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- [00:01]
Tim Miller
This week on a special episode of WebMD's Health Discovered podcast, we're taking a closer look at a common form of lung cancer that accounts for 85% of all cases.
- [00:12]
Podcast Advertiser
When I first heard the words you
- [00:14]
Tim Miller
have lung cancer, I was in shock. It's a diagnosis that changes everything. So what does it really mean to advocate for yourself when you're living with non small cell lung cancer? Listen to Health discovered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, everybody, tickets are on sale now for everybody for our live shows in downtown San Diego and downtown Los Angeles. You can go to the Bulwark.com events to get your tickets. Now I'm looking at my flights. I'm excited to be back in California. Sam Stein's gonna be there. Sarah Longwell, I think Woke Bill Crystal is going to be there. We're working on some others. We're going to have fun. It's going to be fun. Who knows, it's California. Maybe I'll have a gummy.
- [01:05]
Podcast Advertiser
I don't know.
- [01:05]
Tim Miller
Sarah might have a gummy. Who knows? We're going to have a great time. Come hang with us. Come hang with your fellow Bulwarkians as our next guest called us. And we'll see you all there. If you're looking for an excuse to have a vacation, find la. Come see the show on Thursday. Spend a weekend, go to Venice. It'll be awesome. TheBull.com events May 20 in Downtown San Diego. May 21 Downtown LA. Hope to see you all there. Up next, Ben Rhodes. Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back to the show the former deputy national Security advisor for Barack Obama, co host of a show called Pod Save the World and author of a forthcoming book all we the Battle for American Identity, released in May. Pre order it now, it's Benjamin Rhodes. What's up, Ben?
- [02:09]
Ben Rhodes
Tim, awesome to be here as always.
- [02:11]
Tim Miller
Thank you so much for doing this. Obviously the news this morning with the art of the deal from our president in Iran brings us to an area of expertise and experience for you. So I'm grateful for your presence. I just want to lay for folks, lay out for folks what we know at the time of the taping here. It's about 11 in the east. Israel and Lebanon had a 10 day ceasefire that went into effect overnight that led Iran to say that they would open the strait. Trump said that's good but was still keeping the blockade until we had a final deal. We now have a proposed deal that's not finalized. U.S. and Iranian negotiators are likely to meet Sunday in Islamabad, but Trump is already doing victory laps about it. Axios reports the outlines unfreezing $20 billion of Iran assets. And the U.S. in the last round of talks, was demanding a 20 year moratorium on uranium enrichment. Iran countered with five years. Now they're claiming that in exchange for the 20 million, we would actually get the uranium. So we'll see if that's how that shakes out. That said, there's a second US Official talking to Axios. I wonder who that is. A second US Official feels kind of like Jared Kushner to me, because it's not an administration official, it's a US Official.
- [03:29]
Ben Rhodes
Anyway, if it's Barack Ravid, it's Jared Kushner.
- [03:32]
Tim Miller
Yeah, it seems like it's Jared Kushner. A little less bullish than, let's just say, potentially their father in law. They're saying that Iran wants a 20 billion and a lot more. They want to sell oil at free market rates without sanctions. They want to participate in the global financial system. They also want to still have their nuclear program. They want to fund terrorists, and they don't want to give that up enough to get the things we're offering, so. So maybe the victory lapse a little early for Trump. Tbd. We'll see. But that's kind of the outlines of the deal. He's tweeting this morning, many thanks to Pakistan, all the Arab states, and he's dunking on NATO for not helping us. So what are your reactions to the current state of play?
- [04:07]
Ben Rhodes
I mean, Tim, we are in the most absurd timeline here because essentially, we have to just live with the truth, right? Not the truth, social post, but the actual truth, which is that Donald Trump launched a war thinking that there would be quick and easy regime change. None of that happened. He killed thousands of people with this war. He spent hundreds of billions of dollars. He probably wiped out, you know, trillions of dollars in price increases. You know, you've got countries where people can't even access fuel. He decimated what was left of our international relationship. The rest of the world kind of looks at us warily, like a rogue state that could knock anything over at any time. And now he's trumpeting the fact that he has reopened the very strait that was open before he launched the war. And perhaps he will get Iran to ship out its highly enriched uranium stockpile. And we can talk more about how that's not necessarily at all getting rid of their nuclear program, and yet the regime is in place. They have demonstrated their capacity to close the Strait of Hormuz, which gives them extraordinary deterrence and leverage going forward over the global economy. And no suggestion that they're going to change their approach to supporting proxy groups across the region. No indication that they're going to abandon a ballistic missile program. I guess we sunk a bunch of Iranian ships and destroyed a bunch of ballistic missiles, but they can manufacture those. So on the scale of what we accomplished versus the destruction we wrought, I'm glad this is happening. It's better than destroying a civilization and, you know, perpetuating the war. But we must keep the perspective here, because there's going to be a tremendous amount of propaganda that suggests that somehow this was a great deal, when in fact, this was a deal you could have had easily without fighting the war.
- [05:58]
Tim Miller
But other than that, pretty good.
- [06:00]
Ben Rhodes
So, I mean, I'm just, you know, like, I'm, I'm glad it's happening. I mean, like. But I can feel what's coming from Trump in his, you know, echo chamber, to use a phrase. And then I think we just have to look at reality.
- [06:11]
Tim Miller
So I want to break this down a little bit more detail, but I thought it would be useful, given that you're the guest on the podcast that you were there for the JCPOA, for people who either tuned into politics in 2015 because of Trump, who are listening to this and weren't really around for that, or, you know, for those of us who've had a lot of drinks since the jcpoa. And so our memories are a little bit fuzzy. Just for a basis of comparison, if you could do just a little bit of a 101, like, what was the deal between, when. When you guys were in charge between Obama and Iran, and then how does that compare to kind of what they're talking about now?
- [06:51]
Ben Rhodes
So in terms of what the deal was, in terms of what the US Got out of the deal, Iran agreed to strict limitations on the nuclear program. So just to go through a few of them, they shipped their stockpile of enriched uranium out of the country. So, so this thing that, you know, Trump is going to be touting was routine under the jcpoa, like, whatever stockpile they accumulated, they had to ship out 98% of their enriched uranium at any given time. And then they submit, would it go. It would go to Russia and kind of, it would be blended down and it would go to Russia, and essentially they would make. They would get end use of, like, things like Medical isotopes, but they couldn't accumulate the stockpile in their country. They destroyed the core of their plutonium reactor. So they kind of wiped out their capacity to pursue a nuclear weapon with plutonium. They accepted limitations on the number of centrifuges that they could be operating. All of their facilities were under strict monitoring from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the iaea. Not only were there kind of centrifuge facilities at Natanz and Fordo, these, the two facilities where they operated centrifuges, not only did they have those limitations and have IEA presence there, including, like cameras. And, you know, it wasn't just like people showing up every few weeks. It was kind of constant monitoring, but there was also monitoring. And this is important because Count me is skeptical that this is going to be part of anything Trump negotiates. There was monitoring of uranium mines. Where do they mine the uranium? There was monitoring of uranium mills. So how do they convert it into something that can be put in a centrifuge? So essentially, the entire supply chain of the Iranian nuclear program, from when you take, you know, uranium out of the ground, you to when you ship that stockpile out of the country, was under monitoring and verification. And this is what's really important, is that, you know, having people on the ground, having cameras, having, you know, the centrifuges that they put in storage were under lock and seal. So if they opened the crate, you know, people could see that. So it was, it was an effort to essentially put a blanket over the nuclear program limitations on it. In response, they got sanctions relief. They got basically their assets unfrozen. So the oil that they were selling in the national market, they couldn't access the resources they were getting for that. So people were buying oil. But then it was getting tied up in US Sanctions that got unfrozen. Now, the criticisms, I want to be fair to the criticisms of the deal. It did not deal with the ballistic missile program, did not deal with support for proxies. The Iranians were not negotiating that with us. We were negotiating on the nuclear program. And then there were these kind of different durations for aspects of the deal. Some of the more strict limitations of the deal lasted 10 years. Some of them lasted 15 years. People freaked out about this. But, Tim, like, to me, that always was the most, I don't know, absurd critique in some ways, because that's how most nuclear arms treaties are. Right? The US Russia New Start treaty that we negotiated with the Russians during the Obama years had a 10 year duration and nobody freaked out about that. Because that you renegotiate after 10 years. Right. You see how things are there. And I should say that the sanctions on Iran, this is important, remained in place. The United States did not lift sanctions on Iran. They got sanctions relief. They didn't get sanctions removed under the deal. So, again, there's so many more dimensions to this argument.
