← The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim
The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim
‘F*** Around, Find Out’: Trump takes on the world
00:35:39
Does the key to understanding Donald Trump’s foreign policy lie in the President’s New York business dealings in the 1970s? That’s what Richard and Yalda ask themselves this week on the podcast. From tariffs to trade wars and a proposed slashing of...
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- [00:00]
James Matthews
Donald Trump is heading back to the White House.
- [00:03]
Richard Engel
Together, we can truly make America great again. We are in for an unpredictable but fascinating four years.
- [00:10]
James Matthews
And we're going to be following every twist and turn for the first 100 days. We'll be bringing you the latest updates and analysis first thing every morning. So join me, James Matthews, me, Martha.
- [00:22]
Richard Engel
Calmick, and me, Mark Stone for Trump.
- [00:24]
James Matthews
100 every weekday at 6:00am, wherever you get your podcast.
- [00:43]
Yalda Hakim
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the world with me, Yalda Hakim, and I'm currently in London.
- [00:49]
Richard Engel
Yalda, it's great to see you. This is Richard Engel and I am in Lisbon right now, but heading out the door very soon. And what a busy week it has been. Another crazy busy week. And we're going to try and break it down, help people understand what is happening and where this is all going.
- [01:08]
Yalda Hakim
We have had so much feedback on last week's episode, including several questions about Syria, your time at the Al Hol camp. So, so we're going to address all of these questions and of course, talk about the whirlwind that has been week three of Donald Trump's presidency and some of the massive issues that have come out, including tariffs, of course, and the big question around what to do with usaid.
- [01:38]
Richard Engel
And of course, you can follow us wherever you get your podcasts. And our email to write in those comments and questions is the world@sky.uk so let's get into it.
- [01:59]
Yalda Hakim
So, Richard, as I was saying, we have had a lot of feedback from our listeners, especially around the question of Alhol. We talked last week about, you know, the fact that the Kurds are looking after this camp which is housing tens of thousands of ISIS families, up to 10,000 ISIS fighters themselves. And one of the things that we talked about and I raised was the fact that the Americans are paying for the salaries of these Kurds who are looking after the prisons. You were talking about having concerns about there being a prison breakout. And one of the things we raised was the fact that many of them aren't coming to work at the moment because their salaries aren't being paid, because, of course, Donald Trump had turned off the taps. And the question that we were being asked by a number of listeners is why on earth should US Taxpayers be paying any government employees in Syria, of all places? They've gone on to say that U.S. taxes need to stay in the U.S. another person said, charity begins at home. So big questions about why on earth American money should be going out and, you know, funding Kurdish prison workers, for example.
- [03:24]
Richard Engel
So it's a great question. And basically they're right. American taxpayer money should go to benefit Americans. Right. And if there's plenty of work, plenty of things that can be done in the United States or other close countries that'll directly benefit Americans, that should be a priority. Right, that, that makes sense. But there are certain international issues that have no borders. And if you want to protect your air and your water or your public safety from terrorism, you can't just necessarily look in the United States. So how. This is obviously in people's interests. And again, I'm not getting a cut from these current salary here. It's not that I'm pushing this policy, but I've spoken to a lot of Kurds, of US Military officials, of intelligence officials, who are deeply concerned about this issue and think that this is certainly a worthwhile investment. So it's not that I'm pushing it. This is the argument that is being made by many serious people who I take seriously. There are roughly 10,000 ISIS fighters in jails, poorly guarded jails, jails that are being guarded currently by the Kurds. So 10,000 ISIS fighters, that's a large number. That's an ISIS army in waiting. That's a whole division of the military of military age, males in prison who are angry, who haven't gotten any less angry by being locked up for the last decade. And then in addition to them, you have about 40,000 of their family members who are trapped in a hopeless situation in this alhold camp where they're trying to break out and they're getting ever more radicalized and they've taken over the camp. So the Kurds are also keeping that situation contained. Now, neither of these situations has a good outcome right now. The prison, there's no sentences, there's no structure there. It's not sustainable in the long term. Some kind of court system, reintegration system, sending them back to their home countries, whatever. The process needs to be done, that needs to happen. The camp, it just sits there in the middle of the desert, getting bigger and more and more radical every year. And there are certain countries that are slowly taking their people home one at a time. But just saying, oh, we're going to walk away from this, forget this, we've had enough. While there are plenty of steps that can be done to make it better and to make it more sustainable, to eliminate these camps and eliminate the problem, Sure, a thousand percent welcome. But just saying, ah, this isn't our money. Okay, sure, it's not your money, but would you want 10,000 ISIS fighters released who could go any place, including the United States, including Europe. Europe's a lot closer. So one could argue that this should be, you know, Europe paying this problem. But it's truly a transnational problem. So anybody who has a vested interest should in not having tens of thousands of ISIS fighters and their families who potentially the next generation of ISIS on the loose.
