so good to be here in palm springs. thank you for the invite. i was in dreary durham yesterday. durham? yeah. i was speaking to the class at duke. i cut a deal where i would go do it if they brought me to a basketball game. it's worth it. it's a good deal. worth it but still a cut. does everybody ben rhodes. you didn't get booed yet. all i'll see i i just want to

start by saying you know these these political books obviously you've got a lot of folks that come to these things. i've written a political and many of them are very smart. but sometimes they feel kind of like homework, you know, and that they are reciting, you know, what went through. and as i was thinking about, i wanted to write. i had go back and reread a lot of it. i didn't have to i wanted to reread everybody's books and and ben's they're going to talk about today after the fall was one that really struck with them it stuck me because it seemed like, hey, you were really deeply reflecting on your experience and wasn't just kind of this memoir of, oh, this happened, and that happened and that happened, but it was was trying to think about my own impressions of my job. when i went into the job. and when i think about that now, what i've learned and, and that influenced a lot. and i really highly recommend it if you haven't read it, just on that regard alone. but i'm just kind of wondering what, you know, what was the

process for you like when you thought about writing the book? why did you want to write it? what did you want to get out of it? well, thanks for that, tim. and your book actually accomplishes that in spades. we didn't plan this before, by the way, that you you got to book. it's very searching personal. and if i didn't like it i would tell you. i promise he would actually. but i. well for me, the starting point was, you know, this thing happened where after eight years working in the white house, donald trump was elected president and. the other for me was very even more disorienting because i was 29 years old when i went to work on the obama campaign 2008. and most people don't stay the white house for eight years for a good reason but i did and so as 39 on inauguration day 2017 and it was literally like being spit out on the other end of some insane chain wormhole that i'd dropped into and i was dropped into dystopia for me, you know, because everything

we've been doing, everything i've been working on, everything i was proud of had culminated in this handoff to people that then immediately set about trying to dismantle everything i'd worked on. and so it's a very disorienting experience and. it took me a while to kind of literally catch my breath. i think it would normally, in even normal circumstances, but given the extremity of what was happening, the stakes that i felt the war was happening, i was very disoriented. i must have little memory of the early months of 2017. and then i found interesting, which is when i traveled outside of the united states, what was happening in the united states somehow made more sense to me, it's a bit like being in a dysfunction. no family, not that my family has, any history of that. but it's an unsafe leave your family to see what's going on your own house. and so i started to notice some

things that some version of the same thing was happening everywhere with democracy and authoritarian and people's sense of disorientation, the world and and there was i knew was something there. and now i wrote a memoir of my time, the obama white house that i just did as fast as could. i wanted to get it out. but in my head i was like, there's something here about kind of trying to understand what's happening in america by looking at what's happening in other places. and for me, that jumping off point of the book was early 18. i was in germany, met a guy who's in the hungarian opposition. he's an anti-corruption activist is a and some things it's a good business to be in because there's a lot of corruption hungary but it's not easy to be an opposition to viktor orban who's basically a dictator in. and i said to him, well how did this happen? how did you go from being a liberal democracy in 2010? and viktor orban got to essentially a single party

autocracy. now, as we're meeting, he said, well, that's simple. viktor orban got elected on a right wing populist backlash to the financial crisis. he changed the voting laws to make it, easier for his supporters to vote and harder for others to vote against him. he packed the courts with far right judges who would find in favor of his power grabs. he enriched some cronies on the outside who financed his politics, bought up the media, turned into kind of a far right propaganda machinery in parallel, he wrapped it all up. he wrapped it all up in a nationalism, us versus them, us the true christian hungarians against them, the immigrants, muslims, george soros elites and i said, okay, this is the book because there's a different flavor of this happening everywhere. and so that started this journey for me of trying to tell the story about authoritarianism is on the rise in our country, around the world, through the

stories of different places. yeah, i want to get into those places that you went, but there is there's one element of the book that as maybe a wayward conservative that i kept thinking about when i was reading is there's this old line that we conservatives like to use to make ourselves feel better, which is the irving kristol about, you know, conservatives, just a liberal who is mugged by. yeah. and there was like this of that in your book like you felt you. i mean you were mugged by reality about as hard as anybody possibly be about by reality. i think donald you know stephen miller basically your old job, the white nationalist. literally. yeah, literally. yeah. so you know that did that make you just kind of talk about what that made you kind rethink? i'm not saying it made you change your policies. would that would that make you rethink about, you know, the world? no, i think it i think it's true. and that's why that irving kristol quote has endured. and and what was weird for me is that i was mugged for a foreign policy. i'm sure some didn't work out

