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- [00:00]
A
Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying Big Wireless Way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint. You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments. But that's weird. Okay, one judgment anyway. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com starting a business can seem like a daunting task unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz and Allbirds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into Sign up for your $1 per month trial@shopify.com specialoffer some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com Obama's foreign policy, of which you were heavily involved, was sort of loosely defined as don't do stupid. Is what Trump's doing in Iran stupid?
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B
Yes. I mean, in fact, it's like precisely what Obama had in mind when he said that, you know, they've gotten rid of all of usaid, they've attacked their own intelligence community. I was never in a war game in which the first thing the Iranians did wasn't to close the Strait of Hormuz. The cost of getting rid of all that expertise for so many years, all this is converging in this one event because he is reckless enough to listen to Netanyahu and think, if I do this, I'll collapse the Iranian regime and be a hero and incompetent enough to not have had experts who are like, hey, they'd close the Strait of Hormuz and paralyze the global economy.
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A
I'm Joanna Coles. This is the Daily Beast podcast, and there is literally no one who knows more about the Forever War and the negotiations that Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are leading us through with Iran than our next guest, Ben Rhodes, because he was heavily involved in the Obama Iran negotiations and that deal, and he led the conversations and negotiations with Cuba So we're going to get into it, but before we do, I just wanted to recommend one thing. Substack has started their own series of podcasts called Open Tab, and I am, surprisingly, rather thrillingly, actually one of their subjects. I'm interviewed by Hannah Winarsky, and guess what happens when we're in the middle of the interview? There is a spontaneous fire. I think our conversation was so hot, Hannah's questions were so incisive that somehow this lamp blew up and it was all a bit of a drama. Anyway, you can find it on Substack, on Open Tab, on Substack, where we love our partnership with them, so I hope you enjoy the conversation. It's me talking at great length, but Hannah's got some very good questions which put me on edge, and, well, they're just, what can I say? It was sufficiently explosive. We had a fire in the restaurant. Don't forget to press the subscription button. And now let's get into it. How did we get into this forever war? And are Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner up to the task of helping Donald Trump get out of it? Ben Rhodes, let's talk about it. Couldn't be more excited, Ben Rhodes, to have you in the House, because there's almost no one who's got better experience to talk about what's going on in Iran, unfortunately, and indeed Cuba, because you were involved, heavily involved in. You led the Cuba negotiations, and you were heavily involved in the Iranian negotiations. So I guess my first question to you is this book is a look at America's identity through the lens of 15 speeches. And the last two speeches juxtapose Barack Obama, who you worked for, his speech on race, and Donald Trump's second speech, his inauguration speech. And it feels as if America has had a complete change of identity just with those two speeches. Can you just reflect on how much has changed in the White House since you were in the White House?
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B
In the actual White House, yeah. I mean, first of all, I wrote the book because I wanted to explore the kind of two identities that exist, because I think Obama's kind of emblematic of a more progressive identity where we're struggling to live up to the aspiration in the Declaration of Independence of equality. And Trump is kind of a manifest of the kind of crudest form of the more exclusionary identity. We're kind of a white Christian nation for some people. Other people can be here, but you have to kind of subordinate yourself to me. Now, that said, the Obama White House, in addition to just the place, not being Changed. It was an incredibly diverse place. I mean, I remember feeling, being at events sometimes. I remember a party after his second inauguration and looking around and I was in the minority as white people there, and it was like a black excellence. And Hamilton was birthed at the White House when Lin Manuel Miranda came. And so, in addition to the place itself, the cast of characters that came through the Obama White House, the people who were honored. Dolores Huerto is in my book, that's the kind of person who got the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
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A
Well, and I want to come to her speech because obviously through the lens, the revelations about Cesar Chavez, her speech feels very different.
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B
Very different.
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A
Anyway, keep going.
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B
But so then you go to Trump. And part of what's interesting to me is even though Obama comes out of the more disruptive progressive tradition, we need to change things. It's actually Trump who's proven to be, in his kind of absolute insistence on kind of taking custody of America and its story. He's been the one whose deviation from any kind of agreed upon norms of behavior or look physically manifest. Like, I was just in Washington, like, the. I mean, I felt very humbled to be at the White House for eight years. Like, not many people get to work there for eight full years. I love to roam around and kind of feel the ghosts there.
- [06:51]
A
It never gets old. I mean, I obviously haven't worked there, but I've certainly visited there a lot, largely under Obama's presidency. And it never gets old, the excitement of going to that house.
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B
Well, I mean. Cause so, I mean, I'll just. Because obviously it's insane now to see, like, the construction of some, like, you know, megadome for the Ultimate Fighting Championship. It's absolutely jarring to see a giant hole in some construction where the East Wing used to be. But even, like, part of what was so wonderful about the White House and intentionally so by the people who designed it, it was supposed to be nice, but a little understated.
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A
Right?
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B
And so when I see, like, my favorite detail is not just the gold trim in the Oval Office, which reminds me of every authoritarian office I was ever in. You know, if you go to, like, the headquarters of the Burmese junta, like, it looks like the Oval Office looks now, like there's gold trim everywhere. But the fact that he's got, like, Oval Office written in script outside, like it's the country club clubhouse. Like, we have to tell people this is the Oval Office, right? Like, we have to. When you are actually confident in who you are and your connection to history, you don't Need a gold sign outside.