- [10:04]
Tim Miller
Just a couple follow ups. So, like, the relief was to the tune of about a half a billion, is that right? Like 4 or 500 million?
- [10:10]
Ben Rhodes
No, this is a different piece of the deal. But essentially, when we tallied up how much we thought Iran was getting from the deal, it went up to about 50 billion. They had something like $150 billion. And again, I'm. I'm literally going off of my memory from 10 years ago.
- [10:26]
Tim Miller
Yeah, sure.
- [10:26]
Ben Rhodes
But somewhere in the neighborhood, $150 billion in frozen revenues. Right. So they've been shipping oil out to places like China and India and just not able to access their own money. Right. So it was cast as, like, payments from us, but in fact, their capacity to access revenue for stuff they've already sold, in a way. Now, very Importantly, the famous $450 million pallets of cash was a separate part of the implementation of the deal where Iran released a number of Americans who were detained in Iran, including Jason Rezaian, we both know, the Washington Post journalist, in response to that. Iran had purchased some weapons from the United States before the Shah was ousted. And we never delivered those weapons, unsurprisingly. And various international courts had found that the United States owed Iran this amount of money.
- [11:21]
Tim Miller
Right.
- [11:22]
Ben Rhodes
And so essentially we were closing different accounts with Iran. And so Iran was paid for the weapons that they never received. And this became like, you know, one of the most insane freakouts from the Republican Party and the FDD verse to those who are nerds, when in fact it's a drop in the bucket compared to what Trump has already unfrozen in this war to sweeten the pod for the ratings.
- [11:46]
Tim Miller
I want to get back to the freak out from the FDD crowd in a second, but just a few, just on the fact. So it was set to expire. Like, when would that deal, the jcpoa, have completely expired? Like, when would they have been allowed to. To start to advance the nuclear program again?
- [12:01]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, so. So first of all, Iran also said, because Trump always makes this comment, that, you know, they've never said they won't develop a nuclear weapon. Like, the preamble to the JCPOA was a permanent promise, a pledge, a commitment from the Iranians to never develop a nuclear weapon. So. So there was a permanent prohibition on Iran ever developing a nuclear weapon or weaponizing their nuclear program. And people think about this as if they get enough fuel and suddenly they magically have a nuclear weapon. Now they have to figure out how to put that on a warhead, right? They have to weaponize their nuclear program. That was permanent. And there were a number of things in the deal that were permanent, including like, you know, having to submit to IAEA inspections. You know, after about 10 years, you know, the. There were certain. Some of the restrictions on the numbers of centrifuges that Iran could operate, that, that ceiling started to go up, right? And the. The kinds of research and development that they could do on more advanced centrifuges so that they could enrich uranium quicker, those started to lift. And now this became another source of general freak out to the FTD crowd. I do have to say, Tim here, because Donald Trump pulled out of this deal in 2018, long before this was my next question. What happened? Sunset periods. So pulling out of the deal, they put the centrifuges back in. They started using the advanced centrifuges, they started to acquire a stockpile of enriched uranium. So the geniuses in, not just the Trump administration, but at the FDD and these other hawkish places got what they wanted, which is a much faster acceleration of the Iran nuclear program than would have been the case under the jcpoa. And this is one of the reasons why I try not to think about it too much.
- [13:42]
Tim Miller
And this is important context, because in a lot of ways, Trump 2 is negotiating against Trump 1 as we come to this deal, right? Because not everything about the Iranian nuclear program or everything about the ballistic missiles or the other stuff they've been trying to get out of this war changed when they got on the deal, but Iran advanced the program that we are now negotiating again to get them to stop. If you can think of the deal as like, we're American, so it's like the football field. Like, they were able to move the ball further down than it would have been like had it been status quo.
- [14:16]
Ben Rhodes
The point is that before this war, because Donald Trump pulled out of the jcpoa, Iran's nuclear program was more advanced than it was before the jcpoa. Never mind with the JCPOA restrictions, they had more of a stockpile of highly enriched uranium. You know, we're using more advanced centrifuges. All the things that the critics of the JCPOA warned about, they were doing because Donald Trump pulled out of the JCPOA in 2018. So we ostensibly went to war against Donald Trump's own policy of pulling out of the jcpoa, which is something that these people will never acknowledge for the rest of my lifetime. But it is the truth.
- [14:53]
Tim Miller
I can feel your anger building. I want to keep it building a little bit more before we start talking about how the right wing hawks are going to react to this. Just kind of to put a button on it then. Based on the contours what we're seeing now, we don't know exactly what will come out of Islamabad. Give us a little compare and contrast with where we will end up versus where we were at the end of when they pulled out of the jcpoa.
- [15:13]
Ben Rhodes
I assume that if in the good scenario, in the best case scenario, in which Iran makes a deal and this war ends comprehensively, they'll ship that stockpile out. Think of it this way. Iran is more than willing to concede things that they can re accumulate, right? And this is something that, you know, we went through in negotiations with them. So if they ship the stockpile out, they can, you know, at some point reaccumulate a stockpile. Obviously, I assume that what you'll get is they'll ship that stockpile out. They'll commit to not enrich uranium or to a very limited amount of enrichment for some duration of time. I think that the Iranians, by the way, think that these years are totally fungible because they've seen that the United States doesn't keep deals. So fine, they can promise 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years. They know that these timelines are fairly artificial. And so I think they'll commit to some limited enrichment, limitations on enrichment and shipping the stockpile out and having the straight of Hormuz open. And what they will want in return is as much money as they can get from unfrozen assets. And ideally what they'd want is sanctions relief, like the ability to actually normalize our economy, sell oil on the open market, or to tax the Strait of Hormuz and get a fee from those shipping. They want revenue, essentially, so they'll want revenue exchange for limitation. The other thing I'd say is that the JCPOA had the permanent five members of the United Nations Security Council, right? So the United States, Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom and Germany and the EU were all part of the deal with Iran, with the iea. So you had this kind of international legitimacy around the deal. You had the inspections mechanism, you had the people that were serving as essentially guarantors you had UN Security Council resolutions. This is like a handshake agreement in Pakistan. Right. And so it just doesn't have the same, like, legitimacy, legal basis. Someone could walk away from this in six months or a year without the kind of same drama and consequence of walking away from the jcpoa.