the way i would have hoped they did around the world. i really got mugged at home. right. which is what's interesting. what i really examine. i examined in the book everything that all the assumptions i had and what i had to admit to myself is, you know, you and i are similar age. like i was born in kind of came of age politically at the time of kind of maximum triumphalism around, america, democracy, the inexorable nature of progress, our history yeah. arc of history like i was, you know, i was first kind of politically conscious and following events through the kind of late and the cold war and it felt like all this stuff had endings right. and and that was kind of wired into me, you know, never mind the fact that i was also like a white guy, new york city. and so, like being born at any time in human with any identity,

a white male american in new york city coming of age that time you are among the most wired to that. things work out and now i, i there were some intervening events. the, the thing that propelled me into national was 911. so obviously i and i witnessed those attacks. so i obviously knew that history wasn't over, but then my first major political campaign on the national stage i did some local stuff in new york was barack obama's 2008 campaign. and look how that out. you know. and so if i'm honest with myself, i do have and i did unpack in the book this experience of recognizing that that's not how history usually goes. and in fact when i looked at this, i look at putin russia or about in hungary. xi jumping in china this and i look at the us but this kind of strongman politics tribal politics that inexorably leads

to war and we see that now in ukraine that's actually the normal story of human history right like but that's what usually happens like countries become more nationalist the strongman takes over they demonize. the other and ultimately that autocratic strain at home leads to conflict and human beings live that cycle over and over and over and over again. and the exception was really this period from the end of world two to now essentially. now, it's not that that was perfect for the vietnam. we had all kinds of things, but you know, we have to correct that. no, this is actually what normally happens, right? like trump's seem really abnormal. no, this is lack of a normal state of human nature expressed through politics. and so it takes a lot of work to prevent that from happening. so knowing that, you know, let's look let's take you like back through the wormhole and, you know, with your bruises of

reality, like, how do you look at your time? obama particularly at threat foreign policy and you know, think man you know maybe if i was 39 and i'd started this and you know, obama was 55, you know, right. we didn't maybe have quite as much hubris and triumphalism about all of this. you know, might you have done anything differently. yes. but like interesting about it is and i go through this, the book, as you know, i go through the you know, a lot of different pieces of it. for me, it's actually not usually i could give you a list of things that i like or didn't like about our foreign policy. sure. but for me. the more fundamental thing i that again, i couldn't have control when i was 31 years old coming the white house. but what i really like peel the

more pulled the thread on what happened in these places. what i found and this is a main theme in the book was how profoundly impactful. the 2008 financial crisis was to politics right in there. in fact, there is one a hong kong official. i kind profiled the hong kong protest movement. this book and i sat down this anonymous hong kong official who met with me kind of quietly at the very it was late 2019 of the hong kong protest movement and. i said, i'm writing about the rise of nationalism, authoritarianism. do you think happened? i kind of started there with everybody. he said, well, that's quite simple. in 2008, the narrative of liberalism and democracy collapsed with the global economy. that's when people in the west started to ask, is really working out for us and a liberal took advantage of that sentiment and created politics grievance that's opened the door to people like putin to undermine the

global order and xi jinping and the chinese looked at this and said, why do we have to defer to the americans? you know for all time they thought the at least were good stewards of global economy. we can kind of be you know, we can kind of hitch our wagon to this order that the americans built. and after that crisis were like, we can these guys we don't need to buy our time and i say that not to absolve us of responsibility, but to say that i think we didn't fully appreciate when we came the scale of disruption that had taken place because of the financial. and so therefore, you know, an orban, right. who seemed like an eccentric, weird right winger in hungary. we didn't necessarily see this guy is actually trying undermine the european project right or when you know you this feeling of in this country around the world whether it's a tea party movement here or all the

manifestations, that kind of populism around the world, like i think we were slow to realize the extent to which that wasn't a spasm. right. just because of the financial crisis, it would kind of correct itself once growth was restored. but that that was that we had to speak to kind of fundamentally and that was by some of the things we saw as hopeful, like social media, right? obama gets elected as the first social media president. these tools then become tools to destroy democracy through disinformation or through surveillance and monitoring. the chinese version is surveillance. monitoring the russian one is disinformation. and so so we didn't do anything to try to curb the access in social media. so for me it's like, yeah, i could go through the foreign policy, but it's more like a fundamental slowness to appreciate the scale of disruption that was happening us which i think, if i had to do it over again, like, you know, you you just might have moved quicker.