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A
Well, and the very point of it is that there's a lack of signage. That the reason that you are there is for the Oval Office, which doesn't need to shout its name.
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B
Yeah, yeah. That's why it's oval. Doesn't look like other offices. And so I think what's interesting, you know, some of my friends who work in politics have thought said to me, you know, well, these ballrooms and things, it's a distraction. We should be focused on all ice and all these. But they're all of a piece. Because I like the way you asked the question, like, the physical changes in the White House and the changes of the kind of people who go through there. What's interesting is that, you know, I remember when Obama came in, and I'm going to say I believe there was a racialized subtext to this. We had, like, scandals because there was a picture of him with his foot on his feet on the desk in the Oval Office.
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A
Right.
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B
I mean, then I look at, like, you know, Kid Rock coming in and looking kind of hammered, and Elon Musk.
- [09:00]
A
Elon Musk hitting its nose and wiping it on the Resolute desk.
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B
They seem intent on, like, showing disrespect for what is supposed to be, like, a. Not their property. It's like the property of the American people, and it's a symbol of our history. And again, it kind of reinforces where the book ends, which is that it's. Isn't it interesting that the reactionary is the one who actually is the UN American version of the story? That's kind of a surprise in a way. Right. You'd think that reactionaries are usually about tradition and small C conservatism, like, maintaining things the way they are.
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A
Right. And upholding the establishment. And, in fact, he's trying to tear it down.
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B
Yeah, yeah. Quite literally, I'm physically trying to tear it down.
- [09:51]
A
Right, right. So Obama's foreign policy, of which you were heavily involved and you were deputy National Security Advisor and lead speechwriter, was sort of loosely defined as don't do stupid shit. Is what Trump's doing in Iran stupid shit?
- [10:12]
B
Yes. I mean, in fact, it's like, precisely what Obama had in mind when he said that. And I always thought, like, there are two sides of the coin. Right. Like, don't do stupid shit and then be opportunistic in trying to get wins where you can. And he said that phrase kind of at the precise time that we were trying to do a nuclear deal with Iran, and he was getting a lot of pressure to not make the nuclear deal with Iran. And so that was part of what he was referring to. And essentially the history of American foreign policy is the basics. If you tend to the basics, the alliances, the kind of operating of the systems that America constructed after World War II, if you build upon that foundation and then kind of look again based on the opportunity that presents itself or the crisis you have to respond to, like what you have to manage effectively. If you do that, you get pretty good outcomes. And what has derailed American foreign policy are these usually wars that are incredibly destructive and often pointless. I mean, if we look back at Iraq, Vietnam, like these are the kinds of things Obama's referring to. And again, at that time, the debate was, do you do a nuclear deal with Iran or do you just kind of keep ratcheting up the pressure in a way that we thought was inexorably going to lead to war? We said that at the time and people said, no, no, there's just get a better deal. And we kept saying, well, no, this is the deal. Something like this deal is the best deal you're going to get. And so if you don't do a deal and don't want Iran to get a nuclear weapon at some point, you're going to end up in a war. And that would be stupid. And here we are.
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A
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B
So first of all, unlike the current negotiations, you also have to remember that it was not just the United States and Iran.
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A
Right.
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B
It was the United States and then Britain, France, the United.
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A
Sorry, it's the UN, right?
- [14:08]
B
Yeah. The UN's permanent five. So Britain, France, Russia, China and then Germany and the eu. So the permanent five members of the Security Council. So I say that because in addition to the direct negotiations with the Iranians, like your number one agenda item when you're meeting with all those other countries is the Iran talks, the actual talks. My role was I was not in the negotiating team in the field, but I was in the White House situation room. And we would get updates every session after from them. And then I would be the one, you know, with, with a couple other people to go get Obama's guidance for the people in the talks. They were in Geneva and Vienna and then a lot of them really were long table, you know, people exchanging views. But as someone who did a lot of.
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A
Would you have, I'm sorry to be very basic about this, but would you have the Iranians down one side and everybody else down the other side? Or were people sort of sitting, sitting cheek by jowl? What does it actually feel like in a room?
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B
So what it feels like, and I did some of these myself, particularly with Cuba, there's a formal negotiation, there's a formal process where the Iranians are one side table and everybody else on the other side. And maybe it's square if you have to fit in other people. But oftentimes the more sensitive topics, you pull the person aside and take a walk. So John Kerry's gonna go for a walk with Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister at the time, Abbas Arachi, who's the foreign minister now, he was the kind of deputy who was kind of working level negotiator. And so he's doing that with American counterparts and others sometimes because there are multiple countries, you kind of pick which country is going to kind of present an idea to the Iranians or they're going to go to different. So the reason it took a lot of time is both the complexity of those Negotiations, but also the kind of multifaceted nature we had to negotiate to keep the block of the permanent five members of the Security Council together at the same time that we're trying to get the Iranians to make concessions. One interesting thing that again, sticks out, given the contrast of the current moment when things were kind of stuck towards the end and things were getting very technical, because it was like, how can you have inspections that kind of convince us that we know they're not cheating, what do we really need to get from them? But they need to keep some face savings elements of their program. We brought Ernie Moniz, who was the Secretary of Energy, who's a nuclear physicist, quite literally into the negotiation.
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A
Right.
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B
And then his counterpart, who was the leader of the Iranian nuclear program, a guy named Salehi, came into the negotiation. They had known each other from mit.