- [17:22]
Tim Miller
And since the regime is still in place, if Iran gets this degree of sanctions relief and has a huge influx of cash from their oil sales, do we expect they're going to be spending that money on health care for their people, or do we think that they're just going to be able to rebuild the ballistic missiles that they had lost during the war?
- [17:42]
Ben Rhodes
So they will rebuild their ballistic missile capability, the nuclear program, by the way, they may very well say we're not going to enrich uranium for a period of time. Because part of what they've learned, Tim, is that as long as they have a nuclear program, right, that's an option available to them. And by the way, we don't know what they might try to do covertly. Right. Because if at the inspections regime, you're counting on intelligence, and clearly the US And Israel have pretty good intelligence, but they could just take that nuclear program underground, but they'll restart their ballistic missile program. What they've also learned, though, what this war has demonstrated is that a bunch of drones that they can build in the garage were actually in some ways more damaging than even their ballistic missiles. Because they were able to shut down the Gulf, they were able to disrupt the entire global economy by hitting the largest natural gas field in the world in Qatar. Right. They were able to end the Dubai model. We'll see how long it takes for tourism to crank back up there. Right. So just with drones in some ballistic missiles, they've demonstrated a deterrent capability and ability to shut down the strait. And so the regime will take that revenue and they will reinvest in all those different military capabilities. Yes, I think they will also rebuild
- [18:49]
Tim Miller
and be stronger, probably. One of the original reasons I think this keeps getting lost. And so I like to restate it. One of the actual reasons that we did what we did was because Iran seemed so weak. And Bibi convinced Trump that we could be able to go in with the help of MBS and his business partners in the Arab states, they convinced him that he can go in because Iran's regime was so weak in that moment. They'd been weakened economically, they'd been weakened by the attacks. A year ago, The Ayatollah was 86. There were protesters in the streets and so now you come out of this on the other side with same regime, essentially, and an influx of cash and an awareness of their power of controlling the Strait and who knows, potentially being able to invest in more modern drones and other weapon systems. If you don't like the mullahs, we've strengthened them throughout this process.
- [19:43]
Ben Rhodes
I think that's exactly right. And look, they could use that money to buy more effective missiles from China. Right? Which they begun to do. The Chinese and Russians saw that. Wow, look, the Iranians can really bloody the Americans nose, not by like directly hitting the United States, but just by kind of humiliating the United States, by shutting down this whole Gulf infrastructure that the US Depends upon for the supply of the global energy markets. And by the way, we don't even know the damage assessments to our bases and facilities across the region. The Pentagon has not been at all transparent about that. So you're right. They're strengthened in the sense that they've demonstrated that the Strait of Hormuz is like a nuclear weapon in some ways. Right. It's not as obviously devastating, but it is a deterrence capability. Look, the weakness of the regime to me is it's this odious regime hated by most of its people. And what needs to change regime is the Iranian people. And I actually think that this war made that less likely. What it also did is it made the military option look less scary as it was before, in the sense that the United States and Israel have demonstrated they cannot change the regime from the air. Right. And so now everybody knows that it would take a ground invasion to get these guys out, or it would take the Iranian people just doing it themselves. But it's hard for them to do it, Tim, when their country is being bombed. So I think it does change the dynamic in the favor of the Iranians vis a vis where things were before the war.
- [21:11]
Tim Miller
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- [23:05]
Ben Rhodes
Based on the.
- [23:06]
Tim Miller
Yes. That you brought them. You were docked. You were called a trader, a terrorist. I was scrolling through some of the old tweets that John Potteritz has sent about you. Kadamite. I mean, the types of language, capo. Yeah, all of it. Hamas. And now fast forward to Trump doing something in the ballpark of essentially the same deal, likely in Islamabad. What do you think? Do you think that we're going to hear the same type of rhetoric from that crowd? What are you expecting? Are you thinking about calling some of your right wing hawk buddies to see if they have any thoughts about Steve Wyckoff or Jared Kushner?
- [23:46]
Ben Rhodes
This whole thing is. It's a pretty extraordinary life experience, Tim. Setting aside, by the way, that the next target is Cuba, who I also negotiated normalization deal with.
- [23:55]
Tim Miller
Oh yeah, we're coming to that.
- [23:56]
Ben Rhodes
There was something at the time that I found genuinely kind of insane and irrational. Right. You know, for a while you assume that maybe these people have a sincere good faith disagreement about how to reach like a nuclear agreement. But I think part of what happened is there was such a mania about the fact that Obama did this deal and it went through Congress and it was kind of the first chink in, I'm going to be just be blunt, the kind of sense that AIPAC had to sign off on things that went through Congress. So we had this whole fight and I think they were genuinely surprised that like most Democrats, you know, over 40 Democrats in the Senate, which was enough to have the deal survive, supported the deal. It went through. Public opinion, was kind of supportive of it, and they needed to delegitimize not just the deal. They needed to delegitimize the people who'd been the face of the deal. And so it wasn't enough to say that, hey, we don't like this deal because the sunset provisions aren't long enough, or what have you. It said I have to become evil and Hamas and a liar and a horrible human being. And obviously, Barack Obama is part of the shady, you know, brown people that are, you know, hate America and love the ayatollahs. And. And it was like a nasty.
- [25:17]
Tim Miller
Valerie has dual loyalty.
- [25:18]
Ben Rhodes
Valerie, Jared, Valerie, Jarrett, Tim, if you want to go back. This got so insane that they had a congressional hearing where I was supposed to be a witness, but they didn't actually try to get me to come. They had an empty chair. And I think Trey Gowdy and Tom Cotton took turns, like, yelling at the empty chair where I was supposed to be sitting. I mean, this is how weird things got in 2015.
- [25:39]
Tim Miller
Little Clint Eastwood moment. Yeah.
- [25:41]
Ben Rhodes
Kash Patel, when I had to testify in front of the House Intelligence Committee during the Russia investigation, confronted me about some conspiracy theory that I had been denied a security clearance before the Obama administration because I was an Iranian asset, when, in fact, I had been temporarily denied a security clearance because I had been honest about my drug use. But anyway.
- [26:01]
Tim Miller
But point is, talking about that, was it MDMA or.
- [26:04]
Ben Rhodes
No, no, it's just, you know, it's all in the SF86.
- [26:08]
Tim Miller
Okay.
- [26:09]
Ben Rhodes
Some of it took place in New Orleans, but. All right, I'll just say that today it'll be an interesting test of who actually cares about this ideology of ending the Iranian nuclear program versus who just sold their soul to Donald Trump and the Republican Party of maga. And I'm not holding my breath. Most of these people that gave us no fucking room for error are going to give Donald Trump a ocean's worth of room for error. Suddenly, they'll be defending unfreezing assets for the Iranians, giving the Iranians tens of billions of dollars, right? Suddenly they'll be saying, oh, he destroyed some of the Iranian navy, and so this whole war was worth it. Never mind that they didn't need a navy to shut down the street of Hormuz, so what's the point of destroying the Iranian navy, right? They will rationalize this. I don't know who they're talking to. Anymore, except each other. And a very small, like, Lindsey Graham types on the Hill. Like it's, it's a. They're on a shrinking island.
