Mission: Impossible - Catering Truck (Starring Donald J. Trump)

Summary

Pod Save the World – Episode Summary

Episode Title: Mission: Impossible – Catering Truck (Starring Donald J. Trump)
Date: August 12, 2026
Hosts: Tommy Vietor & Ben Rhodes

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Overview

This episode of Pod Save the World dives into a week full of wild and consequential developments in U.S. foreign policy and global affairs. Tommy and Ben break down a bizarre and troubling story involving Donald Trump’s secret flight home from a NATO summit—with major security and ethical implications—and follow with coverage of critical international events: the state of Iran talks, the diplomatic impasse in Gaza and Israel, Yemen’s fragile ceasefire, the disastrous state of Sudan, alarming corruption and internal politics at the Pentagon, Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian infrastructure, and a deep-dive interview on the crisis in Myanmar with Richard Horsey.

The tone is exasperated, darkly comic, and relentlessly candid, with the hosts fully in their element skewering both the absurdity and gravity of current events.

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Table of Contents

1. A Disavowed Guest: Enes Kanter and the WNBA Stunt
2. Main Story: Trump’s “Secret” NATO Getaway—Catering Truck Capers
3. Iran Update: Sanctions, “Chess Games,” and Farcical Negotiations
4. Israel and Gaza: A Plan Going Nowhere
5. Boiling Over: Yemen Near War, Sudan’s Proxy Nightmare
6. Pentagon & MAGAfication: Pete Hegseth and Corruption
7. Ukraine: Strikes, Civilians, and the Laws of War
8. Kushner’s Peninsular Real Estate Scandal
9. Ebola Outbreak and Institutional Collapse
10. AI Fumbles in Politics
11. Deep Dive: The Fractured Crisis in Myanmar (Interview with Richard Horsey)

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1. Enes Kanter and the WNBA Stunt (02:42 - 04:38)

• Discussion: Ben and Tommy open by revisiting former guest and ex-NBA player Enes Kanter’s turn to anti-trans activism, “declaring himself eligible for the WNBA draft as a shot at trans people” alongside disgraced NBA player Royce White.
  • Quote: “It's him and a guy named Royce White... who abused his ex-wife repeatedly... This guy was on Benny Johnson's TPUSA show because he decided to also declare for the WNBA and he wore a wig in the interview. And they think this is fun and cool.” – Tommy [03:42]
• Both hosts regret previously platforming Kanter and disavow his recent actions.

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2. Trump Secret NATO Getaway – Catering Truck (05:42 – 16:35)

(Main theme of the episode)

• Washington Post scoop: Trump, after the NATO summit in Ankara, abandoned the new Air Force One (the Qatar “bribe” jet) due to an alleged Iranian threat. He first boarded the old Air Force One, then, using a catering truck, secretly switched to yet another Air Force jet. His staff and press—unaware—flew as decoys to the UK.

  • Quote: “He was then secretly taken to another Air Force jet while hiding inside a catering truck that is normally used for, like, meals and supplies. Very macho, very manly to hide in a catering truck.” – Tommy [09:54]

• Staff and media were used as “human decoys”—a break from standard security procedure, where at least pool reporters would get informed and could consent to known risks.

• Trump’s cover story: “We're sending the new Air Force One ahead so the troops can check it out in Britain” [07:54]. Hosts point out how absurd this fabricated reason was.

• Ben’s perspective: The entire incident epitomizes Trump’s lack of care for others and disregard for presidential norms, turning the White House and Air Force One into personal property.

  • Quote: “Our weak, old, feckless, stupid president left his own staff and the media to fly alone as bait… Kind of a perfect Trump anecdote.” – Tommy [10:34]

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3. Iran Update (16:35 – 20:32)

• Diplomacy stalled: Trump publicly signals disinterest. Told Axios, “We are low keying it… It's like a chess game” [16:35]. Ben is exasperated: “Every single thing he just said there was not true” [18:25].

• New sanctions are applied, but hosts note the futility: “Sanctions are really going to stick it to them after we just let them sell… $10 billion worth of oil.” – Tommy [16:13]

• Iranian demands for talks are effectively “a big middle finger to Donald Trump”—including reparations, lifting all sanctions, and withdrawal of troops.

• Ben calls attention to the “maximalist” nature of both sides’ posturing, noting, “The best we’re going to get is the Strait reopens with the Iranians making a bunch of money and that regime more entrenched in power and no nuclear deal.” [20:03]

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4. Israel and Gaza: A Plan Going Nowhere (23:41 – 28:11)

• Trump administration’s 15-point plan for Gaza widely ridiculed and instantly rejected by Netanyahu, who states, “As long as I am Prime Minister, a Palestinian state will not be established, neither in Gaza, nor in Judea or in Samaria.”
  • Quote: “Netanyahu only cares about appeasing the far right, so obviously he wasn’t going to do anything that looked in any way soft in Gaza.” – Tommy [24:33]
• Ben points out there was “never any there, there” to the plan, calling foreign policy a “catastrophic failure on their [Trump administration’s] terms.”

Broader implications:

• The constant occupation and dispossession of Palestinians continues to be a “driver of extremism,” but the hosts speculate whether Arab indifference and likely outright annexation will eventually generate blowback.

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5. Yemen, Sudan, and UAE Proxy War (28:11 – 37:40)

Yemen:

• The ceasefire is “boiling over.” UN envoy warns risk of “renewed large scale conflict… greater than at any point since April 2022” [29:00]. Saudis and Houthis are engaged in escalating tit-for-tat violence.
  • Ben observes, “You get to the state where… a reversion to a conflict that could kill tens of thousands of people… and it’s like, oh, you’re just kind of watching in slow motion and doing very little.” [31:21]

Sudan:

• UAE’s support for the RSF has worsened Sudan’s civil war, perpetuating violence. Viral clip discussed: a Sudanese man confronts UAE PM in London (“You’re killing my people in my country”). The Emirati entourage responds with racist insults and threats.
  • Tommy: “If more officials were treated like this… instead of being invited to the White House or Cafe Milano for a nice meal…” [33:19]
• Ben: “The gap between powerful people and accountability has just been growing… People are so frustrated and they feel like they have no outlet, you know, and you go to a place like London and all these people hang out in London… discomfort beginning to show up in front of people is like, that’s just going to keep happening.” [35:10]
• Both connect the normalization of violence and impunity across different conflict zones—Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Gaza—to a broader crisis of accountability.

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6. Pentagon & MAGA Corruption (36:60 – 45:06)

• Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense: Overseeing a “generational problem” in military promotions—dramatic decline of women and minorities promoted. “He's clearly trying to remake the military in MAGA’s image… an extension of MAGA political interest and reflective of the MAGA worldview, which is pretty white and male.” – Ben [38:24]

• Weapons/Ammunition Shortages:

  • Trump allegedly just discovered the U.S. is running out of critical munitions. Hegseth blames his deputy and resorts to sending threatening letters to arms suppliers. Tommy: “If Trump is behind every text thread that I'm on by six months, that's a little alarming.” [40:33]

• Corruption at the Pentagon: Appointment of Marc Andreessen and Blake Masters (venture capitalists with clear conflicts) to Defense Policy Board, with connections to Don Jr.’s investment firm. Hosts note: “Everyone sees the President gorging at the trough and they're running up to try to, like, catch one of his scraps in their mouth.” [42:55]

• Notable quote: “This is the trillion and a half dollar budget version of remaking it, which is by the time you're in year four of the Trump administration, there's limitless corruption available.” – Ben [42:55]

• Transparency Breakdown:

  • Story of fatal medevac crash in New Mexico linked to military GPS jamming. Pentagon secrecy and lack of accountability is the throughline.

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7. Ukraine: Military Strikes on Russian Civilian Infrastructure (45:06 – 55:59)

• New Ukrainian tactic: Strikes on Wildberries, Russia’s Amazon, cause billions in damage and hit civilian life—over 23 facilities hit, nine Wildberries employees killed.

  • “More than half of the people in Russia use wild berries once a month … brings the war home in a way that Ukraine hasn't managed to do previously.” – Tommy [47:26]

• The hosts debate legitimacy under international law. Ben is sympathetic but cautious: “It’s a slippery slope … the Russians could say, ‘the Ukrainians get a lot of supplies from Europe, maybe we should start drone attacks on warehouses in Poland’ … this escalation cycle could get hairier and hairier…” [53:45]

• Growing risks of war spilling over into NATO countries.

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8. Jared Kushner and Albania (55:59 – 59:12)

• WSJ report: Jared and Ivanka Kushner’s resort and real estate deal in Albania is tainted by ties to an alleged gangster and money laundering. Land involved may belong to villagers displaced by fraud.
  • Tommy: “I’m not remotely surprised Jared Kushner is in cahoots with a mobster in Albania since his father-in-law acts like one. And actually his father acts like one too.” [57:44]
• Ben calls for aggressive investigation if Democrats return to power: “Subpoena Kushner. Subpoena his business partners… Like all of it. Day one.” [59:03]

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9. Ebola Outbreak (60:06 – 61:27)

• Second largest Ebola outbreak ever, fastest-growing on record, with over 2,000 deaths in DRC and spreading to Uganda. Lack of vaccines, ongoing warfare, and U.S. withdrawal from WHO have made international response much harder.
  • Ben: “We don't really have an international, global public health infrastructure, which, after Covid, is pretty remarkable.” [61:09]

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10. AI in Governmental Speechwriting (62:27 – 66:00)

• Viral clip: Canadian politician Bill Oliver reads an AI prompt aloud in legislative speech—multiple times.
  • Tommy: “How stupid do you have to be to anchorman yourself not once, not twice, but three times in 40 minutes?” [63:04]
• Both warn that AI-generated text in politics exemplifies both the banality of political speech and the dangers of politicians outsourcing thinking.
  • Ben: “If you can just stand up there and do your job by reciting AI produced text, what are you like, what are you bringing in particular to this?” [63:36]

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11. Deep Dive: Myanmar – Interview with Richard Horsey (70:00 – 91:56)

[Key segment: 70:12 – 91:56]

• Context: Five years after the military coup, Myanmar is the world's most “fragmented conflict,” with at least 1,200 armed groups and millions of civilians at risk.

• Richard Horsey (International Crisis Group) explains:

  • The military solidified power through Chinese, Indian, and regional support.
  • Over half the country (possibly much more) is not under central control.
  • Normalized diplomatic engagement is returning, at least regionally, as neighbors "make calculations" about the military’s permanence.
  • Aung San Suu Kyi: Remains a symbolic touchstone but is completely isolated, proof of life only recently provided via the Red Cross. Her death would be a flashpoint.
  • The opposition is determined but fragmented, lacking centralized leadership.
  • Myanmar has become a global hub for meth production and scam centers, feeding regional crime and corruption.
  • Western attention is minimal, and “the humanitarian system is broken and broke.”