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A
Oh, wow.
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B
And so first interesting point about that is that sometimes, you know, because the Iranian regime is odious, their cast is kind of fanatics. Like, no, these are very sophisticated people.
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A
Right.
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B
But because they had this relationship, they actually kind of really made the difference in kind of hammering out some of these details at the end.
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A
And again, did they have food? I mean.
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B
Oh, yeah.
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A
Is this a table laden with food?
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B
No, no, this is like, you know, it's along the side of the room. You know, you get up and, you know, it's kind of. Right, like not great meeting or something. Yeah, yes, it is.
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A
Right.
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B
It's very much like a board meeting.
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A
Okay. So you don't end up with blood sugar low and people storming.
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B
No, it's not like there's like containers on the table.
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A
No, I wanted to make sure. So the other thing I'm fascinated by is, you know, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and occasionally JD Vance have been sent in to negotiate these. Could you right now go down and negotiate a 99 year lease for a building downtown in Manhattan, which is supposedly Steve Wyckoff's expertise?
- [17:49]
B
Nope, I would have no idea how to do that.
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A
Right. So what advice would you give poor Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who've been delegated this seemingly difficult and intransigent task as they get up to speed with how to negotiate with the Iranians.
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B
So one of the things I actually loved working on this issue in part because we had this enormous team that included the avengers of experts within the US government, the people who knew Iranian politics, people who were nuclear scientists, people who were sanctions experts who knew how to deal with the imposition and relaxing of sanctions. Any expert you could think of. We found the best one related to these negotiations and had them supporting the work. I don't think a single one of those people are still in the US Government because they're the kind of people that were purged by Trump.
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A
Right.
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B
So what my advice would that to them would be, hey, like, just get the very best experts in the United States government to help you prepare for these meetings. But part of what I think, and I can feel has happened is that not only do they not know anything about what they're negotiating, I mean, they don't know the mechanics of how uranium is mined and milled and put through centrifuges, but they've gotten rid of all the experts. The National Security Council that I used to work on used to have a staff of some 250 people. People said that was too big. Okay, maybe a little bit. But I think the last I've heard is that now there's like 25 or 30 people in the White House working on this. They've gotten rid of all of usaid. They've attacked their own intelligence community. They got rid of the experts who said that the Iranian program wasn't obliterated. Remember, those people were clearly right, or else we wouldn't be negotiating this. The State Department is hollowed out. We don't have ambassadors in 100 countries. I think people don't know that. And so they don't even.
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A
We don't have ambassadors in 100 countries.
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B
100 countries, willful disregard for expertise, and they finally run into a problem where they're probably looking around. I mean, that's every. We did war games, right?
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A
Well, I was going to say, in war games, you must have talked about the Strait of Hormuz, didn't you?
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B
So this is. We did this because. You know why we did war games? One, because you could end up in a conflict with Iran, and two, because Bibi Netanyahu was constantly pressing us to go to war with Iran and bomb their nuclear facilities. So we said, well, let's game out. What would happen. I was never in a war game in which the first thing the Iranians did wasn't to close the Strait of Hormuz.
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A
Right.
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B
But again, I think what you get in Iran is this weird convergence of Trump's recklessness and incompetence.
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A
Recklessness and incompetence.
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B
Yeah. Because the cost of getting rid of all that expertise for so many years, because it was in Trump first term, too, all this is converging in this one event because he is reckless enough to Listen to Netanyahu and think, if I do this, I'll collapse the Iranian regime and be a hero and incompetent enough to not have had experts who were like, hey, they'd close the Strait of Hormuz and paralyzed the global economy.
- [21:03]
A
Right. And it can't be that they didn't think about the Strait of Hormuz. They must have known that this is a potential outcome. Do you think, or do you think it's possible they didn't actually think it was a potential outcome?
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B
I think that they believed. And from some people I've talked to, including people I'm friends with in places like the Gulf, you know, we're talking to them. They were sold a bill of goods by Netanyahu, that the regime would just collapse. And by the way, you saw them try to do that. They assassinated the Supreme Leader. I think that they were.
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A
And that was day one. So actually, day one looked pretty good,
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B
except that, again, any expert on the Iranian regime would tell you that that regime has millions of people under arms, that the Supreme Leader kind of sits on top of a very deep structure within which the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the irgc, is the strongest. And so nobody else thought the regime was going to collapse. That was wishful thinking. And then I also think that every national security decision that I was a part of, and frankly, the same was true in the Bush years. And it's not a partisan point. There's a very rigorous process. You have to sit around a table and have everyone kind of present their views in front of each other and then in front of the president. That is not how they make decisions. It is clearly Trump in the Oval Office, maybe sometimes with a very small number of people. And he doesn't want to hear that it's not going to work. He wants to hear that whatever he's inclined to do is the right thing.
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A
Right. So is there a way out? Here is a man who campaigned on no more forever wars. We're 13 weeks in, and he seems flummoxed, he seems stuck. Is there a way out?
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B
There's a very clear way out. The way out is he's going to have to accept he's not going to accomplish any of the things he said at the beginning, that the Iranians are going to have to get a significant amount of revenue from some form of sanctions relief, and the Strait of Hormuz will be opened, our blockade will be lifted, and whatever nuclear deal is negotiated is probably going to look quite like the Obama era nuclear deal. Restrictions on the Iranian program Not the elimination of it, hopefully.
