South Korean President Declares Martial Law

Summary

Pod Save the World - Episode: South Korean President Declares Martial Law
Release Date: December 4, 2024
Hosts: Tommy Vietor & Ben Rhodes
Knowledge Cutoff: October 2023

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Introduction

In this episode of Pod Save the World, hosts Tommy Vietor and Ben Rhodes delve into a tumultuous week in global politics. The discussion spans the unprecedented declaration of martial law in South Korea, significant developments in Syria, personnel movements within the Trump administration, grim updates from Gaza, and pivotal elections in Romania, Georgia, and Ireland. The hosts provide in-depth analysis, expert insights, and notable quotes to elucidate these complex issues.

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1. South Korean President Declares Martial Law

Timestamp: [03:03] - [11:17]

Overview:
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol made a dramatic move by declaring martial law, the first such declaration in nearly half a century. This action involved the military taking temporary control over the government, deploying troops to the National Assembly, banning protests and political activities, and attempting to seize media control. The declaration faced swift opposition from both the public and legislative bodies, resulting in its invalidation within hours.

Key Points:

• Martial Law Declaration and Response:
  President Yoon’s declaration aimed ostensibly at eradicating pro-North Korean forces and safeguarding constitutional freedoms. However, underlying motives appear to stem from frustration with political opponents who had been obstructing his agenda since May 2022. Faced with a unified opposition, including members of his own party, Yoon’s attempt at a coup was met with a resounding 190-0 vote defeating the declaration.

  Tommy Vietor [07:08]: "Yoon Suk Yeol is a career prosecutor. He's used to having a ton of authority in that job. He has, you know, tons of resources like Korean prosecutors never lose."

• Expert Analysis by Danny Russell:
  Former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Danny Russell, highlighted the excessive overreach by President Yoon and praised the resilience of South Korea's democratic institutions.

  Danny Russell [05:46]: "A phenomenal amount of damage has been done by this. He abruptly, unilaterally chose this route."

• Implications for Democracy and US Relations:
  The episode discusses the potential fallout for President Yoon, including impeachment or imprisonment, and the broader impact on US-South Korea alliances. Concerns are raised about North Korea's possible militaristic responses and South Korea's potential pivot towards China amidst perceived US unreliability.

  Ben Rhodes [11:17]: "There's no way. This guy could not get hired for a mid-level desk job at the Pentagon. And we're talking about him being the next Secretary of Defense."

Quotes:

• Ben Rhodes [06:15]: "There's no situation that's so bad that you can't make it worse."
• Tommy Vietor [06:45]: "So I guess a nice reminder for us Americans that politics can get worse."

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2. Developments in Syria

Timestamp: [12:24] - [74:25]

Overview:
Syria has witnessed a significant escalation as opposition factions, including Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the Syrian National Army (SNA), swiftly retake territories in Aleppo and advance towards Hama. This resurgence challenges the Assad regime, especially as its traditional backers, Iran and Hezbollah, are currently preoccupied with other conflicts, notably in Ukraine and Israel.

Key Points:

• Rapid Territorial Gains:
  Rebel factions exploited the Assad regime’s weakened state, partially due to diminished support from Iran and Hezbollah following Israeli offensives. The opposition’s use of sleeper cells and increased military capabilities facilitated their swift advances without substantial bloodshed.

  Natasha Hall [67:37]: "Assad security forces just kind of melt away. We know that they've been planning this for months..."

• Role of HTS and SNA:
  HTS, formerly an offshoot of Al-Qaeda, has attempted to present a more moderate facade, whereas the SNA, backed by Turkey, comprises various armed groups. Both factions are pivotal in the current offensive, reflecting Turkey’s strategic interests in the region.

  Natasha Hall [70:40]: "Hayat Ahri Reshem is, back in the day was Jupiter Nusra, essentially, which was an offshoot of Al Qaeda."

• US and Turkey’s Strategic Position:
  The US maintains a limited but significant military presence in Northeast Syria, primarily to counter ISIS and stem Iranian influence. The hosts discuss the potential for US-Turkey collaboration to support opposition areas while navigating the complexities of Turkey’s opposition to Kurdish forces allied with the US.

  Natasha Hall [81:12]: "It’s very important for the US to work with Turkey to maintain supply routes..."

• Future Implications:
  The resurgence poses a strategic challenge for the incoming Trump administration, which inherits a volatile situation complicated by entrenched interests of regional powers and the potential for further destabilization.

  Tommy Vietor [74:25]: "There's a very fluid Add South Korea to your list of countries to watch here for the next year."

Quotes:

• Natasha Hall [74:25]: "Iran and Russia cannot lose the Assad regime."
• Ben Rhodes [77:39]: "I do not believe that number is 40,000."

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3. Trump Administration Personnel News

Timestamp: [12:36] - [46:00]

Overview:
The episode scrutinizes the Trump administration’s key personnel nominations, highlighting concerns over qualifications and potential ramifications for US institutions.

Key Points:

• Cash Patel as FBI Director:
  Cash Patel’s nomination has sparked controversy due to his perceived lack of qualifications, close ties to Trump, and history of promoting conspiracy theories about the “Deep State.”

  Tommy Vietor [21:13]: "Cash Patel’s sole qualification is that he'll do whatever Trump wants."

  • Concerns Discussed:

    • Lack of Experience: Patel’s background is criticized as insufficient for leading the FBI, with former colleagues describing him as untrustworthy and politically driven.
    • Potential for Abuse: The discussion raises alarms about the erosion of FBI’s independence, risking it becoming a tool for political vendettas.

    Ben Rhodes [24:44]: "I mean, this is incredibly dangerous to just have just the idea that Trump would install someone to begin with who's a loyalist is scary."

• Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense:
  Former Fox News anchor Pete Hegseth’s nomination is met with skepticism due to reported personal misconduct, including alcohol abuse and sexist behavior, raising doubts about his suitability to manage the Pentagon.

  Tommy Vietor [32:29]: "Jane Mayer at the New Yorker, a sort of heavy hitter investigative journalist, has a long report..."

  • Issues Highlighted:

    • Personal Conduct: Reports of excessive drinking and inappropriate behavior.
    • Professional Competence: Allegations of financial mismanagement and ineffectiveness in previous roles.

    Ben Rhodes [34:16]: "This is a horrendous message to send to the women of the American military."

• Charles Kushner and Masood Boulos Appointments:
  Concerns over nepotism are raised with the appointment of Jared Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner, as Ambassador to France, and Masood Boulos as Senior Advisor on Arab and Middle Eastern Affairs, highlighting potential conflicts of interest and lack of relevant diplomatic experience.

  Tommy Vietor [43:33]: "If you are a Gulf autocrat, who do you bribe?"

Quotes:

• Ben Rhodes [25:09]: "This is an unbelievably dangerous appointment."
• Tommy Vietor [29:31]: "We're gonna steal a lot of money..."

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4. Gaza Humanitarian Crisis

Timestamp: [50:15] - [57:11]

Overview:
The humanitarian situation in Gaza has deteriorated significantly, with aid deliveries being disrupted and looted, exacerbating the plight of the civilian population.

Key Points:

• Aid Delivery Issues:
  UNRWA has suspended aid deliveries at major crossings due to attacks and looting by criminal gangs. The reduction in aid has led to a sharp decline in the availability of essential supplies for Gaza’s 1.9 million residents.

  Tommy Vietor [53:53]: "We reached around 9,000 families. This is 9,000 families in a population of 1.9 million people."

• Criminal Activity:
  Looting of aid trucks, driven by profit motives (e.g., smuggling cigarettes at exorbitant prices), undermines humanitarian efforts and increases suffering.

  Tommy Vietor [54:21]: "They were able to get some flower through. UNRA spent the day distributing this flower."

• Allegations of Ethnic Cleansing:
  Former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yallon accused the Netanyahu government of ethnic cleansing and war crimes in northern Gaza, highlighting the severity of the conflict and its impact on civilian populations.

  Ben Rhodes [54:22]: "We can see what's happening before our eyes, which does look like ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza."

Quotes:

• Louise Wateridge [53:53]: "Under international humanitarian law, the Israeli authorities are responsible for the safe passage of aid to reach the intended population."
• Moshe Yallon [55:20]: "Israel is becoming a corrupt and leprous fascistic, messianic state."

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5. European Elections: Romania, Georgia, and Ireland

Timestamp: [58:03] - [64:00]

Overview:
The episode covers significant political shifts in Europe, focusing on the presidential and parliamentary elections in Romania, protests in Georgia, and the unique election outcome in Ireland.

Key Points:

• Romania’s Presidential and Parliamentary Elections:
  An unexpected surge of far-right candidates, particularly Killeen Georgescu, has led to runoff elections, signaling rising anti-Western and pro-Russian sentiments within the country.

  Ben Rhodes [59:42]: "If Romania goes the way of this far-right movement... it's going to make EU decision making more complicated."

• Georgia’s Parliamentary Elections and Protests:
  The ruling Georgian Dream Party, perceived as pro-Russian, faces opposition and accusations of electoral fraud, sparking massive protests. The decision to suspend EU integration efforts until 2028 has further inflamed public dissent.

  Tommy Vietor [58:17]: "The Georgian Dream Party is governed Georgia since 2012. They have tried to push the country away from the west and the EU and closer to Russia."

• Ireland’s Election:
  In a rare occurrence, incumbent centrist parties retained power against the left-wing Sinn Féin party, necessitating coalition formation. The episode notes the normalization of Sinn Féin as a mainstream political force, moving beyond historical ties to the IRA.

  Ben Rhodes [62:34]: "We are tracking that one. And then this past Sunday, Romania held parliamentary elections..."

Quotes:

• Ben Rhodes [61:53]: "Sinn Fein is becoming increasingly, incrementally a more mainstream party in Ireland."
• Tommy Vietor [63:03]: "You have to do what I did, which is. I didn't. I wasn't on the cloud for a long time because, I don't know, I fundamentally don't trust it."

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6. Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Timestamp: [86:29] - [90:10]

Overview:
The hosts conclude with lighter topics, discussing personal anecdotes and future geopolitical concerns, particularly highlighting the unpredictable nature of global politics under the incoming Trump administration.

Key Points:

• Future Geopolitical Uncertainties:
  Anticipation of further instability in Europe with upcoming German elections and potential government collapse in France. The complex interplay between global conflicts and US foreign policy under Trump remains a significant concern.

  Ben Rhodes [86:23]: "We still don't have foreign journalists in Gaza."

• Personal Reflections and Light-hearted Remarks:
  Hosts share personal stories about technology, family, and the challenges of managing digital footprints, adding a human touch to the intense discussions.

Quotes:

• Tommy Vietor [87:21]: "There’s a creepiness to the whole elf subgenre also."
• Ben Rhodes [87:42]: "There’s like no video evidence of me ever being a child, ever."