• On hope: Despite devastation, a new generation remains inspired—they remember "the vision of Myanmar they want" and aspire to a multi-ethnic, multi-religious future [91:29].

  • Quote: “If this country were allowed to reach its potential and the potential of these extraordinary people… it would be truly extraordinary. And yet we've had to see people go through so much.” – Ben [91:30]

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Notable Quotes

• On Trump & the NATO stunt:
  “Our weak, old, feckless, stupid president left his own staff and the media to fly alone as bait… Kind of a perfect Trump anecdote.” – Tommy [10:34]

• On Iran negotiations:
  “Every single thing he just said there was not true… Art of the Deal would suggest what the Iranians are doing… Trump is never even specific.” – Ben [18:25]

• On normalization of violence:
  “You get to the state where… a reversion to a conflict that could kill tens of thousands of people… and it's like, oh, you're just kind of watching in slow motion and doing very little.” – Ben [31:21]

• On Pentagon corruption:
  “…everyone sees the President of the United States, like, gorging himself at the trough and they're running up to try to, like, catch one of his scraps in their mouth.” – Tommy [42:55]

• On AI in politics:
  “If you can just stand up there and do your job by reciting AI produced text, what are you bringing in particular to this?” – Ben [63:36]

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Conclusion

This episode is a whirlwind tour of American and global dysfunction. Through sharp, darkly humorous analysis, Tommy and Ben highlight the growing normalization of abuses of power (from Trump’s catering truck episode to MAGA-fied military leadership), the structural failures that perpetuate foreign crises, and the dangerous spillover when accountability and empathy vanish at the top. The interview on Myanmar provides both a lament for lost opportunity and admiration for the resilience of its people. If you want a bleakly funny roadmap to a dangerous world—and a few glimmers of hope—this is your episode.

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Interview of the week:
Richard Horsey (International Crisis Group) on Myanmar [70:00–91:56]

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Produced by Crooked Media.

Transcript

[Tommy Vietor]

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[Tommy Vietor]

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor.

[Ben Rhodes]

I'm Ben Rhodes.

[Tommy Vietor]

Ben Enes Kanter, former guest on this show, former NBA player is now kind of making it his deal to just attack trans people. I guess he's suggesting he's going to join the wnba.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yes.

[Tommy Vietor]

I haven't really followed what the specific rules are that he thinks would allow him to join the wnba.

[Ben Rhodes]

View it's an interesting cautionary tale about me booking guests because Enes Cander reached out to me some years ago before he'd gone full MAGA and he was on the Knicks.

[Tommy Vietor]

So he was on the Celtics too. So it was before Celtics. Don't blame yourself fully.

[Ben Rhodes]

No. But the world does know a Knicks player. Sure. So we have Modani as this story about authoritarianism in Erdogan, but man, this guy's gone. I think particularly as his NBA career has crashed and burned. The remaining relevancy seems to be this MAGA swerve. But as someone who does kind of follow the WNBA discourse like Enes Cantor declaring himself eligible for the WNBA draft as a shot at trans people was pretty, pretty jarring.

[Tommy Vietor]

It's him and a guy named Royce White who's another NBA player who a judge found. This is from the Star Tribune. Minnesota Star Tribune found that Royce White abused his ex wife repeatedly, slapping her, grabbing her, pulling her hair, leaving her bruised and swollen. And then a child advocate assigned to the case found that Royce White's son is scared for his physical safety around his father. This guy was on Benny Johnson's TP USA show because he decided to also declare for the WNBA and he wore a wig in the interview. And they think this is fun and cool. So they're just having this guy who beat up his wife.

[Ben Rhodes]

You know what's so dumb about this too? He's like, the WMA is awesome right now. They don't need any other play. They've got great players. The quality of play has never been better. This controlling and oh my God, it's just, it's exhausting.

[Tommy Vietor]

And Endis Ganter was Not that good.

[Jon Favreau]

He wasn't.

[Ben Rhodes]

I mean, you could stand under the basket and get you rebounds, but, like, that's about what he could do.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah. Anyway, so we disavow. We disavow our former guests.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. Sorry, guys.

[Tommy Vietor]

Probably a long list if we really thought about it.

[Ben Rhodes]

But some wonderful people, too.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, some great ones, too. We got a great show for you guys today. We're back together in studio. It's great to see you.

[Ben Rhodes]

I'm here.

[Tommy Vietor]

We're going to cover this insane story about Donald Trump's secret flight home from the NATO summit last month. We covered at the time how they switched planes, but now it turns out the Washington Post had this great scoop about how Trump switched his plane, but then used the media and his own staff as a decoy. So we'll dig into all of that when update you on the Iran talks, such as there are updates. We'll tell you about how the diplomatic effort to forge a path forward in Gaza are going. We'll talk about why people are scared of resumption of fighting in Yemen. And then we're going to talk about this brave activist who is calling out the leaders of the UAE for perpetuating the civil war in Sudan. I don't know if you saw this.

[Ben Rhodes]

I did see that. I saw it because you sent it

[Tommy Vietor]

to me all over my Twitter timeline. It made me very happy. Then we're going to check in on Pete Hexseth, our secretary of war over at the Pentagon. Always great to hear from Pete. We're going to talk about Ukraine's military campaign against a Russian E commerce site in this blurry line between civilian and military targeting. We'll update you on Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump's effort to steal an island, basically, or at least a peninsula.

[Pete Hegseth]

Yes.

[Tommy Vietor]

Quick thing on Ebola, just so you guys know what's going on over there and some great moments in AI. Then, Ben, you did an interview for today. What are we going to hear?

[Ben Rhodes]

So I talked to Richard Horsey, who's been on before, and very good guest. He is a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group in Asia. He's led their work in Myanmar and so thought that there's actually been a lot going on in Myanmar. We're going to update people on where things stand. Five years after the military coup and civil war that's killed 100,000 people, the military government's going the extra mile to kind of create a sense of legitimacy. A lot of diplomatic visits, the state of the opposition. We talk about Aung San SUU Kyi, who nobody had seen for years.

[Tommy Vietor]

For years. Right. The Red Cross just saw her.

[Ben Rhodes]

I think Red Cross just saw her. So Richard walks us through that and then just kind of how people are feeling in Myanmar, what governments can be doing. Not that the Trump administration cares that much. So it's an important update. If people have just been kind of curious about what's going on there.

[Jon Favreau]

This.

[Ben Rhodes]

This is a level set.

[Tommy Vietor]

There's a lot of things we worked on in the Obama administration that are now depressing to talk about. Myanmar might be number one. And it has nothing to do with Trump.

[Ben Rhodes]

Cuban, Myanmar.

[Tommy Vietor]

Cuba's 100% Trump's fault.

[Ben Rhodes]

Cuba's 1% Trump's fault. With a little Biden sprinkled in.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah.

[Ben Rhodes]

Myanmar is. Is just. Just a horrific series of events.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah. Yeah. Really awful. I'm definitely gonna listen to that interview. I think it's a very undercovered story, an important one. After Ben's interview, our friend of the POD subscribers will hear Ben and I answer some questions from the friend of the POD or the POD Save the world Discord community. If you want ad free episod this show ad free episodes Pod Save America and a bunch more, consider becoming a paid subscriber. You'll also get tons of bonus content, including bonus Pod Save America episodes. Get discounted tickets to Crooked Con. Great newsletters. Tasteful Nudes of Dan. So go to crooked.com friends to learn more. Just kidding. About the Nudes of Dan. They're not tasteful. No, you don't get any. Just headshots.

[Ben Rhodes]

Speaking of nudes, did you listen to the Hunter Biden Tucker interview? No, I listened to the entire thing.

[Tommy Vietor]

I downloaded it. I will listen to it eventually. It's interesting. Interesting, I'm guessing, but, you know, yeah,

[Ben Rhodes]

they spend a fair amount of time in the nudes.

[Tommy Vietor]

Okay, wonderful. Something to look forward to. All right, we are going to lead with this shocking scoop from the Washington Post about President Trump's secret flight home from the NATO summit last month. So again, we talked about this at the time. There was some sort of intel about an Iranian threat. It forced President Trump to abandon the new Air Force One, the one that was the bribe from Qatar, and ride on the old Air Force One back from the NATO summit, Ankara to the UK at the time, Trump lied about it. He was like, we're sending the new Air Force One ahead so the troops can check it out in Britain. That was a lie. The old Air Force One has missile defense features. The new one does not. And Trump, they said would be better defended on the old one. But it turns out the story is even crazier than that. The Washington Post reported that after Trump boarded the old Air Force One jet and the press was loaded up, he was then secretly taken to another Air Force jet while hiding inside a catering truck that is normally used for, like, meals and supplies. Very macho, very manly to hide in a catering truck. The media and Trump's staff flew to the UK inside the jet that Trump had abandoned. Most of them unwitting that he had left the left the plane. They were essentially treated like human decoys in case Iran did try to do something. Then when Trump landed and the other plane landed, Trump secretly reboarded the Air Force One. Everyone thought he was on and acted like nothing had happened. Then he gets on, I think the Qatari bribe Force One for the flight home to the US Gaggled with the media was asked why he switched planes and he said, quote, well, I have a threat all the time. I'm number one on their list before you. But if I go, you go, Right? Perhaps someday you want to change professions. Which is an interesting comment. So just for context, everyone should know that this is not standard operating procedure. Presidents often use subterfuge for security reasons. The White House will release like a fake schedule to cover for a real trip to a war zone. For example, there was a story in the Post today, another story about an incident in the in March of 2000 when President Clinton secretly switched planes like Trump did before a flight from India to Pakistan. But the difference is, in the cases in the past, at least some members of the media are told about the plan in advance. Usually it's like the the pool reporter that day or like the lead White House correspondent. You also get to learn about the risk to you personally. But in this case, our week old feckless, stupid president left his own staff and the media to fly alone as bait, and then he got to hide from the consequences of his own decision to go to war with Iran. So this is way bigger than just like breaking the rules of, like, pool coverage. It is like endangering others to save yourself. Kind of a perfect Trump anecdote.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, there's so many layers to this anecdote. Let's just first of all talk about how things normally work. Because you mentioned this, there are times that you engage in some subterfuge. So for instance, I remember I had to be involved in the planning of all of Obama's trips to Afghanistan. When you don't announce the trip in advance, the plane Takes off kind of under cover of darkness from Andrews Air Force Base near the White House. You kind of land in the dark, et cetera. Now, what we would do there is we plan the trip, then we would sit down in the White House press secretary's office with usually the leader or leadership from the White House Correspondents association, back when that was somebody you talked to about things and bring them into it and say, get your pool together for this time at this night. And you kind of plan in conjunction

[Tommy Vietor]

with the press and also decide if you want to come on this trip where there's elevated danger.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, look, I was even on a trip, and I can't talk about too much detail where there was a threat that emerged. Emerged. And we kind of had to evaluate that threat and delay something, but we went on with it. I mean, you can deal with these things in stride. This felt very much not in stride to look at the different pieces of this one. Why were they using the Qatari Air Force One in the first place if it isn't capable of dealing with threats? Just because Trump wanted to have, like, golden interiors faster than the Air Force could get that ready for him. Like, we had to kind of go through all this cost and danger. That's the first thing. The second thing is, it is, it bears repeating how insane it is that they've invented some cover story that they're going to fly this other plane to the troops so they could see it.

