Trump Begs Allies to Clean Up Iran Mess

Summary

Podcast Summary: Pod Save the World – “Trump Begs Allies to Clean Up Iran Mess”

Date: April 1, 2026
Hosts: Ilona Minkovsky (substituting for Tommy Vietor) & Ben Rhodes
Key Guest: Nika Kovac (Slovenian activist)
Main Theme: The episode dives into the chaotic and dangerous state of the Iran War, U.S. administration’s incoherence, the impacts at home and abroad, escalation risks, broader trends in global authoritarianism, and recent events in Slovenia and Russia.

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Episode Overview

This episode examines the Trump administration's convoluted messaging and actions during the ongoing Iran war, its shifting objectives, the mounting regional and civilian toll, and the unprecedented drift toward authoritarian and militaristic approaches in U.S. governance. The hosts also discuss external authoritarian resilience, featuring Russia's tech clampdowns and intervention in European elections, before closing with a literary palate-cleanser via Nicolas Sarkozy’s prison memoir.

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1. Iran War: Chaos, Contradiction, and Escalation

Mixed Messages & Shifting Deadlines

[07:37 – 10:44]

• The U.S. administration’s approach to Iran is characterized by confusing and inconsistent statements.
• President Trump’s threats shift from bringing Iran to the table under nuclear pretexts, to threatening obliteration of civilian infrastructure, to declaring the Strait of Hormuz “not our problem anymore.”
• Trump on Truth Social:

  “If the Hormuz Strait is not immediately 'open for business,' we will conclude our lovely 'stay' in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their electric generating plants, oil wells, and Kharg island, and possibly desalinization plants, which we have purposefully not yet touched.” (Ilona reading Trump's post, [09:37])

The Role of the Allies

[10:44 – 11:26]

• Trump shifts blame/involvement to U.S. allies:

  “There are countries around the world who ought be prepared to step up on this critical waterway as well... Last time I checked, there was supposed to be a big, bad Royal Navy…” (Sec. Pete Hegseth, [10:44])

Policy Incoherence & Lack of Objectives

[11:45 – 16:43]

• Ben Rhodes critiques the lack of consistent U.S. objectives:
  • No clarity on whether the aim is nuclear prevention, regime change, or economic leverage.
  • No meaningful negotiations; mixed messaging serves to ‘calm markets’ rather than resolve conflict.

  “I have no idea what the hell they're doing and neither do they… The fundamental issue is that things are much worse today than when the war started. The main reason for that is that the Strait of Hormuz has been closed, and therefore 20% of the world's fossil fuel energy is not getting out…” (Ben Rhodes, [11:45])

“Regime Change” as Spin

[18:14 – 22:32]

• Trump claims regime change has already occurred due to assassinations and leadership shifts, despite the regime structure remaining intact.

  “We’ve had regime change, if you look already, because the one regime was decimated, destroyed, they're all dead…” (Donald Trump, [18:17])

• Ben argues that such narrative is “utter bullshit” and policy cannot be driven by such blatant falsehoods.

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2. Escalation, Troop Deployments, and Civilian Harm

Troop Deployments & Risks of Ground Invasion

[27:50 – 34:15]

• Over 50,000 U.S. troops now in the Middle East; ground options being considered include invasion of Kharg Island and seizing enriched uranium.
• Even Erik Prince warns:

  “I don't share the optimism of the administration that there's going to be a peaceful stop to this. They will burn it down… If they try to put boots on the ground, force the Straits of Hormuz, you will see imagery of burning American warships in the next couple of weeks.” (Erik Prince, [30:07])

• Ben: Military deployments often take on “a logic and a momentum of their own,” leading to mission creep.

American Public’s Detachment

[43:04 – 47:24]

• Clip of spring breakers clueless about U.S. wars illustrates public disconnection from consequences.
• Hosts reflect on this as a failure of education and civic responsibility:

  “It's a failure of all of us… If this is the way that our youth are looking at the world… it's on all of us.” (Ilona, [46:45])

Normalization of Civilian Targeting

[35:00 – 41:49]

• Both sides increasingly attack civilian infrastructure; U.S. threatens war crimes.
• Firsthand account from Iran by Marte van Ramsdonk, Norwegian Refugee Council:

  “People try to help each other… Despite all this doom and gloom, Iranians are still living. We are living in a surreal balance of war and everyday life.” ([36:53])

• Ben warns:

  “When Donald Trump goes out and threatens to blow up desalination plants and threatens to blow up electricity generation, he is threatening to commit war crimes…” ([38:02])

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3. The U.S. Military: Politicization and Discrimination

Pete Hegseth’s Interference

[52:13 – 56:59]

• Hegseth, Secretary of War, is personally blocking promotions of women and Black officers.
• Ben:

  “There's a pattern here of getting rid of Black people and women from high positions in the military… It's just pure racism and misogyny.”

Militant Christianity and Ideological Cleansing

[57:10 – 59:31]

• Hegseth institutes overt Christian rituals at Pentagon, marginalizes non-Christians and minorities, ties warrior ethos to performative faith:

  “His department announced military chaplains would no longer wear their rank… instead religious insignia.”
  “This is just bullshit performative Christianity that doesn’t comport with any Christianity I’m familiar with.” (Ben, [59:31])

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4. Authoritarian Trends Abroad: Russia, Slovenia, Cuba

Russia's Information Clampdown

[60:25 – 68:18]

• Russian government is curtailing Telegram usage, pushing a state app, and regularly disrupting Internet service.
• Personal anecdotes from Ilona about loss of contact with family, and broader social/economic impacts.
• Ben:

  “Russia had an open Internet-based society. Imagine all that being taken away... Putin's success is not the Russian people's success.” ([64:12 – 68:10])

Slovenian Election, Foreign Interference (Interview with Nika Kovac)

[79:23 onward]

• Nika details how activists and journalists uncovered former Mossad-affiliated firm Black Cube’s covert involvement in supporting the far-right and anti-democratic candidate, Janša.
• Exposure changed the electoral outcome, showing resilience through transparency and coalition.

  “We should not be afraid of them. …when you become loud and …start to expose them, they get so lost…” (Nika Kovac, [96:53])

• Lessons for fighting authoritarianism:
  • Learn and adapt playbooks,
  • Build broad civil coalitions,
  • Act with transparency,
  • “Love your country.”

Cuba Blockade & Humanitarian Crisis

[69:14 – 74:02]

• U.S. blockade (dating from Trump’s reversal of Obama normalization) has caused a massive crisis in Cuba; Trump briefly allows a Russian oil tanker through for humanitarian optics but maintains policy incoherence.
• Ben: “The policy of the United States under Trump was to do the opposite of what he just said. …So now he's magnanimous because he's letting a single oil tanker through his own blockade.” ([71:47])

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5. Light Moment: Nicolas Sarkozy’s Memoir

[75:11 – 78:59]

• Dramatic reading of Sarkozy’s 'Journal of a Prisoner'—the ex-French president laments hard beds, bad baguettes, and missing Parisian vistas during his 20-day prison sentence.

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Notable Quotes

• Ben Rhodes ([11:45]):
  “There’s so many problems with this, but is it—I have no idea what the hell they're doing, and neither do they.”
• Ilona Minkovsky ([16:43]):
  “[I]t’s so demoralizing to see that nobody really has an idea of what's happening, who's in charge...”
• Donald Trump ([18:17]):
  “We've had regime change, if you look already… I would consider that regime change. And frankly, they've been very reasonable.”
• Erik Prince ([30:07]):
  “They will burn it down. …you will see imagery of burning American warships in the next couple of weeks…”
• Marte van Ramsdonk ([36:53]):
  “Civilians are paying the highest price for this war… Even in this situation, people try to help each other.”
• Nika Kovac ([96:53]):
  “When you become loud and when you become not afraid and when you start to exposing them, like they get so lost…”
• Ben Rhodes ([38:02]):
  “If you're trying to suit policy to the lies being told by the president in something as big and complex as a war… these are all facts that Trump cannot contend with.”

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Segment | Start | Topic | |------------------------------------------|---------|-----------------------------------------------------------| | Iran chaos & admin contradictions | 07:37 | Sanctions, objectives, and Trump’s reversals | | Trump, regime change, & disinformation | 18:14 | Regime change claims and truth distortion | | Troop buildup & military plans | 27:50 | Ground war scenarios and risks | | Civilian harm & normalization | 35:00 | Firsthand Iran reports, war crimes, infrastructure damage | | Pete Hegseth & military politicization | 52:13 | Racism, promotions, and faith-based militarization | | Russia: Information crackdown | 60:25 | Telegram bans and internet outages in Russia | | Cuba blockade crisis | 69:14 | Humanitarian cost, Trump’s policy detours | | Sarkozy prison memoir reading | 75:11 | Satirical literary closing | | Interview: Nika Kovac (Slovenia) | 79:23 | Black Cube exposure, resisting authoritarianism |

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Tone and Final Thoughts

The episode mixes urgent critique, dark humor, and first-person perspectives. The hosts oscillate between deep anxiety about the state of U.S. foreign/military policy and moments of ridicule or disbelief at administration actions and global autocracy. Guest insights (Nika Kovac, Marte van Ramsdonk) offer hope and practical lessons for resisting right-wing power grabs. The episode’s tone is passionate, irreverent, and deeply concerned with the human and democratic toll of current global politics.

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For First-Time Listeners:

This summary covers the critical foreign policy issues, background debate, notable exchanges, and highlighted global stories. Whether you’re catching up or need a refresher, this roadmap should orient you on the major subjects, narrative twists, and memorable moments from the show.

Transcript

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[Zainab Selby]

Cristiana Figueres was the chief negotiator of the Paris Agreement. This is her advice about the current state of the climate movement.

[Ben Rhodes]

The first thing I would say is not kebab.

[Zainab Selby]

So where do we go from here? I'm Zainab Selby. Join us for the Hidden Economics of Remarkable Women, a show from Foreign Policy where we tell stories about women creating change and refusing to accept the status quo with verbo care. Help is always ready before, during, and after your stay. We've planned for the plot twists, so so support is always available because a great trip starts with peace of mind, day or night. VRBoCare is here 247 to help make every part of your stay seamless. If anything comes up or you simply need a little guidance, support is ready whenever you reach out. From the moment you book to the moment you head home, we're here to help things run smoothly. Because a great trip starts with the right support. And hey, a good playlist doesn't hurt either.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

Welcome to Pod Save the World. I'm Ilona Minkovsky.

[Ben Rhodes]

And I'm Ben Rhodes.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

Tommy Vider island spring breaking with his family. I mean, I hope he's having a great time. Yeah, yeah. No one works harder than Tommy, so I'm happy he's on a little bit of.

[Ben Rhodes]

Some people work harder than Tommy, you know, it's farm workers day.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

Oh, how could I forget those guys.