- [27:02]
Tim Miller
You know, the weekly Life, Liberty and Levin watchers. I think that that is right about the domestic hawks or critics of you who are happy with what Trump has been doing. I think that they'll, they'll rationalize that. I'm not sure if that's going to be true in Israel, though, because something I continue to say, like, I'm flabbergasted and just outraged that that Bibi was in our Situation Room convincing us to get into this war. That was not an acute interest for us at all. It's insane. It's not irrational, though, from the Israel perspective to believe that this is a real security interest for you, given the way that Iran has funded proxies. And I think that in Israel, there was a view that with Trump, this is the moment, maybe the last moment, that they'd have an American ally that they could use to eviscerate all of their opponents in the region.
- [27:52]
Ben Rhodes
That's right.
- [27:53]
Tim Miller
And so my guess is that Israel is going to be unhappy about this. And, you know, maybe not in the very short term, but I think that that is another element of the instability of this deal. In addition to what you were talking about, about how China and Russia and the, you know, international community isn't involved. Like, Israel is involved, but, like, I don't know, we saw a number of ceasefires in Gaza, and I think that Israel's interests from the start were misaligned from ours. And so we'll see how that reflects in their actions. I'm just kind of wondering what you think about the Israel interplay of this.
- [28:27]
Ben Rhodes
No, I think that's right. Look, the presentation in this situation, which is completely absurd and dangerous for Israel's own interest, it's not a good look. If part of what you're fighting against is a perception on the left and the right that you have too much influence over American foreign policy. The details leaked out. And the thing that I always thought was absurd is that, that the Israelis were suggesting that, you know, Reza Pahlavi, the son of the Shah, could move in. And I do think that the Israelis believe that they could collapse the regime, you know, and that, by the way, there might be violent chaos, there might be civil conflict in Iran, but that, that's better than having this regime in place. And that means that they're not going to be able to do things like develop a nuclear weapon and have, like, a effective ballistic missile program. And that objective has not been achieved. So they have like weakened Iran's certain capabilities. But like, for all the reasons we talked about, they've not achieved their military objectives vis Iran. And so that's going to be a source of, I think, discomfort. They'll spin it, they'll do the Pete Hegseth Vietnam body count thing, except it's about, you know, the number of missiles that, you know, we destroyed and the number of ships we destroyed. But at core their interest is not dealt with. That regime is still in place. And in some ways it's more dangerous. I think in Lebanon, you know, they have, I think, come closer to accomplishing what they want. They say they want to destroy Hezbollah. That's, that's about as likely as the objective of destroying Hamas and Gaza was. What they have done is they've occupied southern Lebanon. And I don't think they're going to leave anytime soon. And so I think what you have is like a very tenuous cold peace if this actually becomes a lasting ceasefire where Israel is probably going to violate the terms in Lebanon periodically if they feel like they need to take a shot. And then the big question is will they show restraint or will they occasionally take shots that are on. Let's take a full step back here post October 7th, Tim. And it's like, was this worth it? You know, they have decimated a lot of Hamas, but Hamas is still there. Hamas still has a tunnel network. They have decimated a lot of Hezbollah, but Hezbollah is still there. And they have, you know, set back Iranian capabilities, but the regime is still there. That proxy network, that axis of resistance is weaker significantly. So. But was it worth what has been done to Israel's position in this country and around the world? Was it worth the blowback? Because I can guess that people in Gaza and Lebanon and Iran are not going to forget what happened and are going to be seeking revenge for a very long time. Was this all worth it? I would argue it wasn't.
- [30:56]
Tim Miller
And alienating. I mean, obviously speaking about this in kind of blunt geopolitical terms, obviously there's the human face of this and the cost and the loss of life and all the tragedy. But just as a blunt geopolitical, strategic matter probably alienated both American parties kind of decided to go in with one and make a bet on Trump. And I think more likely than not, not guaranteed you to end up in 2028 with both parties having a candidate that wants to, in some fashion reimagine our relationship with Israel and make it less tight than it has been and potentially having both party nominees wanting to decouple altogether.
- [31:39]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. I mean, you have 40 Democratic senators voting to cut off all arms sales to Israel the other day. Sales, not just assistance, not just financing.
- [31:47]
J.D. Vance
Yeah.
- [31:47]
Ben Rhodes
And that includes importantly every single Democratic senator who's considering running for president. Like, I'm not sure, Mark Kelly and Alyssa Slotin, I don't know. But, you know, the point is that the incentive structure is clear in the Democratic Party. Yeah. And it's only moving in one direction like this. There's not some world in which people go back to thinking like, no, no, let's start giving them all this military assistance. And the same thing is happening obviously, on the right. And you know, never mind Europe, by the way. I mean, a million European citizens signed a petition to try to terminate trade agreement with Israel. You have different European governments calling for that. You've got Italy under Giorgia Meloni, a right wing populist who was at Trump's inauguration, canceling certain agreements with Israel on defense and trade. So, I mean, this is a sea change.
- [32:34]
Tim Miller
Well, in this case, I mean, obviously there's anti Semitism in Europe, we should say, so there's that, that's a play and that has deep roots. But in addition to that, the cost of this war was Europe bore the brunt of it. It's not irrational. Again, just like I think it's not irrational for Israel to be concerned about their national security interests vis a vis Iran and its proxies. It's not irrational for the countries in Europe to look at this and say, what is happening. We have gas shortages because Israel and Trump wanted to, you know, try to decapitate the Ayatollah. And it didn't work. And like, we are now suffering all these, like, real consequences. And you didn't even ask us, you didn't even involve us in the conversation. And then after, and then after it all happened, you shit on us and rubbed our face in it. It's like, okay, good luck.
- [33:26]
Ben Rhodes
Well, this is the other thing that's happened though, in this war is I think that this is the thing that finally broke the floor underneath Donald Trump internationally. Right. You know, in the sense that nobody outside of this country in Israel believes that this war was necessary. Nobody buys this stuff about, you know, they were two weeks away from a nuclear weapon or what, you know, whatever. They live in the real world. And as you said, it's harder for them. Some of these countries are hugely dependent on Qatari natural gas that is offline, for instance. So they're not just dealing with high prices, they're dealing with meaningful shortages.
- [33:57]
Tim Miller
Right.
- [33:58]
Ben Rhodes
And meanwhile, Trump comes along and says, you have to open the strait, and then he insults them. And what you're increasingly seeing is when you have Pedro Sanchez, the socialist, and I'd say the leader of the European left, and Giorgio Maloney, the leader of the European right, the most successful right wing politician, both in the same place, fighting Donald Trump, unafraid of Donald Trump. I thought the most important thing the Pope said was, I'm not afraid of him. That's what you keep hearing. The fear factor is other than Keir Starmer, who's always kind of hiding in the corner. Like, world leaders are not afraid of this man anymore. They think he's incompetent and they've seen
- [34:39]
Tim Miller
him back down a bunch when people stand up to him. Like, there's a period of time where the madman theory, which isn't. Which is stupid. You can see the, you know, the end of the madman theory and what the limits are of it. Like, but it did work for a little while. It's okay to just acknowledge that. Right. And there are people who are like, this guy's so fucking crazy. We'll suck up to him, we'll give him fake trophies, like, whatever it takes. But he backs down. You know, it. Backed down on tariffs. He backed down on this war. He backed down on Jimmy Kimmel. He backed down on Sukkot. Like, he just. He keeps backing down and eventually they're not scared of him anymore.
- [35:06]
Ben Rhodes
Back down in Iran. Back down.