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Notable Quotes with Attribution

• Tommy Vietor [07:08]: "Yoon Suk Yeol is a career prosecutor. He's used to having a ton of authority in that job."
• Ben Rhodes [06:15]: "There's no situation that's so bad that you can't make it worse."
• Danny Russell [05:46]: "A phenomenal amount of damage has been done by this. He abruptly, unilaterally chose this route."
• Tommy Vietor [25:09]: "This is an unbelievably dangerous appointment."
• Natasha Hall [70:40]: "Hayat Ahri Reshem is, back in the day was Jupiter Nusra, essentially, which was an offshoot of Al Qaeda."
• Moshe Yallon [55:20]: "Israel is becoming a corrupt and leprous fascistic, messianic state."
• Ben Rhodes [59:42]: "If Romania goes the way of this far-right movement... it's going to make EU decision making more complicated."
• Natasha Hall [81:12]: "It’s very important for the US to work with Turkey to maintain supply routes..."

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Conclusion

This episode of Pod Save the World offers a comprehensive exploration of critical geopolitical events shaping the world in late 2024. From the fragile democracy in South Korea confronting internal strife to the volatile resurgence of rebel forces in Syria, and the contentious personnel decisions within the Trump administration, the hosts provide nuanced perspectives backed by expert insights. Additionally, updates on humanitarian crises and pivotal elections across Europe underscore the interconnectedness of global political dynamics. Listeners gain a deeper understanding of the challenges and potential trajectories of these multifaceted issues.

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Note: This summary excludes advertisements, intros, outros, and non-content sections as per instructions, focusing solely on the substantive discussions within the episode.

Transcript

[Tommy Vitor]

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[Ben Rhodes]

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[Tommy Vitor]

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[Ben Rhodes]

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[Tommy Vitor]

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[Ben Rhodes]

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[Tommy Vitor]

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

[Ben Rhodes]

I'm Ben Rhodes.

[Tommy Vitor]

Wow, man. A lot going on today.

[Ben Rhodes]

Quite a day. Quite a day in the world. O portfolio.

[Tommy Vitor]

It's one of those weeks where we could have done two episodes. Probably.

[Ben Rhodes]

This might be what the next four years are like. Let's just acknowledge that reality.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. A lot of geopolitical events are shifting.

[Ben Rhodes]

A lot of tectonic plates moving underneath the surface.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. Well, we're going to start with the president of South Korea declaring martial law.

[Ben Rhodes]

There's that.

[Tommy Vitor]

That's something that happened today.

[Ben Rhodes]

That happened today.

[Tommy Vitor]

Wild story. Then we're going to talk about the events in Syria over the past week where you've seen the opposition take back territory on battle lines that really haven't moved significantly in four years.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

If not longer.

[Ben Rhodes]

The past is, you know, back to the future here.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, exactly. And we'll talk about what it means for the incoming Trump team and how they might handle it given their past statements about Syria. Then we're gonna talk about a bunch of Trump personnel news, including an excellent nominee to run the FBI.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, we've been on Patel watch for a while. Nobody can accuse us of being latecomers to this party.

[Tommy Vitor]

Ben, I gotta say, we talked about Cash Patel a little bit on Save America. I was a little annoyed being like, you guys just read the Atlantic. Prof. Yeah.

[Ben Rhodes]

Come on. I thought that profile before it was written.

[Tommy Vitor]

You, me, and Godly for a Long time.

[Ben Rhodes]

Might have to please since he questioned me in 2017.

[Tommy Vitor]

We're going to talk also about some plum new gigs for Trump family in laws. Very exciting. Some more tariff threats via social media. The latest grim news for Gaza, some major elections and protest movements in Romania and Georgia. Then we're going to talk about an election in Ireland. Kind of cutting against the grain in that it was less interesting.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yes. Hard to compete with the plot lines in the same genre.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. And then you're going to hear my conversation with Natasha hall, who is an expert on Syria. We dive deeper into the players in the opposition, the groups fighting Assad, all the various countries that have got their mitts on Syria, treating it like a proxy war, and then some recommendations for what the US should do and what might happen next. So a really helpful interview for understanding all this. But let's start in South Korea, Ben. Because President Yoon Suk Yul declared martial law in the country for the first time in nearly 50 years. And listeners might be thinking that sounds a little drastic. And boy are you right. What this means in practice was that the military was temporarily in charge of the government. Troops were deployed to South Korea's National Assembly. In this case, the military also announced a ban on protests political activities by Parliament. And they tried to put all media in South Korea under the military's control. So big deal. There's even reports that these like military special forces that were sent to the national assembly were trying to arrest members of the National Assembly. So the Korean people saw this happening. They took to the streets to protest. The members of the national assembly quickly assembled and they voted down the martial law declaration, making it invalid. The vote was 190 to 0. Just everybody who showed up.

[Ben Rhodes]

No Republicans in Congress there.

[Tommy Vitor]

Mr. McConnell didn't abstain this one. So basically martial law was declared and invalidated in a matter of like six hours.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

President Yoon Suk Yeol announced after like, you know, sort of tucked his tail and made another speech saying he would lift the martial law declaration. As of this recording, I don't know if it's officially happened because he needs to convene cabinet to officially undeclare martial law. Listeners are also probably wondering, why? Why did he do this? President Yoon Suk Yeol claimed the martial law declaration was, quote, aimed at eradicating pro North Korean forces and to protect the constitutional order of freedom. But really he was seems like he was just pissed at his political opponents. They have controlled Parliament since May of 2022. They used that power to cut his budget, move to impeach his cabinet members and highlight his extremely corrupt wife, who's done a bunch of stuff that's sketchy. To try to understand all this, Ben, we reached out to our former colleague Danny Russell. He was Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Now he's the Vice President for International Security and Diplomacy at the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York. Here's a clip. A phenomenal amount of damage has been done by this. He abruptly, unilaterally chose this route. It was partly in response to log jams in diet, but his martial law decree, the declaration, the statement was really.

[Ben Rhodes]

Over the top, and it included pretty.

[Tommy Vitor]

Scary things about exterminating enemies and so on. The fact that this ended without actual bloodshed is miraculous, and we should be grateful for that. If Korean security forces had used violence against protesters, as has happened in Korea's pretty bloody history, would have been just disaster, a wound that would take a.

[Ben Rhodes]

Really long time to heal.

[Tommy Vitor]

So it's been kind of a stress test for a democratic system, how it can be resilient in the face of a political crisis. On the other hand, surviving a crisis is one thing, but healing is a very different thing. And as I used to say when I was in government, there's no situation that's so bad that you can't make it worse. Ben. So I guess a nice reminder for us Americans that politics can get worse.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yes. I mean, first of all, don't you sometimes just hear Danny and want to sit with a scotch in front of a fire and talk about Asian politics for a few hours?

[Tommy Vitor]

Just tell me about Japanese elections or whatever?

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. Look, on the one hand, politics in South Korea has always been a bit of a blood sport. You know, successive presidents have been imprisoned.

[Tommy Vitor]

You set a list that was incredible.

[Ben Rhodes]

There's only one South Korean president that has managed to not be put in prison or deposed or killed. You know, now, that included a number of military dictatorships and coups until the massive democratic reforms of the 80s. But even since then, you know, it's pretty bare knuckled, right? We've seen presidents impeach, we've seen presidents prosecuted. On the other hand, big other hand, we have not seen the declaration of martial law since the transition to democracy. And given the recency of that just a few generations ago, this surely struck deep chords of trauma and concern among the South Korean public, which I think explains some of the resilience. We saw the people taking to the streets, the lawmakers coming together, members of the president's own party voting against him. So that is all to the good in terms of a couple of things that occurred to me about what to watch beyond Danny's point about how do they get out of this political morass? Does the president get impeached? Does the president get imprisoned? How do they just manage this transition? It seems like it's gonna be hard for this guy to stay out the rest of his term after he just lost 190 to zero vote about a coup. So there's that to watch. Then there's the US Piece of this banner year for Joe Biden, because we remember that the kind of cornerstone of this. I'm the guy that did the Pacific Basin strategy was the trilateral diplomacy that they did very good work on to get a summit earlier this year at Camp David. He's had exchange state visits with this guy. Now the Japanese leader is no longer the prime minister of Japan. And this guy doesn't seem like he's long for South Korea. So what that kind of means for this US Strategy of having this trilateral alliance in Northeast Asia and networking our allies in the region, that's going to have to be watched as well. And the last piece of this is you've heard me occasionally freak out a bit on this podcast about South Korea in general. With Trump coming back, Kim Jong Un has got to feel like he's got a buddy in the White House now. He's got all this Russian military technology. South Korea looks pretty messy and divided. I do just worry about what this means for South Korea. Does Kim Jong Un lash out and are there military provocations that he could pursue? Feeling like they're divided. Does South Korea. Do they have to get closer to China because they can't trust the US Anymore? It's going to be a very fluid Add South Korea to your list of countries to watch here for the next year.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, I mean, to your point about how much this must have freaked out your average South Korean citizen, the last martial law declaration was in 1979, when South Korea's then military dictator was assassinated in a coup attempt. And martial law has not been invoked since the Republic of Korea became a parliamentary democracy in 1987. So this was shocking. Danny did tell us in that call with him that the next step is probably impeachment, probably removal, and then a snap election. So there could be a sea change politically in South Korea. And he also mentioned what you were saying about North Korea, which is that they are watching these events very closely. They are going to mine them for maximum propaganda value and who knows what else. So Something to watch there. You know, I was talking to another Korea expert who just made the point that Yoon Suk Yul is a career prosecutor. He's used to having a ton of authority in that job. He has, you know, tons of resources like Korean prosecutors never lose. And now he's stuck in politics with an opposition that is a supermajority in the unicameral, you know, parliament and just getting his ass handed to him over and over again. Yeah, and he's got this wife who created all these scandals. She took like a free Dior bag and they've been going hard after her and it clearly just made him lose it. And now he just lit his political career on fire and might end up in prison. Because, look, martial law, the steps for martial law is in the constitution. You can declare it and then the national assembly can revoke it or can invalidate it. But it does sound like the military was trying to prevent the national assembly from meeting to take this next step to have this vote. And in that case, feels pretty cool, like.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yes, it does. I mean, you're right to point out he's a creepy guy with autocratic tendencies and whiffs of corruption around him. And he's been waging a kind of anti feminist agenda. I mean, it doesn't seem like your ideal leader here. And on the martial law piece, another thing Tommy, that'd be interesting to watch is kind of, where is the South Korean military on all this? They were uncomfortably involved, it seemed like, at the front end with this operation on the Capitol, but. Or on the. On the national assembly, but they also withdrew. So it'll be interesting to see in the recriminations that transpire, can the military make clear that it respects civilian control, does not have any aspirations to see this kind of policy pursued. And this matters to the US too, because we obviously have 30,000 troops in South Korea. We've got deep relationships with the South Korean military that is meant to include the kind of professionalization of civilian control. That's my understanding of how the South Korean military generally operates. It'd be important for them to kind of reaffirm that in the days to come.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, and the same person I was talking to, if the military had gone all in with Yoon Suk Yeol, then it is of course a military coup. But what makes that complicated in a society like South Korea is you have conscription, mandatory conscription. Everyone between 18 to 28 has to do, I think 18 months of military service. So everyone's got skin in the game now. It's not just Sort of like a 1 or 2 or 5% of the country that's part of the armed services. It's. It's everybody for some point in their life.