- [06:29]
Yalda Hakim
Like everything else that Donald Trump does, he's now sort of sifting through all these government departments and talking about USAID that's been around since the 1960s to. Well, he's now said initially Elon Musk said that the president, I have the blessings of the president will going to shut this department down. It's spending billions of dollars. It's inefficient. He described it as when you have an apple with a worm inside, you can take one worm out. I mean, it was a weird, weird way to describe it. But he said this is like a bowl of worms.
- [07:04]
Richard Engel
I listened to it. He was in an interview listening to him describe it, saying, nothing but worms. It's all worms, it's all rotten.
- [07:11]
Yalda Hakim
Exactly, yes. And so he's saying, first of all, they said they wanted to shut it down. Well, frankly you can't just shut it down. It's. It would have to go and be fought in the courts. Just talk about your experience in terms of where you've seen the benefits and perhaps on some level where there has been mismanagement and it hasn't necessarily been as efficient. And, and does Donald Trump and Elon Musk have a point when they say that it's corrupt?
- [07:41]
Richard Engel
So a lot to pack in there. And yolo, you know this world very well. You have a charity, you've worked directly with USAID before. So I'm going to flip that question on you in a. But I've seen USAID operate and misoperate my entire career because I've worked in the Middle east, across the Middle east, worked all across Africa and it's changed significantly. So I'd work in Afghanistan or not at work in Afghanistan. And what it became or what it kind of has become is a refunding agency that it still has big budgets, it still does a lot of very important work. It spends a lot on women's healthcare and reproductive rights and food security, providing basic nourishment for areas that are in famine. It has a world class famine tracking system. So it provides a benefit to the world, but it is very bureaucratic. It is basically a refunding organization. So it's almost like when you do your house they're the large contractor, but then they hire smaller contractors to actually do the work, subcontractors. And that's a pretty inefficient system. It costs a lot of money, but for the organization, it means they don't have to have as many people on their payroll. So there's a bit of a cost washout there. But they're not particularly efficient, they're not particularly effective in terms of pursuing policy. It's a bit shotgun a blast of what they do, but removing them, and now it doesn't look like he wants to remove them. He wants to take them under control of the government. And this goes back, this makes more sense. It goes back to exactly the point that we've been talking about on this podcast for the last several weeks now. It's all about the executive takeover of the United States. So here is usaid. It was handing out benefits and goodies to the, to the world in a kind of disorganized way through subcontractors, very expensive. And Trump in his inner circle, and Trump decided, well, we're not getting any benefit out of this. Why do we care if money is spent to help such and such a cause in some place that doesn't directly affect him? So now Rubio, the acting secretary of, actually the confirmed Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, says that he wants it to become under the State Department. Then USAID becomes another lever of power, another instrument of executive control, so that when Trump goes to a country, and by the way, this is exactly what, what China does currently and what the way the way aid operates in a lot of worlds. It's very, very cynical. And I've seen this myself many, many times in, in African country where aid becomes a sweetener. It is not just aid for AIDS sake, in order to stop the spread of malaria so that malaria doesn't kill lots of babies and mutate and become, you know, anti unkillable. No. Or it's not to stop AIDS before AIDS mutates again and comes back and kills all of us, or to keep ISIS in a box somewhere far away so it doesn't break out. It's transactional. And he wants that transactional power.