[Ben Rhodes]

And women work harder. But, yeah, but we love Tommy.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

Okay? We love you Tommy. We miss you. But I'm gonna fill in today in his absence. And Ben, you were remote last week for the show because you were in Mammoth with your family.

[Ben Rhodes]

That was my spring break trip.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

I went to Mammoth this past weekend with my family. And so I remember last week you were like, I just skiing in a T shirt. He had this glow. I saw the table. I saw a woman skiing in a bikini over the weekend. Oh, you did too? Okay. I saw a guy, no shirt, just only bib.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, it's a little weird up there. I mean, the funny thing about Mammoth for people who aren't Californians is it's kind of only accessible from like LA and Southern California.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

Yeah.

[Ben Rhodes]

So you kind of feel like you're in Los Angeles on a mountain, including the people wearing few clothes.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

It's a very like laid back Southern California vibe. I'll say that. This is not like your hoity toity.

[Ben Rhodes]

There's a lot of edible skiing happening.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

I think you know, the party scene afterwards with like the DJ and everything, I saw people in like Burning Man. You know, it's a little Burning man esque.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, that vibe is definitely interesting.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

You know, it was fun. It was fun. I loved it. All right, we do have more serious business to discuss. We have a great show for you guys today. We will get into all of the latest with the war in Iran, like the continued mixed messages from the administration, the military buildup in the Middle east, the very scary normalization of targeting civilian infrastructure. And we'll talk about peace. Hegseth personally interfering in military promotions, the Russian government's attempts to block the messaging app telegram, and basically the Internet altogether. The latest in Cuba and a little special treat from Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy. Ben, who did you speak to for the interview today?

[Ben Rhodes]

I spoke to Nika Kovacs, who's been on before. She's a Slovenian based activist who's done a lot of work. She has done work on behalf of reproductive rights across Europe, but most recently in Slovenia. They had an election about last week where the kind of far right authoritarian candidate Yanza was widely expected to win. A week before the election, Nika was one of a small group of people who did an investigation and revealed that the Israeli intelligence firm Black Cube, which is made up of former Mossad officials, had essentially contracted with Yanza to interfere in the Slovenian election. That kind of rocked things and ultimately the progressive incumbent closed very strong and eked out a victory. So we talked about that story. It's a great story of just how did they reveal this Black Cube interference? Why is a group of former Israeli spies intervening in Slovenian politics? They've also done it in Hungary. They've also spied on me. Then we talked about where things are in Slovenia with the election result, what it might say about the election in Hungary with Victor Orban, who's coming up. Viktor Orban is very close to Jansa. And then I think really importantly, and I hope people listen to this, I asked Nika, who's been involved in a lot of campaigns in lots of different parts of the world, kind of what her lessons learned are about the best way to fight authoritarianism. And she had a very good summary, I think, of key lessons learned from not just Slovenia, but a lot of work she's done. So people should check it out.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

Yeah. And I mean, you actually have such a great network internationally, I feel like of pro democracy activists and those are people that you are in touch with all the time, that you speak to all the time. So if you want more of Ben's insight from speaking with these people, I just want to also highlight that Friends of the Pod is something everyone should be. You know, that's where we bring you bonus content drops every single week. Bonus insight from our incredible hosts. Last week we dropped a new episode of Pod Save America Only Friends with Lovett and Favreau. And as a subscriber, you get access to tons of content. There's Polar Coaster with Dan Pfeiffer, Open Tabs, which is the behind the scenes newsletter from PSA editor Reid Churlin. Terminally online crookest loosest show where hosts and staff reveal the unhinged rabbit holes that their algorithms dragged them into. This week, I would argue, like maybe our YouTube specials get a little looser sometimes only because I ask our YouTube

[Ben Rhodes]

questions are a little looser.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

I ask you really awkward questions. And then if you need any more reason to subscribe, just remember that doing so directly supports independent progressive media that helps crooked reduce their dependence on tech platforms. You get ad free episodes of your favorite crooked pods. And of course, you have a great community of fellow crooked listeners from across the country. So hit pause. Subscribe to Friends of the pod right now, cricket.com friends across the country and around the world. There you go.

[Ben Rhodes]

Don't forget, the world is out there.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

We have quite a global audience here at pod. Save the world. Okay, now let's get to Iran. So it's truly impossible to make sense of all the various statements, the threats, the backing off, the contradictions that are coming from the president and his administration on this. So I'm going to do my best here to give you a play by play. So I guess just hold on.

[Ben Rhodes]

Buckle up.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

Hold on to your seat. So as of Tuesday, which is the day that we record this show, there are reports saying that President Trump doesn't care about the Strait of Hormuz anymore. We could just walk away from the war before the Strait gets reopened. But as you and Tommy discussed last week, Trump initially gave Iran 48 hours to open the Strait of Hormuz. Then last Monday, he extended that deadline by five days. Then last Thursday, he said that he was pausing the period of energy plant destruction by 10 days to Monday, April 6th. And I have to point out too, that all along we're getting these messages from Trump, right, that the talks are ongoing, that the talks are going very well. At the same time, he will write on Truth Social threats to obliterate Iranian power plants. He also restated his plan to take Carg island in an interview with the Financial Times. And I have not been in high stakes international negotiations, Ben. I know that you have. That seems to me like a little bit of a counterproductive strategy. Yes, if you're trying to negotiate with someone. But the Iranians, meanwhile, they still don't acknowledge that that any talks are even happening. Abbas Aragachi runs foreign minister, said today in an interview with Al Jazeera that he had received a direct message from Steve Witkoff. That's President Trump's special envoy. But he denied that the countries were negotiating at all. And so then that's how we come back to this week. Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday that the talks with the new and the more reasonable regime were going great, but that if for any Reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be. I'm reading verbatim here from his truth. And if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately, quote, unquote, open for business, we will conclude our lovely, quote, unquote stay in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their electric generating plants, oil wells and Kharg island, and possibly desalinization plants, which we have purposefully not yet touched. And then, as we previewed at the top of this section by Tuesday morning, the story changed. The Strait of Hormuz is apparently not our problem anymore. President Trump truthed all of those countries that can't get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran. I have a suggestion for you. Number one, buy from the U.S. we have plenty. And number two, build up some delayed courage. Go to the straight and just take it. You'll have to start learning how to fight for yourself. The USA won't be there to help you anymore, just like you weren't there for us. I'm going to end that very long tirade I just gave with a little clip from Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War. He gave his first press conference in 12 days today. In the middle of war. Yeah. Where he basically just followed up on what we've been hearing from the President.

[Ben Rhodes]

I think the President was clear this morning in his truth that there are countries around the world who ought be prepared to step up on this critical waterway as well. It's not just the United States Navy. Last time I checked, there was supposed to be a big, bad Royal Navy that could be prepared to do things like that as well. So he's pointing out this is an international waterway that we use less than most. In fact, dramatically less than most. So the world ought pay attention and be prepared to stand up. President Trump's been willing to do the heavy lifting on behalf of the free world to address this threat of Iran. It's not just our problem set going forward, even though we have done the lion's share of preparation to ensure that that strait will be. Will be open, which is an outcome the President's been very clear on.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

I don't know, Ben, if you were just to sit back and think, like, my wildest dreams, I'm gonna write this fictional story, would you ever have considered that it would be for us to start a war, create a global economic crisis, and then just walk away and tell everyone that it's their problem?

[Ben Rhodes]

I mean, the problem, there's so many problems with this, but is it. I have no idea what the hell they're doing and neither do they. And I mean, let's just kind of break this into pieces. You've got the negotiations, the strait and the Hexathian demands made on other countries. On these negotiations. It is quite clear that there are no really active bilateral negotiations between the United States and Iran. There's a lot of diplomatic activity. You know, today the Chinese and the Pakistanis met to come up with a formula of friending the war. We know everybody from Egypt to Turkey to Saudi have been involved in diplomatic efforts, probably back channeling happening. But what's very clear is that nobody can believe anything that Trump says and that most of what he posts on social media has the single minded intention of trying to calm markets and keep oil prices from going up too high or keep the stock market from going down too much. But every single time he says there are these negotiations, Iranians come out and say that there are not negotiations happening. Or yeah, maybe Iraqi. The foreign minister might have gotten like a U up text from Witkoff, but like that. There's no formula that anybody is aware of about how to end this war. In part because there's no clarity on what the US Objectives are. Right. And that leads to the strait, because when the war started, we were told it was because Iran's nuclear program was two weeks away from a nuclear weapon, which is complete bullshit. Now we don't even hear anything about the nuclear program. Then, you know, Marco Rubio has been out there saying that the purpose of the war is to destroy the Iranian navy and air force.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

Yeah, that's a new one.

[Ben Rhodes]

It's a new one. First of all, like, I'm not, I mean, I don't like the Iranian regime, but I don't know how many Americans are like, you know what I'd really like my government to be doing? Like destroying the Iranian air Force, you know, that can't fly to the United States. Yeah, like it's an, like it has nothing to do the nuclear program. It has nothing to do with, oh, I forgot, the Iranian people were supposed to rise up and there was gonna be a democracy and the former Shah's son was gonna go, what happened to that? That's out the window. So no nuclear ambitions anymore? No ambitions to change the regime to a democracy. I'm not saying that would have worked. But we don't hear about that anymore. We hear about the navy and the air force of Iran. But the fundamental issue for the United States is, is that things are much worse today than when the war started. The main reason for that is that the Strait of Hormuz has been closed, and therefore 20% of the world's fossil fuel energy is not getting out, creating a potentially economic catastrophe that I think people have not yet gotten their minds around, because it's coming one way or another. Even if the war ended, tomorrow, we're going to be dealing with the effects of this. So I, as an American citizen, have no idea what the purpose of this war is. Importantly, the Iranians, who are supposed to be the ones that Trump is ostensibly negotiating with, how could the Iranians have any idea what they're being asked to do when these things keep changing? How can the Iranians trust a negotiation when they've been bombed twice in the middle of previous negotiations? How can they trust a negotiation when Israel keeps assassinating people, including some of the people that would be engaged in those negotiations? So it's just totally incoherent. And now for him to say, we will walk away from this without the Strait of Hormuz being opened up. In fact, the Strait of Hormuz is being run like a fucking toll road by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which was not the case before the war. So Iran's gotten in a stronger position because of Iran.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

We've literally just made everything worse.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, we made the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, like, hold 20% of the world's energy hostage if we walk away from that. And our only solution is to ask, like, the Royal Navy Aspedex. You forgot big, bad, big bad British Navy. Like, as if it's, you know, the 19th century. Like, those countries are not gonna bail Trump out because he's treated them like shit, because he's tariffed them, he's insulted them, he's humiliated them, he's threatened to invade Greenland. Why would they come bail Trump out by opening up the Strait? And by the way, even if they decided they wanted to do that, do you know how long it would take the Europeans to put together some naval armada to then go down to the Strait of Hormuz and escort tankers? Like, months. So none of this makes any sense. And meanwhile, while it's happening, Trump is deploying the 82nd Airborne and all these special forces to the region? So maybe he's just saying all these things about peace to calm markets, but we're going to have ground troops. We just don't know at this point. And that is terrifying, given the scale of the crisis that we're in, that people that follow this, as closely as we do, can make no sense of what the hell is going on.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

Yeah. And. Well, and it's something we'll discuss more in terms of the ground troops, in terms of the impacts for people in the region. There's a projection from the UN Development Program. It said one month of this war could plunge 4 million more people across the Arab world into poverty and shave off up to 6% of the region's economic output during that time. And that's just one month of the war. We're in week five of this war, and that's not including all the other global economic impacts that we talked about on the show, and especially last week in our interview. Obviously, something is happening. Right. Like there were 20 Pakistani oil tankers that were let through. So somebody's talking to the Iranians. But as you mentioned, maybe it's not bilateral talks. I can see how it's also not. You know, the Iranians would want to project an image of strength probably to their people and not say that they're negotiating with the US Even if they were. But either way, it's just. It's so demoralizing to see that nobody really has an idea of what's happening, who's in charge. And so another thing that I want to bring up, though, is because the notion of regime change used to be focused on bringing some kind of democracy right to the Iranian people. First of all, Mujtab Al Khamenei, the former ayatollah's son, who's now been put in charge, he hasn't been seen or heard from. The Russian ambassador to Iran did say that rumors that he was being treated in Russia are untrue and that he's in Iran, but obviously avoiding public appearances. But I don't know if you've noticed, Ben, suddenly the line from the administration is that regime change is just. It's already happening.