[Ben Rhodes]

Bts.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yes. BTS is really K. Pop stars are not immune. Ben, you mentioned President Biden in his relationship with Yoon Suk Yeol. Listeners might remember the South Korean state visit to the White House in April of last year. Here's a clip.

[Ben Rhodes]

We know this is one of your favorite songs, American Pie.

[Natasha Hall]

American Pie. Yes, that's true. Yes. When I was in going to school, it was one of my favorite songs.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, we wanted to hear you sing it. A long, long time ago. Some sing touched me deep inside. The day the music Died.

[Tommy Vitor]

I remember talking to people at the time who were like unbelievably touched by that moment. Said it was incredible. And you know, now I guess he's.

[Ben Rhodes]

Got a lot of.

[Tommy Vitor]

Staying in jail.

[Ben Rhodes]

I was gonna say there's a kind of more resonance to the day the music died. You know that put that on the guy's epitaph. Today was probably the day the music died for that guy.

[Tommy Vitor]

Democracy died. Or your political career.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. Or your political career.

[Tommy Vitor]

Incredible story.

[Ben Rhodes]

Great story.

[Tommy Vitor]

I can't believe.

[Ben Rhodes]

Not great story, but I mean, amazing story.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. At least it. Look, it could have been a hell of a lot worse, as Danny pointed out, if there had been, you know, live fire protesters or something like that. Okay. The other huge story this week has been the events in Syria. So the later in the show, you're going to hear my interview with Natasha hall about what's been going on, like how the opposition took all this territory in a week. The players involved, the proxy groups, all the details. Ben and I also just wanted to talk about the challenge this creates for the United States, specifically President elect Trump, because Trump's history when it comes to Syria is quite complicated. So going back in the time machine a little bit, a lot of time machine stuff today. What do we get to Cash Patel? In 2018, Trump announced that ISIS was defeated and that all US troops were coming home from Syria. The Pentagon slow walked a lot of that. Jim Mattis, remember that's when he resigned in protest. That was.

[Ben Rhodes]

That was described. That was the thing. God forbid we take 500 guys out of Syria.

[Tommy Vitor]

The thing that got him. And ultimately I think most of those troops stayed in Syria or the region. Then in 2019, Trump announced he was going to withdraw U.S. troops for a second time, specifically the troops in the northeastern part of the country that were working with Kurdish forces to fight isis. Those Kurdish troops also face a constant threat from Turkey who view Kurdish separatists like the PKK as an existential threat to them.

[Ben Rhodes]

Side note, you do wonder whether some of the corruption, economic ties that Trumps may have with Erdogan contribute to that. But anyway, just put that aside.

[Tommy Vitor]

We'll. Yeah, we'll keep that one on the.

[Ben Rhodes]

Back burner until we get to the family.

[Tommy Vitor]

Exactly, exactly. So, Again, Trump in 2019 tries to pull back troops. There's a huge backlash, including from some incoming members of Trump's national security team. So here's two clips put together from 2019. The first is Trump talking about Syria. And the second, Ben, is his incoming National Security adviser, Mike Walts. So Syria was lost long ago. It was lost long ago. And besides that, I don't want. We're talking about sand and death. That's what we're talking about.

[Ben Rhodes]

We're not talking about, you know, vast wealth. We're talking about sand and death. Well, I think we're just making a strategic mistake here. There's no other way to put it. I am very concerned that we are creating the conditions for ISIS to return. I understand the President's frustration and many people's frustration for how long these efforts have taken. Too hard, too expensive. I understand that. But I think there's a misconception amongst many that we had tens of thousands of soldiers there. We had a few hundred Green Berets that were actually preventing endless war. They were a deterrent against war by establishing that buffer zone that by all accounts was working between the Kurds and the Turks and keeping everyone focused on keeping a lid on that Pandora's box that is isis. They can and will return. They will attack America again. And we have to stay on the offense. We have to fight these wars over there. Stephanie, not back at home.

[Tommy Vitor]

And it will follow us home. So interesting there. Criticism from Waltz. Marco Rubio is about to be Secretary of State, if confirmed. Also criticized Trump at the time, saying, the decision to abandon our Kurdish allies and withdraw American troops from northern Syria is a grave mistake that will have serious consequences beyond Syria. But then incoming Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard infamously flew to Syria and met with Assad and in 2019, said Assad is not the enemy of the United States. So Trump is inheriting a mess here, one of many. I imagine, that his team will get together and start talking about this and weigh some interest, like concern about abandoning the troops, concern about a resurgent isis, the desire to deter Iran and Russia from solidifying their hold in Syria to the extent they need to, I guess. And then just the desire Trump clearly has to not have US Troops all around the world. Am I missing anything? And where do you think they're going to shake out on this thing? What do you think? What do they do?

[Ben Rhodes]

Those clips are really instructive about how much uncertainty there is about which Trump shows up because, yeah, his instinct is what? Sand and death and who cares? There's not natural resources there. There's not wealth there.

[Tommy Vitor]

Really telling.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, he doesn't care.

[Tommy Vitor]

Ten words says it all.

[Ben Rhodes]

And yet he has these people around him that see it in this geopolitical sense. And Israel's at war with Hezbollah, and so maybe there's kind of a pro Israel push to, I don't know, make this a bigger L for Hezbollah and Assad in Iran. I'm watching two things, because I'm sure you get into some of the details of all these groups and how complicated an Alphabet soup it is in Syria. The first thing is World War Watch. This is what we've been talking about in the sense that this is happening because of the intersection of Syria with the two wars. So because Russia is more tied down in Ukraine and because Hezbollah has taken a huge hit in the Israel war, now we see fighting pop up in Syria that is related to that. And when you start to see the blending of these crises and conflicts, I just think that's concerning. It just shows you how much this kind of state of active war and conflict can move around the map. And the second piece, Arab Spring 2.0 watch, may be something we have to watch, which is we've talked about Jordan's stability is tenuous now and could get worse if Palestinians are displaced there. Egypt, very brittle with a military kleptocracy dictatorship that is deeply unpopular now. We see this kind of return of the movement against Assad in Syria. I think the Trump people are going to be managing a lot more instability in the Middle east than even what we've been dealing with to date. And you're right, they're going to be deeply unpredictable in how they do that, which is also probably creating some of this sense of now's the time to move. There's this transition in the U.S. people's attention is elsewhere. I think we could see a lot of things popping up in the Middle east in the coming years.

[Tommy Vitor]

Where I thought you were going to go in your World War Watch is northwest Syria is a place where you've seen Turkey fight directly with the Russians. Yes, you got a NATO member going after the Russians.

[Ben Rhodes]

Good addition. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

And also at the same time, there's complexity where the US Is closely allied with the Kurds, but the Turks hate them because they think that they're worried about their own Kurdish population trying to break off and start an independence movement or be successful in an independence movement and have been attacking them. So.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, no, just two quick things on the Turkey point. I mean, one is that as NATO becomes less important because Trump doesn't care about it, Turkey is likely to start being a more independent actor, militarily and strategically. And this, I think, reflects that because they're clearly providing support to some of these guys who came from Idlib province down into Aleppo. And the other piece is that Kurdish one, which is that, you know, the Kurds are the Americans preferred partners, but that is not who the Turks want to win any civil war in Syria. They see that as an existential threat. If the Kurds have kind of some state or mini state in Syria, they see that as a platform for Kurds inside of Turkey to, you know, potentially attack the Turkish state. And so that kind of clash could be coming between the kind of Sunni Arabs that are backed by the Turks and the Kurds that the United States has supported.

[Tommy Vitor]

And then who knows what if Qatar or other Gulf leaders start funneling money in there? It's going to be a mess.

[Ben Rhodes]

I remember the first time. It wasn't great.

[Tommy Vitor]

No. Okay. Well, at least I got a great team coming in to handle it. The newest member is a guy named Cash Patel. We've been constantly, week by week, trying to divine what, you know, the kind of personnel, national security selections tell us about Trump's priorities in the second term. And I think it's fair to say the selection of Cash Patel to be the FBI director tells us it's pure vengeance.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yes.

[Tommy Vitor]

Destroying your enemies. That's what we're gonna do here. So Trump's last pick to be FBI director was Christopher Wray. He has three years left on his 10 year term. Those long terms are supposed to insulate the FBI director from politics, but that is, again, the opposite of what Trump wants. He wants them to be moved by politics. So we're going to replace the guy. I guess Cash Patel's sole qualification is that he'll do whatever Trump wants. His relevant experience in terms of his resume includes a couple of years as a congressional aid for Devin Nunes, a year or two on the national security staff, some time installed as Deputy DNI Director of National Intelligence, and then, like two months as acting Chief of staff of the Pentagon. But again, he will say or do anything for Trump. Remember, Cash Patel is a guy who claimed Trump had declassified all these documents that he then took to Mar A Lago, even though that claim was absurd on its face and there was no evidence of it. Cash Patel's own former colleagues say his primary focus was getting FaceTime with Trump and kind of feeding his paranoia about the Deep State. Patel's former boss at the nsc, this guy named Charles Cooperman, said Patel is, quote, absolutely unqualified for this job. He's untrustworthy, and he called the selection a disgrace. Katz tries to portray himself as a reformer of institutions or law enforcement or the intelligence world. Ben, here he is on a podcast called the Sean Ryan show, talking about what he'd do if he got the FBI job.

[Ben Rhodes]

We need to decrease what I call government creep with personnel. The FBI's footprint has gotten so fricking big, and the biggest problem the FBI has had has come out of its intel shops. I'd break that component out of it. I'd shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one and reopening the next day as a museum of the Deep state. And I take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals. Go be cops. Your cops. Go be cops. Go chase down murderers and rapists and drug dealers and violent offenders. What do you need 7,000 people there for? Same thing with DOJ. What are all these people doing here?

[Tommy Vitor]

It sounds like he's sincerely asking. Yeah, your reform agenda is you take a bunch of people from one building and send them to other buildings. You don't change the mission.

[Ben Rhodes]

Can you. What do you think the Museum of the Deep State would look like?

[Tommy Vitor]

I don't know. Might be a good time. Yeah, I'd love to check it out.

[Ben Rhodes]

Like what? Like a John Brennan room or something.

[Tommy Vitor]

This is the funny thing. Like, Cash Patel's idea of the Deep State is like a bunch of random Obama employees and some people that worked for Trump, that turned on Trump, that cache Patel now doesn't like, like John Bolton or Bill Barr. What's her name?

