
- [36:35]
Jake Sullivan
Definitely. I mean, because we know a lot of stuff that is still considered classified information, of course, we wouldn't reveal any of that. So we have to be careful about policing that line between what's classified and what's not classified. But of course, we had a lot of practice with that in our time in government, knowing what we're allowed to say publicly and what we're not allowed to say publicly. But that remains something that we have to think about. And also, Max, it's interesting. It does take, we've now done, I think, a dozen episodes or close to a dozen episodes. And I would say we're not at 100% of being purely human yet, you know, of being like, like, hey, we're just gonna tell you how it is because beyond the classified filter, there's still the kind of public official filter of how to say things the right way. And we are just trying to tear that, you know, we'll keep the classified filter up like, you know, absolutely four square. But this other filter I think we need to tear down. And we're doing, we're getting better every episode by like out of know, the end of this year, I think we're just gonna be really letting it rip. But that has been an interesting adjustment, for sure. That, that is something new. That is uncharted territory. Talking like a pure, unadulterated human being.
- [37:51]
Max Tawney
Important part of, of podcast success is, is letting it rip. But Jake, speaking of, someone was telling us in the prep for this interview that you're a rumored senate candidate in Minnesota. Is this gonna be a short lived podcast stint? Are you gonna be, are you running there? Is that a, is that a real thing? This was in our show notes, so it's important we ask.
- [38:09]
Jake Sullivan
I really wonder where that came from in your show notes because the answer to that question is definitely no. And that's not a. I'm just happy doing what I'm doing podcasting right now while I explore it. No, I'm not running for Senate in Minnesota.
- [38:22]
John Finer
And, and now that Jake's not running, I'm going to have to look hard.
- [38:24]
Max Tawney
Are you going to have to take a hard look at it? Yeah, that's. Yes, exactly. I think that's a, that's a good place for us to wrap it. So now that you guys feel comfortable encroaching on our territory as podcast hosts, maybe I, I should put myself up for National Security Director or Deputy National Security Chief.
- [38:39]
John Finer
Let us know if you need a reference. Happy to provide.
- [38:42]
Max Tawney
Exactly. Thanks again.
- [38:52]
Ben Smith
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- [39:23]
Max Tawney
Ben, what did you think about kind of the overall thrust that they had had of this idea that Americans need foreign policy demystified for them and that the media space at the moment kind of isn't doing a particularly good job at explaining these key pillars of foreign policy. I mean, they basically mentioned during the episode that Americans inability to understand fully what was going on in the world was one of the reasons why Donald Trump was able to kind of, as they put it, drive a truck through the way that the world was operating and Americans understanding of foreign affairs and why things operate the way that they do in this kind of global system. What did you think about that argument? Did that ring true to you?
- [40:06]
Ben Smith
Yeah, I mean, I think that they are, you know, doing these podcasts in a way, like the way we are sort of learning as they go, using this podcast to try to figure out a media space that I think at a very high geopolitical level, Jake and John played extremely effectively against the Russians in particular, but in an American tactical political level really didn't work. They had this idea we're gonna explain foreign policy in a way that makes sense to the middle class. Maybe Joe Biden couldn't really explain at that point, but that didn't work. And Trump came in and did actually explain foreign policy in a way that made sense to people. Totally personalizes it. You know, it's about his relationships with other leaders and then has meetings in public that typically would have taken place in private, like the Ukraine breakdown. Zelensky wasn't something that happened behind the scenes. And we learned about that happened on camera. And there's this way in which Trump is operating totally in public that I think has allowed him to explain what he's doing abroad. Fraud. I'm not sure that's made it popular, but it's made it clearer and it's drawn attention in a way that I think the Biden administration didn't really succeed in doing.
- [41:12]
Max Tawney
One of the things that we wanted to ask about was this kind of battle over information related to kind of the war in Gaza. Whether on one side you had kind of the Israeli state, essentially propaganda, and on the other side you had kind of this interest based media. You know, particularly we asked about Al Jazeera as an example of that. But what did you think about the ways that the Biden administration and those Guys were thinking about. About handling information and how that was shaping public perceptions of the war, of what was going on over there.
- [41:41]
Ben Smith
My own perception is that they were very focused on communicating to the Israeli public and to Benjamin Netanyahu and really kind of lost the information war at home there. And then meanwhile, the Israeli and Palestinian sides, via Al Jazeera, via the Israeli government, via a network of people on Twitter, kind of took the whole narrative away from them. I did think the thing. I just want to sort of the thing that Jake said is true. The fact that the Israelis don't allow independent journalists into Gaza means that we don't have independent, you know, voices telling us what's going on. And that is a. That's just a real issue.
- [42:15]
Max Tawney
You know, it really strikes me that both John and Jake understand, you know, foreign policy quite well. But one of the things that they are actively puzzling through with this podcast and puzzling through in the aftermath of their departure from the White House is how to communicate about foreign policy in information landscape and how to use communication as kind of a state tool. And that I think part of the reason why they're not writing books or necessarily becoming contributors on television is that they are trying to feel like what it is on the other side, being the communicators, being part of this kind of new media ecosystem. And I think in some ways, that's teaching them how to kind of shape for US Foreign policy going forward. Should either of them be involved in any administration's the future?
- [43:00]
Ben Smith
I think that's a great point. And to that point, I mean, you asked, I thought, a kind of impolite question about the way in which Gaza, I think, will hang over everybody from the Biden administration. You covered the White House, you covered these guys. How do you think the Biden approach to that war is going to play in 2028? I mean, are there going to be people who are disqualified from running for president because they were too pro Israel?
- [43:22]
Max Tawney
I think that John said it pretty well. This is going to be an issue that is going to hang over the 2028 Democratic primary and where various candidates stood on this. Going to be something that matters to a slice of the Democratic electorate. And so that was the reason why we wanted to kind of ask them. Both of those guys are some of the most senior foreign policy officials in Democratic politics. And it is an open question about whether they'll be involved in future administrations, given the controversy around this and the sensitivity around this particular topic.
- [43:51]
Ben Smith
Yeah, no, I think. I think it was a good question. I guess my own experience is that once folks get into that little circle of people who've had that level of experience, they come back, partly because it's just by definition, there's so few people who have the experience. So I suspect those guys won't be podcasters for life. Look forward to their roles in the AOC administration.
- [44:14]
Max Tawney
And that is it for us this week. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Mixed Signals from us here at Semaphore. Our show is produced by Manny Fadal and Josh Billenson, who both had to put in some extra, extra reps this week because of our technical difficulties. We really appreciate that. With special thanks to Anna Pizzino, Jules Zern, Chad Lewis, Rachel Oppenheim, Tori Kaur, Garrett Wiley, and Daniel Haft. Our engineer is Rick Kwan and our theme music is by Steve Bone. Our public editors this week are former guests of the show, former foreign policy experts, U.S. undersecretary for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers, and of course, Jamie Rubin. Guys, what did you guys think of what John and Jake had to say? Let us. Let us know. Send us an email if you like the show.
- [44:54]
Ben Smith
Please follow us wherever you get your podcasts. And Please subscribe on YouTube.
- [44:58]
Max Tawney
And if you want more, you can always sign up for Semaphore's media newsletter, which is out every Sunday night. And please send us questions for our Trust in Media Summit, which is happening next week in Washington.