[Tommy Vietor]

I mean, he said, for old time's sake, we'll be taking the former Air Force One from Turkey to Mildenhall, a short trip that is totally worth doing in order to give our great military heroes a chance to appreciate our beautiful new addition to the Air Force fleet. That was your cover story?

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. I mean, that felt kind of weird at the time. And then one of the elements of the Iran war, there's so much of it that you have hard time kind of remembering these different threads. The fact that the United States and Israel assassinated the leader of Iran.

[Jon Favreau]

Right.

[Ben Rhodes]

Ayatollah Khamenei, it has nothing to do with whether he was a good guy or not. He was not a good guy. But that is a dramatically new thing to do. We've talked about this a couple times, and inevitably, that's going to increase the threats on the American president, and probably not just now, probably into the future, too. And so it does raise the question of just how serious are these plots from Iran? Was it really the case that how much danger was Trump in? This is a pretty extraordinary amount of length to go to. It makes you wonder whether the information was specific or whether more likely, they just have all this broad reporting that the Iranians are interested in doing something and we happen to be in that region.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, well, the Wall Street Journal said Israel briefed Trump on intel that included a threat to use shoulder to air missiles to target Air Force One. I mean, I don't know, it seems pretty vague to me that it's.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vietor]

They also just resumed the conflict with the war, like the US Just started bombing. I also love this anecdote then, which is that Marco Rubio stayed on the Air Force One where Trump was supposed to be, and Pete Hegseth got onto the other plane with Trump. The two people most responsible for the war were safe.

[Ben Rhodes]

And I guess my point, which is a little bit word guessing here, I can't believe that the threat reporting was that specific if they let all those people get on the other plane. So it feels like they went to some extraordinary length because Trump was concerned about this. Because if the Secret Service really believed that there was dudes with shoulder fired rocket launchers in the vicinity of the airport, I don't think they would have let that plane take off with Michael Rubio and Pseth and everybody else on it.

[Tommy Vietor]

Couldn't you just fly a route that avoids Iran? It's so crazy.

[Ben Rhodes]

And the other thing for people who are just like, well, this is frustrating. Why are we always talking about this? Well, Air Force One is not the personal property. It's not like Donald Trump's private jet. Like, we pay for it. We pay for all this stuff. We pay for the Secret Service. We like in all these stories. I think sometimes what's missing is Trump treats all this machinery like his personal property when it costs tens and tens of millions of dollars to move all this stuff around and we have no idea why they're making decisions. I will say, Tommy, just to bring different episodes together here for those who listened, I wonder if that gift he got of the gun, if he got

[Tommy Vietor]

in some trouble, Erdogan gave him that,

[Ben Rhodes]

maybe that gun with the bullets might have come in handy.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, he's just sniping missiles from out the window.

[Pete Hegseth]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vietor]

The thing that bugs me about this story, it's like, I don't know, the lying has come to be expected from these people. But to put a bunch of journalists and your own staff at risk and basically send them up to be like the decoy to get shot at so you can fly separately is genuinely shocking. All right, well, we're going to just quickly update you guys on the Iran talks this week because we are trapped in this like tedious, endless cycle with no clear path forward. But it is still very important. So I don't know if you saw this over the weekend, Ben, but the President seems to be signaling that he just doesn't care anymore about all this. He told Axios, quote, we are low keying it. This is about the talks with Iran. We are only semi negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money. And then he said, quote, it will work out. It always works out. It's like a chess game. So that inspires confidence. Last week the Treasury Department announced some new sanctions because sanctions are really going to stick it to them after we just let them sell what like $10 billion worth of oil. Iran and Oman are working on a deal to determine control of the straight of Hormuz. Those the their demands include, quote, never threaten nor insult Iran in any language, permanently end the war against Iran and Iran's allies in Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen and Iraq. And the naval blockade. Withdraw military forces around Iran, pay reparations, release frozen assets, lift all sanctions. It's basically a big middle finger to Donald Trump. Trump was asked about Iran's negotiating position at a press event Monday. Here's his response.

[Ad/Promo Voice]

Massive escalation.

[Tommy Vietor]

Is that still on the table?

[Pete Hegseth]

Well, we have that certainly that ability if we want to do that. Yeah, you'll find out.

[Tommy Vietor]

You said you're low keying it with

[Ad/Promo Voice]

them, but you're semi negotiating.

[Pete Hegseth]

What happened is that, well, they asked for, they asked for reparations, you might say, or they asked for money for the damage that we've done. And I said that's a good idea. Well, we're going to ask for money for the damage they've done over a 50 year period. Whether you go SS Cole, or whether you go all of the people that were so badly hurt, so badly wounded or killed many thousands of people and maybe damages for the 52,000 protests over the last four months that were killed in Iran.

[Tommy Vietor]

Can you give us an estimate of what you think the Strait of Hormuz will?

[Pete Hegseth]

Well, it's open now. We're taking a lot of shit. It's open now. Look, the only one that has control of the Strait of Hormuz right now is the United States Navy. We have a blockade that's been infallible, it's a steel wall. But it's open for others now. Little bit complex because they will on occasion drop a mine. And we find the mines, you know, we've mine swept the entire strait as you probably maybe heard, maybe you didn't hear, but, but we control the strait 100%.

[Tommy Vietor]

Just making shit up in Iran. The supreme leader, Moshtabohamenei, he's added another hardline IRGC goon to his top decision making council. This is the supreme National Security Council. They will oversee things like efforts to end the war or reopen the Strait of Hormuz. So Ben, I just, like, I don't know, I'm just wondering, my only question now is when he's just going to walk away from this mess and be like, yeah, strait's open, war's over, nukes are covered, we can watch it.

[Ben Rhodes]

He's getting pretty close. I mean it does bear emphasizing that I think every single thing he just said there was not true. Like everything from like the 52,000 protesters in the last four months. There haven't really been protests in the last four months.

[Tommy Vietor]

Right.

[Ben Rhodes]

Also, that number keeps going up too.

[Tommy Vietor]

It keeps going up and I just, I've never seen anyone really back it up.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. And it's not to diminish the horror that happened.

[Tommy Vietor]

I just want to know where it's coming from.

[Ben Rhodes]

Late last year. But, but, but then also the strait's not open. I mean if the strait was open, we wouldn't be having this conversation. You know, like he's denying physical reality again. You know, that the US controls the strait. We do. Like we've mind swept it all. We have like the Iranians are firing at tankers, like they're, they're still, you know, a fraction of the traffic getting out of that strait. I take that the, the, the message from the Iranian demands is that their government is entirely in the hands of the irgc. It's the hardliners. So even some of these people that show up in Islamabad or in Oman are not empowered to make a deal. And that's them saying to Trump, fuck you. That's not them expecting Trump to agree to all those things. That's saying we don't need a deal, we have the actual leverage. And if you look, the Iranians are quite specific even in their unrealistic demands. And Trump is never even specific. He's all, we don't need a deal or we do need a deal. Like we don't even know what he's shooting for anymore. And I mean art of the deal would suggest that what the Iranians are doing, which is you ratchet up your demands so that whatever you get is far more than you would have anticipated at the beginning because you made such maximalist demands. Look, at the end of the day, he's probably just going to have to accept a certain point that the best he can do is the Strait reopens with the Iranians making a bunch of money and that regime more entrenched in power and no nuclear deal. Like, that's the best that we're going to get.

[Tommy Vietor]

That's the most likely outcome.

[Ben Rhodes]

I'd fucking take it. Like, let's just get off this war. This is stupid. Yeah, this.

[Tommy Vietor]

That is, I think, the most important point, which is there's this sunk cost fallacy where it's like, well, we've sacrificed so much. We can't stop now. And it's like, nope, sometimes stopping now is your best option. And that's what we should do here.

[Ben Rhodes]

Maybe the next hit of heroin will solve my addiction, you know? Yeah, yeah.

[Tommy Vietor]

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[Ben Rhodes]

That's the big mystery to me because even when they announced this, as we said at the time, like, nobody really believed it.

[Tommy Vietor]

It was like, what?

[Ben Rhodes]

It didn't kind of come out of any process. It just seemed out of nowhere that they're announcing this and like, kind of demanding support for it. I will note that aipac, for instance, at the time welcomed this plan and demanded that everybody support it. I'm wondering, I'm waiting for the aipac.

[Tommy Vietor]

Are they gonna attack Netanyahu?

[Ben Rhodes]

A statement attacking Netanyahu for not going along with it. Not holding my breath. Look, there's never any there or there to this. It never seemed plausible that this was actually gonna happen again in the physical world. The only thing I wanna add, Tommy, is like, this foreign policy, they have no way out of the dumb war they start in Iran. They've got no plan for how to deal with this. They're giving away nuclear weapon or nuclear program to Saudi Arabia. Or maybe they're not. No concept of how to wind down the Ukraine war. Like, what are we doing? You know, I mean, like, I guess. Marco Rubio context Delsey Rodriguez in Venezuela about her media appearances. Like, this is a catastrophic failure of their entire foreign policy on their terms. Like, the things that they say they want to achieve, they're just doing the opposite.

[Tommy Vietor]

The thing that I've been trying to figure out. So there was this great piece that's worth reading, I think it was by Graham Wood in the Atlantic that was kind of like, what's up with Al Qaeda? We're like, what, 20, 25 years after 9, 11? Are they weaker? Are they stronger? Are they biding their time? By what metric do you judge? Because there have been no catastrophic attacks on the U.S. homeland. With the exception. Well, no, there was nine, 11. Right then there were basically no Al Qaeda attacks on the US homeland, except for in 2019 when that Saudi pilot in Florida shot like, three people.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vietor]

But it was sort of a blip on the radar compared to how terrorism is usually covered and discussed. And there's a bunch of analysts trying to figure out, like, what the deal is with terrorism generally. And I think it made me think about this conflict and whether the Palestinian issue is still going to be a driver of extremism in the way that it's been in the past, whether leaders like Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia clearly just not giving a fuck about Gaza or the Palestinian people will impact things and whether this could just kind of like annexation in the west bank could become complete over the next couple of years. Gaza could just be occupied forever. I'm just wondering when there will be blowback from that and where it will come from. Obviously, that's like trying to predict the future.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, there's a lot of pressure in the system because if you look at the things that could happen in the next year or two, given the way things are going, you could have this kind of re. Escalation of the war in Iran at any point. You could have a concerted effort to annex the west bank, or you could have an intifada in the west bank that turns that into more of a conflict zone that gets very dangerous and potentially deadly. You could have pent up, you know, Arab Spring type uprisings. I mean, Egypt and Jordan are not in the most stable place. Like, you could have this Russia, Ukraine war escalate either in that theater or somewhere else. The Chinese in Taiwan, like, there's all these pots that are, like, you know, boiling and like, beginning to spill over a little bit. And it does worry you that, hey, what's the thing that could happen that just tips us into kind of seeming chaos? I mean, because we're already kind of there. If you look at the Iran war.