[Ben Rhodes]

Cassidy Hutches. Cassidy Hutchinson. Yeah, yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

Just very random, but I don't know.

[Ben Rhodes]

Look, there's so many things you could say about this. I mean, just to make a few points, the degree of his unqualification cannot possibly be overstated.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yes.

[Ben Rhodes]

I mean, sure, he can say on his resumes at the NSC for a couple years, but he was there just like funnel and paper to Trump. He wasn't actually managing the interagency process. This guy has no qualifications to do this job, and Trump knows that. I mean, so this isn't a case where like, Trump is aware of that and he likes him. It's not even like a Hegzet thing where Trump probably didn't even know the full story. Trump knows exactly who Cash Patel is. That's why he chose him.

[Tommy Vitor]

Exactly.

[Ben Rhodes]

We'll get to the prosecuting opponents, but it's in part he wants someone who's totally incompetent. He has no respect for the FBI. He doesn't want it to function well. He wants it to be riven with internal disputes. He wants an employee workforce that's up in arms because they're run by a guy who's trying to fire them or kick them out of their offices. So it just shows that he. He wants to be a chaos agent in these agencies. He doesn't like, like the FBI, that should concern people. I mean, the FBI is the preeminent law enforcement agency. It's supposed to be going after drug cartels, gun running, child sex trafficking, Wall street corruption and malfeasance, political corruption. So all those missions are going to suffer badly if Cash Patel is there. I'm old enough to remember when we used to worry about things like terrorist attacks and the FBI was supposed to prevent those. And that's why you had people like Bob Mueller remember him and unfortunately, Jim Comey selected by Obama. Which leads me to the last point, which is you really don't normally have the FBI director even more so than the Attorney general have any connection to the sitting president. Bush didn't have a connection to Mueller. Obama didn't have a connection to Comey. The whole idea is to have this independence so that the President of the United States is not like reaching to pull a lever to control the FBI. The reason for that is, in part, that's what police states do. That's why they're called police states.

[Tommy Vitor]

Right.

[Ben Rhodes]

Because they're police agencies that police the leaders, opponents. But also because of the geography, abuses of wiretapping and running smear campaigns against Martin Luther King or doing whatever Nixon wanted done for dirty work. So this is incredibly dangerous to just have just the idea that Trump would install someone to begin with who's a loyalist is scary. To install this guy is extra scary because it shows how much he intends to use this as a tool of his own interest. And I think that as much as people might, in this kind of reconsideration of everything mood, that we're all in, including me, could scoff at. Well, what's the big deal if there's a few annoying investigations for a handful of the people on that list? I don't know, it'll just. Once you live in a country where there's a normalization of the pointless prosecution of the previous government, I don't know that we know what that feels like. I don't think that's going to feel good if we start seeing totally random and extraneous investigations and prosecutions launched at a whole range of former Biden and Obama officials or reporters that they don't like.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. And listen, the Trump kind of origin story in anger at this. I guess it goes back to Jim Comey briefing him on the Steele dossier and then the Mueller probe, which by the way, his DOJ put in place. Right. They named the special prosecutor to look into all this. But then he's clearly really, really mad about the classified documents case and all the prosecutions of him after he left the White House. We don't need to belabor kind of the validity of all of those. But their response to that anger is to be like, okay, now we're gonna do it to you. They're not trying to clean up the system. They just wanna put someone in place at the FBI that's gonna go after all the perceived enemies on the Democratic side. So that's not a good way to run a railroad.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

It's not a reform agenda.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. I've always found the strange thing about this to be the fact that we've talked about this. FBI always seemed to me to be a pretty right wing organization. I mean, you know, it's cops. Right. I mean, it's not exact progressive side of the House. But that shows you too that this is not ideological. It's not even like a right left thing. This is a, this needs to be a pure instrument of my will to go after my opponents. But again, like, I don't think we're also considering, what if the FBI stops doing all the other things it's supposed to be doing or is deprioritized from doing those things or is firing or driving out the most competent people? I mean, what if the most competent people in preventing, you know, drug trafficking or corporate fraud, all cybersecurity, Cybersecurity at a time of maximum.

[Tommy Vitor]

I mean, actually, you know, espionage, foreign espionage.

[Ben Rhodes]

Not to sound like I'm doing an MSNBC hit here, but like if I'm a foreign cyber adversary, I'm like looking at the Cash Patel thing. I Mean, this is great.

[Tommy Vitor]

Totally.

[Ben Rhodes]

We're gonna steal a lot of money. We're gonna use AI to scam a bunch of old people. We're gonna. You know, whatever the thing is, it's open season.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, well, those 7,000 people at the FBI building are moving out to, I don't know, the Oklahoma field office. We're gonna do some shit. Also, Kashmir tells. His origin story is just this weird ser of grievances. Like, there's this anecdote, I think it was in the Atlantic story, where he had to fly from out of the country to a case in Texas. He didn't have a tie with him, so he didn't wear one into the thing. The judge yelled at him, and he's, like, so mad about that. He can't let it go. He also claims that he was leading the Benghazi prosecution and main justice of the prosecution of the Benghazi terrorists. That was not true. He was on the team. I think he was coordinating warrants and indictments and other sort of, like, paperwork. But he was mad that he thought the DOJ went soft on the Benghazi attackers and didn't indict enough people because they only indicted one. They prosecuted one. Well, they prosecuted one because I think they only managed to capture one.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

Maybe later they captured a second guy and they brought charges against him. But it's just like this weird series of grievances and anger and paranoia that he clearly feeds to Trump. You can just tell that, like, Cash Patel is where a lot of Trump's insanity about the deep state comes from.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. I mean, two things that I'll regret saying if he becomes the FBI director. The first being that he actually, as much as that's a joke, it sucks that we have to make a joke in the United States. But he is driven by a grievance that is not what is so dangerous about him. And you kind of get the same sense as Steve Miller, although Steve Miller's a little more ideological. It's a personal grievance. This isn't even like someone who is, like, a right winger or a left winger who really wants to get in there and shake things up. There are these weird personal dimensions to what his worldview is that are alarming. Like, people like that having power is kind of scary because they're not even trying to use it to. To change things to be a certain ideological way. They're using that to punish people.

[Tommy Vitor]

They were mean to me.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. And the other thing is that there's a casual dishonesty. Like, if you listen to some of the reports of the people who've worked with him. I mean, you covered well on psa, the lie he told about getting approval for the raid, Navy SEAL raid in Nigeria. But it's equally concerning in some ways. You hear from some of the former colleagues he had that he's just totally casually dishonest.

[Tommy Vitor]

He apparently tells people he gave the order to take out Baghdadi.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, yeah, he'll just tell these lies completely made up that don't suggest someone who's dealing with like a full deck, you know. Now again, like that person in charge of the law enforcement and domestic intelligence capacity of the United States. Is that that's one to be concerned about.

[Tommy Vitor]

Not a good combo. Another one to be concerned about is Pete Hegseth.

[Ben Rhodes]

Easy transitions.

[Tommy Vitor]

So Pete Hegseth, a Fox News weekend anchor that was selected by Trump to be a Secretary of Defense. Jane Mayer at the New Yorker, a sort of heavy hitter investigative journalist, has a long report out this week on Hegseth's tenure as president of these right wing billionaire funded kind of astroturf organizations on behalf of veterans that like, you know, they advocated for continuing the war in Iraq or whatever they were called, Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America. The story is worth reading in full, but here's just like a couple highlights. One, Hegseth was reportedly drunk all the time.

[Ben Rhodes]

All the time.

[Tommy Vitor]

Like blacked out, carried out of events. Absolutely shitfaced. One time he was so drunk he was chanting kill all Muslims at a bar. That's excellent messaging for a Secretary of defense genocidal wound. Yeah, that's good. He also completely mismanaged these organizations financially and professionally despite them being tiny. So we're talking five to 10 people with five to $10 million budgets. Again, this guy's being asked to run the pentagon with nearly 3 million employees and an $800 billion budget. The new York Times also published a blistering email that Pete Hegseth's own mother sent to him about his mistreatment of women, especially his ex wife. And we have also talked before about the sexual assault allegations against Hexath from not long ago, from 2017. So, Ben, I mean, again, given the Pentagon's very high profile problems with preventing sexual assault in the military, given some of the pretty serious disciplinary problems we've seen, especially in the Special Forces community. And remember that Hegseth is someone who lobbied Trump to let war criminals off to pardon war criminals. It really seems that Pete Hegseth is not just lacking qualifications for the job in many ways. He's kind of the worst possible leader when it comes to his character.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, yeah, the Jane Mayer piece is worth reading. First of all, she's such an og. I feel like whenever Trump gets elected or it's like this and Bush, all of a sudden you remember that Jane Mayer is there and you're really grateful.

[Tommy Vitor]

That she dig it deep.

[Ben Rhodes]

And I have to say, the Astroturf part of this with these bullshit organizations with names like Concerned Veterans or Vets for Freedom does remind you that the Koch brothers and people like them created people like Pete Hegseth who became maga, who then cannibalized the Koch brothers. So good job with your Astroturf.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, well done, guys.

[Ben Rhodes]

But I was reading this article, Tommy, and I didn't feel bad for him. It was like reading the Hunter Biden pieces. I mean, this is a troubled guy. This is someone who for whatever reason had no guardrails on his personal behavior, on his drinking, on his treatment of women, on the things he was willing to do in public. I mean, a deeply troubled individual, relatively recently. I mean, and we don't even know that he's necessarily cleaned up his act because these reports just covered this period of time. And the idea that this person would be, you know, anywhere near, this person wouldn't get hired at the Pentagon. No way. This guy could go through any kind of cursory review that they normally do to hire personnel, background check, calling references like, this guy could not get hired for a mid level desk job at the Pentagon. And we're talking about him being the next Secretary of Defense, being at the principals committee table, being in the nuclear chain of command. There will be military incidents. I mean, I used to, you know, when I was in government, you know, I had the yellow phone in my house. And some weird crisis pops up in the other end of the world. And you gotta get a few people on the phone. And the first person the President asks what's going on is his Secretary of Defense, who you know, is responsible for gathering the information and talking to the military commanders and literally giving military options to the President of the United States. A guy that is this big of a train wreck and also an ideologue putting him in charge. And then the last piece, the treatment of women here, the insults to the hundreds of thousands of women who serve in the United States military and the Pentagon. I cannot imagine, given the horrible instances of sexual assault that were not punished because of an already clubby patriarchal uniform code of military justice, you got women in combat serving in dangerous places right now. You've got women who are going to feel like maybe the creepiest guy that is around them is going to feel empowered to get drunk and do things to them. Because if the SEC def did it, why shouldn't I be able to do it? This is a horrendous message to send to the women of the American military. So this is one that these two on the hierarchy. You're hoping the Senate Republicans have enough institutionalists to not let this go forward.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. And just compare them to some of their predecessors, like Jim Mattis and Lloyd Austin. Right. So Trump's first Secretary of Defense and Biden's Secretary of Defense, both of them were controversial because they were either in uniform or had been in uniform recently. And they're supposed to be civilian control at the Secretary of Defense position. But Lloyd Austin commanded the forces in Iraq. He was the Army Vice Chief of staff. He ran Central Command. I mean, Pete Hegseth is the weekend anchor. Yeah, at Fox News. I mean, listen, he served in combat. He served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had two Bronze Stars. Like, I'm not saying he hasn't done some brave stuff.