- [11:02]
Yalda Hakim
I mean, when you look at the costs of it, it's staggering billions and billions of dollars. And you and I, Richard, have both worked in places like Afghanistan, for example. Do you remember all of the ghost schools that would get built the subcontracting that you're talking about? America showed up with billions of dollars and said, we're going to fund this project and that project and the idea and the concept was always, it always felt like, oh, this is a good idea. But it turned into a massive war economy where billions of dollars were wasted and you'd go to some remote village somewhere and you'd say, where's that school that they said they were going to build? Oh, it was supposed to be here, but it never got built because the subcontractor who subcontracted it to someone else ran off with billions of dollars. And so on the one hand, you can see why if you're trawling through all of these different departments and you think, oh my God, there's so much money being spent on, on X, Y and Z, Y. I mean, the example I can give you, just the foundation that we set up, there were different American departments coming to us and saying, you can have tens of millions of dollars to do this project. And our guys, and I'm a journalist, so I'm like, I don't want your tens of millions of dollars. But there needs to be a level of accountability. So our guys would put a budget together and say, actually for the project that you're offering, 90 million, for example, and this wasn't USAID, by the way, this was another department.
- [12:36]
Richard Engel
Yalu, do me a favor, tell people what your project is. I know, I know your charity, but I think it'll help understand, like, what is she talking about? 90 million to do what?
- [12:46]
Yalda Hakim
So I started in 2017 or 2018, a foundation for girls education out of Afghanistan. I was approached by the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul. They wanted to name a scholarship in my name. We decided to turn it into a foundation so it wouldn't be a one off and it would be something that we could offer disadvantaged Afghan girls to have a chance at a better life and an education. The fees were really, really high at this university in Kabul, mainly because of security and because bringing lecturers in from the United States and various other places cost a lot of money. Like all things in Afghanistan, every project you touch cost a lot of money. Anyway, so we set this up. Kabul then collapses. I've got all these young women who we've put through these scholarship programs who are at the university, need to be evacuated. I had at one point, I mean, millions of dollars being poured into our foundation because while the American government may have let down the Afghan people, the American people did not. And they dug deep and they, they had deep pockets and they put a lot of money into helping young Afghan women evacuate from out of the country. So we set up lots of Projects in places like Iraq and Albania, for example, to set up shop and have these young women there and their families until America was able to process their documents and get them to the United States. In Albania, for example, we were one of a number of foundations and charities. We would put budgets together for projects and various different departments in the United States would say, Here's 100 million. And we'd say, whoa, wait, that's not how much it's going to cost. It's going to cost like 2 million or 3 million. And we're able to do it in quite an efficient way and lead these projects without spending tens of millions of dollars. But you can imagine, Richard, there would be others who would happily take those large sums of money for overheads, for different things, administrative costs. And this is how you can see where things can start to go wrong when there's no accountability. And I can see why something like USAID can suddenly balloon and have overheads, administrative costs in all of these places subcontract, as you say, and suddenly billions of dollars is being spent and perhaps being mismanaged. Now, that's not to take away from the fact that they also have a number of life saving HIV projects, health projects, famine projects, polio projects, educational projects that they have that have been incredibly effective and efficient. But there is also something to be said about the level of mismanagement here as well.
- [15:51]
Richard Engel
And I think you've seen it. I've seen it. I saw it in Iraq the first time and I saw it in Afghanistan in a tremendous way. I remember those schools you're talking about, these ghost schools. Then when you go there, it wasn't even really done. That happened many times. I would see this building that should have cost a couple of million, 3 million maximum. And then you'd go there and then they tell you, oh, this cost $20 million. And the USAID people never like to tell you exactly how much cost. They would blur it. And, well, we'd have to go and check it was done through different subcontractors and you'd have to really tug at them to get the final approximate bill, which was always in the tens of millions of dollars. And then the place was falling down. You go into the bathroom, you turn on the tap and the tap comes off in your hand, the doorknobs pull off. So done with incredibly shoddy work. But is there a way to split the difference?