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A
So they're left with uranium for sort of health purposes, but the rest of it's taken away.
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B
Yeah, they shipped 98% of their stockpile out of the country. They accepted strict limitations on the number of centrifuges they could operate. And they had all these inspections. And so all was left was the kind of nuclear capability that could produce medical isotopes. And then you had inspectors in there to make sure that that's what they were doing. And they got access to some of their frozen revenue from oil sales. Because the way sanctions work is. And Trump constantly misrepresent. This is going to be interesting to watch. He made it seem like America paid Iran for this deal, when in fact all we did is our sanction had frozen. Now well over $100 billion in Iranian revenue. They sell oil to China or India or some other country and they can't get that money. It's frozen because they can't transit through the dollar in the financial system. And so you have to unlock some, not all of that revenue. That's what you're going to get. And that is wildly preferable to this. High gas prices, consistent violence, shortages of vital inputs to the global economy around the world. And frankly, if this continues, one thing I worry about is Trump seems to think that just because there's not like large scale violence every day that it's like not a war. The strait is still closed.
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A
What's happening? Ben, you may be able to help me with this. Cause I'm sort of fascinated by the fact we were obsessed during COVID with the number of boats, the number of ships stacked with shipping containers that were idling outside the ports, California, constant photos of them. Yet we know there are, I think now 1700 oil tankers in the Persian Gulf completely trapped. They've got people on board. They don't have enough resources. They've been stuck there for weeks. How did they. Even if the strait is open tomorrow, how long does it take to get them moving?
- [25:34]
B
Well, many months, but. So if this is settled tomorrow, like, first of all, you have to. They're not going to go through there unless they're assured that there's not mines. So it's going to take some time to do that. And then just unblocking the logjam will take many months. But even more profoundly, the damage to energy infrastructure is worse than I think the Trump administration has been willing to talk about. Like Qatar has the largest liquefied natural gas field in the world that's been taken offline by Iranian strikes. That's years it's going to take for that thing to come fully up and running.
- [26:11]
A
And what do we need liquefied gas for? Like, what is that for?
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B
Well, in the uk, Qatari LNG is fundamental to home heating oil. Countries use it for power, for a source of power. And so I think one thing that people have to realize is we'll be feeling the consequences of this war in our economy. Like, for years, the price of gas at our pump will come down slightly over time. There have been huge disruptions in fertilizer that comes through that strait. People will feel that in next year's harvest and then in next year's food prices. In the same way, by the way, that the COVID disruptions had a tail into inflation, right?
- [26:54]
A
No, we're still feeling the impact of COVID Do you think that Donald Trump understands that?
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B
I think he understands some of it and doesn't care. I don't think Donald Trump cares about us. I don't think he cares about the future. I certainly don't think he cares about anything after he's president, because this is going to have a till that lasts until after he's president. No, the most honest thing he says is when he basically says, I really don't care. I mean, there are versions of him saying, I don't care that Americans are paying more at the pump, or I don't care that you can't afford childcare. You know, we have to spend money on these wars and not on the things that actually Americans want. Like, I don't think. He's not sitting there worried about his own voters who can't afford to fill up their gas tank. That's pretty clear.
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A
Yeah. I mean, it's just an astonishing situation that we're going to end up with a worse deal at the end of this war, by the looks of it,
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B
at a cost that is incalculable. It's not just the hundreds of billions of practical taxpayer costs. It's trillions of dollars in prices and economic output.
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A
Well, and to what extent do you think it's impacted America's legacy abroad? I mean, with our. Well, with our allies first, and then. Let's talk about Russia.
- [28:20]
B
Well, let's start in the Gulf. The Gulf Arab countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qata are. The basic bargain of their society is that they provide security and a measure of prosperity, and they get to have total control. And the way they provide security is America is essentially the subcontractor for it. We broke that deal with them this Put them at enormous risk. They've been devastated, some of them by Iranian strikes. Their economies have taken this massive hit. They saw that all the fancy air defense systems that we had went to Israel and our bases and did not protect them. That's why, you know, we can't even see the videos of what happened in places like Dubai.
- [29:06]
A
And also, it seems unfathomable that, you know, Dubai, which is one of the busiest, most international airports in the world, was being bombed. I mean, it's just, you know, it's the 21st century. How is this possible that, that this led to this?
- [29:23]
B
Well, that's the model of their society is broken. You know, they can say all they want, but I don't know that the tourists are gonna be coming back to Dubai.
- [29:30]
A
Right. I don't know anybody that even wants to go via Dubai anywhere. Right.
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B
They used to pay influencers to come there and post pictures, and now they put you in prison if you post pictures. That says kind of in miniature, but I think those countries start hedging against America and getting closer to China. The UAE might be the least likely to do that. But I think the Gulf states, who are the most cash rich countries in a cash poor world, turning to China over time, that puts a risk. The dollar is a reserve currency because the reason the dollar is a reserve currency is because petro trades are made through it. The Europeans are suffering more than we are economically because they're more dependent on energy resources from that region than we are. And they were not consulted. They were totally cut out of this.
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A
Well, and they were humiliated by Trump, who, when they wouldn't agree, he started going after them individually. Yeah.