[Ben Rhodes]

He knows Steve Doocy, though.

[Tommy Vitor]

But no, he's not. He's no Peter Doocy. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but before we go, if you want something a lot lighter and a lot more stupid, check out my YouTube series, Liberal Tears with Brian Tyler Cohen, where we have some fun. We rank things. This week we ranked Trump's cabinet picks, and also the loser of each episode has to endure some terrible punishment. And Brian made me eat some sort of fish. That was considered one of the smelliest, most disgusting things on earth. Yeah, it's weird that I do this for a living, so check that out.

[Ben Rhodes]

This is where progressive influencing is going.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yes, it is, my friends. So check it out on the Pod Save America YouTube page. And while you're there, subscribe to all the video versions of these great podcasts, plus great bonus content from hosts Ben and Ilona. Do a lot of cool stuff on.

[Ben Rhodes]

The Pate of the World page. We had a lot of stuff planned.

[Tommy Vitor]

For that, so look for that and look for Liberal Tears. T I E R s on the YouTube search bar. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Holiday season is, as they say, the most wonderful time of the year. It can be filled with joy and happiness, but it can also be the most stressful time of the year. Scheduling conflicts, added expenses, family dynamics, and drama can all take a toll. So it's important to slow down and not lose. Sight of your mental well being. Therapy is a great way to do just that. Not only during this stressful time of the year, but all year long. And BetterHelp online therapy is a great way to get into therapy. BetterHelp is designed to be convenient, flexible, and built around your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist that fits your needs and preferences. Once matched, you can connect via phone, video, text or chat. Whatever works for you. It's surprisingly affordable too. So this season, give yourself a gift you can appreciate all year round. It's a stressful election we just had. Yeah, a lot of people are in their feelings. Understandably. Not a bad time to start therapy. Talk it out. Do not let these bad feelings explode on your loved ones at the dinner table or on Twitter. This holiday season, better to just talk to a therapist. That's right. Visit betterhelp.com crookedworld Go today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp H E L p.com crookedworld Polite of the World is brought to you by Aura Frames. We're getting to that season where you're always trying to find the perfect gift for a loved one or many loved ones. And it could be very difficult. And look, you just you feel better when you find something that you know this person in your life will like and will be meaningful. Isn't it funny how the people we love the most are often hardest to shop for? Luckily, there's one gift that everyone on your list is sure to enjoy. 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Even if you think it's a bit Overhyped AI is suddenly everywhere from self driving cars to molecular medicine to business efficiency. If it's not in your industry yet, it's coming fast. But AI needs a lot of speed and computing power. So how do you compete without cost? Spiraling out of control? Time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or oci. OCI is a blazing, fast and secure platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, plus all your AI and machine learning workloads. OCI costs 50% less for computing and 80% less for networking, so you're saving a ton of money. Right now Oracle is offering to cut your current cloud bill in half if you move to OCI for new US customers with minimum financial commitment. Offer ends December 31, 2024. See if your company qualifies for the special [e-mail] world that's oracle.com/world. All right, some other fun personnel news Ben, because it's nepotism week in Washington both for for the Bidens and for Trump. So Trump picked Charles Kushner, Jared Kushner's dad, to be ambassador to France. Plum. Plum gig. Charles Kushner once hired a prostitute to seduce his brother in law so that he could secretly tape their affair and then send the tape to his sister in an attempt to intimidate her out of testifying against him in a financial fraud case. So seems like a good guy. Trump pardoned Charles Kushner back in 2020. He also named Masood Boulos to be senior advisor on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs. Boulos son is married to Tiffany Trump. So keep it in the family again here. He's an important surrogate for Trump with Arab American voters during the campaign became kind of a go between between Trump and Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority. I guess this guy got rich in the auto industry. He's got some ties in Lebanon. He ran for parliament, but no, no diplomatic experience. He will be working with Trump's golf buddy Steve Witkoff, who is named Middle east envoy last month. So Ben, these nominations I think raise a really important question which is if you're a Gulf autocrat, who do you bribe? Is it still Jared Kushner? Is it Don Jr. Is it Eric? Do you just buy the Trump crypto? Do you buy the DJT stock on nasdaq? Like what's the best practice?

[Ben Rhodes]

Now I all of this is about these people getting as rich as they possibly can in the next four years. And if we don't look at it that way, we're missing the actual story of what's happening, because again, this is what happens in other countries that are kind of corrupt kleptocracies. And the thing is, you put these people in place, whether it's Blues or Charles Kushner in Paris, but the reality of this is. Or this Witkoff guy, Middle east envoy, the other Middle east envoy. I guess you got one for one set of Middle Easterners and another for another. But the point is, yes, if you are sitting in the Gulf or you're sitting in Turkey, or you're sitting in Central Asia, right, You're sitting anywhere where you kind of control a sovereign wealth fund, or you control a set of natural resources, or you kind of have slush funds for this purpose. What you're doing is you're not necessarily writing checks to these people, but these people have associates. I mean, this is the thing that's going to be. Hopefully there's going to be good investigative journalism, or if I'm in the Democratic Congress, I'm looking at this. These people have associates who are like, one degree removed from them. The ultimate purpose is to make the Trump family and their friends as rich as possible. And so there'll be other people where it's understood, if they're going to the sovereign wealth fund of ex Gulf country, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, uae, and they're saying, hey, we really would like this investment in our new fund for blah, blah, blah, it's going to be understood by those people that they are expected to pay there. And this is what's going to be happening. I mean, the thing that drives me belus this could be very straightforward and transactional. The Charles Kushner thing. Got to meet Tommy because you could argue he won't be a particularly substantive ambassador. We don't run the relationship through this person. In addition to just being kind of a fuck you to Macron to have this guy coming out there to run the embassy. I've been to that embassy, in that residence.

[Tommy Vitor]

It's nice.

[Ben Rhodes]

It's nice.

[Tommy Vitor]

It's really nice.

[Ben Rhodes]

So what they're gonna be doing is they're gonna have meetings in that fucking embassy, you know, have dinners, have social parties. You know, Jared and Ivanka will be staying at that embassy residence. And this infrastructure of the US Government, these beautiful residences, are just gonna become spaces to do the shakedown, you know?

[Tommy Vitor]

Totally. Yeah. And I'm sure Jared will be the recipient of a lot of that money. Yeah, he's already got.

[Ben Rhodes]

They will be multi. Multibillionaires by the time this is.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, yeah. Finally. Actually, there's Two more Trump, maybe not.

[Ben Rhodes]

Eric, but everybody else will be.

[Tommy Vitor]

We'll see some of that crypto. But also Trump named a former a, I think it was chief of staff on the nsc, retired army general Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg to be the special envoy for the Russia Ukraine war. Kellogg, he's an interesting figure. He recommended in some papers he did for like I think the America First Policy Institute that future military assistance to Ukraine be conditioned on their entering into peace talks, but that the US Would continue to arm Ukraine to strengthen its defenses. And they also he recommended that to sort of induce Russia into talks at the US And NATO should offer to put off NATO membership for Ukraine indefinitely in exchange for a peace deal. Here's a clip of Kellogg on Fox a couple weeks ago talking about Biden's decision to allow Ukraine to use US Missiles to hit inside Russia.

[Ben Rhodes]

What he has done Biden, through his action, he's actually given President Trump more leverage really, because now he can pull back, he can go left, he can go right, he can do something. And I think what he did is he basically said, well, this is what I want to do. And I'm hoping it was there's something to this.

[Tommy Vitor]

I don't know.

[Ben Rhodes]

But it does give the President Trump more ability to pivot from that. Look, they should have been doing this a year ago by but they've basically pulled back. You do not fight. You don't fight a war allowing other.

[Tommy Vitor]

Countries to have sanctuaries.

[Ben Rhodes]

If you're going to fight a war, you fight a war. And we've basically pulled back on letting Zelensky fight a war that he should have been fighting a long time ago. I know the casualties are horrific. Yeah. Of course, the advantages that he had this last summer are not there anymore.

[Tommy Vitor]

He meet in Zelensky. So it's an interesting clip and it's just an interesting set of personnel because I don't know, there's a version of this where Trump gets in, he says, zelensky, you're cut off. You're not getting any more shit. Get to the table. And he forces him to cut a deal with Putin that's just unbelievably advantageous to Putin. Putin decides to just take it, knowing that he'll invade the rest of the country either slowly or in a couple years. Or there's a version of this where you actually have some more hawkish people in that administration that are going to keep funneling weapons to Ukraine. Ukraine refuses to quit. Putin won't come to like the idea that we're Gonna. We're gonna force Putin to the table. If he doesn't wanna come to the table, like he's ascended here.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

He's gonna do what he wants. If he wants to give Trump a win, I'll give him a win. If he doesn't, he won't. But I don't know, it just feels like it's a little more complicated than I maybe thought.

[Ben Rhodes]

It does. This whole Trump foreign policy feels a little more complicated. And it may be actually not to be too cynical that what I was just talking about, the corruption angle. That's what Trump really cares about. And this other stuff, you know, people.

[Tommy Vitor]

Good to run on.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, yeah. People can kind of do their own thing and he'll get involved episodically. I don't know one thing about Keith Kellogg. First of all, Tommy, you know, he took my office so that you used to sit inside. Yeah. So just a fun fact about Keith Kellogg.