- [35:08]
Tim Miller
Back down on Iran.
- [35:09]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I hate to say it here.
- [35:11]
Tim Miller
This is Trump this morning. Now that the Hormuz Strait situation is over. We'll see about that. I received a call from NATO asking if we'd need some help. I told them to stay away all caps unless they just want to load up their ships with oil. They were useless when needed. A paper tiger. So it's like, okay, we'll see how that goes.
- [35:28]
Ben Rhodes
Fine. But that's the point is they don't care. Like, NATO doesn't want to be at the Strait of Hormuz. Like, the other thing people in Europe know is that Putin benefited from high energy prices.
- [35:37]
Tim Miller
Yeah.
- [35:37]
Ben Rhodes
Putin got sanctions relief. We were literally waving sanctions on Russian oil sales because we were so afraid of the price of gas. Right. Putin is much stronger than before this war, and the Europeans know that too. So they spared them the lectures about, like, you know, the talking points from 2015. Tim, I just think that this shtick is is old. It's 10 years old. Donald Trump is a lame duck. He's pulling the 30s. Like these leaders are starting to look past him and realizing, yeah, the madman thing. Maybe we had to give him some tariff deals in the first six months of his presidency, but no more.
- [36:11]
Tim Miller
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- [37:30]
Ben Rhodes
I think that this might be the largest geopolitical shift of the whole war because the whole premise of this decade of the Gulf being at the center of this kind of Magaverse and all their investments in Jared Kushner. The whole premise of the Abraham Accords, right, is that we're going to stand up to Iran together and we're going to give you all these defense capabilities. Look, what did they get for all this? They got left out in the cold. We launched this war on the Iranians. We couldn't defend them against, you know, drones and missile attacks. While they were spending down their missile defense that they bought for us at an exorbitant price, we were giving the Israelis missile defense for free. You know, like, they saw that the United States could not protect them, could not keep the straight open, could not guarantee that the Dubai model is not going to be shattered by drones coming in. And so if you're them, you're thinking, well, why did I spend all this money, you know, on American weapons and paying off Jared Kushner, you know, having these crazy conferences with Eric Trump and Witkoff's kid, getting, you know, billions of dollars investments in crypto scams. They bought all this American AI. Guess what the Iranians hit. They hit data centers in the Emirates, right? And so they suffered huge losses. So I think what you're gonna see is they're not gonna, like, pull the plug on us, but they're gonna hedge, they're gonna start making deals with the Chinese, they're gonna start making deals with the Russians. They're not gonna invest a trillion dollars that they, you know, told. They lied and told Trump that they invest in the American economy. And so I think that's gonna be a big shift.
- [38:56]
Tim Miller
All right, so with the Pope. With the Pope and Trump in a fight, we have J.D. you know, who became a Catholic two minutes ago, telling the Pope to know his role and shut his mouth. I'm wondering what you. And obviously there's a domestic political side, but, I mean, you guys worked with the Pope on normalizing with Cuba. The then Pope was involved with that. So I'm just wondering kind of how you think about whether that matters. Is there an impact to the feud beyond just them looking stupid and J.D. looking phony?
- [39:28]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. Anything that makes J.D. vance look even more ridiculous is good. I think here's where it matters. I was really struck, Tim, by when the Pope gave this speech yesterday, it basically gave a midterm message for Democrats. Right? Like, the masters of war spend all this money on bombs and, you know, weapons and get death and destruction, and they should be investing in health and education. Right? And he did it more articulately than that. That's not direct. Quote, he was speaking in Cameroon, and then he was in a sea of people in. In the Global South. And. And what I was struck by is at a time of absolute kind of amorality and immorality in the world, when you've got Putin invading Ukraine, you got Trump like a bull in the China shop of the world, you've got, you know, Xi Jinping, this kind of, you know, obviously bloodless Chinese Communist Party leader. All these guys, and they're all guys. He's a. A moral leader, and he is establishing himself as someone who's actually Willing to stand up to power. He. He talked about all these tyrants yesterday in Cameroon. That message is going to go down very well among billions of people around the world, not just Catholics. And I think what he's showing us is that the world still has a conscience and it makes people like Trump look small by comparison. And that's what pisses Trump and JD off, is that they can't knock this guy off his pedestal. He will be there after them. Trump will be gone. Pope Leo will still be there. The Catholic Church will be there. You know why? Cuz it's been there for a couple thousand fucking years. And I can curse because I'm not Catholic. Okay?
- [41:17]
Tim Miller
Catholics curse.
- [41:18]
Ben Rhodes
And I think it's reminding people we're good. Okay, good. I think it's reminding people of, like, the absurdity of and the impermanence of people like Trump. And I can tell you, when we negotiate, negotiated the deal, the normalization deal with Cuba, I went to the Vatican. Vatican was kind of the guarantor of the deal. We had to present it there. Pretty good story. I walked in and we had to meet sequentially with the Secretary of State of the Vatican, who's kind of the number two over there. The cardinal and the Cubans go in first, and they go through this whole deal. And then I go in and the Cardinal says, so you guys are normalizing relations and you're reopening embassies. And he kind of goes through the deal. And I was like, yeah, yeah. And he looks at me and he goes, who are you? Does John Kerry know about this? Like, I was like, I promise, I promise, it's true.
- [42:05]
Tim Miller
But anyway, the Secretary of the State of the Vatican wasn't watching a lot of the Chris Hayes show. He wasn't recognized.
- [42:11]
Ben Rhodes
He was not seeing the Chris Hayes show. But what those people brought was like, they could have credibility in Cuba and in the United States. They could have credibility across these divides between left and right, between power and, you know, those without power, between global north, global South. And so I just think that this is served to make Trump look smaller and he will continue to shrink relative to people like Leo.
- [42:35]
Tim Miller
Okay, let's basically do the same thing with the JCPOA that we did with now with Cuba, and just give us a little bit of like, what was the deal? What's happened since? And now what do we think is next?
- [42:47]
Ben Rhodes
The terms of the deal were the Cubans released. You know, Alan Gross, who is in prison in Cuba, they released a CIA asset down there, too. So it was kind of a Spy swap in exchange for a few Cubans that had been imprisoned in the United States. But beyond that, prisoner exchange, the Cubans also released, I think, 53 political prisoners that we had on our list. But beyond that, we agreed to reopen embassies, re establish diplomatic relations. We couldn't promise to lift the embargo on Cuba because that's legislative, but we agreed to kind of reopen commerce and travel to Cuba as much as we could from the U.S. side. And they in turn, agreed to increase Internet access for Cubans and to reciprocate in changes in their economy by growing their private sector, where they were letting Cubans own small businesses, restaurants, taxis, things like this. Now, those are the terms of the deal. The bigger point was we were just betting, hey, look, this policy is crazy. We've had it for 60 years. It hurts Cubans. They suffer in extreme poverty. It's entrenched. And this is important, the Communist Party in power, because they deal well in a hermetically sealed economy where there's no foreign investment. Right?
- [43:55]
Tim Miller
Sure.