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B
So I think that they too are like, should I go along with America's China policy or should I start doing kind of what Mark Carney's doing and cutting my own trade deals with the Chinese and the Indians. It's not just about we're going to spend more on defense to support the Ukrainians. It's more fundamentally. And again, these consequences are going to. A lot of them happen past Trump, so he doesn't care. But a world in which the Europeans aren't working with us in the same way and the Gulf Arabs are working with us and everybody's kind of like the Chinese. I mean, I like everything about those guys, but at least I know the terms of the deal. At least it's predictable. I think what we've done is massively accelerate a world that is going to be oriented towards China and not the United States. And. And if that Starts to. If that puts imperils the dollar's reserve currency, goodbye standard of living, American people. Because the reason, even though you can't afford things, the reason you can afford what you can is because we're able to run up trillions of dollars in debt because everybody's got to deal through the dollar. If that starts to go away, a lot changes.
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A
And where does Russia stand in this? Where does Russia stand to gain in all this?
- [31:37]
B
Two ways. I mean, in short term, their entire economic model is propped up by revenue. And so the price of oil is higher, they have more money. Simple as that. I think more fundamentally, whereas China is trying to kind of build an alternative world order, Russia just wants everything to be chaos. Right? So how much have you heard about Ukraine in this country recently? That's good for Russia, right? Like, like, like, by the way, the whole premise of holding Russia accountable for the war in Ukraine is you're not allowed to launch illegal wars. Well, you know, Putin's what about ism is now verified. You know, look what America did. They just started a dumb illegal war, too. Like, he. A world that kind of confirms Putin's narrative that there are no rules and big nations can do whatever they want. That's the world he wants. And so the Iran war, in a strange way, that confirms his priors. And also, like, the national security person would say, we have spent down, like, years worth of our munitions. Not only is that assistance that we can't give to the Ukrainians, like, that's just, you know, makes us a less credible deterrent for China invading Taiwan or if Putin wants to test the waters in the Baltics, you know, so it's just. It's not good. I mean, I really. I can't identify a good. You know, the administration is reduced to saying, like, we destroyed some, you know, missiles and Iranian Navy, like, worth. Okay, like, was that worth this?
- [33:05]
A
Right. When you saw Putin coming for the visit with Trump in Alaska, and they were sort of walking on the red carpet together, and then Putin gets in the beast. What's sort of going through your mind?
- [33:21]
B
This is the world Trump wants. It's a world and there's strong men, and he's one of them. It's a world in which there's three major powers, the United States, Russia, and China, and they can kind of do whatever they want and make their own deals and that he wants to do business with Russia. I think his. His ultimate interest is for personal family business in Russia. I think Jared, people like Jared Kushner and Steve Wyckoff would love to do real estate deals and critical minerals deals with the Russians.
- [33:51]
A
I can't imagine anywhere it'd be more difficult to build things than Russia. Actually. I don't know why they want to do that there. There are certainly easier places.
- [33:59]
B
Well, but because the nature of strongmen economics, like these guys like Putin and Erdogan and Orban was like this in Hungary. They can grease the deals. Right. And so you can make money. I mean, very notably. Just to show I'm not like some conspiracy theorist, the person from Russia who had come and presented a quote, unquote peace proposal to Witkoff and Kushner in the lead up to that was not the foreign minister, was not the head of the fsb, was not a Russian military official. It was the head of the Russian sovereign wealth fund.
- [34:32]
A
Right.
- [34:32]
B
The head of the Russian sovereign wealth fund does not usually negotiate the end of a war. In Ukraine, Putin showed up with a whole delegation of kind of ministers and business people. Right now, because Putin is so inflexible that he wouldn't give anything on Ukraine, they couldn't make a deal because the Ukrainian, Putin couldn't present anything that the Ukrainians would ever accept or that the Europeans would ever accept. But I'm sure Trump would have accepted it. I'm sure Trump would have accepted Putin's terms.
- [35:02]
A
Right.
- [35:02]
B
The reason the war didn't end is because the Ukrainians and the Europeans, you remember the Europeans rushed to Washington after that summit and we're like, no, like, we're not going to press on. We're not going to lean on Zelensky
- [35:12]
A
to accept basically all of completely unacceptable terms for. And also the Ukrainian people themselves, I mean, having thought they could rely on the US have realized they've done it and they've been magnificent, frankly.
- [35:24]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [35:25]
A
And also the use of drones, which has been a cheap way for them to attack.
- [35:29]
B
Well, they've figured that out. And by the way, so have the Iranians. And this is the future of war. These are not expensive drones. I mean, I kind of chuckle when I see these big defense tech firms here, like getting huge contracts. And not even just the corrupt ones, but even the kind of Palantir adjacent ones. The Iranians have closed the straight to Hormuz with stuff that you can make in your garage. The, the Ukrainians are kind of turning the tide a bit against the Russians with thousands. It's, it's, it's a quantity game, not a quality game. Like the Ukrainians have figured that out that like, with, with the right quantity of drones, they can bombard the Russian front line and they can target infrastructure deep into Russia, and that's where war is going. And, and, and part of what the Iran war exposed is, like, aircraft carriers and F35s and like, hugely expensive systems can't open the strait.
- [36:23]
A
Right, right. And a single drone can take. Right. Seriously an engine room out.
- [36:30]
B
Yeah. A bunch of drones that literally are no bigger than, you know, that are much smaller than this table, can destroy one tanker and the straight's close. So. Yeah.