[Ben Rhodes]

It's happening miraculously.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

Yeah, yeah, we have a clip of that. Let's take a list.

[Donald Trump]

Extremely well in that negotiation. But you never know with their end because we negotiate with them and then we always have to blow them up. But we've had regime change, if you look already, because the one regime was decimated, destroyed, they're all dead. The next regime is mostly dead. And the third regime, we're dealing with different people than anybody's dealt with before. It's a whole different group of people. So I would consider that regime change. And frankly, they've been very reasonable.

[Ben Rhodes]

If there are new people now in charge who have a more reasonable vision of the future. That would be good news for us, for them, for the entire world. But we also have to be prepared for the possibility, maybe even the probability, that that is not the case.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

There's a little. Marcos not in the loop, apparently. But are we on regime number three? I was under the impression that regime is a system. It's not just about what individual might be at the top that you're talking to.

[Ben Rhodes]

And first of all, I do want to say on the 20 tank, because Trump also went out and said that Iran made this tribute to us of letting.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

Right. It was a gift, a presence.

[Ben Rhodes]

Eight tankers before the war, 100 to 135 tankers were going through the Strait of Hormuz every day. So this is such Trumpian logic. You launch an illegal and unnecessary war, create a giant fucking problem, and then when eight tankers get through, you treat it like an achievement when you should have 135 tankers getting through there potentially in a day. So, like, just bear that in mind. Look on the regime point, this is Trump. He's finally created a problem that is so big that there's just no way to him to spin his way out of it. He's so accustomed to bullshitting his way through things and lying about things in ways that he knows will be repeated on Fox News. But just take the regime issue. We assassinated or Israel assassinated, the 86 year old supreme leader. Well, the 86 year old supreme leader was replaced by his younger and more hardline son. The regime is not Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who's been killed. The regime is called the Islamic Republic of Iran. It's a system of governance that has clerics, that has the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as the most extreme and hardcore version of their security forces, that has Basij militia, that has a military, that has government officials across that country. Just because you kill a bunch of those people does not mean that there's regime change. I don't think Americans thought there was regime change, God forbid when like JFK was assassinated. You know, like the regime is fully in place and the regime is in some ways weaker because they've lost a lot of people and capabilities, but in some ways actually stronger because they are now controlling the Strait of Hormuz and holding the entire global economy hostage. They have now demonstrated that they can regionalize this war and impose such a cost on the United States that the President of the United States is self evidently trying to talk himself out of this war. Right. And so this is utter bullshit. And there's the problem with it, Alona, is that you cannot make policy based on lies. Like, he wants us to believe that the regime has changed. He wants us to believe that everything has been obliterated. He wants us to believe that Iran is paying tribute with ships that are going through the Strait of Hormuz, which is closed. Like these things aren't happening. And if you're trying to suit policy to the lies being told by the president in something as big and complex as a war, when Iran gets a vote how and when this war ends, Israel, which gets a vote on how and when this war ends, the fact that even if this war ended tomorrow, it would take years, I think, to rehabilitate all of that energy infrastructure that's been damaged and to restart the full supply of energy through the Strait of Hormuz. These are all facts that Trump cannot contend with. And so we're living in this crazy reality where we can all see from the price of gas in this country to the shit that has blown up across the Middle east, to the tankers that aren't getting to the Strait of Hormuz, what is actually happening. And you have Trump out there saying there's regime change. We're on the third regime. We're winning. We've already won. We've obliterated everything. When none of those things are true.

[Zainab Selby]

Yeah,

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[Ben Rhodes]

Mm.

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[Ilona Minkovsky]

It's interesting, you know, you bring all that up that you can't win a war, run a war based on lies. You know, I have a lot of people who I know who are supporters of Trump or who maybe think that this war is happening for the right reasons because they're afraid of Iran getting a nuclear weapon. Right. And I'm always just trying to think of like, how do I have a reasonable conversation where I'm really trying to put myself into their shoes, see their perspective, you know, come back with what I think are like rational arguments to express my own. And you know, I think pre Trump, the American people were also got really fed up too of feeling like they were lied to by their government when it came to wars with Iraq or with Afghanistan. I mean, I'm sorry, but for 20 years, we kept being told that we were, like, winning hearts and minds and that things were working, you know, when realistically. No, they weren't at all. But now it's just the lies seem so much more in your face.

[Ben Rhodes]

But this is such an important point, and you're right. Let us try to inhabit someone who might support this or support a tougher policy with Iran. When the last operation at Midnight Hammer, the last war with Iran, the 12 day war, whatever you want to call it, when we bombed Iran's nuclear program last year, I could have a sincere policy difference, right? I could say, okay, I guess I understand, even if I totally disagree, that the best way to deal with the Ran Snukar program is to bomb it. But I could see that someone else might think that, you know, what, like, diplomacy is not working well enough. And, you know, this is a threat. You know, we don't want Iran to get a nuclear weapon. And so I, you know, I can inhabit the perspective of somebody who thought that bombing the Iranian nuclear program was a good policy, and then we have a difference of opinion about that. The problem with this war is I don't know what it's about. So I actually can't even inhabit the position of a war supporter because nobody can tell me what the purpose of the war is. Is it the nuclear program? Is it to install Reza Pahlavi as the leader of Iran? Is it to destroy the Iranian navy? Is it to change the regime? Is it. What is it?

[Ilona Minkovsky]

It's all of the above, Jen. Right? It's because we, just because we felt like it is essentially what it comes

[Ben Rhodes]

down to, or Israel felt like it. And so how can inhabit the position of people that are supportive of this when you don't even know what this is? You don't even know, like, what. Even in Afghanistan or any of these other. Actually, I knew what the Bush administration said it was. It was trying to set up a new government in Iraq. You know, in Afghanistan, we were trying to keep the Taliban out of power. Like, I don't know what we're doing in Iran, and I don't even know if the President of the United States knows what we're doing in Iran. And that's what makes it impossible to even, like, try to understand it from their perspective.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

Well, I think the part that really upsets me is that, you know, it's. People's lives are at stake. A lot of people. Yeah, war is not a game. There are already 13 US service members who have been killed, around 300 last I checked, who have been injured. And now the New York Times reported that we have over 50,000 troops currently in the Middle East. That's because that's 10,000 more than we usually have in the region. That's because we've sent more there. In addition to the 2,000 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division that were sent last week, several hundred special operations forces, that's Army Rangers and Navy seals have been deployed. And the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump is considering sending another 10,000 troops, which would likely include infantry, armored vehicles and logistics support. I mean, you and Tommy have spoken about some of this already on the show. I just want to go over some of it again. Right. Some of the potential ground operations that are on the table, which are the invasion of Kharg island, which is where most of Iran's oil exports go through export ports go through. That island is only 16 miles from Iran's coast. So drones, missiles, those would be a constant threat if we were to invade Kharg Island. Then there's the operations along the coastline of the strait or on strategic islands to secure the Strait of Hormuz, but we apparently don't care about the Strait of Hormuz anymore. And then there's an operation to seize Iran's enriched uranium, which would be a massive multi day undertaking involving, per the Wall Street Journal, combat troops to secure perimeters, engineers with excavating equipment to search through debris and check for min and booby traps, special operations forces with expertise in handling nuclear material. And unless an airfield was available, a makeshift one would need to be set up to bring equipment in and take the nuclear material out. I just want to play you a clip here because I think you have some unlikely people who normally would be war cheerleaders who've been coming out and we've talked about them. But just in reference to all of this potential military action, you have Erik Prince, right. The founder of the infamous military contractor Blackwater, formerly known as Blackwater. I forget what they rebranded to. So this was at a panel at CPAC last week, and I kid you not the name of this panel. It was called Breaking Stuff and Killing Bad the Case for Western Military Dominance. But here's what he had to say.

[Ben Rhodes]

I counseled as loud as possible against doing this in the first place. I don't share the optimism of the administration that there's going to be a peaceful stop to this. They will burn it down. And my real concern is that if they try to put boots on the ground force, the Straits of Hormuz, you will see imagery of burning American warships in the next couple of weeks, and I don't think people are really prepared for that.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

I take everything Erik Prince says with a grain of salt. Right. I mean, the guy, he's profited plenty off of American military endeavors. But what does that tell you?