[Pete Hegseth]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vietor]

No, it's. It's like a steady state level of violence and uncertainty and instability that would be kind of unimaginable a decade ago. Yeah, but you're.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, yes, that's right.

[Tommy Vietor]

It's just crazy that there is a massive, like, hot war between the Russians in Ukraine.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vietor]

That's just been going on for four years and the Iran war is now going on for so long. Yeah. Just the backdrop. Well, one of those pots that's kind of seeming to boil over right now is in Yemen. Yes, that's a good one. Yeah, yeah. So we got the Houthis and then there's the internationally recognized Saudi Arabia backed Yemeni government. The UN Special envoy for Yemen, Hans Grundberg, warned last Friday that, quote, yemen today faces a greater risk of renewed large scale conflict than at any point since the UN broker truce of April 2022. As we've discussed on the show, that that truce was broken when the Saudis attacked Sanaa Airport ahead of this flight that was arriving from with a Houthi delegation in it from the Supreme Leader of Iran's funeral. The Houthis retaliated. They announced a blockade on Saudi ships in the Red Sea. And since then there's been this tit for tat where it cheated up last week when at least 30 people were killed in Houthi attacks on Yemeni military bases during some like morning training event. Also on Tuesday, Yemeni sources told Reuters that the Houthis hit a Tanzanian flagged ship in the Bab El Mandeb Strait, killing six people. And so what is so worrisome about these isolated events is that the civil war in Yemen was so catastrophic, you know, what is from 2015 to 2022, I think nearly 400,000 people were killed, most of them civilians, many of them from starvation or disease. And it could easily start back up again if, you know, some red line is crossed either for the Houthis or the Saudis. And it feels like we're kind of dancing up to that red line.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, because we've seen these strikes by the Saudis and these actions by the Houthis. And this is a good example of the fact that part of what's happened as the UN system that resolves conflicts has been weakened, but also as there's been. And this anticipates some of our upcoming topics too, the normalization of violence.

[Jon Favreau]

Right.

[Ben Rhodes]

That if you're sitting in Riyadh or Abu Dhabi or Jerusalem or Washington, what's happening in Sudan, it's just happening and we don't really have to do anything to stop it. Or the situation obviously in the, in Gaza or in southern Lebanon or the situation in Ukraine, like you get to the state where, you know, a reversion to a conflict that could kill tens of thousands of people in this place, hundreds of thousands of people is happening in so many places that it's like, oh, you know, you're just kind of watching in slow motion and doing very little other than, you know, having a UN envoy put out these statements. But the problem is, first of all, the human suffering that would ensue. And also, as we talked about, you're beginning to feel all these conflicts merge into one. So if the Yemen thing sparks up again, it's going to interact with the Iran war.

[Tommy Vietor]

Oh, for sure.

[Ben Rhodes]

And it could impact Red Sea shipping, and it could kind of become one big theater where everybody's kind of fighting in different places. And this is. Man, it's like watching a bunch of different, you know, to use a Southern California analogy, like fires burning. And if they come together, you know, that's. That's how you get something you can no longer contain. And we're kind of already teetering there and just have this tolerance, you know, because I don't have a lot of hope that, like, Marco Rubio's State Department has a big plan to kind of avoid a reversion to war in Yemen.

[Tommy Vietor]

No, not at all. Well, another one of those conflicts, as you said, of like, just the sort of normalization or us of getting used to just horrific levels of violence has been Sudan. Syria has been ravaged by civil war for four years. It's a conflict between the Sudanese government and a rebel group called the rsf. It is very difficult to know the true death toll of the war because it's just so hard to get there. But there are estimates into the several hundred thousand, and then between 14 and 15 million are believed to have been displaced, most internally, but some across the border into Chad. The war has worsened and been prolonged because the uae, the United Arab Emirates, has been funneling weapons to the rsf, the rebel group. Which brings us to this hero in London who was, I guess, just walking down the street when he spotted Muhammad bin Rashid al Maktoum, who is the UAE's Prime Minister. He's also the ruler of Dubai. He's just strolling around London with this, like, massive entourage. And so let's watch the clip of what unfolded.

[Ben Rhodes]

Stop killing Sudanese in uae. They're killing Sudanese. Sudanese people. You're killing my people of Sudan. You're killing my people. Sudanese people.

[Pete Hegseth]

Your people.

[Ben Rhodes]

You're killing my people in my country. You, my country. Stop killing Sudanese.

[Tommy Vietor]

So, as you can see, there's just one guy. This clip was posted, I think, by Middle east highs. It's one guy, this entourage of like, 50 people with this Emirati royal. It's a little hard to hear, but he's yelling, you're killing Sudanese Emiratis in uae. They're killing Sudanese people. And A member of the Prime Minister. Prime Minister's entourage responds, fuck you and fuck your people, motherfucker. Black bitch. He then crosses the street to menace the man. Ben, I do wonder if things would be different if Emirati, you know, cost benefit analysis of supporting the RSF would change if more officials were treated like this in places like Washington instead of being invited to the White House or Cafe Milano for a nice meal.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. It is entirely the case that this Emirati support for the rsf, which is well documented, has at a minimum, contributed significantly to the levels of violence and loss of life inside of Sudan. And I have to say, like, there's been a pass on this, number one, because the Emiratis have a lot of friends, they have a lot of resources. I think, number two, they did the Abraham Accords. So it's kind of like, hey, we did this thing. You, like, don't look at this other thing we're doing. But I think that the takeaway, I

[Tommy Vietor]

pay a lot of bribes. I mean, they're giving the Trump family

[Ben Rhodes]

a lot of cash, $2 billion investment in their crypto.

[Richard Horsey]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vietor]

They bought half of a business that didn't yet exist for, I think, 500 million.

[Ben Rhodes]

500 million. Was it okay?

[Tommy Vietor]

Pretty good deal.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. You know, and other commitments, you know, these commitments they make to invest, God knows what, we don't know, trillions of dollars in.

[Tommy Vietor]

Oh, they bought 2 billion worth. One of the Emirati firm bought 2 million billion worth of Trump coin. That's when they use, like the Trump stablecoin and investment into Binance crypto firm.

[Ben Rhodes]

So the other thing, though, that's interesting me about this is you do get this sense that the gap between powerful people and accountability has just been growing the last 10 years. So to take your 10 year kind of step back day, the difference between what was kind of tolerable in terms of conflict and violence and loss of civilian life has somehow really opened up in the last 10 years. And there's a sense that powerful people are not accountable. And I think what you're seeing increasingly is stuff like this happening. You know, like, people are so frustrated and they feel like they have no outlet, you know, and you go to a place like London and all these people hang out in London and they. And you're right. Like, I think discomfort beginning to show up in front of people is like, that's just going to keep happening because people can see what's going on in the world. They see that nobody seems to be held accountable for it. And they also see, by the way, Nobody even feels kind of bad about it. Their reaction wasn't to be like, no, we're not doing that. Or it's been like, shut the fuck up. And it's that mentality that I think is just the powder keg is just going to keep getting more and more pressure inside of it when it's the

[Tommy Vietor]

most shameless proxy war stuff you've ever heard of. It's like the Emiratis gold down there. Yeah. They're supporting the rsf. They're giving the RSF drones, which they're using to massacre civilians because the RSF has access to, like, gold mines. Yeah, that is.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vietor]

Gross shit.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. Yeah. And gold's, you know, doing well because people don't trust currencies because they don't trust their governments. I mean, all this stuff is kind of connected to basically powerful people wrecking things and hoarding power and resources, and ordinary people feeling that they have less outlets to express themselves. So they end up just, like, shouting at people in the street in London,

[Tommy Vietor]

you know, and they're for that, we salute you, sir. Speaking of powerful people wrecking things, let's talk about Secretary Defense Pete Hegseth. You might remember Pistol Pete from his Fox News days. Drunk guy on the weekends. Now he's in charge of America's nukes and of its wars, which may be why the latter's not going so well. A couple stories about Pete that caught our eye, so we'll tick through these. First, the New York Times did an analysis of military promotions under Hegseth and found that he really, really hates promoting women and people of color. The Times found, quote, 8 of 201 candidates for high ranking posts this year have been women, or 4%, less than half the average percentage of the past 10 years. The largest drop offs have come from the Navy and Air Force. In July, the Times reported that Hegseth recently blocked the promotions of seven senior Navy officers, five of whom are women or people of color, to the two star admiral rank. This also comes after Hegseth fired a bunch of senior women and black officers, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who was fired literally for filming one video about what it was like to be black in America. Then this just strikes me as well, they also looked at the lower ranks, where Hexath is not part of the promotions process. And there are a lot more women and people of color are coming up. But it does feel like Hexath is creating, like, a generational problem within the military by promoting only white men for this period.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, I think the alarming thing about Hexeth are there are a lot of them. One of the alarming things about Hexeth versus Trump's first term secretaries of defense or war is that he's clearly trying to remake the military and maga's image. Like he's trying to turn the United States military into kind of an extension of MAGA political interest and reflective of the MAGA worldview, which is pretty white and male.

[Jon Favreau]

Right.

[Ben Rhodes]

And the problem for that is, well, one, it's wrong and unfair to people who are being overlooked for promotions. Two, I worry that that's so that the military will be more likely to follow more extreme orders as the Trump administration goes on. So that by the time you get to year three and year four and we're coming back at Greenland or coming back at deploying troops in American cities.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, over the streets. Right.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. All of a sudden, you've got a slightly more likely group of people to do that. And then the last piece is what's going to be left at the end. You know, like, you're going to come in and you're going to have this kind of MAGA military and, you know, rebuilding cohesion and a force that is representative of the United States will. Will be hard to do after all this wrecking.