- [36:41]
A
So the other thing that you were responsible for when you were at the White House was Cuba. And of course, Cuba is now up both your territories. We indicted Raul Castro, as you saw, two weeks ago. What do you think is. All the signals seem to be that something is going to happen in Cuba. Clearly, Trump is bored with Iran. It's proving very difficult. He needs something new to keep him entertained. Looks like it could be Cuba. What are you hearing, do you think about what might be in store for the Cubans?
- [37:15]
B
So I will say, like, you get a little older, you do a little work on yourself, and you do a little ego destruction. Right. And what you come to realize is that you're just like everybody else. Right. We're all ordinary people. I may be unique in one way. I don't know that there's anybody else on earth who can claim that they negotiated the normalization of relations with Cuba at the same time that they were deep in the Iran nuclear deal and now get to see both of the countries that I did that with one after the other again, like, that may
- [37:46]
A
be your entire life.
- [37:47]
B
That may be my. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That may be the unique life experience I've had in the world. Look what I hear. First of all, this whole thing is totally ridiculous. It's much. And by the way, like, I Kind of. Shame on all of us for not paying more attention to the fact that this blockade of Cuba has killed people. I was talking to somebody recently who has family in Cuba. No fan of the government. His family member died because the hospital was shut down by power outage. A guy went into sepsis and couldn't get health care.
- [38:23]
A
Right.
- [38:24]
B
And his family couldn't even be there to bury him because there was no cooling in Cuba. So they had to bury him right away.
- [38:34]
A
Right.
- [38:35]
B
People, if you deny power as we have to Cuba because we're blockading any oil getting in, people on ventilators die, Children in the NICU die. Like this is happening. I talked to journalists down there. So first of all, this is not a game of risk. Like Trump makes it seem like. And what I think is going to happen is I think they're trying to set up the Venezuela model. Like you indict Raul Castro, the 94 year old ex leader of Cuba, you send some special forces guys to go grab him in the middle of the night. I mean, 94 year old man, I don't know if he survives that. And you think that, I guess you can control what comes next in the politics of the country? I think that's a deeply flawed assumption and I don't even know why. I mean, well, I have theories of why they're doing it, but there's no national interest for the United States in that.
- [39:29]
A
Well, isn't the, I mean, that does seem like it could be a real estate grab. That it's, it's 90, right. It's 90 miles off the coast of Florida. Why wouldn't they turn it into a fabulous.
- [39:40]
B
That's all. So to me, Venezuela has oil, Cuba has real estate. I spent a lot of time in Cuba. That whole northern coastline of Cuba, there's a, you know, yes, some of the Cuban exile people in Miami and other places care about the Cuban people, but some of them want that land. They want to build hotels and golf
- [39:59]
A
courses and, and that's what Trump understands. Right. I mean, they seem to be doing that everywhere. They want to do it in Gaza, they're trying to do it in Albania, in Russia.
- [40:07]
B
Yeah.
- [40:07]
A
Now Cuba, they tried to do it
- [40:09]
B
in Serbia when I was still, you know, dealing with the Cubans in 2016. One reason they weren't that worried about Trump, and they obviously should have been, is that the Trump Organization was down there while Trump was running for president, scouting properties for golf courses and hotels. There is a lot of very valuable land in Cuba.
- [40:29]
A
Right.
- [40:30]
B
And so to me, this is about Marco Rubio's politics in South Florida and real estate deals for the Trump family and their circle.
- [40:39]
A
And do you think that, that in the end, given that Cuba has been in incredible poverty for the Last sort of 50, 60 years, do you think that in the end that's actually a thing for Cuba?
- [40:52]
B
No, because what I worry is that it won't be that simple, that the place might actually implode. And so there's a scenario. Yeah, I mean, if, frankly, we were not trying to do something, we weren't trying to like, enrich ourselves, we were trying to open the place up. And part of what we thought would happen is that there'd be a bunch of development and kind of a tourism economy. And that'd be good.
- [41:17]
A
Right.
- [41:17]
B
So yes, like I a non corrupt version of that in which is like an evolution of the Cuban government to be less repressive and their standards of living get better. I mean, first of all, you could do that tomorrow if you just lift the embargo because the Cubans want investment and just go in.
- [41:34]
A
Right.
- [41:35]
B
What I worry about is this like there's that place is desperate. You take out Castro or the leadership, all hell breaks loose. People start looting the hotels, the military, the guys with guns tend to be the worst guys. They start shooting people. Criminal elements from other parts of the Americas. Cartels are like, well look, we got an island close to America, let's move in there. And suddenly you have something approximating Haiti and you have kind of mass migration of people into Florida. And then we're sending in the Marines to create the stability for the real estate deals. I mean, and maybe that won't happen, but there's a high enough chance that that might happen that it's not worth the risk of sending a bunch of Delta Force guys or Navy Seals to grab a 94 year old man.
- [42:20]
A
Right. And goodness knows Cuba has felled American presidents.
- [42:24]
B
Well, that's the thing. The Bay of Pigs seemed like a good idea on paper too, you know.
- [42:27]
A
Right. So have you been to see the Obama library yet?
- [42:32]
B
Not since it was like, you know, I saw it under construction. I've not seen the finished. I'm going to the opening in June 18th.
- [42:38]
A
Right. And I was gonna ask you, and this actually was a question from one of our writers and contributors who writes the Simpsons. And I was saying, I've got Ben Rhodes coming in this afternoon. What would you ask him? And she said to your point that you worked on Iran and Cuba and both now have sort of been turned 180 degrees. What do you do to self soothe? How do you survive watching essentially your work criticized, torn apart and then broken apart?