[Tommy Vitor]

Enjoy the dead rats in the walls.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. I think he got rid of my full bar that I had not in any. Well, but I should say that there's another option to the one you said that Kellogg has kind of flirted with in his own comments, which is. And first of all, it's funny in that clip how the Fox guy was surprised that he said something nice about Biden. He's like, really? That's not what you're supposed to say, but where they come in and actually go a little crazy and let the Ukrainians do more and give them more weapons if they actually try the quote, unquote madman theory. The Ukrainians seem to be counting on that or want that. The Ukrainians think Trump might come in and do some kind of shock thing where he suddenly. He's giving them a bunch of advanced missiles or something as a part of saying, okay, now let's negotiate. And I don't know. I just don't know. There's a spectrum there. I think the core point is what is probably not going to be there at all, given what Trump has said and what we know about his instincts is kind of long term support for Ukraine. So the idea that next year 2020, good luck with Congress. And so I think what this means is a very volatile Ukrainian war in the next six months where everybody's sorting this out, everybody's messaging each other. Putin's showing his strength, Ukrainians are showing their strength. Trump people are probably divided and trying to figure it out. So that's what I'd. A bumpy ride into some negotiation.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. Last thing we sort of talked about this last week, but Trump is already acting like he's president, so he threatened sanctions on the Canadians and Mexicans. That led Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to make a pilgrimage down to Mar a Lago for a three hour dinner where Trump reportedly joked that Canada should become the 51st state. Funny, Mexican President Claudia Sheenbaum, she got a phone call. And then Trump hopped on Truth Social to threaten tariffs on 100% of BRICS countries if they move away from the dollar as the world's reserve currency and create their own of some sort. He said, quote, there's no chance that the BRICS will replace the US Dollar in international trade and any country that tries should wave goodbye to America, end quote. BRIC stands for Brazil, Russia, India and China and South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia and the UAE joined the group in 2024, which kind of ruins the acronym, but that's okay. Here we are, I guess we're just threatening tariffs on everybody now. Last year Putin suggested creating kind of an international payment system to get around US sanctions. Lula da Silva has talked about the need to limit reliance on the US dollar for trade. It doesn't seem like there's been any progress towards that goal. I think 58% of the world's currency reserves are still in the dollar. And creating a new currency of some sort or system would require some political alignment from these countries that I'm not sure they currently have. Crypto seems like an easier avenue for them to destabilize the dollar. But interesting, interesting to watch Stone go after this.

[Ben Rhodes]

The thing I find interesting is where they have made headway is on sanctions evasion, as we've seen with the Russians just finding ways around the US dollar based financial system for certain transactions. And this is interesting because that tweet from Trump is the perfect distillation of his foreign policy's short term effects and medium and long term problems. Because yeah, in the short term it sounds tough, like don't fuck with the dollar, but actually threatening that is the single biggest incentive for these people to move away from the dollars that reserve. Saying that you're going to weaponize tariffs to 100% because we don't like you is all the more reason for these guys to be accelerate under the table planning to do away with the dollars reserve currency.

[Tommy Vitor]

Good point.

[Ben Rhodes]

So they may not announce it next year because they don't want the tariffs, but you can be damn sure that they're working on it because of what Trump said. And that's something that has kind of not been communicated to the American voter like he is creating a lot of fucking problems that are going to come due for the poor person that has to follow him.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, let's do a few more things here. So checking on Gaza, where unfortunately the news is quite grim. Unrwa, the organization that provides aid to Palestinians, has stopped deliveries via the biggest aid crossing, the Crem Shalom Crossing, in response to basically looting of aid trucks. This is a clip from Louise Wateridge, the UNRWA senior emergency officer who's helping us explain what is happening. In the last few weeks and months, we have had drivers attacked, we've had drivers injured, and on occasion, drivers have been killed transporting this humanitarian aid from the crossing to the population. And in addition to that, the aid is being looted. On one occasion in November, 109 trucks with World Food Program on UNRWA, over 90% of the aid was looted. Under international humanitarian law, the Israeli authorities are responsible for the safe passage of aid to reach the intended population. And we're simply not seeing this. Last night, our partners, the World Food Program, were able to use another crossing in the south. This is the Gate 96 crossing, but it's not as big as the Kerem.

[Natasha Hall]

Shalom Keroua Basalem crossing.

[Tommy Vitor]

They were able to get some flower through. UNRA spent the day distributing this flower. We reached reached around 9,000 families. This is 9,000 families in a population of 1.9 million people. CNN says the number of food trucks entering Gaza in November of 2024 was just 36% of the monthly average since November of 2023. So it's way, way, way, way down.

[Ben Rhodes]

Astonishing.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. And in terms of the looting of these trucks, the Washington Post had a big piece last week or two weeks ago about the gangs that were doing this. It doesn't sound like it's Hamas. It's mostly criminal gangs that are looking for cigarettes getting smuggled into Gaza, which are being sold at astronomical markups. I think they said reported $1,000 for like a pack. It's crazy numbers, but. So that's one huge problem for people in Gaza in terms of the famine and then just in terms of like the entirety of the war and sentiment around it. Ben the former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yallon gave a series of interviews over the weekend where he accused the Netanyahu government of ethnic cleansing and war crimes, specifically in northern Gaza. Yellen was defense minister from 2013 to 2016, the time which included another conflict in Gaza. Before that, he was the IDF chief of staff. He also said that Israel is becoming a, quote, corrupt and leprous fascistic, messianic state. That's pretty direct. Pretty direct criticism there.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. I think we can see what's happening before our eyes, which does look like ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza. And you see these reports of the Israelis building structures that seem like bases in areas of Gaza where they've destroyed a lot of buildings. Nothing that we're seeing suggests any interest in, quote, unquote, a ceasefire for hostages deal. Well, we've talked about the disingenuous nature of Bibi trying to act like there's some negotiation when this is what they're actually doing in Gaza. And they see maximum opportunity here, if you're on the Israeli right with Trump coming in to inflict maximum punishment. One additional point I make, Tommy, that I've been thinking about is that we still don't have foreign journalists in Gaza. I don't. Have you noticed, not to be ghoulish, that the death count in Gaza has been 40,000 for, like, six months?

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, it's been stuck at 43 for a while. And I wondered if that was because of a reduced sort of rate of operation or if just numbers are not getting tally.

[Ben Rhodes]

I think they're not getting tallyed. And this is my point. I think between the people that are in the rubble, between the decimation of the, quote, unquote, Health Ministry, I would be. One thing the Biden people could do, and I don't know if they'll do it, is declassify their assessments of how many people have been killed in Gaza, that's a good idea, because, honestly, I've not heard people talk about this. I do not believe that number is 40,000. I don't either. There have been some independent assessments that have put that number in the hundreds of thousands. There is tons and tons of rubble there. And if the US Intelligence community has its own estimates of how many people have been killed, in part because I don't know that well, certainly the Israeli government's not going to want that number out there. The Trump administration is not going to care. I would like somebody who knows to give us an assessment, because there's some accountability and transparency here, and I don't know that we have it at this point.

[Tommy Vitor]

That's a good point. And by the way, Moshe Yalon's point was he said he's hearing from IDF commanders who are operating in the northern Strip who are scared that they are committing, or asked to be committing war crimes. His, quote was conquering, annexing, ethnic cleansing. Look at northern Gaza. I mean, he is, like, so crystal clear about it. And these are, by the way, things. If you said on Twitter, you know, you'd have someone from the ADL telling you you're an anti Semite. It's just these are Sky. Was the IDF chief of staff saying this? Yeah, I don't know how much word.

[Ben Rhodes]

I don't know what other credential you guys need.

[Tommy Vitor]

Also, last week we talked about this ceasefire between the Israeli forces and Hezbollah and Lebanon. So far, the ceasefire is holding in that like no one has walked away from it. But there are all these reports that mortars are being lobbed over the border all day. It's weird. It's like there is fighting. It's a much reduced intensity, I think, but it's still happening.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, there's not bombs being dropped on Beirut, but there's just a lot going on at that point.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. So last week, Romania had a shocking presidential election where an obscure far right candidate named Killeen Georgescu came out of nowhere to get the most votes.

[Ben Rhodes]

And we didn't talk about it.

[Tommy Vitor]

And we didn't fucking talk about it. So that presidential race will go to a runoff on December 8th. So we're tracking that one. And then this past Sunday, Romania held parliamentary elections where three far right pro Russia parties did extremely well, which means it's not clear how Romania will form a government. And there's some very clear anti Western, anti NATO, pro Russia sentiment on the rise. And then across the Black Sea in Georgia, there have been major protests after Georgian Prime Minister Iraq Lee Kobakidze announced that Georgia would suspend its efforts to get into the European Union until the end of 2028. This is a particularly big deal for the Georgian people because the aspiration of Georgia joining the EU is literally in their constitution. It's enshrined in the constitution. The Georgian Dream Party, the pro Russia party, is governed Georgia since 2012. They have tried to push the country away from the west and the EU and closer to Russia. Georgian Dream claimed victory in last month's elections. But the opposition and a bunch of election observers say that there was fraud and irregularities and the current parliament is illegitimate because of that fraud and irregularities. So, Ben, you know, Romania is already part of the eu. They're already part of NATO. Many Georgians would like to be. But it's interesting to see these two significant inflection points in both countries where the leaders are going to decide soon whether to pursue closer ties with Europe or Russia.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, I mean, if Romania goes the way of this far right movement and this particularly, you know, odious far right leader. Then you add that to the list with Slovakia and Hungary, you know, these countries inside the NATO tent and inside the EU tent who are profoundly, potentially pro Russian or far right. It's going to make EU decision making more complicated. It's obviously going to complicate NATO decision making. It'll be used by Russia as a wedge. There's risks of conflict in the Balkans, too, Serbia and Kosovo. I don't have high hopes for Rick Grinnell to parachute into that situation and solve it. So instability and dysfunction in parts of Europe is something we could be looking at. And Georgia is one of these situations where it just feels like the deck is pretty stacked against these people. They're clearly representing a majority of Georgians. The EU found that that was a fraudulent election. They are showing up in the streets in huge numbers. And where they got Trump coming in, is he really going to get their back? Putin clearly would like Georgia to become more like Belarus than Ukraine. So Georgia is this fault line where I worry about crackdowns on protests and kind of a forced integration of Georgia, not fully into Russia, but kind of in the Russian side of things, against the will of the people.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. And then the final election we were watching was in Ireland where there was a rare case of incumbents not being thrown out of power. So you have two centrist parties in Ireland that beat out the left wing Irish nationalists Sinn Fein party. The centrists will now have to form a coalition by bringing in some other party, but they've refused to work with Sinn Fein because of their past ties to the ira. I am getting my Irish cultural fix these days, Ben, by watching say Nothing on Hulu, which is Patrick Radenkief's book adapted into a TV show. Also, my friend Jim Rooney has a new book out called A Different Way to Win, that's all about Dan Rooney, who was the legendary owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers and then became Obama's US Ambassador to Ireland. So two shameless plugs in there in.

[Ben Rhodes]

This Ireland, very well integrated plugs. The Rooneys are wonderful people.

[Tommy Vitor]

The best people.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. I mean, it was interesting because there was dissatisfaction with those incumbent parties. Sinn Fein did well. You know, if it was a straight plurality, they could win. But the two centrist parties together still have an overwhelming capacity to form a government. I mean, when you looked under the hood there, what you found was people are pissed about the cost of living, people are pissed about the cost of housing, but they have enough faith in, like a deal that has generally worked pretty well for Ireland of these Two parties running the show that delivered a lot of prosperity. So, you know, I'm always pulling for Ireland. I mean, that's my bottom line.

[Tommy Vitor]

Pro.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, I'm pro. Whatever the Irish wanted to do. It's interesting to watch Sinn Fein become increasingly, incrementally a more mainstream party in Ireland and in Northern Ireland, obviously. So in some ways I think that's healthy. You know, it just shows a kind of. We're moving past the definition of all Irish politics being around the conflict because Sinn doesn't do well because of that history. They do well because they're railing about the price of housing. And there's something kind of normal and nice about that.