[Tommy Vietor]

You're not going to just, like, bring these people back. They're going to have lives and families and things going on. It's just not how the process works. The second story that caught our eye was we've talked a bunch of times about this critical shortage of U.S. weapons and munitions thanks to the war in Iran. A lot of it is like interceptor missiles, but there's also offensive weapons. Apparently, Trump finally learned about this issue, too. And the Washington Post reported that he screamed at Hegseth during a meeting at Camp David. So Hegseth did what every brave leader does. He blamed his deputy, who then wrote armed suppliers a letter, basically telling them they had 21 days to figure it out. When all of this leaked, Trump posted a message calling the report both false, but also treasonous. Which it can't be both, but, I mean, it's just. Look, we've talked about this enough. We don't need to belabor it. But if Trump really did just learn that this was a problem and their response was to write a letter like, it just shows how fucked we are, because the timeline for making some of these weapons is literally years, and there's no way to change that in the short term.

[Pete Hegseth]

Yeah.

[Ben Rhodes]

It just shows that because you and I are on some Text threads with, you know, former national security types. Anybody who follows any of this stuff within the first three weeks of this war was like, oh, shit, we're going to run out of munitions. And so if Trump is behind every text thread that I'm on by six months, that's a little alarming. It is also the case that, as you said, you can just fire off a thing, replenish our Patriot missiles that takes years to do, not 21 days. Hegseth, passing the buck. Not surprising there at all. And again, to be a bit of a national security person here, Russia, China, they're looking around like the US doesn't have anything left. This might be the time to escalate in Ukraine or to take a whack at Taiwan, because there's literally nothing that they could do that's a very real concern. Or if this thing with Iran escalates, as they've already demonstrated, they can fire it everywhere. We are in the Middle east, and we just don't have enough defensive munitions to protect things anymore.

[Richard Horsey]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vietor]

Nor do our Gulf allies. The irony of all of this. Well, not really an irony. It's that a lot of Trump administration officials oppose support to Ukraine because they were worried about this kind of critical munitions shortage. Now, we went to war with Iran, which is making it exponentially worse.

[Ben Rhodes]

And that's the thing. And I wouldn't let them to blame the Ukraine thing, because let's be very clear. If you look at the numbers of defensive munitions we've used in the Iran war as against what we gave Ukraine, like, what, the crisis has been caused by a dumb war.

[Tommy Vietor]

100%.

[Ben Rhodes]

We could have weathered the agreement. Yeah.

[Tommy Vietor]

Third, the Guardian had a report about corruption at the Pentagon, specifically the appointment of venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and then failed Senate candidate Blake Masters to the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board. It's a board that kind of, like, oversees. It's like a sounding board for Pentagon,

[Ben Rhodes]

for Hegseth, but it gets you good access, gets you in the door there, for sure.

[Tommy Vietor]

Both have links to Donald Trump Jr. S investment firm, 1789 Capital. They also have ties to big defense contractors and companies like Anduril and SpaceX. Ungodly numbers of investments on their own, so no conflict of interest there. It does feel like we're at the point of the kind of corruption cycle where everyone sees the President of the United States, like, gorging himself at the trough and they're running up to try to, like, catch one of his scraps in their mouth.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Ben Rhodes]

And again, if we Talk about the personnel version of remake. This is the trillion and a half dollar budget version of remaking it, which is by the time you're in year four of the Trump administration, there's limitless corruption available. Because if you have a trillion plus dollar budget and you can just do these massive contracts, you can do it with Don Junior's company, you can do it with Silicon Valley oligarchs that you like, like Andreessen. It also like spotlights this. We should come back on this defense tech issue because the new defense contractors are the Silicon Valley people. As systems are shifting to AI and autonomous weaponry, it's less Lockheed Martin and Boeing, they're still around, obviously, but it's more. And Marc Andreessen, he's one of these guys who founded Netscape. Congratulations. Does that mean you know how to be the defense supplier? These guys think that they can portable their.

[Tommy Vietor]

You know, Mary, when he was kind of a lib and he was super online, which is like tweet all day, and then I think his firm made a massive bet on crypto. Democrats kind of came out against crypto

[Ben Rhodes]

and he became anti woke. He became anti woke.

[Tommy Vietor]

And yeah, I think he tweeted something about how colonization was good for India.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, yeah.

[Tommy Vietor]

And got hammered for it and didn't

[Ben Rhodes]

like getting dragged mad because these guys, he has like. He's one of these Silicon Valley guys with like the thinnest skin imaginable.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, I'm waiting for the bad guys to start losing.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, yeah, it's coming. I can feel it building.

[Tommy Vietor]

Let's hope. Finally. Wired had this remarkable story that caught our eye. So in May, a medevac plane carrying two pilots and two nurses on a routine 30 minute flight in New Mexico crashed into the side of a mountain in an accident linked to military conducted GPS jamming exercises in the area leading up to the crash. The Air Force was doing an event where it brought together all of its electronic warfare units for these two weeks of exercises, including units to test technologies to block gps. Tragically, this medevac flight had its GPS blocked as it was trying to land in the dead of night in the middle of a desert and they hit a mountain. We don't know. It was just a horrible story. We don't really know the backstory and whether incompetence played a role here or if you could tie this to Hegseth in any way. But Jesus Christ, how does this happen?

[Ben Rhodes]

But what you also know is that there's not transparency about these kinds of events.

[Jon Favreau]

Right.

[Tommy Vietor]

It was like secret forever.

[Ben Rhodes]

And so if you're going to stack up these things, you've got and Pete Hexet, the guy that is like promoting white people and trying to bring MAGA people in the military, who's burning through our munitions in a dumb war, who is like facilitating rampant corruption and military contracting and is running the least transparent Pentagon of my life, kicking people out of the briefing room and not sharing information about stuff. And like that's why these things go together. It's this shows the depth of the rotation at like an agency that is the most powerful in the U.S. government.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yes, well said. Pod Save the World is brought to you by Haya. Back to school season is here again and you want to give your kids the best shot to be prepared for the new academic year ahead that includes their health and wellness. That's exactly why HAYA exists, to give parents a real solution. In a market flooded with kids vitamins that prioritize candy like appeal over actual nutrition. Some children's vitamins on the market today contain up to 7 grams of sugar per serving and are stuffed with artificial additives and petroleum based dyes. Haya took the opposite approach. Zero sugar, zero gummy additives, just clean nutrition. What makes Haya different is thoughtful design. They looked at what modern kids are actually eating or not eating and formulated around those specific nutritional gaps. 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It's not a sleep aid, it's a non habit forming chewable with L theanine, B6 GABA and chamomile flower extract plus magnesium and calcium that helps kids relax before bed and wake up rejuvenated and refreshed. No synthetic hormones like melatonin, no sugar, just calm support to help them recharge for everything they've got going on. You can now find Haya in person at Target stores nationwide or order directly from their website with a special deal we've worked out just for you receive 50% off your first order on any of their products. To claim this deal you must go to hiahealth.com world. This deal is not available on the regular website. Go to H I Y-A H-E-A-L-T-.comWorld and get your kids the full body support they need. Pod Save the World is brought to you by Fast Growing Trees. Did you know? Fast Growing Trees is America's largest and most trusted online nursery with thousands of trees and plants and over 2 million happy customers. They have all the plants your yard or home needs, including fruit trees, privacy trees, flowering trees, shrubs and houseplants. All grown with care and guaranteed to arrive healthy. Whatever you're looking for, Fast Growing Trees helps you find options that actually work for your climate, for your space and your lifestyle. Fast Growing Trees makes it easy to get your dream yard. Just click order Grow and get healthy, thriving plants delivered to your door. Their Alive and thrive guarantee promises that your plants arrive happy and healthy. No green thumb required, just quality plants you can count on. Plus get ongoing support from the trained plant experts who can help you plan your landscape, choose the right plants and learn how to care for them every step along the way. We have a ton of great plants from Fast Growing Trees here at the office. The thing that's so great about what they do is it's not just about like going to a place to buy a plant. You gotta need to know what will actually work in the environment where you live or like you know the climate you live in. You want to know what is going to look good in your backyard or in your house. You want to know how to keep the thing alive because I don't know about you, but I'm good at killing plants. They will get you covered. They will walk you through everything step by step and make sure that you have a beautiful plant in your home for many, many years to come. Right now they have great deals on summer planting essentials, up to half off on select plants and listeners to our show get 20% off their first purchase when using the Code World at checkout. That's an additional 20% off. Better plants and better growing at fastgrowingtrees.com using the code world at checkout fastgrowingtrees.com code world Now's the perfect time to plant. Let's grow together. Use Code World to save today, offer is valid for a limited time. Terms and conditions may apply. All right, let's turn to Ukraine, because a couple of weeks back, we talked about this surprising Ukrainian airstrike or drone strike on a Russian business called Wildberries. Wildberries is basically the Amazon of Russia. You can buy anything there. It's e commerce. The first strike on this Wild Berries warehouse created a cloud of smoke that was reportedly so large that you could see it from space. It's a lot of stuff burning. But this campaign against wild berries, it did not end there. Foreign policy magazine and the New York Times did great pieces on all this that I'm going to draw from liberally in this section. They found that in the past month or so, at least 23 Wild Berries facilities have been hit by Ukraine and nine Wild Berries employees have been killed. This Moscow based organization called Data Insight estimates that Wild Berries has lost up to one third of its warehouse space and nearly $6 billion in goods. And that's a big deal if you're an average Russian because more than half of the people in Russia use wild berries once a month and tens of millions of Russians use it multiple times a week. So the service being disrupted just has a big impact on ordinary people's lives. And it brings the war home in a way that Ukraine hasn't managed to do previously to like, sort of the Russian populace. But the strikes may also have a material impact on the battlefield. So the fp, the Foreign Policy piece, dug into a bunch of detail about how Russian soldiers use wild berries for supplies. The Russian military, I think, can be quite incompetent when it comes to resupplying guys at the front. So soldiers will end up buying stuff for themselves or they'll are these kind of like ad hoc groups that raise money and donate supplies to them and have it delivered via wildberries. Until recently, the Wildberry site had a dedicated section called Everything for the svo. SVO stands for special military operation. You could buy items like, or you still can buy items, but they were like, sort of bucketed in this section. Stuff like body armor, drone components, fins for grenades. The list goes on and on. This reporter who did the piece for Foreign Policy, Alexei Kovalev, said he counted 1,000 items that were military use only and about 4,500 that could be considered dual use. He also said that there were like, you know, you could find Russian military bloggers talking about how important wildberries is to guides at the front. So, Ben, I think these strikes raise some interesting questions about civilian versus military targeting. And what's appropriate under international law. A target becomes legitimate when it's providing a military banish to your enemy and destroying it would create a definite military advantage for you. I think the Ukrainians argue that the extensive military hardware on the Wildberry site makes it a pretty easy call. I think they'd also point out that Russia has bombed the shit out of Nova Posta, which is a Ukrainian delivery company. They're also, I think, honest though, the Ukrainians, that part of it is psychological warfare. The commander of Ukraine's drone force said the strikes were about destroying, quote, the illusion of a comfortable peacetime. So, Ben, it's interesting. These are obviously slippery slope arguments. Walmart and Bass Pro Shop sell a lot of guns, including to service members. I wonder how people would feel about those suddenly getting bombed by an adversary in a war. But I do feel like in this specific case, Ukraine. Their argument is pretty compelling. But I don't know what you made of it.