- [43:11]
B
Well, the criticism. The funny thing is I became kind of a right wing villain at the end of the Obama years and they really beat the hell out of me online. And that used to get to me, but that I kind of learned to switch off, switch off. I don't read that stuff. And frankly, all the people that do it have proven themselves to be the worst version of themselves, so who cares?
- [43:34]
A
Well, and I was thinking largely of Trump just saying it's the worst deal ever. And now he's complet. It's trapped between the Israelis and the Iranians, which is probably the worst place for anybody.
- [43:47]
B
Nobody wants to be There. But, no, it's very painful. And my positive thing I do is I'm a runner, which kind of empties my head. And I live out in la and so I can run on the beach and kind of look at the ocean and realize that the world is much bigger than all this. And the Trumps and Putins of the world, or, you know, there's the ocean. It was here before. Then we'll be there after them. Soothing. I mean, thankfully, it's a. I live in a state with legalized marijuana. That's. That's, like, not a bad way to check out sometimes if, you know, like, you just want to unplug. And. And actually, I mean, this. I honestly is not just a bookstore of, like, history. Like, I. I found comfort in writing. Actually, I chose to write a history book in part because I wanted to get out of the present. You know, it's like, both to realize that, you know, as insane as everything feels now, like that happens every now and then. Like, we. And I think about this a lot. Like we're in it. Like we're in one of those periods. Like we weren't when I was a kid. Like, things looked pretty good in the 90s, pretty good through the aughts, even though we had nine, 11 Obama years. You know, like, bumpy stuff has happened. Global financial crisis. But again, well, now, you know, we're in the 30s or the 60s. Like, this happens, you know, periods of disruption.
- [45:16]
A
I mean, we had Kurt Anderson in last week, and he was reminding me of Andrew Jackson inviting people to the White House when he was inaugurated.
- [45:24]
B
And they, of course, tore the place
- [45:25]
A
up, stole everything, smacked it up, and he had to be extricated through a window. So it sort of does. It does happen. So in your book, you talk about. And again, just to remind people, it's a study of American identity through 15 different speeches, not all of them presidential. But you talk about the crowd that's gathered for Trump's second inauguration, and you have all the leaders of the social media companies obviously sitting there, and you've got Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, and you've got the crew from Google. Is it possible, do you think, to. In the age of social media, and you criticize them for sort of demolishing our attention spans. Do you think it's possible ever to go back or ever to have a rousing political speech again, that people don't have the attention span to sit through it, that it will only ever be snipped up and sent across the airwaves?
- [46:26]
B
Yeah, I think it's, it's not only possible, but it's actually necessary. One of the things I, you know, you learn things in writing a book and one of the things I learned is how much what people say, like the political storytelling, to use a phrase, has been driven throughout history by technology. So I start with Benjamin Franklin. In those days, you give a speech, the only people can hear are in the room, right. Then it's reprinted in newspapers. So you that favors kind of like an essay, like speech, 19th century people. Around the time when people like Frederick Douglass, there's a speaker circuit. So you're traveling around the country giving the same speech hundreds of times. That starts to favor like a certain degree of performance, like oratory. Right. Then radio comes along that favors kind of plain spoken explanation. FDR mastered this. Right. Like I'm going to explain things to you. You can listen to it in your living room, then tv. And that favors spectacle and charisma. Right. King and Kennedy, like the big crowds and the charismatic figure. Well, now we're in the age of the Internet and social media and what that's done is people don't consume whole arguments anymore. They don't watch. You know, in the 08, when I was a speecher in the 08 Obama campaign, I still knew that a big speech, like some people would watch the whole thing on television or read the transcript online. Now all you get is an algorithmically designed. The reason those people like Elon and Zuckerberg are so symbiotic with Trump is their business model is we're going to deliver something that is algorithmically designed to either make you really angry at the people you hate or really reinforce in the sense that you're right. And Trump is the perfect figure for that age because his speeches are kind of one hour rants and rallies where he knows nobody's going to consume all that other than the absolute diehards. But the next day it's just going to. The social media will do its work for him. The platforms of Zuckerberg and Musk will hand deliver that into everybody's feeds and polarize them. And I truly believe that unless we learn how to counter program that and tell like make whole arguments and tell a story about what is going on and make people believe that we can get out of this. Because I think what Trump has in common with those tech oligarchs is they want to make people believe it can't change. It has to be this way. You couldn't possibly regulate social media. You couldn't Possibly regulate artificial intelligence. You don't even understand it. Or the political system is so dysfunctional that it could never do it. Well, that's absolutely absurd. Of course we can do it. This is democracy. We could choose to do that if we wanted to do it. And if you look at our history, the Gilded Age was followed by the Progressive Era, like this country is ripe for some real reform. But I think it requires making arguments again.
- [49:31]
A
So if you're thinking about writing speeches again for another Democratic leader who is out there, that enthuses you.
- [49:41]
B
So I. And again, I talk a little bit in here about the history, the movements, the people that did this, but also what makes the speech work. And to me, it's people who don't just tell you what they want to do, they tell you why they want to do it. They give you a sense of their motivation and they connect dots for people. They tell a whole story about what's happening. It's not a list. And when I look at the Democrats, it's interesting. Everybody's sick of these Democrats that are. That seem so afraid of losing that they talk like nobody's ever spoken before. You know, like Biden and Harris both had this phrase. It drove me nuts. It was, we need an economy that works from the bottom up to the middle out.