- [16:47]
Yalda Hakim
Yeah, I mean, the thing is, Richard, that you can see how an agency like this is an easy target for Donald Trump. It's easy to Burn these things down. But what are you going to replace it with? How are you going to reform and rebuild?
- [17:04]
Richard Engel
It's just become another tariff, another financial, relatively blunt tool that the executive branch now can use to get what it wants. You know, you don't agree with us, we're going to put a tariff on it. You don't agree with us, we're going to cut usaid. You agree with us, we're going to give you a little bit more of that pet project, maybe through a favorite charity that may or may not be close to some member of the ruling family. And that's the world we're living in. And you know what? It's a very New York world. Trump is from New York. I'm a New York City guy. I grew up in the city. I live overseas now. I cover the US from the outside in. But I grew up looking at Trump. He was always on the newspaper, tabloids, internationally. He's just been around for the last, you know, decade or so. But as a New Yorker, he's close to 80. I'm just over 50. So he's been a factor in my life really, as far as I remember. Every time I remember going to the supermarket in New York. So I grew up in the city, on the island in New York. Trump Tower was 20 minute walk, 15 minute walk from my, my house. He was always a feature of New York society. People think of New York City now as a relatively clean, expensive, modern place. It was pretty nasty when I grew up there. We're talking 40 years ago when I was a kid in New York and in the 70s, very early 80s, it was rough. You could get mugged. There were real downtrodden areas, slums where the Trump family had a lot of properties. There were parts of New York City where you really didn't go, you know, a young white kid didn't go to certain parts of New York because you would get, you'd get beat up or you, you know, or, or worse. But, but beat up was, was a pretty standard thing. And it was also a city with a, with a big mob presence. And I don't want to get, you know, say Trump was a mobster or anything like that, but he certainly being involved in big construction in the 70s and 80s in New York, he rubbed shoulders with a lot of people in the mob and that. And he's talked about this, this is not a secret. He kind of liked the way they did business. And it was all, you know, control. It was all based on your, your word, your word was your Bond. And if you could, you know, cut corners, then, then you did. And, you know, if you had to screw your business partner and not pay them, you did. If you didn't take an advantage, you were a sucker. And if you saw an advantage and you failed to capitalize on it, then you were weak and someone else was going to take your place. Very dog eats dog, very aggressive. It's the same mentality that you see now in the foreign policy goes back to that New York, 1970s, early 80s, where you wanted to be a tough guy, you wanted to be a wise guy, and construction was a major thing. You don't build major buildings in New York City or you didn't at the time without rubbing some shoulders with some tough guys.
- [20:25]
Yalda Hakim
Yeah, and Donald Trump always had a chip on his shoulder because of course, he wasn't in the in crowd. He was from Queens and in many ways, while he was part of the tabloids and he was quite a larger than life figure in New York City, he wasn't part of the elite or the establishment, was he, Richard? I mean, he was an outsider. And in many ways they sort of behind closed doors poked fun at him. You know, his Trump Tower, the way that it looks, the way that he carried on, you know, he wasn't one of the in crowd. And I think that chip on his shoulder remains to this day.
- [21:08]
Richard Engel
He wasn't part of the, the old establishment. His family had real estate, Queens, a lot of broken down real estate. They weren't from one of the big sort of. I'm not, they're not royal families, but aristocratic families of the United States. But he had money, he had smarts, he had, you know, a desire to be well known. And it wasn't a mistake that he was on the, an accident that he was on the COVID of all the tabloids every week. That takes some effort to cultivate the right tabloid sources. And his relationship with the National Enquirer has now been, is quite well explored. Catch and kill to promote his image and kill other stories that would be negative against him, but he was part of this nouveau riche. He would go to the clubs, he would be photographed at the clubs, and he was always on. Do you remember the show Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous?
- [22:00]
Yalda Hakim
Of course. Yeah.