[Donald Trump]

You.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, I, I was trying to figure out how to not say I agree with Eric Prince. But, but he's got a point. But he's got a point. And, and, and, and look, you know, he tends to like to operate in places where there it's kind of chaos and there's not, not like a military force like the Iranians. You summed up well these potential operations. I, I just make a few points. In any event, where the American military is put onto the ground in Iran, they will face fierce resistance, either from drones and missiles or from some kind of direct combat. The thing that concerns me is that Trump might want to continually be looking for some win, some event that allows him to say, we won, we have Kharg island, or we won, we got the stuff out of Isfahan, where the nuclear material is in the center of Iran. And it is entirely in Iran's interest to deny Trump the illusion or the narrative that he won. Right. And so therefore, they're not just going to say, oh, you got us, you won Carg island, we surrender, you know? No, they're going to try to kill as many Americans as they can in Carg island, to take out warships to bomb our facilities across the region. And this is a country of 90 plus million people. This is a civilization that has survived for 5,000 years. This is a regime in the Islamic Republic that went through nearly a decade of the Iran Iraq War, losing hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people and continued to fight. This is not a statement that the Iranian regime is a bunch of good guys. It's a statement that they're not going to capitulate. And Trump just doesn't seem to understand that. And what I worry about with these deployments, as we saw in the run up to the war, or as we saw with the deployments to the Caribbean, they take on a logic and a momentum of their own. You don't send all these people to the Middle east without doing something with them. It just feels ominously like he's going to pick from this menu of like, seize an island or open the strait or try to get the nuclear material, but that's escalation. And if you Boots touch Iranian ground, the Iranians are gonna fight like hell and then we're gonna feel like we have to hit them again because they killed some more of our guys. And we just stay in this escalation loop that actually over time benefits the Iranians in some ways because they know that. They've looked at Afghanistan, they've looked at Iraq, they've looked at Libya, they know that the United States is not gonna stay invested in a multi year ground war in Iran. They know that there's no public support for that and they're just gonna wanna try to, to, to cause as much damage to us as they can so that we don't do it again. And, and so this is the fundamental problem. There's, there's not like a Trump keeps wanting like the video game victory, you know, like the, you know, like the, this island can become the objective, you know, when that's not how the Iranians are going to respond. And in the meantime, Americans, I've said this to you, Alona offline, but we're not seeing the full damage picture either. The Pentagon is not being transparent. Like we've had facilities hit in Bahrain, we've had facilities hit in Saudi, we've had embassies hit in Riyadh, in Baghdad. We are taking on huge damage. We don't know how seriously these injuries are. I keep learning about injuries from leaked reports. Officials say.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

Well there was, let me just say, so there were 12 troops who were injured on Friday when Iranian missiles and drones hit the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, which is interesting too. Cause it's like we don't have, have a military base in Saudi Arabia, unlike some of the other Gulf countries. But then clearly there's a US troop presence there.

[Ben Rhodes]

And can I say one thing about that? They destroyed an awacs, which is one of the most expensive planes that the United States has. It's like a radar aircraft. And there are reports that they knew exactly where to shoot and that the Russian intelligence that the Iranians may be getting could be improving their capacity to hit things. To hit an awac, a single airplane on a tarmac, you know, it shows a level of capability and a level of targeting that is better than the Iranians were a month ago.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

And the New York Times said that many of the 13 military bases in the region used by American troops are all but uninhabitable. So, you know, yeah, this is what we've done. And I think, like just to your point earlier too, that you do one thing, it's gonna lead to continued escalation. Continued escalation. You know, you and I were talking about this earlier before the show. That just feels like mission creep. It becomes an inevitable thing when you think that some type of military operation is just gonna be quick one and done. It never is. And so I just wanna hit one more aspect of this war that we haven't gotten to, but which is incredibly important, which is of course the civilian harm that's being caused. The normalization of the targeting of civilian infrastructure from both sides too. I mean, the list of non military targets that have been hit is very, very long. We spoke a lot about the girls ELE school at the start of the war. Iran's Ministry of Science says that 21 universities in the country have been damaged by strikes. And Iran has, by the way, threatened to retaliate by hitting American affiliated universities in the Middle East. Then of course, we've spoken about all of the attacks on energy infrastructure and we've seen hits on water desalination plants, Amazon data centers, airports, ports, steel, chemical and aluminum factories. I mean, this is both sides too, right? It's not just like only one side doing it. But we, we also then were able to speak with somebody who is in Tehran currently because, you know, one of the big problems is we've been hearing so little from people. Yes, we see so little from the people who are living through this in Iran, who understandably, I think, have very complex feelings about it. And so. This is Marte van Ramsdonk. She is the Iran country Director for the Norwegian Refugee Council. And here's just a little bit of what she told us. Life in Tehran is like right now.

[Marte van Ramsdonk]

My colleagues are working under extreme, difficult and dangerous conditions to scale up our relief for families that are displaced by the war. We have over 100 aid workers of which many have been displaced themselves with their families. In nearly every neighborhood, buildings are destroyed with surrounding damages. Desperate families tape their windows to prevent shattered glass after a blow. Civilians are paying the highest price for this war. I also lie awake at night and listen to the heavy explosions in telescopes. I am worried about my colleagues and their families. Some are living so close to locations under attack and colleagues have been telling me that the sounds are becoming too much. Even small cities are under attack and nowhere seems to be safe. Yet even in this situation, people try to help each other. Conversations now start with inquiring if the other person is okay and still safe. Despite all this doom and gloom, Iranians are still living. We are living in a surreal balance of war and everyday life.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

And the Latest estimates that we've seen, by the way, do show that at least 1500 Iranian civilians have been killed so far.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. And first of all, on the targeting piece, this is incredibly worrying. And part of what we've seen, and we talked about this for years with Gaza, right, is that the Israeli Defense Forces had a view of fighting wars that ignores the laws of wars. Right. We saw them bomb hospitals, we saw them bomb schools, we saw them drop 2,000 pound bombs on apartment blocks to kill one terrorist and God knows how many other people got killed. We saw refugee camps bombed. And basically we saw the laws of war tossed out the window. We saw serial commission of war crimes by the IDF in Gaza. And if you pointed that out, you got attacked or called names or what have you, but that's what happened. And what's worrying me is that the United States military, which has always held itself to tried, I'm not saying it perfectly, but tried to abide by standards at first. You saw a targeting error. I would like to believe that. And I do believe that that Iranian girls school that got bombed where over 100 children were killed, that was a targeting mistake. But when Donald Trump goes out and threatens to blow up desalination plants and threatens to blow up electricity generation, he is threatening to commit war crimes. The same thing that if Vladimir Putin does in Ukraine, we're all appalled and up in arms about it. The same thing that the IDF has been doing in Lebanon and in Gaza. And if we are now in a world in which this is what it's like when nobody plays by the. If you want to know why there are laws of war, this is why. Because it becomes a race to the bottom. Because everybody starts committing war crimes, everybody starts targeting civilian targets, everybody starts targeting infrastructure that will have an economic impact and a human impact. And so when Trump says those things, we shouldn't shrug it off. I wish he heard more resistance, including from Republicans, that if the American military starts to act like the IDF has been acting and blowing up desalination plants and bombing, and don't, you know, the universities really pisses me off because then they'll say like, well, there was some IRGC research going under that standard. You know how many American universities do

[Ilona Minkovsky]

research for the Defense Department?

[Ben Rhodes]

Are they credible military targets now? Because that's what the Iranians are going to say. It doesn't make the Iranians right, it makes them wrong. But it means that there's a reason why we follow rules because we want other people to follow rules too. And the other thing I'd say is, is whatever the objectives of this war are, there are. We talked about the thousand plus killed. Millions of Iranians are displaced, A fifth of Lebanon is displaced. Is anything that is trying to be accomplished right now worth that? We are shattering millions of lives. The United States and Israel. Do you know Americans are inconvenienced because you're paying more at the pump. Imagine if you and your family were living in a fucking tent in southern Lebanon or you know, on the outskirts of Tehran. That's what we're doing to families. For what purpose? So Donald Trump can get a news cycle win or so Bibi Netanyahu can annex southern Lebanon. Like this is, this is. I'm sorry, like I, I told you, I'm doing nonsense.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

I respect your passion because it's true.

[Ben Rhodes]

It's true. What I would like to happen is for this war to end and it can end diplomatically. And so if people say, well, what's your solution? My solution is probably a multilateral, probably not the US even leading the negotiations, but some agreement in which the Strait of Hormuz reopens Israel and the US stop bombing Iran is gonna have to get something. Sanctions relief. And we can all just, everybody can move on with their lives. Cuz the longer this goes on, the more individuals are gonna suffer and the more global economic catastrophe is going to be deeper.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

Well, I also think that's just always the problem with a lot of our military exploits as a country. Right. Is we just tend to be geographically, physically, in many ways economically isolated and removed from it. This is my very awkward segue, then into the next clip I was gonna play for you, Ben, because I didn't expect for you to go on such an impassioned rant before. No, I'm really glad you did it because I've been thinking and feeling the same thing all the time. And it's why I think that hearing firsthand accounts are so important. Right. And it's one of the things that we talk about this all the time. With press not allowed into Gaza, you're not seeing any that we miss. Right. Without a lot of more reporters in Iran. It's the thing that you're missing which seeing people who are just living absolutely normal lives a month ago, just like you and me. Yeah. Who now are completely uprooted. And you know, I was listening to a report on BBC just this morning and they were talking about like, there's these newborns who are four or five days old and these people used to have homes with all the toys for their kids. And now, as you mentioned, you know, they're living in a tent and it's not the environment you would want to bring kids into. I want to play this clip for you, which was actually done for the Jesse Waters show on Fox News of Americans spring breakers. Yeah. So let's just, I guess, for, for a little levity. Let's check it out.

[Ben Rhodes]

Spring break 2026. What is the game plan if my mom is watching? I'm sorry, mom, but I've been getting pretty drunk almost every day. What issue facing America is the most important to you?

[Ilona Minkovsky]

What bikini I'm going to wear next? Obesity is terrible. Getting a tan on the beach, that's the most important thing in my life right now.

[Ben Rhodes]

What have you heard that Donald Trump has been doing recently?

[Ilona Minkovsky]

We're going to war with Iraq. That's been crazy.

[Ben Rhodes]

What are you doing? Colombia. You got Maduro out. The Ayatollah's dead.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

I'm so.

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

What?

[Zainab Selby]

Who, What?

[Ilona Minkovsky]

What is that?

[Ben Rhodes]

Who the is Ayatollah? I have never heard that word in my life. Louis, what's Ayatollah? He was the Supreme Leader of Iran. He's dead. We killed him. You did? You killed him? What have you heard about Venezuela?

[Zainab Selby]

Venezuela?

[Ben Rhodes]

That they beat us in the World Big Baseball Classic. Have you heard anything else?

[Zainab Selby]

No.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

Okay, so by the way, that went on for a lot longer and that was just Anisha, you know, cut it down to a nice little bite sized chunk. Before we hear from you, I just want to say that my first instinct when I saw this video was to like, to be in defense of our youth because I'm like, you know what? They're dumb. You're allowed to be dumb. You're on spring break. You're allowed to be getting like drunk and like, you know, certainly if you would've asked me about geopolitical events when I was like a freshman in college, I probably wouldn't have given you a very, like, salient responses to things, you know, and then people evolve and they get wiser and they get older. But man, when we just compare that to what we were talking about, you know, in terms of our isolation as a nation, it's not such a good look.

[Ben Rhodes]

Oh, God.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

Did you consider that in Mammoth?