- [43:56]
Ben Rhodes
Our bet was you open this up, you let Americans travel down there, you let Americans invest there. This place that's 90 miles from Florida is going to change. Cubans lives will get better. And then ultimately, we're not going to be the ones to determine it. We're not going to be the ones to pick the next leader of Cuba, but we think that will work better than what we've been doing for 60 years. Trump came in, he, over time, with the urging of Marco Rubio in the first term, basically rolled back all of the opening in terms of, like, travel and, you know, investment, things like that. Trade, trade. They kept the. The embassies open, so the diplomatic relations piece remained. And then over time, they squeezed and squeezed and squeezed. Biden was a chicken shit and was afraid to go back to the Obama policy because he was afraid of Bob Menendez. So we somehow got the Trump policy through Joe Biden's administration in the same way that Biden was afraid to come back in the JCPOA because he was afraid of Bob Menendez and FDD for criticizing him.
- [44:49]
Tim Miller
Well, that's great. Good thing that we knew that Bob Menendez was a great moral arbiter, as we saw, and it was important to kind of let him.
- [44:55]
Ben Rhodes
Literally, that's what happened. But the point is that now Cubans are suffering more than they ever have, I think, in their history, because in addition to the sanctions, there's now a fuel blockade on Cuba from the Trump administration. You have people dying because of Those sanctions, I think Americans don't like to think about that. But the reality is when power goes off, babies in the NICU and people on ventilators die in hospitals, you've got extreme malnourishment in Cuba. So it's a real dire humanitarian circumstance in Cuba right now. And look, I would argue that morally and from the perspective of US Interests, our approach was better. I mean, there's much more to say about it. But like, I'd argue that on the moral basis, but I also argued on the human rights basis of I actually think that life, if you ask Cubans, and I don't mean Cuban Americans in Miami, I mean Cubans in Cuba, they remember those two years under Obama as the time they were hopeful for the future. And now they're in hell.
- [45:49]
Tim Miller
And so now we have Rolito going around Marco apparently trying to get to Trump directly. And I think that they see that there's going to be a squeeze put in and Trump's going to try to redo Venezuela and he's trying to identify who the hand picked successor is, just like he did in Venezuela. Right. Is that basically how we see things going?
- [46:11]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. So I negotiated with Alejandro Castro, who's Raoul's son, and now we're onto the third generation here, rally to his grandson. What's interesting to me about this, Tim, and I talk to people in Cuba and Miami is that nobody quite knows what Trump wants because it's kind of like the jcpoa.
- [46:27]
Tim Miller
If he wants, he wants to have his guy in. That's it. He wants Delsey. He wants a Delsey and to call it a win, that's what he wants. Right.
- [46:33]
Ben Rhodes
So in 2016, when I was, you know, we're still talking Cubans, obviously, we're in government, they said, oh, we're not worried about Trump because we know his people well. They've been down here trying to build golf courses and hotels. While Trump was a Republican nominee, the Trump Organization was in Cuba trying to build hotels and golf courses. So they thought they could make that deal with him. Ultimately, Trump decided that, you know, and you worked in Florida politics like he ultimately decided, you know, these Bay Pigs veterans down in Miami, like in Marco Rubio, I'm going to listen to those guys instead because they delivered some votes for me. So now if he wants a deal where it's basically what we were trying to do, they opened up the economy, but particularly the oil in Cuba is real estate. Right, Right. The northern coast, the keys, the undeveloped beachfront properties, people at Miami have been Salivating over that for years. The Cubans, I'm sure, would be willing to say, like, fine, we'll let the Miami Cubans come down here and develop this real estate.
- [47:29]
Tim Miller
There'll be a Trump Tower, of course,
- [47:32]
Ben Rhodes
there'll be a Trump, you know, PGA Tour event here, you know, in three years. They'll give that away, I'm sure. The question is, politically, what do they have to give? Now, the funny thing about that is Diaz Canelo is the president of Cuba, but he's not really in charge of Cuba. Like, it's not even like Maduro, right? Like, Diaz Canal is kind of frontman for the Communist Party, but you still got the Castro family, you got the military. So what's even more bizarre about this is like they could, you know, Diaz Canal could be on the chopping block and, you know, but nothing would change.
- [48:01]
Tim Miller
Right? He's already the Delsey, kind of. There already is a Del C. He is the Delsey.
- [48:06]
Pharmaceutical Advertiser
Right?
- [48:06]
Tim Miller
Yeah, Right.
- [48:06]
Ben Rhodes
And what's funny about this is, and again, it's kind of like the Iran thing. Like, and, you know, some of these Florida people, like, is that going to be enough for Marco and Jorge Mas and, you know, all the right wing Miami Cubans? Maybe. But the thing is, if it is, then the whole pretense of this was about human rights was bullshit. It was about who gets to develop the land in Cuba.
- [48:29]
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- [48:57]
Tim Miller
I'm going to do some big picture stuff, though, when we get to the book at the end. Last time you were on, I think we were discussing the ways in which you were moving my direction. I was saying that your last book after the fall was kind of crystallian. It was kind of like a Ben Rhodes as Bill Kristol type book, talking about all of the terrible authoritarian regimes overseas and how the US Needs to be a leader so freedom can flourish around the world. And, you know, maybe we won't do regime change wars. But like the other parts, you know, the softer parts of the kind of neocon rhetoric you were warming up to, I felt like and after the fall. Now fast forward to this one. And many of my neocon sympathetic listeners are emailing me about how I'm sounding like Rhodes, too critical of Israel, too interested in wanting to kind of homer in the bushes from the Middle east altogether. And so I'm kind of wondering if you have any thoughts on moving forward, like, where we can find a delicate balance between being a leader and supporting freedom around the world without some of the recklessness and without being involved in ways that are hampering folks. I guess my question is how would you talk to a Democrat 2028, er, about unifying those instincts?
- [50:15]
Ben Rhodes
I think what unites you and me and can be confusing to people is I don't like autocrats. And so I don't like Viktor Orban, I don't like Nicholas Maduro, I don't like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Donald Trump. I don't like Bibi Nanyau, who's a fucking autocrat. And so I sometimes get frustrated by the kind of confusion at this. Not from you, because you're, I think, very consistent on this. Why is this so complicated if you only dislike the autocrats who are geopolitical adversaries of the United States or ideological opponents of, you know, they're on the left or the right. That, to me is what's confusing. Like, I just don't like autocrats.
- [50:58]
Tim Miller
Or if you're a leftist and you only dislike the American autocrats and.
- [51:01]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, exactly.
- [51:02]
Tim Miller
Foreign ones.
- [51:03]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah.
- [51:03]
Tim Miller
You know, or if you're on the. Yeah. Or the flip side, of course. Yeah.