[Ben Rhodes]

I, I find the whole thing worrisome. Look, I, I understand the Ukrainian mentality, like we need to get any advantage we can. These guys make no, you know, distinction between, or very limited distinction between civilian and military targets. And so they're ratcheting it up. And so they were, we saw them hitting energy infrastructure inside of Russia. Now we're seeing them hit this. I understand why they're doing it. I think they're blurring the lines because I think it's probably both, as you pointed out. It's like, sure, there's some military uses. It's also more like we have to bring the war home to the Russian people. If the Russian people don't feel the impact of this war, nothing's going to change, which is a logical conclusion. But that is a slippery slope. And it's both a slippery slope to, you know, getting further and further away from clearly military targets. But what I worry about again is this escalation point that keeps coming up today. You know, the Russians could say, well, the Ukrainians get a lot of supplies from Europe and so maybe we should start drone attacks on warehouses in Poland.

[Tommy Vietor]

Right.

[Ben Rhodes]

Or Germany.

[Tommy Vietor]

Or if you imagine you decided, well, you have to feed your soldiers, so what if we blew up every grain depot?

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. And so I just, you know, the irony is that for all of the ham handed, stupid diplomacy at the beginning of the Trump administration on the war, like it would actually now would be a good time to be trying to walk, you know, the Russians and the Ukrainians back from what feels like a potential escalation cycle that could get Hairier and hairier and you don't feel that happening. And so I think this will give the Ukrainians some advantage. But I have to think that Putin will find some way to escalate in return.

[Jon Favreau]

And.

[Ben Rhodes]

And then we're just kind of keep going on this spiral that we're on.

[Tommy Vietor]

And again, it's another example of like kind of there are these little escalatory steps happening all the time and they almost get brushed off now. Like, I think Moldova said that a Russian drone had landed on Moldovan soil. That could trigger Article 5.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vietor]

There's this report that US intelligence believed Russia was behind an attack on a German airport. It was a drone loaded with explosives that I think was targeting a Ukrainian cargo plane at like in Leipzig in Germany.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vietor]

So just it's pretty scary stuff. There's a NATO intel report that I think leaked that suggested Russia might try an attack of some kind, maybe hybrid or maybe cyber, on a NATO ally in the coming years to kind of test the alliance.

[Ben Rhodes]

That's what I'd watch. I mean, the thing I would watch for to be constructive only in terms of what to watch for is this is like reprisals getting into Europe because the same logic. And again, let's be very clear, Russia is the aggressor here. Ukraine has our sympathy because they are being entrepreneurial in their defense. At the same time, it is what it is. And I think that the Russians could decide we got to bring this war into Europe under the same logic that they're the ones backfilling the Ukrainians.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah. Speaking of threats to Europe, a couple of months back we covered this pretty wild story about Jared and Ivanka Trump claiming they discovered an island in the Mediterranean off the coast of Albania. Ivanka told the story like it was kind of a real estate meet cute. But really it was just like a love story about colonization.

[Ben Rhodes]

Ever since on the Rothschilds yacht. On the Rothschilds yacht, that's when they discovered the swam up the barren islands.

[Tommy Vietor]

We walked to the top of the mountain barefoot. Everyone's like, it's not barren. It's a fucking wildlife. So they cut this sweetheart deal with the Prime Minister of Albania to try to develop this area. Ever since there have been massive protests of the deal of the development of the region, which have been dubbed the Flamingo revolution by locals because there's a bunch of like endangered flamingo species that would be impacted by the construction. The Wall Street Journal added some incredible reporting to this firestorm over the weekend. The Journal says that the development group that Jared Kushner is backing paid over $120 million to a man named Arthur or Arturo. I don't know. He's a gangster who gets shit. Artur Shay who For the land that they're trying to develop. But there are a couple small issues with that. First of all, Sheihu may not legally own the land. The villagers who live there say they, like, saw Jared's like, a rendering of what this resort would look like, realized it was on top of their village, and then reached out to say, hey, this dude stole it from us back in 2000. So that's problem number one. Problem number two is that Che, who is an alleged gangster and drug trafficker, this guy might be kind of overseeing gangs that are leading to people going in boats in the Caribbean. That Pete Hegseth is then drone strike down.

[Jon Favreau]

Great.

[Tommy Vietor]

So that's cool. And then finally, back in June, Albania's corruption office got an order to arrest Shehu for money laundering and racketeering. He currently lives in Miami because he fled Albania because he was involved in like, a shootout at a bar, maybe with a rival gang. So, Ben, great reporting here by the Wall Street Journal. I'm not remotely surprised that Jared Kushner is kind of like, in cahoots with a mobster in Albania since his father in law acts like one. And actually his father acts like one too. I remember he set up his own sister in a sting operation. But crazy story.

[Ben Rhodes]

This story is so important because every single trend in the world that people are pissed about kind of converges in it. Like oligarchs calling shots. Like Jared Kushner doing real estate deals, environmental degradation, like, life not getting better for people. While these deals are done over their heads. The reality is, like, I just don't see this. I'm sorry for Jared and Ivanka. I just. I can't see this thing coming to fruition. It seems like this tapped into a level of disconnect, discontent with the Albanian public. But also just. It does make you wonder imagine if we had like a anti corruption union doj. Like, what are the nature of these deals that are being made by Jared and the Trump family around the world? How many people are there, like, this gangster on the other end of them? Like.

[Jon Favreau]

Like what?

[Ben Rhodes]

Like, because there's so little. I mean, when you think about the, like, colonoscopy done to, like, every business transaction Hunter Biden was ever involved in versus this stuff. Like, yeah, it is insane.

[Tommy Vietor]

This has to be like, like, literally number one on the list for over

[Ben Rhodes]

message to Democrats after you win, knock on wood. And hopefully get certified.

[Jon Favreau]

Knock on wood.

[Ben Rhodes]

This corruption has to be.

[Tommy Vietor]

Do not wait, please.

[Ben Rhodes]

Dive in.

[Tommy Vietor]

Subpoenas.

[Ben Rhodes]

Do independent investigations. Do whatever you have to do.

[Tommy Vietor]

Subpoena Kushner. Subpoena his business partners. Subpoena the banks. Subpoena. Like the partners. Like all of it. Day one.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vietor]

Don't wait. Please, God, don't wait again.

[Ben Rhodes]

You want to put Merrick Garland on this case?

[Tommy Vietor]

Jesus. What's that guy up to, you think?

[Ben Rhodes]

I don't know.

[Tommy Vietor]

Just wallowing.

[Ben Rhodes]

He's just. No, he's just abiding my norms wherever he is.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah. Just feeling. Feeling good about himself. Two more quick things. So, first, it's just worth mentioning that the Ebola outbreak that we've talked about a couple times in the Democratic Republic of Congo and then some parts of Uganda, it's now the second largest in history and the fastest growing on record. The Congolese government published some data on Tuesday showing the death count is now surpassed 2,000. And there's over 4,000 additional confirmed cases. Now, we say confirmed. There's probably a lot of cases they don't know about. There's a lot of problems that make this a harder outbreak. There's no vaccine for this particular strain of Ebola. The outbreak is happening in places where there is, like, ongoing warfare and very little health infrastructure. And there's lots of evidence that the virus is spreading in the community and not being tracked. I saw, like, one health center found that 90% of their patients were not kind of registered anywhere else. They were just new people, which suggests that there's a lot of transmission just happening in life. The Director General of the African CDC also expressed concern this week that the virus might be mutating. So other than that, it's going good. I just wanted to bring this up because it feels very scary. It's a great example of a problem that the White House is just. I don't think I've heard them talk about it or even pretending to try to solve.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, because the chief instrument for solving the ebola epidemic in 2014 was USAID, which doesn't exist. And the chief international organization that we work with to solve that epidemic was the World Health Organization, which the United States has pulled out of. So they don't even have the levers to try to deal with it. And this is one of those issues. It's horrible for the people impacted. And it's also the case that if and when this shows up in the United States, people are going to freak the fuck out and not really understand why. It's happened. It's happened because we've dismantled the mechanisms that we have to deal with it. So things like this tragically happen in the world.

[Jon Favreau]

But.

[Ben Rhodes]

But as is the case with, like, conflicts, we don't have a UN system that works. We don't really have an international, global public health infrastructure, which, after Covid, is pretty remarkable.

[Tommy Vietor]

Terrifying. Yeah. And everyone is even more distrustful of health officials, vaccines, Fauci.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, yell about Fauci, but we won't talk about Ebola.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, great. Finally, Ben, I want to see if you can spot what's wrong with Canadian politician Bill Oliver's speech to the Legislative assembly of New Brunswick. This speech is from June, but the clip kind of made the rounds last week. Let's play that. One of the dangers associated with creating advocacy offices is that citizens often develop expectations that exceed the powers actually granted to those offices. Here's a more natural, flowing version of that section that reads like a legislative speech rather than a series of short points. Madam speaker, one of my concerns with this legislation is, is the potential gap between what New Brunswickers may reasonably expect this office to accomplish and what the office will actually have the authority to do once it is established. Okay, so as you could see there, like, when he copied it over from ChatGPT or whatever, Claude, he left in the AI's framing of his remarks. But he didn't just do it once. A few minutes later, he also read out, quote, here's a more developed and flowing version of the same section. And after that, he started to read another one before catching himself and saying, excuse me. So Oliver has since responded saying, quote, during the spring session in the legislature, I employed AI to help prepare speaking notes. When printing the final version of my speech, AI prompts were not removed, which were spoken by me, and has caused much concern of many individuals. He says he learned an important lesson. Ben, a couple questions here. As a former speechwriter, how stupid do you have to be to anchorman yourself not once, not twice, but three times in 40 minutes? That's question one. And question two. What percentage of politicians do you think have just fully outsourced speechwriting to AI at this point?

[Ben Rhodes]

This is the thing, is, first of all, reading the prompts, it does suggest that I always tell people that it was one of the reasons it was useful that Barack Obama actually, like, read and edited his speeches is because he wasn't reading them for the first time in delivery, right?

[Tommy Vietor]

And like, you have Trump, he reacts to himself.

[Ben Rhodes]

He's like, so, yeah, yeah, yeah, like, but that's the thing you can tell when a politician is kind of reading something for, for the first time now, he gives away the game. I'm surprised he doesn't have their, like, would you like me to develop a five point plan for how you can become a better legislator?

[Tommy Vietor]

Was this answer adequate?