certain areas. i don't know that we could have ever prevented the kind of wave that was building, but we could have, you know, built some some dams and levels, you know, some walls around it. okay. i want to go to the macro on this area. so this isn't more about specific foreign policies. i'm listening to all that. i'm wearing my neocon colored glasses. and i got to the end of your book and thought to myself, i think ben rhodes, be a closet neocon. i just don't know. he's ready to admit it yet because i hear all of that of of what you're saying and, that maybe i mean, this neocon in the sense of believing that america is a force for good in the world and that america should be more forward leaning and and their influence on the world. maybe not about the economic side of things. yeah. a because you know, you're talking to the dissidents in hong kong, you're talking to dissidents in hungary in these other places. and they're saying, oh, the american narrative is falling apart and that's allowing this

to rise. and each as i go through, the more i hear these counter-narrative there a darker and darker, right. i mean, orban explain to her, you know, she is is even darker orban's and so it makes it feel like we have this void we have to fill right however imperfect is that we're needed because. the alternative is so bad and it did feel like when obama came in and o8 is there is maybe a sense that actually america could kind of pull back a little bit? well, i think that. that's a really interesting question, tim. and yes, i have in dna sort of a speech than a question, you know but i have in my dna, you know, i was raised with is kind of a secular religion in my house, which was a useful middle ground because my mom was a liberal -- and my dad was a conservative methodist. we had interesting dinner table conversations in my brother's a libertarian, worked at fox news for 12 years. so when people say, ben rhodes, you're in some bubble. i'm like, not my dinner table is not a bubble, but america was a

secular religion, you know, in the belief. and in what america stood for. i was mugged by reality a couple of times. so and i started here to explain obama mentality coming in i moved down to washington to be a part of the response to 911 and i'd gone to an army recruiter that had no idea what to do with a 24 year old graduate student, nyu in fiction writing, if he had had a better pitch the week after 911, i would have probably end in the military, but they hadn't adjusted. yet they're like, you could learn how to be a computer scientist in the military. and i was like, no, that's all right. so i moved down to d.c. and i really wanted to be a part i was really rooting for george bush. i was stirred by his speeches. i read about this. and in the kind of cause of, you know, america's next great challenge, iraq. i got mugged by that reality because. i remember being like, well, iraq seems like weird response to 911 and but then all these

people i admired and colin powell most profoundly, like we must do this, you know, and all people that knew better than me, just some 24 year old, they all were for this war. and when that went so badly, i was like, wait a second, maybe people don't know what they're talking about. and and meanwhile, there is obama and i got on the obama train really in that senate campaign because he gave speeches about this was a mistake and and so the obama election americans even in 2008 were tired of wars and they were tired of iraq and they're tired of afghanistan. and and so there was a sense that we need to kind of pull back from how far had extended in the war on terror. now we have a long debate about i never thought pulling back from the war on terror meant pulling back from everything else. but to fast forward to this, the other element of your question,

i am very strange creature in, the national security establishment in that i move to the left during my time in government that's not usually what happens to people nationally, but for a bunch of reasons except i still fundamentally america has this indispensable role to play. and what i'd always say other people who are further to my left is if you don't like the american led order, where do you find out about the russian and chinese led order? right. right. and in the book i talk to alexei navalny. he's my main russian character. he's now in a prison cell in solitary confinement. russia. these hong kong protesters who saw their city basically extinguished in terms its freedoms, the hungarian opposition has been grounded up. and what was so interesting is they could give the bad story about america. right. and alexei navalny story was basically like, you know, when you are in mess, he's like my whole life. and alexei navalny is by be pretty be a republican in the united states.

my whole life you probably write for the bulwark actually, my whole life i've been making an argument that democracy produces better, people who are less corrupt and. you guys elected trump and now i can't even win an argument with a cab driver, you know. and then he hit obama too too. so, you know, it's as you said, my life i said these guys are crooks and thieves who only take care of the oligarchs and don't care about the ordinary people. and there you guys are in the united states. and after the financial crisis, all the billionaires got bailed out and richer and everybody else suffered. and, you know, in the social media, tools that created are these platforms that, you know, so he can diagnose what's wrong with america but then? what does he look to for inspiration? america, you know, like he's using the same social media tools that he's attacking. he's using models, community organizing that are could have been taken out of the barack obama 28 handbook everywhere.