- [51:06]
Ben Rhodes
I just don't get what's so complicated. But anyway, I do think that I would advise Democrats, and this is where I'm probably not Bulwarkian. I think what we've seen in Minneapolis and Iran is the final spasms of a war on terror framework filtered through the stupidest fascist kind of government that we could possibly have under Donald Trump. In other words, yes, Trump was necessary for Iran and Minneapolis to happen, but so was the war on terror. All of that ICE infrastructure has been built for 20 years under Republican and Democratic administrations. And, you know, including ourselves, all of the infrastructure in the Middle east. Why do we have like a million bases there? Why are we, why are we so concerned about the Iranian Navy, you know, like, that we are going to war over it. Like, there's an absurdity to this, that we can control events. And so I do think Democrats should be like, this is over. Like, we are an anti war party right now. Like, we are not going to get into these wars in the Middle East. We are going to dismantle some of this infrastructure. Not all of it, but some of it. We are going to dismantle parts of the Department of Homeland Security infrastructure, United States. We're ending the war like, like at home and abroad. You know, essentially the single most most important thing the United States can do for the sake of freedom and human rights and human dignity around the world right now is get our own shit together in our country. Like, the example that we've set has been corrosive around the world under Trump. Now, if we went after corruption, if we actually went after not just, you know, like the crimes that Trump has committed, but this infrastructure of the corruption of our foreign policy, the crypto, the way in which Big Tech has corrupted American foreign policy, that's a playbook that the rest of the world desperately needs. How do we uproot the kind of oligarchs that have gotten their claws into the global commons on technology and on crypto and all these spaces? So I actually think that if we do a detox and a cleanse at home, that that will actually do far more for freedom in the world than having military bases, you know, encircling Iran or, you know, arming, you know, the Israeli government. To be blunt, I don't think any
- [53:30]
Tim Miller
of that was anti Bullockian. And I'm with you. In some ways, I feel like I'm outflanking the existing Democratic Party establishment on the left. And some of the war stuff, I don't understand why there hasn't been more radical opposition to the war. I think, frankly, if this deal does come through on Sunday, I think it was a huge opportunity missed for some Democratic 2028ers to be. To make. To make abundantly clear that they're not. That they're anti stupid Middle east wars and that they're passionate about it. So, I mean, that's my opinion.
- [53:58]
Ben Rhodes
I could not agree more, Tim, like you were speaking. Like, I have a piece coming out where I talked to Graham Platner and he was making this point that it is not hard to stand up in front of a crowd and say it is absolutely insane to spend billions of dollars on bombs to drop on girls school in Iran instead of schools and hospitals in the United States. Like, and there was just none of that energy, you know, maybe from like, handful Murphy, Rubin.
- [54:24]
Tim Miller
Like, we can name the people. There are a handful of people that
- [54:26]
Ben Rhodes
we can name them, though. The fact that we can name them, like, is crazy. The fact that it's not in the Hundreds is insane. Like, this is a huge crisis for the Democratic Party that they didn't take advantage. And here's what this is going to be. The 2022 midterms over again because the Democrats will win overwhelmingly because Trump is such a catastrophe. And Chuck Schumer will be like, well, what a validation of my strategy.
- [54:50]
Tim Miller
Yeah, right. The one area where I think it might not be Bullockian. And maybe we could have a full podcast this later because we're running out of time. But I do wonder where I then start to run up against concerns from the anti war left and where I start to feel like, okay, we're singing the same language on Iran. But now it's like, well, what if Putin invades Estonia in 2029? What if she invades Taiwan? Now I'm starting to flip back to Nikki Haley as I'm talking about Taiwan's a tricky one. Those are the areas I think that are to be worked out.
- [55:19]
Ben Rhodes
Yep.
- [55:20]
Tim Miller
I want to get to Vance. Oh, wait, really quick. You tweeted we are in the worst case of authoritarianism. Do you actually believe that or was that a rhetorical flourish?
- [55:28]
Ben Rhodes
I actually do believe it because I always worried about war. What I was kind of referencing there is when the autocrat gets the war bug, like, to me, that's the worst case. Now, it may not lead to, you know, the darkest place that that can lead.
- [55:44]
Tim Miller
Yeah.
- [55:44]
Ben Rhodes
But I don't know, it'll be interesting whether this war in Iran chastises Trump or whether he's like, I gotta try again, because this one didn't end up, you know, yeah, I'm one for one. Venezuela look good. And Iran was bad. And so now I gotta do Greenland. And there's. There's a kind of, you know, like an addictive quality to the war. And that's why there have to be guardrails put around his ability to wage war.
- [56:06]
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- [56:33]
Tim Miller
The book is Always say the Battle for American identity. There's 15 speeches that you go through and talk about what it is to be an American. And in the prologue, you reference the speech that gets my blood boiling the most from the past five years, probably the clip that gets me the most enraged and radicalized. And that's how you start the book. So once again, we're aligned on something I want to play. It's a little long, but I want to play an excerpt of this speech. It's J.D. vance at the Claremont Institute. And then we can talk about it and how it informs the book.
- [57:11]
J.D. Vance
If you were to ask yourself in 2025 what an American is, I hate to say it, very few of our leaders actually have a good answer. Is it purely agreement with the credal principles of America? I know the Claremont Institute is dedicated to the founding vision of the United States of America. It's a beautiful and wonderful founding vision, but it's not enough by itself, if you think about it. Identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let's say, of the Declaration of Independence. That's a definition that is way over inclusive and under inclusive at the same time. What do I mean by that? Well, first of all, it would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Must we admit all of them tomorrow? If you follow that logic of America as a purely creedal nation, America purely as an idea, that is where it would lead you. But at the same time, that answer would also reject a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists, even though those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. And I happen to think that it's absurd. And the modern left seems dedicated to doing this, to saying, you don't belong in America unless you agree with progressive liberalism in 2025. I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don't belong.
- [58:50]
Tim Miller
So this fucking cunt JD Vance was trying to use that speech to reposition America away from being a nation that welcomes everyone that is willing to come here and be part of the great experiment that is this country and position it more as a blood and soil type country. He slightly distances from that. Trying to position it more as like we are of a place. Well, I mean, kind of. Sure, in the moment, we're of a place and we should care about the people that live in this place. But America has always been about something greater than that. And if it isn't, then there's really no point in what we're doing.
- [59:36]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, I mean, I Wrote this book, spent the last four years on it. Tim. Because after I finished my last one, I wanted to write about this country and I wanted to write about the argument we've been having, because I kind of thought to myself, this is crazy, this timeline we're living in. Because in some ways, Obama and Trump kind of represent two opposing sides of an argument we've been having since the beginning of this country, you know, and So I picked 15 speeches, and it's essentially a history of the United States, a history of the argument we've been having since the founding through those speeches. But not just the speeches, the political movements that led in and out of them, the events, the extraordinary people, you know, from Benjamin Franklin to Abraham Lincoln to Obama and Trump, but also people we haven't heard of, like Maria Stewart, a black woman abolitionist, or Mary Lisa, Kansas populist. And then when I was done, I saw that J.D. vance speech and I made that the beginning of the book because it's such a pure distillation of the. The argument that I hate the most. Right? Because he's essentially saying it's a pretty extraordinary. He says America is not an idea, it's not a creed, it's not the Declaration of Independence. And if there's always been one argument that says we are this kind of blood and soil nationalist entity or we are this kind of more progressive, and I don't mean in the left wing sense, but I mean we expand rights to more people. We want to live up to the meaning of equality and the Declaration of Independence, we want to perfect our union over time. Like, if that's the argument, Vance is taking the most retrograde version of it, and it's pretty extreme because he says we're a particular place, but he's standing in San Diego. This country was founded in fucking Philadelphia with 13 colonies along the East Coast. So, you know, Mr. High School Debater. Winning the debate, like, is proving the point that we are not a particular place or else we wouldn't be in San Diego. Right? Or he says we are a particular people, we're not a particular people. Like, just go outside and look around. Even if people have been here for generations, they came here from everywhere or particular way of life. Tim, do you have the same way of life as JD Vance? I hope not.
- [61:40]
Tim Miller
No. Like, I don't have the same way of life as people living an hour away in Terrebone Parish.
- [61:45]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, exactly. You know, and which is great. Which is what I love about America.
- [61:49]
Tim Miller
Yeah, no, awesome.