[Ben Rhodes]

I'm not a scolding, you know, and I went on spring break, I went to Jamaica and had a good time or whatever. But I would say. There's something, here's what I would ask people, extending the grace that I don't expect every college kid who's on spring break to be following the intricacies of a war in Iran. But we are bombing this country. And the two things I would ask are, what is the grace you extend to a 19 year old Iranian or Lebanese college student? Right? Like, why is it okay that, you know, we can go around and just break countries and bomb people and kill their leaders and blow up their universities and just think it's charming and wonderful that, you know, people are thinking about their bikini tan or how drunk they're gonna get tonight. Like there's, there's something grotesque about that. But the second thing is, how does that clip look to anyone else in the world who's not American? Like, that's what I just think we really need to consider here because we, we cannot simultaneously want to be the superpower that runs the world and that, you know, launches all these wars. The reason we can do that is because of what we just saw. Like the reason we can continue to do stupid things. And by the way, I'd be pissed if I was a 19 year old American who just got deployed to the fucking Middle East. Yeah, right, because it's not. So now let's defend the military. Like we keep asking 19 year olds to go fight in South Asia and North Africa and the Middle East. So what? So that these people can get drunk and Jesse Waters can have a laugh about it, you know, So I don't know, I don't know. I feel, I don't want to be like a.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

No, I don't want to chide them either. But I feel like actually it's like

[Ben Rhodes]

adults, it's a failure of all of us.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

It's a failure of all of us. Yeah, like the adults, it's actually not their fault.

[Ben Rhodes]

It's their parents, their politicians, all of us, it's actually not their fault.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

We're the ones that are supposed to educate the younger generation. So that's what I was thinking too. I feel like these shows always love to make fun of college students and be like, oh, this is what, like a liberal arts education is going to get you. And this is what happens, you know, with all the universities, but it's on everybody. You know, like the way that you parent, the way that you are raised and educated by your community, you know, all of that is, it's all everything that builds up over time. And so if this is the way that, you know, our youth are looking at the world, or rather like, you know, not looking or thinking about the world, it's on all of us.

[Ben Rhodes]

And now this is a toll swerve and we can come back. But like there is a longer conversation to be had about, about the systematic dismantling of public education in this country since Ronald Reagan was president. The systematic delegitimizing of being smart, you know, like elites or intellectuals or you know, the starving of funds for, you know, state university systems in some cases. If I'm cynical, I would say some of that is by design because like autocratic right wing parties would like to have dumber populations so that they're easier to control. And that's not even getting into what social media has done, unregulated social media has done too. So I truly, truly, truly don't blame young people. I blame the last 40 years of post Reagan policies that have starved public education and deregulated the kind of technology platforms that kind of lock people into,

[Ilona Minkovsky]

you know, or even with this current administration, just in terms of like the books that are being banned. Right. The dismantling of DEI means also taking out like rewriting, rewriting history, all kinds of people, all of that is connected. I couldn't agree with you more. And it's just, it's so deeply upsetting and frustrating because it's also, it's what happens in other countries and the word around when they try to just erase dirty histories so that you have an uneducated population and then know you, you just.

[Ben Rhodes]

A war like this could not have happened.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

Get away with it all.

[Ben Rhodes]

Thirty years ago a lot of prep work had to be done to to make Americans like be able to tolerate this.

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[Ben Rhodes]

You know.

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[Ilona Minkovsky]

All right, well, let's, let's segue into, you know, the products of 40 years of post Reagan policy and our secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, when it comes to poor education, by the way. Actually, I was thinking about that while I, while I wrote this because I was like, ew, am I going to have to say secretary of War? The writing was on the wall when they changed it from Department of Defense to Department of War last September. We all should have known some shit was coming down.

[Ben Rhodes]

Hexath is better suited to be the idiot interviewing those kids on the beach. That's what he actually, actually is.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

On that note, I'm actually not bringing up Hegset to talk about Iran, but just because you said that there was a CNN report today that was talking about how Pete Hegseth apparently, like, was one of the biggest cheerleaders for the war in Iran with the Trump cabinet. And according to one source familiar with Hegseh's current mindset told cnn, he's very trigger happy. He believes blowing shit up is the best way for him to, for him to keep his job.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, you know, okay, to your point, the warning signs have been there, though, because he said he wanted to get rid of rules of engagement. He wanted to be warriors again. You wanted to be, you know, like, like this has been building for a year.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

All right. But, so I want to talk to him about a different talk about him for a different reason, though. We've spoken before on the show about how he's undergone this firing spree at the Pentagon, right? He fired the Joint Chiefs chairman, CQ Brown. He fired Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to be the chief of naval operations. Now, he has reportedly personally intervened to stop the promotions of four army officers who were on track to become one star generals. It just so happens that they were two women and two black men. And then NPR reported that a black colonel and a female colonel were both taken off of a promotion list as well. You know, Pete Hegseth, of course, former Fox News weekend host, knows a thing or two about being promoted to powerful positions without being qualified, I think. But what I think is really worth bringing up here Ben, is that not only is it unprecedented for the Secretary of War to personally intervene, these people were on these promotion lists because they've been selected by the people that actually work with them. You're selected by your peers based on your performance and all of that to be promoted. So it's just mind blowing to me. And what unnamed officials keep telling the press, because now I think that there's just environment of fear among the Pentagon based on just all of the unnamed anonymous sources that are talking to all the different media organizations, is that they're saying it's just weeding out the people who aren't ideologically compatible.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. But what's even worse about it is they seem to think that just because you're black and a woman, you won't be ideologically compatible.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

Of course, they're just straight up discriminating.

[Ben Rhodes]

There was no reason to get rid of CQ Brown as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, other than the fact that he was black and made an eloquent video once about racism. Right. And we saw him get rid of a lot of senior women, too. So there's a pattern here of getting rid of black people and women from high positions in the military. And just so people understand this, the promotion to a one star general would normally, like the Secretary of Defense would not even be involved in any way, shape or form of that. You know, I mean, keep in mind one star, two star, three star, four stars, like you're climbing a ladder there. And maybe when you get to the four stars, you know, like the.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

Well, he already cleaned house with the four star generals, don't forget.

[Ben Rhodes]

And so the fact that he's reaching all the way down there is clearly sending a message. And if you look at the upper echelons of the military, they're getting more white and more male and presumably more MAGA. And you and I actually did a YouTube about this a while ago. But there are all these warning signs and they are connected to what we've been talking about with Iran because Hegseth has come in and at Trump's direction, the military is far less transparent. Like, They've got the MyPillow guy media in the Pentagon press briefing room, they tried to kick everybody else out. Whiter. It's more ideologically in line with Trump's agenda. It's not being transparent. I hate to say this, I wish I could just pick on Hegseth, but usually there'd be these kind of professional briefings by uniformed military about everything that are factual. And we see much less of that too. And something like 40% of the military is not white. And so this isn't like some crazy, you know, DEI initiative. It's just the point that, like, it's something deeply up about saying we're only going to have a bunch of white men run an institution that looks like America and that should look like America. I mean, it's just pure racism and misogyny. Like, there's no other explanation for why petexeth is reaching down and denying people a promotion to a one star general.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

Well, not to mention, it just goes against everything that we think the military is supposed to represent too. Right. It's meant to represent all of us and all Americans and defend.

[Ben Rhodes]

It's one of the things Americans admire about the military.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

Yeah, exactly. It's meant to be apolitical. Which I mean, that reminds me too, like, I want to bring up another bit about Hegseth, which is that there's been all this reporting that he is injecting so much of his personal faith, Christianity, you know, into the Pentagon too. Like, the Washington Post said that every month at the Pentagon, Hegseth hosts evangelical worship services that legal experts say are unprecedented. His social media profile and public comments routinely espouse his understanding of Christianity. He's brought clergy from his small Christian denomination to preach at the Pentagon, including a prominent pastor who says women shouldn't have the right to vote. And then last Wednesday at the Pentagon, Hegseth prayed for US Troops to inflict, quote, overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. We ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ. And then. Sorry, this is still from the Washington Post. Later that day, his department announced military chaplains would no longer wear their rank on their uniform and instead would wear religious insignia. You know, even that part, like the. The military is also supposed to be highly representative of everybody who serves in it. People who come from all different backgrounds and all different religions. And. And now if you have a very clear prioritization for Christianity, you're again dividing, weeding out people.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, I mean, how would you feel if you were black? How would you feel if you're a woman? How do you feel if you're a Jewish member? How would you feel if you're Jewish? The message being sent to what is really the majority. If you add up the people in the military that are not white Christian men, it's probably a majority of the military. Military, how do they feel? So this will harm the cohesion in the military. It will harm the way recruitment, because do you want to sign up for that kind of military? So this could have long lasting impacts. I'll also just say I'm not the Christian of the year over here. Last I checked.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

No, you and I are just two really bad Jews. We're reminded all the time.

[Ben Rhodes]

But last I checked, Jesus Christ wasn't like a bloodthirsty warlord. I thought, blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called sons of God. Like what? This is such a bastardization of Christianity. Like Christianity is supposed to value civilian life. What is Christian about threatening to blow up desalination plans? What is Christian about bombing a girls school? So this is just bullshit performative Christianity that I doesn't comport with any Christianity I'm familiar with.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

Yeah, I just want to use this moment since you brought up our old YouTube video to, you know, tell everybody, remind everybody to subscribe to Pod Save the world on YouTube because we do additional videos there. Ben and I do stuff every now and then. Ben and Tommy hop on whenever there's big breaking news and we do responses. So don't forget that. That goes a long way for Pod Save the World. We gotta get more subscribers. Cause we're trying to fight the good fight here for progressive media. All right, I wanna do an update on Russia, naturally, but specifically I wanna talk about the way that the Russian government is kind of waging a war on its own people and their access to information. Now there's two major stories there is that the Russian government has been restricting the use of the messaging app Telegram. They're trying to get everybody to switch over to a government created op called Max, but no one really wants to use it because obviously there's surveillance.

[Ben Rhodes]

Literally it goes right to the fsp. Right. I mean, you're the Russian in the conversation, but.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

And I just have to point out that Telegram is incredibly popular within Russia. I've seen statistics that more than 76% of the population uses uses it. Also the government uses it. They have their, you know, like social media channels on there to put out information. The military uses it to communicate with each other. It's also a way for all kinds of influencers and bloggers to make money, like a lot of pro war military bloggers.

[Ben Rhodes]

In the same way that there's a TikTok economy here, there's a Telegram economy.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

Exactly. It's a huge, it's a huge economy. And so yeah, just think about the impacts of that if you're going to take Telegram away from people. And then the second thing that's going on is the Russian government has been increasingly just blocking the Internet altogether. People are complaining that there's no Wi Fi around, that there's no cell service. VPNs are getting blocked. It's less so impacting people who work for like really big companies that have their own servers. But it's inflicting damage on just the way people go about their daily lives. Right. Like Russia's a plugged in society. If you want to order food, you want to order a taxi, you want to pay for something with your phone, you need the Internet to do all that. And according to Kamir San, which is a newspaper, each day of no service costs Russian businesses as much as 1 billion rubles, which is $12 million. I also just want to point out personally I've been impacted by this because it's just getting harder and harder to communicate with my family than Russia.