i went i found people have a and this is where i'm like neocon adjacent but like it's not a pure americas right. because we do it it's therefore right. this is kind of the marco rubio thing. know, we get to pick and whatever we do is kind of fundamentally correct because we're doing it that's not true. we are really complicated. we're a big, strange, diverse country that has a lot of things that have led to bad outcomes around the world, but also represents and has done a lot of things that are lifeline to the alexei navalny. he's in the hong kong protesters in hungary in opposition and what can we do to be more better america than the less better america? i think the ultimate challenge then what do you say to your critics then? that would be like my it seems like sometimes you got the balance, you know, talking about, you know, this quote unquote. but i figured it was in the book or or in an interview. but you said you have to look squarely at the darkest aspects of what america is in order to

fully, truly love what america is supposed to be like that line. but it's sometimes i do feel like the left spends too much time talking about you know the darkest aspects of what america is and that hurts our ability to kind of win this global narrative. and how do you how do you balance that right. it's not you shouldn't whitewash the stuff that you know. how can you get the balance more more right. and it's more evidence and inspiration. i think the fundamental question, tim and the way i put it is this, you know, the way obama try to do this and don't know, he always got it right. but i think he's pretty good at it is he would not you know america is white supremacist structurally racist, fundamentally unequal country that has a, you know, a foreign policy that doesn't see the humanity and people around the world like, you know, he would say america is so great that.

our democracy has allowed us to continue correct our imperfections to combat our structural racism. in other words, he created a space where if you know this guy won indiana in 2008. right. where he could say to like a skeptical center right white voter, like the people that he met in southern illinois. when you starting on politics, i'm not asking you to reject your identity because this is what the left is wrong. like in order to to be seriously, you have, to first reject basically who you are, you know. yeah. this country terrible or my identity is is guilty of all these things he would say, come with me. like, what's so great about our country. is that we can just keep getting better. you know and that's something people want to be a part of. that's something that people want to join the ending of his famous race speech in 2000 campaign was about like an

elderly black men and young white community organizer, realizing that the reason they were drawn to obama's campaign was not obama, it was each other. it created a space where they could do together to make the country better. and that, to me is if we're going to get out of this period of turbulence, it's got to be that kind of where no, you don't deny. i like ron desantis would that there is problems in this country that deny there's racism. but you say what? america has given the gap between the story. all men are created equal and the reality for many people in this country, the work of closing that gap is not just the work being american. it's great it's something we should all want to do with our here, you know? and i think the left goes gets into trouble when they forget that the pursuit of that objective is where the conversation should begin and end, not the repudiation of all

that is gone wrong. all of that i want to move to. yeah, i agree agree. i want to move to since you've written the book, there's been some green shoots, right. and so i've been interested before we sat down, i was like, i wonder he thinks now, you know, as compared to when it came out two years ago. yeah. covid makes time. yeah. time's a fly particle tends to flood circle, but, you know, i think that the american narrative is looking stronger than did when you wrote the book. you know, in chinese management of covid was and has been a nightmare internally and globally the vaccine doesn't you know bolsonaro lost trump last election deniers lost the midterms. so we can think nato because this is you know the nato alliance is much stronger than it was obviously during trump maybe even long before that because the russian incursion so. what what do you make of that

and and does that you know sort of the last two years change your thinking familiar when you finish the book? no. if anything, what's interesting is that everything is like of what i think, you know people want to know why? why is everything so crazy? why? why is it so tense? like, why are politics so crazy here and around world? i think it's because everybody knows high the stakes are right and look it just in my book you know i finished it and turned it in on january. six and so that happened. alexei navalny got poisoned and almost killed while i was interviewed in talking as a character. and now he's in prison. hong kong got swallowed up by the and you know, they got away with that. and putin is invading ukraine. i'm saying i'm wrong? in some ways it's worse than you know. no, no, i'm not. on the other hand. on the other, people are much like hyper vigilant. we.