- [50:23]
A
It's like just one of those.
- [50:25]
B
What the hell does that mean? Like some consultant focus group that. But it doesn't mean it's thing there's no people in that. But when I look at younger Democrats, like when I look at a Jon Ossoff, he's telling a story that connects those dots for people about why the corruption is leading to the outcomes. Right? Like that when a clique of people can do whatever they want, like here's why that means you can't afford things.
- [50:49]
A
So you're connecting the corruption to the impact of people in real life.
- [50:53]
B
That's right. Or I look at Talarico, what he does well. James Talarico in Texas. What he does well is I'm going to really give you a sense of my motivation. His faith compels him to believe that you have to care for your neighbor, which leads to the policy. Democrats sometimes lead with the policy, not the motivation. The motivation is where you get the connection with the audience. Or Alexandra Ocasio Cortez. What she has that I like that the kind of activists in this book had is she's in the face of all these powerful. And frankly, Mamdani has it too. She's fearless and joyful, you know, joyous joyous Democrats have been for the whole Trump decade were just grim, you know, and angry. Like, the 08 Obama campaign was the most joyful thing I was ever part of. And guess what? People want to be a part of that. And if they see that an AOC is out there, a Mamdani's out there, and some people are beating the heck out of them and they, they seem like they don't care, that makes them less afraid, too. It makes people be like, well, you know, they're beating the, out of her. But like, she seems to be doing it with a smile on her face, like, maybe I want to join that, you know, so these younger Democrats have figured it out. And I think part of the reason why people are so frustrated with the older Democrats isn't one, they won't leave and, but two, like, they, they don't sound like people like these, these younger generation. They sound more like, you know, people, you know.
- [52:19]
A
Do you think Graham Platner is going to end up being the candidate? I mean, I know he's currently the candidate, but Janet Mills, the governor of Maine, who wanted that seat too, to run against Susan Collins, do you think, given the drama around him, which he seems to explain away, I think he's rather convincing the way he explains it away and says, well, I've changed and, you know, God forbid that we're judged on all our previous behaviors. Do you think he's actually a good example of that?
- [52:51]
B
Yeah, I like Graham Platner. I spent a bunch of hours talking to him for a piece I wrote in part about him for the New York Times. And look, that guy saw some terrible stuff, right? I mean, he was in as a Marine. As a Marine. So when he was a Marine infantryman, you know, he, and I know this by the way, that the piece was fact checked, you know, with people that served with him. Him, he saw people he was close to get blown apart. He saw kids get blown apart in his 20s. So the idea, and by the way, I know a lot of veterans and I know a lot of other people who've been in wars, refugees who've been through trauma. The idea that that guy would go to some pretty dark places for a pretty long time is pretty credible to me. Like, if he didn't, by the way, that'd be strange. And so am I here to defend everything that Graham Platner has done? Absolutely not. I will say, and this is what I really don't like about the Democrats that are piling on Platner or some of the cynical Stuff with him. This is why people don't go into politics. If you want normal leaders, if you want people that are recognizable to you and they're going to look out for your interests, and then you make a barrier to entry that, oh, shit, if I go into politics, someone's going to do with my Reddit history or I had an affair 15 years ago, or, I mean, my God, all we're gonna be left with are, like, MAGA Republicans who feel no shame about those things and so they get elected, or the person who is running for president from when they were 15 years old, that is usually someone that people don't like that much. I actually feel pretty strongly about. And again, Graham Platner, I don't know him that well. Maybe he did terrible things. I'm just saying that the idea that we're gonna say, you know what, you're out. Well, what does that say to any veteran or anybody with anything in their past? That the Democratic Party is a place where a bunch of, tsk, tsk, I thought we were over. Cancel culture here. What are we doing, people? I actually feel pretty strongly about this. Like, this is between him and his wife or. And I don't care, but it's like subreddit from 15 years ago. Give me a break. You know that? Sorry, you got me. I don't know why that's the thing that riled me up. Well, I've been kind of watching this out of the corner of my eye and not getting it and not understanding, like, what are we doing here? Okay, so let's go back to the octogenigerian career politician that was losing by 40 points in the polls. Like, that's your pathway to victory. It doesn't make any sense to me.
- [55:40]
A
Well, your book makes a lot of sense. Highly recommend it. And thank you so much for coming in to talk to us. It's really fascinating. And literally, you have the two most relevant countries in your background, unfortunately.
- [55:55]
B
Yeah, yeah. Thanks a lot. It was great talking to you.
- [56:02]
A
I love talking to Ben Rhodes, and I really want to recommend his book. You can dip in and out of the way. You can focus on just one speech, and it really covers the sort of complexity of what it feels like to be an American now. And of course, ever since the Benjamin Franklin speech, that he starts with the sort of complicated evolution of America, the two steps forward, one step back. And. Well, I guess we're in the one step back phase at the moment. Anyway, if you have been, thank you for joining us. Don't forget to subscribe we are independent media, so we appreciate your support and we're really trying to get to a million subscribers by the end of the year. Big thanks to our production team, Ryan Murray, John Romero, Rachel Passer, Heather Passaro and Neil Rosenhaus. So the good news is we have so many Beebeast Tier members now, there are too many names to read out and we really appreciate your support.