[Pete Hegseth]

Yeah.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. But then the bigger problem is beyond the fact that this is confirming what people are scared about with AI, it's also kind of confirming what people are scared about with their politicians, which is that if you can just stand up there and do your job by reciting AI produced text, what are you like, what are you bringing in particular to this?

[Tommy Vietor]

Right? Oh, like you're like, literally, look, everything we all do is derivative, right? Like the words I'm saying right now are derivative of my life's experience and things I read to prepare for this show and stuff I learned in the Obama days, whatever. But it does feel like with AI, it's literally just like hunks of text fed into a machine that kind of like blends them together and spits out something new. But that is entirely derivative of whatever it was trained on. If no human beings are having new ideas or political thought or statements like, what happens?

[Ben Rhodes]

Organic book plug.

[Pete Hegseth]

Right.

[Ben Rhodes]

Because having done like, you know, all we say, and looking at the history of political speech in this country, you know, one of the things that's very clear to me is that the thing that makes someone pay attention to what a politician is saying is when you say something that sounds different, like, oh, here's a hard truth I haven't heard before, or here's an argument that is different from what I've heard before, or here's just. I just profiled your doppelganger Rob sand in Iowa. He's got this style. He's not Barack Obama, but it's very Rob Sand. It's this earnest. It's him. And I think part of what scares people about politicians is that they think that they're completely replaceable. That essentially it doesn't really matter who you elect because they're just gonna read the same talking points and reward the same special interest and operate in the same system. And this is the worst version of what people are afraid of. I would imagine that a lot of politicians are using AI because it's a shortcut. But what AI produces is literally the definition of the lowest common denominator. What should a Canadian legislator from this region say about X issue? And it spits it out like, well, okay, I'm glad that you have a machine that can look at a bunch of texts on the Internet and decide what to say. But that's not what people vote for people to do for them. And so I'd caution against, yeah, use AI for research or get some feedback, but you got to write your own fucking text.

[Tommy Vietor]

We're also just like, we're not far away from someone recommending that AI agents actually govern us.

[Ben Rhodes]

That's the next step.

[Tommy Vietor]

Because what's next, like the fever dream. And also someone's going to.

[Ben Rhodes]

Because what's the difference? And I'm sure that would make, you know, you know, Mark Andreessen happy.

[Tommy Vietor]

Oh, Andreessen will be pumped. He would love that. Love. Nothing more. Cool future we got going on here. All right, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, you're going to hear Ben's interview with Richard Horsey about all the things happening in Myanmar. So stick around for that. Potato World is brought to you by Ridge. You know Ridge, they make amazing power banks, wallets, luggage and premium everyday gear. Well, this year they're back with their legendary sweepstakes for the sixth year running. And this time it's bigger than ever. The sweepstakes runs from July 24 through September 8. Two lucky winners will get to choose between. Whoa. A Lamborghini Huracan Sto. That sounds expensive. A Ford Hennessey Velociraptor, a souped up ford Bronco or $100,000 in cash. Damn. Ooh. Rich wants to know which option I would pick if I won. I think. I don't know. I really want to google all these cars. If I could have a Ford Hennessey Velociraptor and tell my son who's two that we own a dinosaur, I think that would go over big in my house. So maybe I'm going with that bad boy. There's only 1500 Lamborghini Huracan Stiratos that exist. And Ridge has given you the chance to own one. This Lambo is the world's first off road supercar. It's naturally aspirated V10 and has 610 horsepower. Jesus. I don't know what any of that means. I know the horsepower part was, but it sounds pretty cool. The Hennessey Velociraptor also has an insane 558 horsepower twin turbo. It's basically an American muscle car put into an all terrain truck. The custom built Bronco is coated in scratch resistant Kevlar armor and riding high on massive 37 inch off road tires. Contest entry is [e-mail] but if you want to boost your chances, you can earn additional entries by picking up Ridge gear during the sweepstakes like a new Power bank wallet or anything else you had your eye on. No matter what you pick, Ridge has free shipping, a 99 day risk free trial and over 100,000 5 star reviews. Ready to upgrade your wallet and maybe your ride. For a limited time only, head to ridge.com and use code PSTW at checkout for 10% off your order and a chance to win Ridge's biggest sweepstakes ever. A Lamborghini Huracan Stirato, a Hennessey Velociraptor, a Ford Bronco, or a $100,000 in cash. No purchase necessary to enter, but every dollar you spend gets you more entries. That's ridge.com use the code PSTW. After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them that Pod Save the World sent you

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[Tommy Vietor]

Hi, my name is Mitch Landrieu.

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[Tommy Vietor]

People in the south feel really misunderstood, left behind, put down on and they want to explain that to somebody.

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We're traveling across six southern states to explore the people, the issues, the assumptions that no longer hold and what the rest of us are missing about a region that will shape the future of our politics and and our country. From left, right and crooked media starting July 27, watch long play series on YouTube at YouTube.com longplay series or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

[Jon Favreau]

Right. I'm very pleased to welcome back to Pod Save the World, Richard Horsey. Richard is the Senior Advisor for Asia at the International Crisis Group where he has long led their work on Myanmar. Richard, thanks so much for joining us.

[Richard Horsey]

It's great to be on Ben.

[Jon Favreau]

So part of what we wanted to do here is catch people up with what's been happening in Myanmar, to use a phrase and so for people that have not been following this closely, you'll remember that in 2021, there was a military coup which overturned the kind of nascent democratic reform movement in Burma and imprisoned Aung San SUU Kyi, the elected state councilor. And since then, there's been a civil war in which over 100,000 people have died. There are millions of people who are displaced. There's malnutrition and hunger across the country. Just to cite a recent report, the monitoring group armed conflict location and event data noted that, quote, Myanmar is the most fragmented conflict in the world with over 1,200 distinct armed groups reported to have been involved in at least one violent event. But Richard, I just want to ask, just how would you describe the current state of play? This has kind of fallen off the radar with everything that's happening around the world. I know that the military has taken steps recently that we can talk about to kind of entrench itself deeper in power. But how would you describe the state of the civil conflict and who's in control in Myanmar?

[Richard Horsey]

So as you said, Ben, after the coup, there was just this eruption, first in peaceful demonstrations, and then when those were brutally suppressed, just, you know, huge swathes of the country and particularly young people took up arms, went to more remote areas, fought back against the military, joined up with long standing ethnic armed groups who've been fighting for decades for greater autonomy. And this really led to, you know, much of the country, perhaps more than half, perhaps much more than that, falling out of state hands. This is not a new phenomenon in Myanmar. Right. This is not a country that was united and where the central government has traditionally had control over all of its territory. You know, for eight decades since independence, Myanmar has been fragmented. But I think the situation we see today is the most fragmented that Myanmar has been over all of those decades. The Myanmar military has managed to stabilize the situation. If we were talking two years ago, I think we'd have been talking about, can the military survive? Will it collapse? Did it face imminent battlefield defeat? But through the backing of China, diplomatically and militarily, through the military's own efforts to improve its drone warfare, enforce conscription for the first time, it's managed to stabilize the front lines. But that's a far cry from recovering all the territory it's lost. And there are large parts of the country, including most of the international borders, that are still not under central control.

[Jon Favreau]

It seems like the military's been trying to kind of seize on some of those gains you mentioned and kind of confer a sense that its ultimate resilience, if not ability to control the whole country is assured. Since having a kind of sham election earlier this year, you've seen Minang Lang, who's the general who led the coup, who is now the President of the country. You've seen him make these diplomatic visits to China and India and Thailand and trying to kind of send this message. I'm, you know, we're back in from the cold. What is the state of the ability of the military to kind of break its international isolation in places like asean, the Organization of Southeast Asian Countries, or drawing on its relationship with China or India? Is that, is that working?

[Richard Horsey]

So I think on Minong Hlang's terms, he probably feels he's won, but he's won at enormous cost to the country. Of course. Now winning on his terms means, you know, the coup was about removing Aung San SUU Kyi, removing that democratic experiment that you spoke about, putting the military back at the center of politics and the economy, let's not forget as well. And in those terms, I think he feels like, you know, after a shaky few years where this, this coup could have actually failed, that he's managed to get through this. He's had these stage managed elections. He's now presenting himself as a civilian elected leader. And some countries have accepted that. China has accepted it. Xi Jinping, you know, literally embraced him in the Great hall of the People a few weeks ago, giving very clear backing. India has hosted him on an official visit and just a couple of days ago, he was on an official visit to Thailand. So I think, you know, countries in the region are making a calculation that Minong lying and the Myanmar military probably aren't going anywhere. They weren't keen to reach out to him. He was in, you know, very strong diplomatic isolation in the period where it looked like he may fall. But now that he's stabilized, now that he has China's very visible backing, India's very visible backing, other countries are making a calculation that these guys are going to be around for a while and we have things to discuss, we have issues, we have concerns, you know, we, we can't keep them at arm's length. And you know, that hasn't, that hasn't broken kind of the West's general distaste for Myanmar. But frankly, Western countries have far higher priorities and are not paying a lot of attention these days to Myanmar and in the region. Some members of the association of Southeast Asian nations, of which Myanmar is a member country, are still kind of considering that normal engagement with Myanmar is distasteful and premature. But at the end of the day, you know, they also want to focus on other things. They don't want Myanmar dominating their meetings and, and summits. And the feeling is that after Thailand has, has now hosted him, Laos has hosted him on a state visit, that it's a probably a matter of time before he will, he will be back. You know, at least in the region, in normal diplomatic circles.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, in some ways it feels like

[Ben Rhodes]

we're all the way back to where

[Jon Favreau]

things were, you know, before say 2010 or 11. You know, there's this kind of de facto engagement, even if it's unpleasant in some ways. I want to ask a couple questions about then the opposition. The first is another story that has been making the rounds recently. Was concerned that Aung San SUU Kyi had not been seen in years. And there was kind of a proof of life effort to kind of establish that, that she was in fact alive and in custody. But there's not been access for her lawyers or not been any obviously media confirmation of her whereabouts. How would you describe the state of play as it relates? She's obviously very old. What do we know about her conditions such as AR and how much does she still matter in the politics of the country? Would her death be a potentially galvanizing event that the military might not want people to know about? Is that lurking in the backdrop here too?