trump is defeated in 2020 and actually think the most hopeful election from my perspective in the last decade was this midterm. yeah because it was just it had nothing to do with anything other than fact that people are like this is too much you know and yeah, in brazil you saw that too. and and zelensky has captured the reason i think he's resonate so much is he is to what has been missing the last few years which is we can have and it's it's not disconnected from what i was just saying about the story we can have a civic nationalism that is about yes it's about being ukrainian but being ukrainian is also about being a democracy and being a part of a liberal world that is better than what putin is offering. not everybody's same. that's what trump wants you to believe, right? everybody's corrupt, everybody's killers is the same. and so what you see is the dial is turned up for good and bad, like unthinkable bad. things have happened since i finished that book, starting

with january six and the invasion of ukraine. but other things have happened to that really good and. if i'm most hopeful about something, is that everybody is kind of aware that the stakes, what they are like, everybody's chips are the table and we're having the now and to your point about the chinese and covid and and frankly putin ukraine one thing autocrats do and trump did this on january six is autocrats overreach because there are no checks and balances and they make mistakes. and what we're seeing is the overplaying of the hand of the autocrats, you know, so i can. but we're not out of the woods, you know so i can find the good bad. everything has just gotten almost more intense because i think people realize that it's all on the line right? yeah. fukuyama, who maybe wasn't for the end of history prediction, was was prescient about. ukraine, i think, was the most bullish person i listened to and talked to him for the same reason the underbelly of

autocracies are much, much weaker than they seem. i was listening to your podcast with parts of the world, which i'm a secret listener, so don't tell anybody. i don't think we're live streaming this now. so we have this disposable and give you the business little bit. we have this like coalition now like we're basically on the same team essentially, right? like there's this uneasy coalition that's true in america with with kind of never trumpers and democrats. but it's really globally true. right. the coalition is very sprawled, right? i mean, it includes like i you were mentioned on the podcast, lula who. yeah. totally disagrees with us about what we do in ukraine. forget other, you know, forget central america, you know, includes some decently, you know, center right leaders, you know, and some of these european countries, obviously, merkel and you can have examples. what's your sense of like how stable that is, how we can best manage that and foster it going forward that an inevitable end

date to this where, you know, we all have divorce. i think that one really important point is that the people that have come together in this country and around the world because, they realize and feel intuitively. this is a kind of existential moment for democracy. we have to make allowance for fact that we are going to about some things. right, because we agree. the fundamental thing, you know i you know there are too many litmus test and i think social media is fed this because like, you know, if i say something nice about tim miller, you all my friends on the left, you know, do you know that tim miller once said this about, you know, tax policy or whatever? the thing is we do or, you you might say, like, well, i'm talking to ben rhodes about democracy. like, do you realize the iran nuclear deal is the biggest disaster in the history of the world. and and look look, we have to realize that if we if we throw

people off the boat, you know, and shrink the people who are in this kind of coalition, in defense, democracy, we're going to lose. you know, i was if you listen podcast, one of things that talk about recently was a lot my kind of security minded friends got really frustrated with germany because were slow in sending those tanks to. and i'm like, look, if had in the of some of your people been the nazis and had basically recreated a whole national identity around we do not that we don't fight wars anymore we certainly don't have german tanks in ukraine. we're just literally place where they rolled those tanks over. i'm glad that the germans need to think hard about this. do i want to send the tanks? yes, but it has to be okay like going over there and like bludgeoning poor olaf schultz to send leopard tanks. ukraine like, yes, we need to

get there. but like we to get him there on his terms, you and so i think across the board, you're talking about the domestic coalition that is in defense of democracy or the global coalition. we have to create room for disagreement about certain issues and certain things. i don't you know, you know who i'm not a fan of. i'm not a fan of the saudis and you know, like, well, i don't want them in the. so yeah, they're not in the coalition we're not like i'm leaving the party. if they get invited in but, but i can't say anybody who's like got relations with the saudis out, you know, like i can apply a purity test. so i do think that part of what we need to do like a good example he's great example and i encourage you watch this documentary navalny where they put the same question i put to him is navalny and it went in his opposition to putin not in recent years, but early. he would kind co-mingle with some pretty ugly guys, like some nationalist far right russian

because they didn't like putin. now is a well i want there's a great anthony bourdain line where bourdain goes to rally of the standard rally and has some of these far right guys and. and he says to the guys with like, what? why are they why? why are they in the same rally with these human rights activists? and he's like, well, the human rights activists want human rights. and these guys over here think that putin doesn't do enough to the immigrant workers, you know, and. okay. but like the point is, there's a point this, which is that navalny's gotten know and i've been challenged how. can you put navalny on a pedestal? he stood on a stage with these guys. you know, and when navalny's asked a question, asked a question of him, he's like, i'm trying to save this country. like, i need to get this guy out of there. like, i need anybody that believes that this should not be a corrupt system and that we should and we get rid of him and have a democracy then i can fight these guys, you know, now i'm not saying we should have far right nutcases in our coalition in this country, but