- [22:02]
Richard Engel
And so of course he would be on stalls on the rich and famous talking about his big yacht and big buildings and gold offices with his name on the top. And for some of the older New York families, that was pretty distasteful. But now he's, he's saying well, who got the last laugh now?
- [22:21]
Yalda Hakim
Yeah, absolutely.
- [22:22]
Richard Engel
Now that they're all coming, falling up in line to, to get into, you know, Mar a Lago and kissing the.
- [22:28]
Yalda Hakim
Ring and just talking there about the mob, he now has this sort of new acronym or sort of meme where he says around and find out. And I guess many people, it feels the last three weekends, whether it's the Danes or the Colombians, and this week it was the Canadians and the Mexicans, they're finding out. And we're going to talk about that after the break.
- [23:07]
James Matthews
Donald Trump is heading back to the White House.
- [23:10]
Richard Engel
Together, we can truly make America great again. We are in for an unpredictable but fascinating four years.
- [23:17]
James Matthews
And we're going to be following every twist and turn for the first 100 days. We'll be bringing you the latest updates and analysis first thing every morning. So join me, James Matthews, me, Martha.
- [23:29]
Richard Engel
Kalnick, and me, Mark Stone for Trump.
- [23:31]
James Matthews
100 every weekday at 6:00am, wherever you get your podcast.
- [23:46]
Richard Engel
Okay, we're back. And we're going to talk tariffs and we're going to be pretty, pretty, pretty quick.
- [23:51]
Yalda Hakim
Yeah. Okay. So, Richard, before the break, we were talking about this new acronym of Donald Trump's around and find out, and, you know, let's talk about tariffs, because this is a tool in Donald Trump's toolbox. He loves using it, he loves pulling it out. He threatened throughout the campaign trail. I mean, frankly, he'd made these threats and acted on them during Trump 1.0 and throughout the campaign, the presidential campaign, he talked about tariffs a lot. He'd put China, Mexico, Canada on notice. And lo and behold, week three, he's made those threats and waited, I guess, till the 11th hour to see what the other side would do. So let's talk through what happened in the last 24, 48 hours.
- [24:47]
Richard Engel
So tariffs are great for Trump because they're a tool of executive power. He can do them relatively easily. They're easy to understand. You don't need a lot of approval for them, for example, declaring war in the United States, in order to declare war, you need the approval of the full government. You need to have Congress's approval. Tariffs are one of these things that he can do on his own pretty quickly, and everyone knows exactly what it is. And so far, it seems like he's been using them to get people's attention to kind of bully and push around relatively small countries.
- [25:22]
Yalda Hakim
Let's talk about it. Break it down in, you know, let's talk about Mexico first, then we can talk about Canada, then China. So let's just talk through what happened with Mexico, because things started to develop quite quickly. A couple of phone calls in and, you know, they both sort of said, okay, fine, we'll wait 30 days. But if we just go back to the beginning of this and what Trump was. Was actually threatening.