[Richard Horsey]

You know, the whole point of the coup for Minong Hyang was to remove Aung San SUU Kyi and her National League for Democracy party from the political landscape. You know, this was not just about him getting power. It was about her being removed from any possibility of playing a political role. And that's why she's been kept almost totally incommunicado for these last five and a half years. That has led to many concerns of her family, of her supporters of the world at large. What is her situation? And we know that for a time she was in very austere conditions in Napydale Prison, in a sort of tin hut that got extremely hot in the hot season. And you know, for an old person with long standing health issues, that's a concern. The military announced a few months ago that she had been moved to a house in the capital, Naypyidaw, but there was no other information. In the last few days, the Red Cross has been given access to her. So she met with the delegate of the Red Cross in Myanmar, and photographs of that meeting and a short statement from the ICRC have been released. So that is the proof of life that not only her family were calling for, but also countries in the region, and even China was pushing for greater transparency over her situation. And you know, there are a lot of leaders in the region who are very fond of Aung San SUU Kyi. They worked with her for a number of years. They were dismayed to see what happened after the coup. They feel a certain loyalty to her. And so this is an important issue, you know, for the region as well. The demands that she be given access to the ASEAN special envoy to other diplomats have been rebuffed. And I think the ICRC choice was precisely to stop this becoming a kind of constant demand from. From different diplomats, you know. Well, you gave access to the Philippines, who were the chair of the regional grouping. Why not next year give access to Singapore, the next incoming chair? It could have led to this kind of demands to see her and so on. And I think Menong Lang did not want to give her that kind of political role. So it was the Red Cross. There's the proof of life. She seems from the photos, in reasonably good shape. And the Red Cross has had a chance to pass message from her to her family, but that's basically it. She has no access to lawyers. She doesn't have access for her personal doctor. There may be other doctors seeing her, we don't know.

[Ben Rhodes]

And so with her kind of removed

[Jon Favreau]

from the stage, as you mentioned, was Minang Lang's one of his intentions? How would you describe the state of the organized opposition? There was an umbrella group, kind of an umbrella put over this constellation of actors after the coup that included elements of the nld, the democratically elected party, but also young people, and then all the ethnic armed groups that you mentioned too. How would you describe the state of that opposition? Is it organized? Do they continue to have morale that they could somehow prevail in this conflict? Or are they just trying to hold on to whatever territory they've got? What's your sense of it?

[Richard Horsey]

I mean, I think there's an overwhelming feeling across large swathes of the country that the current situation is unacceptable, it's untenable. The military cannot be allowed to reinsert itself at the. At the heart of politics in the country, that the reform period of a decade was far from perfect, but was pointing in the right direction. And now, as you said, everything is pointing in the wrong direction. The clock has been turned back a generation, not only politically, you know, back to another closed, authoritarian military regime, but economically as well. You know, there's a. There's a lost Generation of development, of childhood, of childhood health, of education, of economic output. And so there is a, still a strong determination among many different walks of life. People I talk to, you know, to finish the revolution as they see it, but that's looking like a very long term prospect. And just as the country itself is highly fragmented, so too is resistance and opposition to the military. You have very different kinds of resistance. You have, as you say, the long standing ethnic armed groups who really just want autonomy. They don't care who's in control in the center. They just want to have the ability to have a greater say in their, their own lives and, and their own affairs. There is a young generation of politically active people, some who've taken up arms, others who are resisting in non violent ways. You know, the youth of the, of the cities and the heartland who are determined to have a different future. And you know, these people have different objectives, they're in different parts of the country, they have different strategies. So it is very divided and that works to the military's advantage. After the coup, the government that was deposed established a parallel government, the National Unity government with Aung San SUU Kyi and President Win, her nominee, President at its head. The problem with that is that in the midst of an armed revolution, which it backed, it was never quite clear whether this National Unity government was a government and was aiming to be a government, or was a revolutionary organization aiming to overthrow, you know, the military in Naypyidor. And those kind of two roles kind of clashed a little bit. And you know, I think there's a sense now that a lot of the momentum has been lost, a lot of the political momentum. There's more criticism of the parallel government. You know, the revolution was so close to succeeding and yet we failed. Where are the new ideas? Where is the new direction? And the reality is that the, the, the opposition government with Aung San SUU Kyi at its helm doesn't have leadership. Because if your leader is incarcerated incommunicado, you don't have someone who is visible and there to kind of lead the charge. There is no Zelensky like figure because the Zelensky like figure is Aung San SUU Kyi herself. And she's incommunicado. So she remains incredibly important in that sense, that she's the sort of touchstone for everybody. She's not important in the sense of leading things because she hasn't been able to speak publicly since the couple. But I do think that her death would be a, a trigger moment and something that the military would be very concerned about. They don't want her dying on their watch, in their, in, in their custody. She still is the most influential political figure in the country, even after five years of, of incarceration and detention.

[Ben Rhodes]

One of the, the things that is,

[Jon Favreau]

that feels different to me than the past is the role of the United States, the West, whatever form the United States and Europe, there was a lot of focus on Aung San SUU Kyi and democracy in Burma in the decades leading up to that moment of reform that took place from around 2011 until the couple. It feels like there's much more disengagement now, though. The Trump administration not sure what their policy is. So while there's a familiar China backing the military and some of the Southeast Asian countries being cozier, what seems to be missing is any sense that this is even on the radar screen of the United States or certainly not that there's a kind of pressure strategy to change the behavior of the government. I mean, is there a role to play for the United States? Recognizing the Trump administration is probably not going to be that constructive. And are there other interests too? Because I noticed these recent reports too of a huge kind of scam economy emanating from Myanmar. The kind of proliferation of this online criminality feels almost North Korean, right? That, that this military could just turn to like, you know, crypto and scams and other illicit sources of income. Should that compel greater concern about what's happening here too?

[Richard Horsey]

I think absolutely. I mean, you know, we live in a different world now, right, where we're quite inured to human suffering, where the humanitarian system is broken and broke, to put it frankly, and where international relations is far more transactional. And so that has, that's, you know, been a huge problem for, for people who've been trying to, you know, increase global interest in what's happening in Myanmar, try to drive policy changes that could really have some effect. They're hitting brick walls, right? It's very hard to advocate for Myanmar on humanitarian grounds when you have Gaza, you have Ukraine and where you have, frankly, not only in the US but, but across the west government who are much more concerned about other issues closer to home and, and are not focused on, on principles based foreign policy. So, so this is, this is a huge challenge. But it, as you say, Myanmar demands attention not only because we should care about what's happening because of the humanitarian costs, the human costs. It also matters because having a failed state in the heart of Asia is a dangerous, dangerous thing. You know, Myanmar is the Largest global source of synthetic methamphetamines, mostly going to East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific, Australia, New Zealand, and it's probably the largest current scam center economy. Now these are many of them in parts of the country that the government doesn't have formal control over. But in many cases it's. It's armed groups that it's somehow allied with on the battlefield that are controlling the territory near to the Thai border mostly where these, you know, industrial scale scam cities are growing up out of the paddy fields. And those are targeting people all around the world. So, you know, Myanmar drugs may not be landing on the streets of New York, but Myanmar scam centers are scamming tens of billions of dollars a year from Americans. They're targeting Europeans, they're targeting, you know, victims all around the world. And this really matters. And it matters not only as a criminal justice issue, but I think it matters because the scale of this economy, tens, possibly hundreds of billions of dollars across Southeast Asia. These scam factories, they are developing, you know, dark financial systems, dark company registration systems, North Korean money has been laundered over exactly the same thing channels as the scam center money is being laundered. So this is a whole criminal ecosystem which is emerging, which is a threat to regional stability, it's a threat to financial integrity in the region. We should be very worried about that.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, I mean, it just feels like you, I mean, to be blunt, have

[Jon Favreau]

this kind of gangster military running a piece of this state with no regard for the human rights of its people, purely in self survival mode and willing to turn to kind of all manner of schemes to enrich itself in what has to be an illicit economy. I mean, it's in the heart of Southeast Asia.

[Ben Rhodes]

So I just think there's a lot

[Jon Favreau]

of reasons to care about this. Well, I want to end on the human one, which is, I'm just curious, Richard.

[Ben Rhodes]

I know a lot of people from

[Jon Favreau]

Myanmar from my time working on it in more hopeful days. And it's so sad to kind of here people are scattered, some people are out of the country. People in places like Yangon have kind of gone to ground. On the other hand, it is amazing. It's what you describe. People are still talking about what lessons they could have learned from what went wrong in the last era of reform to get it right the next time. There's this kind of persistent sense that at some point the future will be different. Give people a sense from your context of just what the mood is like for more, more normal people in the country, you know, who are just trying to make sense of this and trying to find some hope in it all. How bad is it economically and politically and, and what is your sense of the remaining kind of hope for the future?

[Richard Horsey]

So in the main cities, you know, Yangon, Mandalay, I think, you know, a lot of people are just kind of traumatized by these last five years and what's happened by the futures that they saw that were stolen from them. But at the end of the day, they have to put food on the table, they have to feed their kids, they have to get their kids to school. And so, you know, in a situation of acute economic distress where there's no jobs available, the economy is in decline, prices are very high. You know, it's a daily struggle just to, just to make ends meet. And that, that is what a lot of people are focused on. And they don't have many options. You know, the options are you go to parts of the country where the illicit economy is thriving because that's where the money is, or you go into the, you know, informal labor migration routes, very dangerous, you know, risks of trafficking, risks of exploitation to Thailand, to the Gulf, to other places to try and send money back home. And that's how, that's how people are coping. But what I take hope from is that everyone I speak to is, you know, still has a vision of the, of the Myanmar that they want. They have a vision of the country that they saw a glimpse of 10 years ago. And they really still believe that that is the direction they have to go in. And I think that, you know, this new young generation is incredibly inspiring. They have put aside a lot of the political divisions of the past, a lot of the received wisdom about what kind of country Myanmar was, the, the racism, the division and you know, they've come to, they sort of come together as a generation, not as a group of Burman people or minority people or whatever. They've come together as a generation. And I think that while that may not be immediately successful in unseating a violent, brutal military, it's a template for the future and it will resonate in the future and when opportunities do arise. You know, what I hope is that it's that vision, it's that multi ethnic, multi religious hopeful vision that will dominate and not the sort of more narrow nationalisms that we've seen exposed at certain times in the past.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, no, it's a great note to

[Jon Favreau]

end on because you do just get a sense that if this country were allowed to reach its potential and the potential of these extraordinary people that have so many ideas for the future. It would be truly extraordinary. And yet we've had to see people go through so much. So we'll keep an eye on this.

[Ben Rhodes]

People should follow your work.

[Jon Favreau]

Crisis Group has always been excellent on Myanmar and Southeast Asia in general. So really appreciate you coming on and helping us understand what's going on.

[Richard Horsey]

Thanks for having me on the podcast, Ben. Great to talk.

[Tommy Vietor]

Thanks again to Richard Horsey for joining the show and we will talk to you guys next week. Pod Save the World is a Crooked Media production. Our show is produced by Ilona Minkowski, Michael Goldsmith, and Anisha Banerjee. Our team includes Matt de Groat, Ben Hethcote, Jordan Kanter, Kenny Moffett, David Tolles, and Ryan Young. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. Hi, my name is Mitch Landrieu.

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