[Tommy Vitor]

The best part about. Well, everything's great about say nothing. The series, just a great show.

[Ben Rhodes]

I mean, everything's great island.

[Tommy Vitor]

But every episode ends with a disclaimer that says, jerry Adams has always denied being a member of the IRA or participating in any IRA related violence.

[Ben Rhodes]

Member of Parliament for Sinn Fein.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, I guess I don't. Just for legal reasons, I guess they have to do it. It's pretty incredible.

[Ben Rhodes]

Jerry must have threatened some litigation. Yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

To keep that lie going. It's amazing. Anyway, congrats.

[Ben Rhodes]

It's a great book, man.

[Tommy Vitor]

Patrick is just one of the best writers I've ever. I read. He had a long piece about the Russian underground and all the oligarch and Russian money in there and this kid who got swirled up in it and it led to his death. It was a New Yorker piece six months ago, which I read the other night. It was just incredible.

[Ben Rhodes]

I have to say. This should be an era, this next few years of just epic long form magazine journalism because there's so many investigative pieces to be written in dark underworlds to explore. That's what I like about what he does. He kind of finds the weak spot in these, you know, undergrounds.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, you're going to hear my interview with Natasha Hall. She is a Syria expert at csis. We're going to talk about what happened in Syria over the last week. How these opposition groups took so much territory, who is doing the fighting and what could happen next if the US or other outside parties get involved. So stick around for that. The credit card companies are ripping you off and you don't even know it. Every time you use your credit card, they charge a hidden swipe fee. It costs the average family more than eleven hundred dollars per year. Really? $1,100. That's because the credit card companies Organize banks into pricing cartels. It's like OPEC for credit cards. That's terrible.

[Natasha Hall]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

Awful organization with no competition. We have the highest credit card swipe fees in the world, and that is just wrong. Thankfully, the House and Senate have a bipartisan bill to fix this problem. It's called the Credit Card Competition Act. It would finally make credit card companies compete like every business across the country is supposed to. So call your senators and representatives and tell them to pass the Credit Card Competition Act. Pod Save the World is brought to you by Lumen. Lumen is the world's first handheld metabolic coach. It's a device that measures your metabolism through your breath. Your metabolism is your body's engine. It's how your body turns the food you eat into fuel that keeps you going. All you have to do is breathe into your lumen first thing in the morning and you'll know what's going on with your metabolism, whether you're burning mostly fats or carbs. Then Lumen gives you a personalized nutrition plan for that day based on your measurements. There's a lot of folks here who are trying out lumen. It's super easy to use. You just blow it in the morning and it gives you a plan for the rest of the day for how to get the most out of your body, how to get the most nutrition, and how to keep your metabolism firing at the best rate. So it's a really cool idea. So if you want to stay on track with your health this holiday season, go to Lumen Me world to get 15% off your lumen. That's L U M E N me World for 15% off your purchase. Lumen makes a great gift too. Thank you Lumen for sponsoring this episode. Pate of the World is brought to you by USA for unhcr. Unhcr, the UN refugee agency, responds to emergencies and provides long term solutions for refugees in more than 130 countries, including Ukraine, Syria and Afghanistan. UNHCR supports people forced to flee from war, violence and persecution at their greatest moment of need. During the winter, people forced to flee are faced with increased hardships and costs. As temperatures drop, families struggle to meet basic needs like heating their shelters, buying warm clothes and cooking hot meals. Refugees and displaced people are struggling to survive like never before. Funding shortfalls and rising food prices force UNHCR to dial back its life saving aid to vulnerable families around the world. Donor support is crucial to address the need for essentials for millions of families. Without sufficient funding, life saving assistance will be threatened, cutting off a vital lifeline for refugees and displaced people. This is a tremendous challenge for people forced to Flee. Donate to USA for UNHCR by visiting unrefugees.org winter all gifts before December 31st are automatically matched. My guest today is Natasha Hall. She's a senior fellow in the Middle East Program at the center for Strategic and International Studies. Great to see you. Thank you for joining.

[Natasha Hall]

Thanks so much for having me.

[Tommy Vitor]

So it's been a remarkable week in Syria. Can we just start with the basics? Can you just tell everybody what happened over the last week or so and how were these rebel factions able to retake so much territory from the Assad regime in just a couple of days?

[Natasha Hall]

Yeah, it's been truly shocking even for me. I've been covering this for 15 years. We haven't seen a major shift in front lines in Syria in four years. And these rebel forces were essentially able to take much of the western Aleppo countryside and Aleppo city, which is the second largest city in Syria, within a couple of days. So quite stunning to watch. You know, Assad security forces just kind of melt away. We know that they've been planning this for months and they have significantly increased their capabilities along the way as well because they've taken some air defense systems, man pads, which you might know from your Obama days, that the rebels had been asking for for some time, but they found some caches. But initially I think what happened was they had sleeper cells within Aleppo city. They were able to infiltrate sort of a highly secure meeting within Aleppo and that just created a lot of confusion amongst pro regime forces initially. But it was a bloodless sort of. They just walked into Aleppo city, it seemed like, and so it was quite shocking. They've also moved south in recent days down the M5 highway which links Aleppo and Damascus. So they're about to enter Hama City, which is also extremely significant because these were very, very hard fought victories for pro regime forces, like years of siege bombardment, chemical weapons to do what rebel forces have done over the course of our long Thanksgiving weekend.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, and so you said they found basically the lightweight kind of shoulder fired missiles. Does that mean that they were able to use those to take out what regime helicopters or something that sort of enabled this rapid movement, is that what you're saying?

[Natasha Hall]

No, I mean, honestly, I think the thing that allowed for this movement because these are more recent gains. Right. Was the fact that the Assad regime is just sort of a husk of its former self. And Iran and Hezbollah have been significantly weakened in recent months because of Israeli attacks. Just the complete decapitation of Hezbollah leadership and decimated rank and file. And Israel continues to hit arms shipments in Lebanon and Syria for Hezbollah. So Russia has also sort of drawn down some of its forces. It's been busy in Ukraine. So I think the rebels took this moment. I think Turkey probably greenlighted some kind of offensive to sort of push Assad in the direction of greater reconciliation because he remains pretty intransigent towards any compromise. But all of those forces just came together to create this perfect storm that allowed rebels to make these, I mean, really unprecedented, shocking advances.

[Tommy Vitor]

So let's talk a bit about the players involved here, starting with an organization called hts. Can you tell us about them a little bit?

[Natasha Hall]

Yeah, sure. Hayat Ahri Reshem is, back in the day was Jupiter Nusra, essentially, which was an offshoot of Al Qaeda. Now they have renounced their affiliation to Al Qaeda a long time ago, and in recent years, they have been trying to put on a more moderate stance to the Western press. They are designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey and the United States. And so they haven't gotten off of those lists. But because they are sort of the de facto government in Idlib in northwestern Syria, you know, Turkey and others have to deal with them. They're also the most powerful and disciplined, I would say, armed group in the northwest at this juncture. And they definitely sort of led this initial offensive into Aleppo. The other sort of umbrella group is the Syrian national army, and they are basically propped up by Turkey, by Ankara. But they were initially a hodgepodge of just all of the armed groups that have been fighting Assad for the past 13 years. And they even come from various parts of Syria, but they've been displaced to this northern sort of corner of Syria, but they have come in sort of at later hour to fight in sort of northern Aleppo areas. And so basically, somewhat, I would say on behalf of Turkey, I mean, I.

[Tommy Vitor]

Think you wrote about this. I mean, one of the leader of HTS was once the commander of Al Nusra. You often hear that they rebranded to hts, they renounced Al Qaeda, et cetera. But what does that mean to rebrand Al Nusra? Is this lip service? Do you think this is real? I mean, how should we read this?

[Natasha Hall]

Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. And that's what I've been sort of studying in depth for the past few years. So I would say that we just look at what is going on in Aleppo city right now. I mean, Aleppo city is a very heterogeneous there Are Christians. There are even pro regime, I would say families or those with links to the regime. And these forces, which are being called jihadist forces in the media, have gone around to reassure minorities that they will not be harmed. And I have to say that even people that I speak to on a regular basis in Idlib have been really surprised by sort of this responsible behavior amongst HTs. I think they've learned quite a bit in the past few years. Now, whether or not that is sustained, I don't know. But they have definitely made a significant effort to show minorities in particular that they will not harm them. Without a doubt, though they have ruled with an iron fist in Idlib in the past and imprisoned and tortured people and all of that as well.

[Tommy Vitor]

And then I said that HTS claims to have about 30,000 fighters. I think the Syrian national army is estimated to have about 40,000 fighters, but they're a little more disparate and as you mentioned, at the top, sort of controlled by Turkey in a lot of ways. Is that accurate?

[Natasha Hall]

Yeah, it's probably about accurate. I mean, we don't really know. And to be honest with the SNA in particular, their salary is really quite pathetic from Turkey. So whether or not all of those fighters are full time is a totally different, different, I think, question to ask. So I think a lot of these people are kind of moonlighting as fighters as part of their, you know, their part time job. So it's difficult to kind of parse exactly what the manpower is.

[Tommy Vitor]

Got it. I think, I mean, part of what probably surprised a lot of people, at least, you know, non experts, not like yourself, was that there was an assumption that the Syrian civil war was frozen, if not won by Assad. You know, we had heard about the United Arab Emirates, for example, leading the charge to bring Assad back into the fold. Syria was reinstated into the Arab League last year. Basically he had been treated like a winner. And I'm wondering how much of the surprise about this last week was because that view was just fundamentally wrong versus what you mentioned earlier, which is over the last year or so all these Assad allies like Iran, Hezbollah and Russia have been distracted by other conflicts. Conflicts.

[Natasha Hall]

Well, I don't think the answer to those two questions are sort of mutually exclusive. Right. I think that if we've learned anything from the past year, it's that frozen conflicts aren't really frozen. They're waiting for a right moment to erupt again. And I would say, you know, none of the conflicts, whether it's, you know, Gaza, whether it's Syria, Yemen, et cetera. If the drivers of conflict remain, the conflict's not over. It's just waiting for the next moment, the next cycle of violence. I would say on behalf of those that are claiming victory for Assad, I think that was kind of wishful thinking on behalf of those that wanted to not think about the Syrian conflict anymore. To be frank, even those who have historically supported the opposition in the early years, they have also invested heavily in Assad's survival. And so I think the fact that a group like HTS is making such advances is, in their minds, not good for anyone. I would have a different take, but I think that that's sort of the answer to your question. I mean, Assad did not control 30% of the territory and 70% of agricultural resources and energy resources in the country. Billions of dollars to reconstruct even government controlled areas. The currency has fallen in value tremendously. It's hard to say that that's a victory, but I think a lot of people just want to move on.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, I mean, a victory in the sense that he remained in control. I mean, I imagine he, yeah, he survived. And I think, you know, what is it, 12%, 13% of the country is Alawite. So there is this sort of sectarian sense of an all or nothing conflict for them. It's existential for them if they lost. I think the narrative was that these Sunni extremist groups were going to come in and, and do something, you know, commit atrocities. Right.