- [25:48]
Richard Engel
So Trump was threatening some direct tariffs, 25% tariffs on things that came in from Mexico. He wanted to cut off Mexico, make it expensive for Mexican products to come over the border and into the United States. And economists have said this would have an inflationary pressure. Have inflationary pressure on the US that it would cause prices to go up, that sure it would harm Mexico, but that the medicine might be as bad or worse than the cure. And there were a lot of people that I know who watch the markets and play the markets and have money in the financial system that thought this was a bad idea and were hoping that. That it would get to this point, that Trump was just using this as a kind of lever to spark negotiations. And I read an interesting article the other day. I think it was in the Wall Street Journal saying how the markets. Wall street is starting to understand this pattern. It isn't freaking out every time he talks about tariffs because they recognize that it is a tool that he likes to use in order to reopen previously closed trade agreements and to get people to talk. You better talk with me, Yalda, or I'm going to, you know, put a 25% tariff on you. Okay. Okay, Richard, what do you want? You come over and you sort it out. So if that's his. His process, I don't say fine, but so far, so good as opp. So far as so good because it hasn't escalated, it hasn't become a full trade war, because so far he's gotten what he wants. Question is, what happens when he doesn't get what he wants? And that's what worries me. Now we have this podcast, which is fabulous, and we can sit back and think about these ideas and think about where this world is going. So far, the tariffs are peaceful. You could disagree with them. They could be very expensive, disruptive for the economy, for the currencies, for commodities markets. They could be very disruptive financially, but they're not warlike. You're not sending troops or drones or tanks or artillery shells to, To. To. To fight, into a combat role. What happens if these. If he doesn't get what he wants and he starts using other means? You talked about soft power. He's all been using, you know, peaceful, hard power, cutting back US Aid or I think targeting it, putting it under more executive control, using tariffs in order to reopen trade agreements and, and sort of bully your neighbors. Okay, that's all hard power, but it's peaceful hard power. The only non peaceful use of hard power we've seen so far is him deploying some troops to the border. And that's also in kind of defensive role. They're going to be there to sort of watch over the border and watch over what the border authorities are doing in the United States. But is this a slippery slope? It's all about executive takeover and executive control. What happens when the tariffs don't work, when people don't start responding, when these peaceful tools of hard power don't seem to work? I worried about the tendency, the accumulation of all this power toward the center, how you use it, because right now it's all been basically at his discretion.
- [29:04]
Yalda Hakim
Yeah, and I mean, if you look at what happened with Mexico, he said, I want illegal immigrants to stop flowing into my country, country from the southern border and I want the drugs trade to stop. So fentanyl to stop. So he talked about fentanyl, he talked about illegal aliens, and he threatened, as you say, 25% tariffs. So suddenly you were going to pay a lot of money. If you wanted to make guacamole or, you know, if you like tomato in your salads, you would have to pay a lot of money. And I mean, we laugh about these things, but ultimately the American people voted Donald Trump in and one of the things that they had top of the agenda was the economy and concerns about grocery prices and inflation. And they wanted to punish the Biden administration because of inflation and how much they were paying for things. So the fact that Donald Trump is saying, well, it's going to hurt you a little bit, but in the long run it's going to be a good thing because we're going to get what we want. We're going to stop the flow of these so called illegal aliens and we're going to stop the flow of, of drugs that are killing the American people. Now, what he got out of this threat of, of the tariffs, sure, we, we woke up Monday morning and found that the markets were panicking, freaking out, but it also backed the Mexicans into a corner that he had a phone call with the Mexican president and the agreement they came to was, fine, I'll send, the Mexican president said, I'll send 10,000 troops to the border and I'll ensure that we monitor the flow of both fentanyl and people. So Donald Trump gets Effectively, it works on some level. It's uncomfortable for business.
- [30:46]
Richard Engel
And the avocados keep coming.
- [30:47]
Yalda Hakim
The avocados keep coming. It's uncomfortable for business leaders, it's uncomfortable for the lawyers. It's a bit of a shock and a jolt for the markets. But again, that warning shot that he sent, I'm prepared to use this. I'm prepared to take this to the 11th hour. I'm not going to back down until I get what I want. Same thing happened with the Canadians. Where. The Canadians, though, had a moment, Richard, where they were like, okay, you know, you've got these illegal immigrants coming from the south southern border, and you've got fentanyl coming in. It's relatively small. What's happening here? What do you want from us? You know, that was the big question. I mean, I spoke to some Canadians yesterday and, and one said to me, we're really having to rethink our entire relationship with the United States here, because why are you deliberately trying to hurt us? And what we found is it's inspired economic patriotism. But we don't want no country should be forced to feel this way suddenly and for it to unite us because we face the threat of going into recession in five months time, because Donald Trump is saying, I'm going to slap you with 25% tariffs and Yalda.
- [32:02]
Richard Engel
This goes back to the basic issue. America's allies feel bullied. And it goes back to that New Yorker attitude. If you have an advantage and you don't push it, you're stupid, you're a sucker. If you see an opportunity to make some money or the contract is written in some sort of flexible way, and if you, you don't take advantage of it, then you're a fool and you're weak and the next shock is going.