[Ben Rhodes]

How do you communicate with them?

[Ilona Minkovsky]

We. I don't want to give all my secrets.

[Ben Rhodes]

Suffice to say, it's that max.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

It's not Max. But, you know, like, we, you know, we communicate, we use video, we use the Internet. And increasingly there's just like really bad service sometimes. Like, you know, we can't really see each other or hear each other. It's just a horrible connection or the calls just don't go through at all. And, you know, all of that obviously is upsetting and terrifying, not just for me, but I think for anybody who has, you know, family and loved ones and people that they need to communicate with in the country. But the thing that they're doing is the Russian government is claiming this is all done under the guise of security. They tell people it's to protect against Ukrainian drones. I also think, though it's interesting because there's a lot of speculation that it's really just Putin becoming completely paranoid after reports saying that the Israelis and the Americans hacked into the street cameras and that's how traffic cameras and that's how they monitor the Iranian leadership's moves there. So I don't know. First, before I go a little further, what do you think of the paranoia angle?

[Ben Rhodes]

I think it feels right to me. I mean, and I saw a crazy. You know, the New York Times bureau chief in Moscow did a great report on this, and her. One of her points was that increasingly the Internet outages are in Moscow.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

Yes, that's a very important point that I.

[Ben Rhodes]

The reason it's an important point, as you know, Beth Milona, is that if the Internet's out in Moscow, what the hell is going on in the rest of Russia because Moscow is supposed to

[Ilona Minkovsky]

be the rest of Russia. They've been dealing with this for a long time.

[Ben Rhodes]

Right.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

They've been firsthand feeling the impacts of the war a lot more because it's their people getting concerned, going to the front. And so Moscow has been the America. It's been the isolated little island where life has pretty much gone on as normal. And then now the last month, I think this has really gone.

[Ben Rhodes]

And we should say as already the major. Facebook is banned, YouTube is banned, WhatsApp is banned. What's interesting to me about this is that, okay, Putin has now moved in the company of like North Korea and to some extent China. But the point is that North Korea never had Internet access. The Chinese built this firewall, so they kind of built the system to be controllable and accessible to mass surveillance.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

And it's been there all along.

[Ben Rhodes]

It's been there all along. So whereas Russia had an open Internet based society. Right. Like they, they were connected, connected to all the same things we are. And I ask people to imagine all that being taken away and not just again, your ability to kind of go to nytimes.com or something, your ability to order food online, your ability to do any e commerce, your ability to communicate like you said, I just have to wonder whether this kind of Putin paranoia and desire to kind of wall off Russia entirely and create a total police state there at some point there's a combination of that casualties, disabled people coming home. When does this start to tip against him? A lot is going in Putin's favor right now, including the war in Iran, including higher oil prices, including getting sanctions relief from the US So this is more a three year, five year question to me, but this has got to be pissing people off.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

Yeah, well, so I mean, I think that's a really interesting point, right, because at the moment people are still too scared for any kind of mass action. I mean there's been reporting that people have been trying to plan protests and rallies, but they're, unless they're sanctioned, like basically allowed and approved by the government, then people choose not to do it because then it gets a little too risky. But the Associated Press actually wrote about this and it's just so classically Russian in terms of the bureaucratic approach, always making no sense. So they talked about how in one Russian city officials blocked a rally due to a tree inspection. And others they blamed snow removal problems or still existing COVID 19 restrictions. And in one location administrators argued that the reason for the protest didn't exist.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah,

[Ilona Minkovsky]

and Then there was this incredible piece. You know, I didn't have the team cut a clip today because it's in Russian, but it was produced by Channel One, which is like a state run news channel there in Russia. And it was like man on the street interviews. And it's just talking about like the novel ways people are getting around the Internet not being available and Wi fi sucking. And it was like, you know, wave down a cab the old fashioned way. Like always carry cash on you. Download the maps in advance. Yeah. Or it's like, you know, go into a cafe and ask if you can use their Internet, you know, to like, call your mom. Oh, God, it's just, it's so pathetic. Well, it's just you have to wonder how long that can go on. But just to your point, right, so there were a couple. There was a recent poll by Levada, which is a polling organization there, and Nova Gaizeta newspaper. They found that three quarters of respondents said that tiredness of war described the mood in the country. And there was a survey that was done. This was like a government sanctioned survey, so it's interesting. But they said the Internet restrictions triggered anger in 46% of teenagers, crying in 15%, confusion or irritation in 14%. This is probably like bad translations, and I didn't read the Russian version, But so overall, 83% of respondents reacted negatively. And that's amongst, you know, teenagers. They didn't ask the adults, understandably, because I think it's easy to be like, oh, the teens can't live without their web. But, yeah, but you have to wonder, you know, if eventually this is the, like, one that could kind of backfire.

[Ben Rhodes]

I think what it reminds you of is like, you know, we talk a lot about, you know, the war in Ukraine's been trending well for Putin in a lot of ways. Right. Like, but that doesn't mean it's trending well for Russians, you know, and, and, and a common thread in all these autocratic societies is what may be good for the strongman or even for like, a cabal of people on top of the system is not benefiting anybody else. One thing we all share in common these days in most countries is that we're all getting screwed by a bunch of corrupt, strong men who, who are hijacked power. And so Putin's success is not the Russian people's success.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

Absolutely not.

[Ben Rhodes]

And you would hope that at a certain point that leads to some change there, but it's not gonna happen tomorrow.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

I was thinking about that a lot yesterday. No, I was Thinking about that a lot, too, because again, I was relating it back to Trump and just how still so many Trump supporters kind of just believe in everything he does, you know, and it becomes this kind of like cult celebrity worship around one figure. And Putin has that too, but. And Putin has that too. And so does, like, you know, so do so many of the autocratic leaders, but they don't have your best interest in mind. If these are people. If these are people who would stay in power forever if they could, you know, they don't have your best interest.

[Ben Rhodes]

Putin would live forever, which is what they're doing.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

Exactly. Like, if they're just focused on how to enrich themselves, you know, damn everyone else, they're not interested in what's best for you. And like, they're just. All the writing is on the wall, you know, like, if you're trying to pick a boyfriend, you're not gonna choose the guy that only wants to talk about himself and wants you to make all the compromises, you know, and so it's like the writing is on the wall, people.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, I hope so. You should talk to my daughters. They're too young for that.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

But later, later on, I'll give them some tips. Last story here. I want to just do a quick update and get your take on it. So, speaking of the Russian president, right. In a strange turn of events, President Trump broke the blockade over the weekend by letting a Russian oil tanker navigate into Cuba. That ship is called the Anatoly Kalotkin and it reached ports this morning. Now, we've continued to cover this, but the blockade that was imposed back in January, it's thrown the island into a full blown energy and economic crisis. I think crisis can seem like a bit of a vague term. So. Yes. And humanitarian crisis. Let me give some specific example of what's going on. Cubans are suffering from frequent and long blackouts. Power plants aren't operating. Hospitals have limited power capacity to treat patients. The water supply is disrupted. There's no heat or air conditioning. Students aren't able to attend classes because there is no fuel. There's no transportation. That means that, you know, like, garbage trucks aren't running. Trash is piled up all over the street. Anything that's arrived at the island is stuck at the ports, including humanitarian assistance. Distance. And, you know, the Washington Post reported that in extreme cases, people were using donkeys to move supplies from the ports. The list just goes on. And I've seen different estimates here on how impactful this single oil tanker would be. Like, some people would say that some people have said that it could meet the country's demand for only nine or 10 days. Other people have said like a month or two. Either way, it's not a very long time. But Trump did comment on this on Air Force One on Sunday. So let's take a listen.

[Donald Trump]

There's a report that the US Is going to let a Russian oil tanker go to Cuba. Is that, well, we have a tanker out there. We don't mind having somebody get a boatload because they need, they have to survive. It would. That report is true as far as, well, I would say I told them if a country wants to send some oil into Cuba right now, I have no problem with.

[Ben Rhodes]

Do you worry that whether it's, whether

[Donald Trump]

it's Russia or not, what do you

[Ilona Minkovsky]

rate them that helps Vladimir Putin, Listen, I'll be applied.

[Donald Trump]

If he loses one boatload of oil, that's all it is. If he wants to do that and if other countries want to do it, doesn't bother me much. It's not going to have an impact. Cuba is finished. They have a bad regime. They have very bad and corrupt leadership. And whether or not they get a vote of oil, it's not going to matter. I'd prefer letting it in whether it's Russia or anybody else, because the people need heat and cooling and all of the other things that you.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

I'm, I'm just so curious what you think is going on because, like, we created the humanitarian crisis that's going on there.

[Ben Rhodes]

Once again, there's incoherence here because we created this humanitarian crisis in Cuba right on top of the embargo that's in place on top of Trump's reversal of the Obama era opening that I negotiated, they put this blockade in place. And so the policy of the United States States under Trump was to do the opposite of what he just said. The policy of the United States has been to restrict any oil and fuel from getting to Cuba, which is leading people to die. I mean, when hospitals shut down, incubators, ventilators shut down, right? I mean, this is not without human consequence. And so now he's magnanimous because he's letting a single oil tanker through his own blockade. And what he's. And again, it's like Iran, the sense of, I don't know what we're trying to achieve in Cuba because the Cuban government, whatever you think of it, poses no threat to the United States. It's not even like Iran again, where there's a nuclear program. This is a poor country. It's a Poor island nation. And so what is he trying to achieve? And actually, there's increasing reports that they're trying to negotiate with the Castro family. Well, the Castro family. I negotiate with the Castro family. I negotiate with Alejandro Castle Castro, who was a good faith negotiator, by the way. I'd say it doesn't mean I agree with him about politics, but he always did what he said. It was the US that changed the terms of the deal when Trump came in. But what's the point of that? What are we trying to achieve here? He talks about regime change, but to what and to what end? We don't know why we're blockading this island and why we let Russian oil tankers through and not other oil tankers. And. And it's nonsensical. And by the way, it bears saying, Alyona, like, this is not what Americans elected Trump to do. They wanted lower prices here. They didn't want to change the Cuban, Venezuelan, Iranian governments. Why he's doing this flies in the face of anything that, with the exception of small pockets of diaspora populations, like hardline Cubans, Iranian monarchists, Venezuelan diaspora, like

[Ilona Minkovsky]

people who clearly have the ear.