[Natasha Hall]

Well, I mean, the regime for the entirety of its existence, all the way to Hafiz al Assad, so we're talking about half a century here, has fed that sectarianism. I mean, I can tell you that I know Aluis that live in Idlib under HTS control peacefully, and they are not harassed. So this is a narrative that has unfortunately been pushed upon people. And it's worked. It's worked rather well because the vast majority of Alawi communities and Christian communities, as you sort of alluded to, have ended up supporting the regime for the fear that they would be exterminated. Essentially.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. In 2016, you mentioned how Russia officially rode to the rescue and started hitting targets on behalf of Assad and really tilted the balance of the conflict militarily. It sounds like they're ramping things back up. There were some comments out of Hezbollah leadership or Iranian leadership about the need to support Assad. But what are you seeing in terms of the Assad allies potentially coming to his rescue or whether they can at this point?

[Natasha Hall]

Yeah, that's a Great question. I think Iran and Russia cannot lose the Assad regime. I mean, Russia has invested quite heavily in this war reputationally, and, you know, blood and treasure, well, not as much blood and treasure, actually. It was a pretty, pretty cheap intervention as far as interventions go. But it is their first warm water port and they've used Syria essentially as a launching pad into Africa, into the Mediterranean. It has, you know, its first war, its first intervention, you know, beyond its near abroad, was pretty significant to really establish Russia as a significant power in the Middle east, which had been traditionally thought to be the United States domain. So they will definitely come sort of to the rescue, typically through air power. And that's what we've seen unfortunately in Idlib, and we've seen several hospitals destroyed in the last couple of days, so sort of the old toolbox being used. But it was interesting because in the initial days the comments from Russia were quite mixed actually, and actually sort of just telling the Assad regime, you need to deal with this. I think there's a bit of a frustration on the part of Russia that it's been trying to get the Assad regime to reconcile with Turkey or with anyone for that matter, and that has not happened. And then to just watch their military just fall apart like this has been, I'm sure, frustrating for the Kremlin. On the Iranian side, it's more complicated, as you might know, because Hezbollah has been so dramatically weakened in the past few months. So it's quite difficult for them to come to the rescue. Iran is just calling up everyone they can in terms of militia groups to send them over Syria, from what I've heard in reports, is also trying to forcibly conscript those who have not been conscripted before even, and just kind of round people up. So they are coming to the rescue. The question is how effective will those forces be compared to the forces that took down Aleppo in 2016? And that kind of remains to be seen. But what I would say is that unfortunately, I think time is on their side. What they've done in the past, because they have been weak in the past too, is come to a ceasefire agreement and just wait it out, regroup, recuperate, and then mount a counterattack.

[Tommy Vitor]

Right, right. I read a piece you wrote where you argued that the US should work with Turkey to protect some of these opposition controlled areas from Syrian attacks. Can you just describe for listeners what the current US Military presence in Syria and I guess neighboring Jordan is like in what they're doing on that counter ISIS mission? And then are you recommending that The US and Turkey go into direct combat with Assad and potentially, I guess, allies like Iran and Russia if it comes to it.

[Natasha Hall]

Yeah. So, I mean, the US Presence is fairly limited, but robust, influential, I would say there's just a few hundred troops in the northeast supporting Syrian Democratic Forces. These are sort of the Kurdish dominated forces in the northeast and then along the sort of the border with Iraq in the east. And this is, I mean, they wouldn't say this, but this is primarily to sort of stem the flow of Iranian influence sort of across Syria. And also there's significant ISIS presence in these areas still and cells throughout. So there's a number of different reasons for the few hundred troops that are still there to be there. But the White House has been fairly clear in its recent statements that, you know, it has nothing to do with this offensive, that it is there to, you know, fight terrorism, et cetera, et cetera. So their role is fairly limited, but they are preventing, I think, more bloodshed. There's also, you know, prisons in the northeast holding a great deal of ISIS fighters that remain there in limbo. So if the regime took over those prisons, I think we'd probably be in trouble. And so that's the presence in Syria. And I think aside from that, the United States has tried to be quite hands off when it comes to Syria except for sanctions and humanitarian aid. But what I was suggesting is that one of the tools in the toolbox for Assad and Russia is to bombard these areas into submission, to starve them into submission, besiege them. And so it's very important for the US to work with Turkey to maintain supply routes, make sure they remain open to Aleppo city and all these areas that are retaken. And I would say to work with Turkey in order to stop the bombardment if it continues. So that doesn't mean the US Going to war necessarily with Russia, but Turkey has gotten to attack to toe with Russia and Syria in the past to basically stop an offensive in 2020, for example. So I think there are other ways to do it. It doesn't have to be sort of all or nothing.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. And this is a bit of a complicated piece of business with Turkey. Right. Because where we could work with them to defend the opposition. Right. Yeah, yeah. They also, they really don't like the Kurdish forces that we work with on counter isis. So would that create complexity here?

[Natasha Hall]

Again, I don't think this is an all or nothing scenario. Turkey wants to get things out of this too. So I think there's a way to get a compromise out of everybody. It also doesn't want bombardment like we've seen in Idlib, because it's already dealing with the largest refugee population in the world. It doesn't want more people sort of streaming across borders and things like that. So. And they've also invested quite heavily in these areas, I should mention as well. I mean, most of them use the Turkish lira. It's to that extent. So I think there's a way to make everybody sort of in a better position than before.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. And I'm not sort of throwing cold water on your proposal specifically, just sort of providing the context for the listener about why this area is so unbelievably complex. Lots of different competing factions. Last question for you. I mean, you talked about, I mean, life has just been hell for the Syrian people for well over a decade now. Hundreds of thousands have died. Millions have been displaced. There's refugees in neighboring countries or inter. Or displaced from their homes, at least IDPs. What do you think is the best outcome for them here?

[Natasha Hall]

Yeah, especially for the 4 million people in the northwest that have been displaced sometimes over a dozen times. I think that this seems like a crisis, but I do think you can turn a crisis into an opportunity. The regime is on its back foot for the first time in a very long time and this could be the opportunity to get concessions out of the regime that suit U.S. interests and the Syrian people. I think that's what Turkey is trying to do, although it has ulterior motives, as you alluded to. And you know, if this, if this moment goes away, that window I don't think is going to open again anytime soon. And so I think the U.S. although it's a lame duck presidency right now, if they can insert themselves in a way that are in the interest of a more sustainable peace, that address some of the drivers of conflict and displacement, we could get to potentially a more stable region and one that is more sustainably stable as well. So I think that there is an opportunity there. Whether or not it's taken, I don't know.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, big open question and a big question about what the Trump team would do. Natasha hall, thank you so much for joining the show and providing some unbelievably helpful context to a complicated and fast moving set of events. So thank you again.

[Natasha Hall]

Thanks so much for having me.

[Tommy Vitor]

Thank you again, Natasha, for doing the show. And that's all I got. Thanks for everybody listening.

[Ben Rhodes]

I mean, God knows what's going to happen between now and next week. So, man, it could be an entirely new slated topic.

[Tommy Vitor]

Some good news would be cool.

[Ben Rhodes]

Good news would be good.

[Tommy Vitor]

What do we got? We got a German election coming up.

[Ben Rhodes]

Not particularly.

[Tommy Vitor]

That's going to be bad news. The French government looks like it's about to collapse.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, we'll probably have to talk about that.

[Tommy Vitor]

Be cool. Marine Le Pen might go to jail and get kicked out of politics for five years.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, there's that.

[Tommy Vitor]

That could be cool. I don't know. Christmas. Tell my daughter about Santa's been fun. She's pretty pumped.

[Ben Rhodes]

I think my kids are still, you know, I think my oldest might be pretending to still believe in Santa.

[Tommy Vitor]

Santa Pill.

[Ben Rhodes]

And the youngest is all in on it, so we're hanging on to Santa.

[Tommy Vitor]

That's awesome. I wanted to just hang on to.

[Ben Rhodes]

Santa for as long as you.

[Tommy Vitor]

It's so fun. The elf on the shelf's a little creepy.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

Little fuckers just staring at you.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, there's a creepiness to the whole elf subgenre also.

[Tommy Vitor]

When you're a kid these days, you grow up with a lot of surveillance in your life. Your parents are taking videos of you. You got the nanic camera in the crib. Some people just have like, nanny cams everywhere.

[Ben Rhodes]

There's like no video evidence of me ever being a child, ever.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. And there's actually, to be blunt, barely had cable. There's not a lot of photographic evidence either, thank God. I mean, which is good. I don't if my parents are sitting there. I got a storage alert on my phone the other day and it said, like, I was approaching my limit. And then I looked at my photos and there are 30,000 photos on my iPhone. It's like, what the fuck is that about?

[Tommy Vitor]

That's a lot.

[Ben Rhodes]

My parents probably have like, you know, 30 remaining photos of me.

[Tommy Vitor]

You have to do what I did, which is. I didn't. I wasn't on the cloud for a long time because, I don't know, I fundamentally don't trust it. And I would break a phone and just purge photos.

[Ben Rhodes]

Oh, that's smart.

[Tommy Vitor]

I'd love to have them all back.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, because I'd like to get rid of them. Because one of the things is like, you know, my wife, perfectionist. Like, she'll take 50 pictures to get the one I got yelled at for my. I know.

[Tommy Vitor]

So Lack of ability.

[Ben Rhodes]

Me too. So I want to go through there and actually delete a bunch of these things. But you know how long that would take. It'd be like a day long project.

[Tommy Vitor]

We need some AI for that. Yeah.

[Ben Rhodes]

We do.

[Tommy Vitor]

Okay, well, we'll invent that between now and next week, but thanks for listening. We'll talk to you soon. If you want to get ad free episodes, exclusive content and more, consider joining our Friends of the Pod subscription [e-mail] friends. Don't forget to follow us at Crooked media on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter for more original content, host takeovers and other community events. Plus, find Pod Save the world on YouTube for access to full episodes, bonus content and more. If you're as opinionated as we are, consider dropping a review. Pod Save the World is a Crooked Media production. Our producer is Ilona Minkowski. Our associate producer is Michael Goldsmith. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor and Ben Rhodes. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick and engineered by Vasilis Vitopoulos. Audio support by Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis. Madeline Herringer is our head of news and programming. Matt DeGroat is our head of production. Andy Taft is our executive assistant. Thanks to our digital team Phoebe Bradford, William Jones, Kirill Pahlav and Molly Lobel, who upload our episodes and videos to YouTube.com podsavetheworld.

[Natasha Hall]

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[Tommy Vitor]

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[Natasha Hall]

Visit ncl.com, call your travel advisor or 1888 NCL cruise offer ends soon Norwegian.

[Tommy Vitor]

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