- [61:50]
Ben Rhodes
That's the awesome thing about it. If they are all like us, then that'd be boring. Right. And so I think what people need to get their minds around, though, is J.D. vance, how extreme this is. If you told Ronald Reagan that the Republican Party would be led by some smarmy guy like JD Vance shitting on immigrants. Ronald Reagan's one of his beautiful speeches. And I have a Reagan chapter in the book. Very Bulwarkian chapter.
- [62:12]
Tim Miller
I noticed it.
- [62:12]
Ben Rhodes
His last speech was about if we had to build walls around this country, we don't have doors in them so that people could come through. Like, literally. It's a beautiful speech. People should read it. And so this is radical what J.D. vance is doing. And look, that's not to say we should have opened borders. It's to say that we are an identity that is not defined by J.D. vance. We all get to choose what being American is. And we can't tell people that. They can't access that because their fucking ancestors didn't fight in the Civil War.
- [62:42]
Tim Miller
The ancestors fighting the Civil War is the worst part of the speech. So, like, it's all horrible. The worldview is awful. But he specifically goes out of the way to say that, you know who is an American? Like, you know who's not an American? Somebody who believes that all men are
- [62:56]
Ben Rhodes
in the Declaration of Independence.
- [62:57]
Tim Miller
Someone that believes in the Declaration of Independence, but lives in Guatemala and is trying to come here and have a better life for themselves. That person does not count as an American. They're not part of our nation.
- [63:09]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah.
- [63:09]
Tim Miller
You know who is part of our nation? Somebody whose ancestors fought for the Confederates who lost the Civil War. Who does not believe that all men are created equal. Who does not believe that our rights are granted to us by our Creator. Who does not connect at all with the American story or the American experiment. And they want to be bigoted and hateful towards their fellow citizens. That person, the Civil War legacy that hates his fellow Americans. They count because, you know, their bloodline has been here.
- [63:44]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. Yeah.
- [63:45]
Tim Miller
It's the most un American notion I could possibly imagine. And for him to give that example in particular was not fucking subtle.
- [63:53]
Ben Rhodes
No, it's not subtle. And we must exalt them, too. Right? You know, he could have used the example.
- [63:58]
Tim Miller
It's like someone who came over on slave ships who doesn't believe in the Declaration of Independence. They're an American. He didn't use that example. It was a Confederate progeny. They're an American.
- [64:10]
Ben Rhodes
What I find so offensive, because one of the things I took away from this project and reading all these words and reviewing all these political movements. You know, part of what you learn is that all this is more complicated than you think in the sense that, you know, just take one example, like the populists, Bernie Sanders, economics wedded to Donald Trump, xenophobia. You know, it's kind of interesting threads that come together and then go apart in American history. But what I take away from it all is that, like, what's so interesting and wonderful in some ways about America is that all these people are here. What is so radical and extreme about Trump and Vance is that they're saying, no, it's only our version of America. Like, I do the Trump speech at the end and he's taking custody. It's, this is my story. Like, I won, it's over, the debate's over. When in fact the debate is what's great, you know, like the fact that we disagree and have different views and, and that's what the Civil War piece is saying. I'm going to rub this in your face. It's not just saying, like, you have to accept those people. I accept those people. It's that those people are somehow more American than people who got here after them. And that is an insane thing to think. An insane thing to think profoundly un American thing. If my values mean anything, I have to believe that it has no bearing on how American you are. What year your people came over. I mean, some of my people came early, some came late. Within our own blood we have people that came at different times. So give me a break with this stuff.
- [65:36]
Tim Miller
The book is Always say the Battle for American Identity. We're going to close with three rapid fire questions. Number one, give me a country in the world where something's good is happening. This is my favorite part about Pon. Save the world. No, that doesn't count. I want to give me something obscure. I like it. Pod Save the world. At the end of the episode where you're like, hey, guess what's happening in Peru? Because I don't know what's happening. So usually I kind of fall asleep during the middle where you're talking about stuff in the news. I know. And then I kind of wake up from my nap and you guys are talking about Peru and I'm like, oh, this is cool. So give me, give me a fun fact.
- [66:07]
Ben Rhodes
I would say, you know, if you look over like a fun place in the world right now, Jesus, I'd say Nepal. Nepal, where you had Gen Z protests that ousted a corrupt establishment and augured in a new era of politics.
- [66:32]
Tim Miller
All Right. Nepal. That's great. That was exactly what I was looking for. I'm going to do a Google deep dive after this. Okay. Number two, Pope Leo was in Cameroon. I didn't realize that yesterday on the podcast. I wanted to issue a correction. Can you issue a single Cameroon fact? Can you tell me a single thing about the nation of Cameroon?
- [66:47]
Ben Rhodes
I think that they have the. I think they have the oldest and longest serving state. Like they have some.
- [66:53]
Tim Miller
The oldest and longest what?
- [66:54]
Ben Rhodes
Serving head of state. I think he's one of these guys who's been in power forever. I mean, I'm not certain of that.
- [67:00]
Tim Miller
It's okay. That's a good guess. Paul Biya. Yeah. President of Cameroon since 1982. That is crazy. Yeah, it's a great Cameroon, in fact.
- [67:09]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, it is a good Cameroon, in fact.
- [67:10]
Tim Miller
You're doing well. I asked Tommy for the third one and he said he won't support my trivia reign of terror. So we will close just with Nuggets and Nicks talk. Do we. Is it possible. Is there hope that. That we could meet at the can or at Madison Square Garden for the NBA Finals or.
- [67:25]
Ben Rhodes
I think so.
- [67:26]
Tim Miller
At all. Hopeful about the Knicks?
- [67:27]
Ben Rhodes
I'm hopeful about the Knicks because when they are healthy and kind of dialed in, they can beat anybody in the East. And the Nuggets, man, like, they close strong and they seem healthy and I really, really, really would like to see it not be Oklahoma City. I. I hate. I've come to hate Oklahoma City in. In a strange way.
- [67:49]
Tim Miller
Same.
- [67:49]
Ben Rhodes
The way that they try to get calls and stuff like, it just bugs me.
- [67:52]
Tim Miller
It's horrible basketball to watch. I'm with you. We need Peyton Watson to get back healthy. I'm also for the Knicks. That Celtic series is going to be tough. Tatum's looking good, but if it happens, ballerina or msg. All right, brother.
- [68:03]
Ben Rhodes
All right, let's do it.
- [68:04]
Tim Miller
It's a day. All right, everybody, thanks so much to Ben Rhodes. We went a little long today, but you know, we had some news happening this morning. So we'll be back on Monday. It's great. It's a nice pairing. As I mentioned, Ben Rhodes was getting Crystallian. I'm getting Rhodes ish. And so on Monday we always get closer.
- [68:20]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [68:21]
Tim Miller
On Monday you'll get to hear from woke Bill Kristol and we can reflect back on our conversation today.
- [68:27]
Ben Rhodes
Anti Iran war Bill Kristol.
- [68:28]
Tim Miller
Yeah, exactly. Thanks to Van Rose, everybody else. You have a wonderful weekend. We'll see you on Monday. Peace, Girls.
- [68:42]
Ben Rhodes
Are you girls, are you so American? He may not be born of this land, but he was born of this world.
- [68:56]
Tim Miller
The Borg podcast is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer Ansley Skipper, and with video editing by Katie Lutz and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.
- [69:08]
Ben Rhodes
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- [70:42]
Ben Rhodes
Com.