[Ben Rhodes]

The US Military should not be a mercenary force for, like, a small number of people in diaspora populations.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

But meanwhile, don't forget that we cut all foreign aid. You know, that was helping people, aid or aids, tuberculosis, you know, like, you. You name it. Okay, well, we're not going to leave you on that depressing note. So I'm just going to. I'm going to finish the show here with a reading of a poem. And I'm actually gonna read the Michael, our amazing producer's exact language here. Cause he always writes such funny scripts. He says, ben, you're a man of letters, so I know that. I know you know that the French have had an outsized impact on literature, right? Michel de Montaigne invented the personal essay. The Marquis de Sade pioneered kinky prose. Yes, he did. And Marcel Proust pushed the very boundaries of what fiction could. But now we welcome a new member of the Pantheon, former President Nicholas Sarkozy, to that exclusive club. Okay, so Sarkozy published a memoir in December of last year. The book is called the Journal of a Prisoner. In it, Sarkozy writes about his long stretch behind bars from October 21st of 2025 to November 10th of 2025.

[Ben Rhodes]

Three weeks.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

Yeah. For the BBC. He was sentenced to five years for conspiring to fund his 2007 election campaign with money from the late Libyan D. Muammar Gaddafi. But he was released a few weeks into the sentence. While he awaits an appeal, and during his 20 days in the clink, he did a lot of reading, writing, Found God. Because why not? So, thanks to Harper's, we have a short excerpt from the memoir to share with listeners. It's translated from French by Laura Treisman, and it goes a little something like this. I don't know if I can read all of it with a straight face, but I'm gonna try. I'm not someone who likes to complain, who seeks pity or commiseration. I don't know how to sulk still less how to pout. Sitting down on the unmade bed on my first night in prison, I had a shock I had never felt, even during my military service. A harder mattress. Not a glass of water, not a coffee, not an ounce of humanity. Never before had I used a treadmill powered solely by my own stride. For someone used to running daily in the Bois de Bologna, the contrast was stark. Never had I encountered a more inconvenient shower setup. The meager steam shut off almost immediately, as if controlled by a timer. You constantly had to find the button and press it again. It produced none of the usual pleasure. From my window, I could no longer see the sky, a bird in flight, or a tree trembling in the wind. I was struck by the complete absence of cold color. And then there was the limp, damp baguette on each day at lunch.

[Ben Rhodes]

No, no. I felt myself becoming vulnerable.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

It was as if my heart had stopped beating. I felt on the edge of the abyss. I got the idea of rereading Sartre to see if I would find there the emotions I was living through. There was nothing to elevate the eye, the perspective, the setting. I am a lover of painting. I appreciate the beauty. Prison is not made for aesthetes.

[Ben Rhodes]

Aesthetics.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

How do I pronounce that word? Are we sure this wasn't, you know.

[Ben Rhodes]

So.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

A satire?

[Ben Rhodes]

No. So, Sarkozy. I had the occasion to be in rooms with him a lot. And my favorite thing about Sarkozy was he had this interpreter who was a younger and attractive woman, if I'm allowed to say that, you know, but it's kind of the point. Like, you know, I've got. I'm French, and I've got. But the. The funny thing about.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

I have a hot translator.

[Ben Rhodes]

But the funny thing about it is she would not just translate, she would mimic his gestures. And so Sarkozy would gesture a lot. So he'd puff out his chest, and she would, too. And he'd pound on the table and she would too.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

That's amazing.

[Ben Rhodes]

Sometimes he'd pull her his lapels and she would too. It was the most bizarre thing, but I love it was, made it entertaining. But he's an over the top kind of guy. Clearly his prison experience, I mean, what's amazing about that is all that he's describing is, yeah, that's why you're in prison. Like we don't know the crimes and are convicted of crimes. The baguettes are damp, the shower pressure's not that good. There's not a view of the Bois de Boulogne to run in. Right. Like, like what the fuck did he think was gonna happen in prison? Did he think he was going to like, you know, he thought he was

[Ilona Minkovsky]

gonna get like a cushy cell.

[Ben Rhodes]

Hotel in the south of France or something.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

The penthouse cell.

[Ben Rhodes]

And the fact that this is he's describing, I'd actually have some more sympathy for it if the guy did five years. I mean, I could do that for three weeks. I could do that for three weeks. Do some fucking push ups.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

It's like a silent retreat, you know, it's like people pay for stuff like that. Logged off from the world.

[Ben Rhodes]

I don't know. I mean, but it is enjoyable.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

Oh, God. Well, I, I didn't make it through all the way without literally like laughing tears, but I hope you all enjoyed my rendition. Next up, we're going to hear Ben's interview with Nika Kovac.

[Ben Rhodes]

All right, I'm very pleased to be joined by my friend Nika Kovach, who's been on the show before. She's an incredible activist. She's the leader of My Voice, My Choice, which successfully. Right. Nika got over a million signatures to force the issue of abortion rights onto the European agenda and successfully got the European Commission to commit additional funding for that effort. She's also the co founder of the 8th of March Institute, a human rights activist. Nika, thanks so much for joining us.

[Zainab Selby]

Hey, I'm so happy to be here.

[Ben Rhodes]

Okay, Nika, so I want to start with. You obviously are Slovenian. You've been involved in Slovenian politics, supporting progressive candidates and causes. There was recently a Slovenian election which we talked about in the last episode. But I want to begin with this crazy story of your role, in coordination with some other activists and journalists in the run up to the election, in uncovering the interference and involvement of Black Cube, which is a firm of former Mossad agents that I have history with. They once were spying on me. But you uncovered that Black Cube was interfering in the election. Can you just start by describing what you discovered essentially, and how that can about.

[Zainab Selby]

Yeah. So basically like we had elections in Slovenia, very intense campaign. The authoritarian candidate was so well organized, like they had influencers who are doing like the usual shit that they do by the playbook. And then suddenly, throughout the night, a web page popped up which was like revealing the corruption in Slovenia. And on that web page there were like videos of different people. They were called Apprentice 1, Apprentice 2, Apprentice 3, which were secretly recorded while speaking about corruption in Slovenia. It was not like a video of actual corruption, like people getting money, just descriptions of how the state function in Slovenia. And when this webpage popped up, for me, it was clear two things. Firstly, that it's not a whistleblower, that it's not someone who is just wanting to attack corruption. And secondly, that it is way too well done that it would be done by anyone in Slovenia. So I got this very suspicious feeling that it's a foreign intervention. And I knew that similar things were happening in 2018, 2022 in Hungary. And I got this very bad feeling that it is going for like Israelis work and that there are some firms with a lot of money attacking Slovenia. I started to talk with very good friends who are journalists, and they had a leak that Jansha met people.

[Ben Rhodes]

The far right populist candidate.

[Zainab Selby]

Yes, he's the authoritarian best friend of Viktor Orban. He's in politics for 33 years and he wanted to get the power back. He lost elections four years ago and he did everything to basically come to the power now. And we got a leak that basically a group of people speaking in not Slovenian language came to him and that they were from Israel and they had a meeting and journalists had this leak. And when I started to speak, hey, I think there is like a foreign interference. We started to connect the dots. We got information when this meeting happened, we bought an access to fly riders. So we got the information when the private jet from Tel Aviv landed in Slovenia. And then we got the names of the people who are there and we realized that it is Black Cube. And then things started to connect and it was this what the fuck is happening in Slovenia moment. In three days, we decided that we will tell the story and that we will go out with the story. I have friends in Israel who are investigating that kind of stuff for years. And they told me who Black Cube is. And then we made the decision that we will expose private Mossad in Slovenia. And in one weekend we prepared a report about this, about the other Cases about what Black Cube already done in other countries and also informations about about what they were doing in Slovenia. And what I think it was really important was that we decided that we do it in a very non traditional way. So it was not just journalists exposing them, not just activists, but it was me, one journalist and another colleague from civil society who had the press conference. And we told, hey, like this is happening, these guys are here and why they met Jansha, who is paying them and what the people that are paying them want from Slovenia. And this is how the whole journey of one week of craziness started. Jansha's first reaction was that he doesn't know who Black Cube is. Then his second reaction was that they need a monument because they're exposing corruption. The third reaction was that he will sue me because I'm saying that he's working with them. And after Slovenian national security forces said publicly that they did an investigation and that they were really at Jansha's party, he finally admitted he knows them. And this is when the story started to unfold. And it's the biggest scandal in Slovenian history. And it's like the biggest attempt to influence our elections, which is actually really dumb. You know, I think Cancer would win like so easily if he wouldn't do that kind of bad shit that he was doing. He would just need a positive agenda. People were quite disappointed with the government that we had and wanted to change. And I think what factor him up was that he's actually an evil guy who used even more evil guys to help him in Slovenia and he was not ready that a group of people will expose them.

[Ben Rhodes]

So yeah, I'm going to give a little bit of background for the listeners too, because of my own history. So for me, way back in 2018, the Guardian reported that Black Cube was digging up dirt on me and trying to spy on me. That was newspaper to me. But I subsequently learned all these things, like they'd contacted my wife, they had, you know, fake LinkedIn pages they had to file on me that had all kinds of stuff in it, but, you know, kind of stuff that was kind of more to intimidate, like pictures of, I don't know, my apartment or front door of my apartment or things like that. What was interesting is and relevant to Slovenia is I went to Hungary a year later when I was reporting my book and I met all these things, people that I didn't even know had been similarly spied on by Black Cube. But essentially what I learned is Block Cube had run a whole operation inside of Hungary to help Viktor Orban, where they recorded conversations with someone who was basically just saying, hey, I'd like the European Union to put more pressure on Viktor Orban. Which, by the way, any activist would say if they came on this podcast. Right. But because it was recorded secretly, it sounded like a secret place plan. And guess where the leak was, Nika? It was in the Jerusalem Post, so it wasn't even subtle. But then Orban took this leak and they called it Soros Leaks. And then Steve Bannon started to juice it on Breitbart, and Orban kind of closed his campaign with the idea that George Soros was trying to overthrow the Hungarian government. The point is that there's a history of Black Cube intervening to help right wing, far right wing, autocratic, democratic people in central and Eastern Europe. The question I want to ask you, because some people may not be familiar with the positions that the current prime minister of Slovenia has taken on Israel. Why do you think Black Cube and Israeli intelligence or former intelligence was so interested in helping Jansa, this far right guy, win in Slovenia? And is it tied to the desire to see far right politicians win in Europe, or is it tied to the positions that the Slovenian government's taken on Israel and give a little bit of background for people on what those positions are?

[Ilona Minkovsky]

Yeah.

[Zainab Selby]

So firstly, I think that it's really important that we say that the Black Cube has always a playbook. Like they always are having fake identities. They record people, they post this, and they even do not post real stuff. They do these mixtures from videos with a clear intention to basically fake the reality. What we need to know is that they're not activists. They are not people coming to the country and fight for, like, different political opinions. They are a firm which is making billions out of that kind of resources. They were also working with Weinstein, and the operation with Weinstein costed like 1.3 million euros. So firstly, someone needed to pay them that they came to Slovenia. But what is also important is that they were definitely close with Jana because the people who came to Slovenia were like the highest people in this organization. Why is this happening? Because, as you said, our prime minister had a really clear stand on Gaza. What he was saying is that this is a genocide. He was very clear about this. We were one of the first countries who basically made Netanyahu a Persona non grata in Slovenia. And it was very, very clear, like, where we are standing as a country. But on the other also hand, Jansha always is visiting, like Israel. He's always speaking nice about Netanyahu, and he's clearly connected with these people. I don't know if this was like an Israeli state operation like in Slovenia, and I also don't want to claim this, but what I know is that there was a clear interest to basically attack the current government and to basically mess with it. But we also need to know that, like, this costed like hundreds of thousands of euros, probably this whole operation was more expensive than all the Slovenian elections altogether. And my question is, like, who was paying for this? Is this the money which came from Hungary? Is this the money that came from some rich people in Soviet Slovenia and why people had such a big interest to do this here?