- [32:28]
Yalda Hakim
To eat you up.
- [32:30]
Richard Engel
And that mentality is what is bringing him, driving him through the White House. And a lot of Americans thought that was great. So far, everything is falling his way, but he's not always going to get his way. And what's going to happen if there's a major terrorist attack, if one of these ISIS cells breaks out, these ISIS cells that nobody wants to pay for, and suddenly there's a major issue. That's always what worries me when you have too much centralization of power, that you have an event, a dramatic jolt, some sort of opportunity to consolidate power even more and take the country in a potentially very different direction. That's what worries me, globally, as you say.
- [33:20]
Yalda Hakim
I mean, he's behaving like this with allies but he's also trying to put pressure on China. When you speak to American generals and you say, well, if you were to go to war with China today, maybe today we'd win that war. But I'm not quite sure where we would be in 5 years time in terms of the kind of investments that China is making in its military and technology and cyber warfare. So will that same sort of thing apply if he tries to bully China in the same sort of way?
- [33:54]
Richard Engel
So I think that might bring us to predictions. Yes. Shall we now do the most dangerous part of our week?
- [34:04]
Yalda Hakim
Well, you seem to be getting them. You get them pretty close to the mark, so I'm going to let you go first.
- [34:10]
Richard Engel
Well, I think we're going to see more on tariffs and I think it's going to be the eu. He hasn't talked about the eu and he started to bully small allies and had relatively successful time of it. Canada, Mexico, these aren't tiny countries and they folded China with a small sanction, the Mult tariff. They're saying they want to talk. I think EU has got to be next because it's a big bloc, it's a huge trading partner. He talks about how the EU is consistently ripping off the US in terms of balance of trade. I think they're coming soon.
- [34:52]
Yalda Hakim
Yeah. And given we talk about the Middle east almost every week. Richard didn't talk about it this week. Well, a little bit with the alcohol.
- [35:01]
Richard Engel
We're about to. You're about to.
- [35:02]
Yalda Hakim
But what I was going to say is Benjamin Netanyahu is visiting Donald Trump and we know that the ceasefire has been shaky. I'm going to keep an eye on that over the course of the next week to see what happens, because there are concerns on the ground that things are quite shaky. Who knows where the ceasefire could end up and how things could blow up there. So I'm keeping a close eye on the situation there.
- [35:32]
Richard Engel
So possibly breakdown of the ceasefire. That's what you're thinking?
- [35:36]
Yalda Hakim
Maybe. Maybe hearing murmurings on the ground.
- [35:39]
Richard Engel
Wouldn't be surprising. Wouldn't be surprising. Could be one of these breakdowns. As we've discussed, that happens. It falls apart for a week. It allows them to do some Israelis to do some more military operations, try and beat back Hamas. The Israelis have not been happy about the way that these handovers have been taking place.
- [35:56]
Yalda Hakim
Yes. So I'll be keeping an eye on the situation there.
- [36:01]
Richard Engel
All right, Yalda, wonderful spending some time with you. My favorite part of the week and thanks to everyone who is listening. And the numbers are growing, which is always encouraging to, to, to see. And those who want to write in your questions, you see, we are getting to them and they're really interesting. Your questions and comments you could write to us@theworld sky.uk Richard, always good to see you.
- [36:27]
Yalda Hakim
See you soon.
- [36:28]
Richard Engel
See you soon.
- [36:39]
James Matthews
Donald Trump is heading back to the White House.
- [36:42]
Richard Engel
Together, we can truly make America great again. We are in for an unpredictable but fascinating four years, and we're going to.
- [36:50]
James Matthews
Be following every twist and turn for the first 100 days. We'll be bringing you the latest updates and analysis first thing every morning. So join me, James Matthews, me, Martha.
- [37:01]
Richard Engel
Kalnick and me, Mark Stone for Trump.
- [37:03]
James Matthews
100 every weekday at 6:00am Wherever you get your podcast.