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, I think, and we've talked about this a lot in the podcast, but people just really need to understand that there is this network, this nexus that extends from Russia into Hungary. Right. Orban is tighter with Putin. He's not a supporter of Ukraine. But then Netanyahu has been very supportive of Orban, despite Orban having some pretty anti Semitic tendencies. But Orban always sides with Israel inside the European Union and against Palestine. And so there's this kind of weird convergence of the American far right and Trump and Putin and Orban and guys like Janza and Slovenia and Netanyahu, like, these guys all help each other out. And again, we're not saying it's an Israeli state operation, but we are saying that there were a group of former Mossad guys who were getting paid to help Jansa.

[Zainab Selby]

And also these people who were in Slovenia were one of the main people, people who were basically the propaganda machine for the genocide. They were the people where we can see public statements of them that like, the Gaza needs to be basically cut down from the humanitarian aid, that they need to be cut down from food, that they need to starve the whole population there. So I also, we need to know where they're standing ideologically and why they are such good friends with Jansha and why they were enslaved Slovenia with such a big passion and wish.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, yeah. And so there are a lot of questions that need to be answered. I do want to ask you about the Slovenian election results. So part of what happened here is it it seemed like Janza was going to cruise to victory, like you said, in part because there was a vigorous campaign, in part because of this. In the final week, it turned out that the progressive incumbent won a plurality. He won more votes. And yeah, Yanza, however, you know, Everybody was under 30% because there are a lot of parties. How do you feel about the election result? And What I know now it's a coalition formation question, like, do we have any sense of who's going to be the next prime minister of Slovenia?

[Zainab Selby]

So a couple of things. Like, the first thing was that, like, people were disappointed by the government, they were disappointed by the cost of living, by the housing situation, by healthcare. And also, like, what current governments did wrongly is that they had like Biden's model of campaigning as the role model of campaigning. So the campaign was not hot at all, you know, and it was very hard to make people excited for the elections. Why I think that revealing this story was so important was because it was a reminder what Jansha is. And it was also showing, like, what kind of Sikh methods he's using to go to the victory. What will happen and what happened on the elections in is that Golob won for like 7,000 votes. It was very intense.

[Ben Rhodes]

Golob is the incumbent, the progressive incumbent. Yes.

[Zainab Selby]

And also right now we don't know who will be the next prime minister of Slovenia. We know that Jana lost in his big mission. His big mission was to get a constitutional majority. And I think this could happen without all the stuff that happened in the last week. But I think that in Slovenia right now, what would need to happen is that all the parties would need to save. We are not going with Yan. So he betrayed the country. He brought like Israeli, private Mossad in the game. And this is the limit. Like, if we are democrats in a sense of like, believing in democracy, we cannot collaborate with that kind of person. But they are not saying this like, the process for forming the government will last at least a month more. And I wish that the current prime minister will stay the prime minister, but I cannot say this with certainty. And also another option is that they will not be able to form a government for a couple of rounds and that we will have another elections, which is something that no one is very excited about.

[Ben Rhodes]

Makes you exhausted thinking about it. Well, we'll follow it. Two more questions that kind of widen this lens a little bit. One is, you're obviously involved in Slovenian politics, but you're also involved in anti authoritarian politics across Europe and frankly around the world. The kind of next big election that everybody's going to be watching is hungry. You've taught already. Slovenia is often seen as a bellwether too. It's a small country, but it's kind of often been seen as an indicator of where things are going, at least in that part of Europe. It seems like Peter Magyar, the opposition candidate in Hungary, has the best chance to beat Viktor Orban of anybody since 2010, when Orban came back to power. I know you have a lot of Hungarian friends. What is your assessment of the Hungarian election? But also, does the Slovenian election have any relevance to Hungary in the sense of Janssen Orban are buddies and Jansa just underperformed? I mean, how are you feeling about the Hungarian election?

[Zainab Selby]

I mean, I'm watching videos from Hungary all the time and it's giving me so much hope because I see people standing up and resisting. And also Orban is doing a lot of mistakes. They also have spice candles. They have different things which are popping up in Hungary. And my feeling is that he will end on his own, his own regime. And I hope this will happen. Another question which we always have in that kind of countries is will elections be fair and will actually not be stolen? For Slovenia particularly, losing Orban in Hungary means that Jansha will lose a lot of money and a lot of funding for the system around him. A lot of media have been bought with Hungarian money. In Slovenia it was always like very connected regime. So we are watching this with a lot of excitement. And I also think that imagine the whole picture of Europe in three weeks. If we have centuries government in Slovenia and the centrist government in Hungary, it would mean a huge change for Europe and also for the vibe of the whole continent. I don't know what will happen as a. As I said, but it's the biggest amount of hope so far and I always hold on to the hope in that kind of situations.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, we need to hold on to hope right now. The last question I want to ask you is we've talked a lot on this podcast and you and I have talked a lot about how network the far right is, how much they learn from each other, how they help each other. You've already talked about the fact that there's Hungarian money buying up media in Slovenia. There's Israeli ex Mossad helping. You know, both Orban and John said, like there's this, you know, you had Marco Rubio fly to Hungary to endorse Viktor Orban. Like there's all this synergies on the right. What we need to do more on the progressive side is similarly network and learn from each other. And so, and frankly, I think a lot of those types of people listen to this podcast. When you look back on the Slovenian election that just took place, what lessons would you you identify that might be relevant to progressives who are mounting campaigns either in politics or civil society in other countries? And if I may ask, kind Of a leading question. It seems like being aggressive in exposing and revealing that foreign interference is probably one lesson. Like don't just wait for the newspaper to print it. People had to go out and do it themselves.

[Zainab Selby]

Yeah, a couple of things. So this is my second get out and vote campaign and the second campaign where we managed to defeat Jansha at least by the amount of votes. And in both campaigns it was super important that I was spending time with people from other countries, that I understood what happened in India, that I understood what happened in Russia, in Belarus, in other places. In on the first campaign it was important because I needed to understand that authoritarians have a playbook and that they always play by the same rules, that they attack the media, that they help other friends, that they attack in of independent institution, that they threaten you in these elections. Why it was important that I have all of you in my life is because I could recognize the pattern and I could understand that what is happening. It's not a whistleblowing campaign, it's not a referendum about corruption, but it is like fucking foreign interference in elections which happened in other places. And it also happened to my friends. The second thing which I always learn is that we should not be afraid of them. We always think that they are so powerful and so strong, but actually these dudes just play by the same, like rules. And when you become loud and when you become not afraid and when you start to exposing them, like they get so lost because they don't know what to do, because they count on you being afraid. The third thing is that the secret is in big coalitions and that usually in. On our side, like politicians are not sexy and hot. Like, it's very rare that you have a candidate.

[Ben Rhodes]

Pedro Sanchez, you know? Yeah.

[Zainab Selby]

Or like, you know, Mamdani and stuff like. But like, in general, you're very lucky if you have a candidate for who you would like, go on the street and die for. So we need to create this aura of making elections fun and important and joyful on our own. And this is why I really believe that we need to form big coalitions, not just with civil society, but also with influencers, with people who are doing different stuff, like with coffee shops, with bars, who have the posters, with people on the ground. And also one of the things is that we need to demand from politics, politicians like that when we go to the elections and when we vote, people need to have a feeling that there will be a difference and that they are voting for something. And if we don't have this something extra, what I think happened in US and also in Slovenia. To certain extent, like, it's very hard to do a campaign because people deserve more and politicians need to promise more. And the fifth thing is that expose them and talk about their tactics and their strategies because it's important that people understand. And in our case, what was also important, that, like, we were a group of friends, like, if I wouldn't have such a close relationship with journalists who were exposing this and with part of civil society who was with us, like, we would never do this crazy and dangerous thing. But we did it because we trusted each other and we did it to protect the country. And also the last thing is that you need to love your country. You know, like, I love Slovenia so much and like, I would do everything for it. And I think that when you love it and when you show the people that, like, there is something we need to protect and care for, they will join you. So at the end, usually things come together. I don't know if it will be the case right now informing the government, but at least we didn't allow Black Cube to fuck around unnoticed.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, look, that's one of the best summaries of the counter authoritarian playbook I've heard. I hope everybody pays careful attention to that. I also just want to say, Nika, I know you've been working like crazy for a long time because you, you protected and extended abortion rights in Europe through my voice, my choice. You exposed this Black Cube operation. You helped defeat Jansa, at least in the vote count for the second consecutive time. So we're very proud of what you're doing and also hope you get some rest. Time for self care. Let's add that to the list of things. Yeah.

[Zainab Selby]

Or did we stop with everything and open a bookstore?

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, you know, as you know, that's the plan. I may need an independent book bookstore and maybe we can have one in Slovenia and one, you know, in New York or something. I don't know.

[Zainab Selby]

Yeah, that's good.

[Ben Rhodes]

All right. Well, it's so good to see you. Thanks for joining.

[Zainab Selby]

Thank you. Bye. Bye.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

All right. Thanks to na. Thanks to Nicholas Sarkozy for giving us the visual of a damp, sad baguette.

[Ben Rhodes]

Thank you, Alona, for stepping in.

[Ilona Minkovsky]

So thanks for hosting the show with me. Ben and Tommy will be back next week, everyone.

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Pod Save the World is a crooked media production. Our senior producer is Alona Minkowski. Our producer is Michael Goldsmith. Our associate producer is Anisha Banerjee. We get production support from Saul Rubin. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor. And Ben Rhodes. The show is engineered, mixed and edited by Jordan Cantor Audio support by Charlotte Landis thank you to our digital team Team Ben Hethcote, Mia Kelman, William Jones, David Tolles and Ryan Young. Matt de Groat is our Head of Production. Adrian Hill is our Senior Vice President of News and Politics. If you want to listen to Pod Save the World ad free and get access to exclusive podcasts, go to crooked.com friends to subscribe on Supercast, Substack, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts. Don't forget to follow us at Crooked Media on Instagram, Tick Tock and Twitter for more original content, post takeovers and other community events. Please subscribe to Pod Save the world on YouTube for access to full episodes, bonus content, and much more. And if you're opinionated like us, leave a review. Our production staff is proudly unionized by the Writers Guild of America East.