point is, like if you look at the alexei navalny and are like in 20, you know, in 2009, he marched in this rally and therefore we should not support him. well, what who who are the people that are going to get rid of putin? like like like you need create space for people. we can't just have -- riot, you know. yeah. they're not going to be president of russia, you know, and this is a big issue because i hear people say all the time like russia's going to lose like putin's is going to surrender, like russia. things are not really going ukraine is not going to be secure. so long as putin is there. and i do not think that he's going to like resign in office if, like the donbass falls to ukraine, you know to your point, we we published them for today advocacy and support of the iranian protesters that was signed by hillary clinton, stephen harper is elevated like a conservative and liberal folks. natan sharansky, i mean, he said stuff people want to be concerned about, you know.

timmerman right. because it's over the map. and so we have to do so. i want to spend the last few minutes doing a quick around the world with you. so we can it. so let's let's start with iran. you know what? what's sense for the state of the prospects of the protesters and like next steps. i think that the that something fundamental is broken in iran in terms of government's hold on the people because. it's not just a political revolution like in the past. and there have been protests in iran. it's like people are upset about this election being stolen or people are about the economy. this is a social revolution led by women that is about core nature of the islamic republic of iran. what they just don't want to be an islamic republic, you know, and i don't think you put that back in a box now. i don't think and i talked to a lot like i do not think that means that next week iranian regime is going to fall. i do think that it means that there's going to be some of evolution in that country over next several years, like a deep,

the contested and almost civil war like atmosphere where like i am, you know, still programed enough to think that on the back end of that, you're going to have a more tolerant and more democratic system in iran. i where i probably part company from some people is i think if we get involved we be involved in speaking out in support of the protesters, trying to get internet in there and trying to spotlight their. but if we take upon ourselves to militarily remove that regime, i actually don't think that is the right way for this to end because then it creates you know, what we just lived through in afghanistan and then the the hardliners become the resistance to the foreign domination. and i think i think we have to do whatever we can to help the iranian people this themselves. i don't think going to part ways

on that one, but maybe on the next two. so let's move. let's move around the world. what about the the threats facing taiwan? i mean, you thought that wasn't really as much part of europe, but hong was. so i think that there are a lot of lessons, right? with with how hong kong got swallowed up. like what's your assessment of you know how you know the taiwanese and the chinese are looking at what's happening in ukraine that affects the potential military action china there and what you think role might be should that and should that threat become more real. so i had such a powerful experience writing about hong kong and i hope you guys pick up the for a lot of reasons but one is the hong kong chapters were so deeply moving because i the young people i kind of met up with and became my guides. they weren't like the leaders of the protest. and it's interesting. and, you know, navalny i picked the leader. they were just young people who are like they felt something slipping away. they felt their identity slipping away. and i i sensed immediately after

the end of that story that taiwan was next and deeply by what had happened in hong kong and in ukraine. so i just went to taiwan and have a long piece in the atlantic on on this. now. and i met president the president taiwan and but i also found a cast of young people and i'm capable of changing attitudes because when i went there like know the atlantic editors were like, you have to ask them about, you know, how is ukraine impacted? and i was like, are we just imposing our that they're the next ukraine. but sure enough, i'm sitting with a young gay civil society activist, and this is a country the way is the only asian country to legalize same sex marriage. it's a fascinating progressive mix of progressive and kind of you know hard line anti china politics. but and i said, well, how have you been backed by ukraine? he said, you know, when we saw that happen, we were bombarded immediately by all this chinese disinformation that all

basically said, you're next and americans will never save you. and when the americans start arming the ukrainians, the disinformation wasn't like, oh, we were wrong. the americans didn't see. the ukrainians, it was like, see what the americans are doing in. ukraine, they're fighting to the last ukrainian. they're going to fight. they're going to be sent in to you. you're all going to die fighting against and losing and then he teared up and he said, then we all saw zelensky and we never realized that one person could change the course of history. like that wow. and this guy is now like getting military training on the weekends. now i hope he doesn't have to use it, but everywhere i went, they they had been stirred to like, we will not give up what have and the president taiwan who is not done is a wonderful leader but you very reserved woman but she had like a steely thing of like we we want to defend ourselves.

we're all we're going to ask you is to help us ourselves. and we want to be worthy that support. and so i absolutely think that we should be doing everything we can to help taiwanese. i reject and this is i'm speaking your neocon heart i reject this idea that you know nancy pelosi can't travel and i know all the reasons that all my friends who gave i forgot that i texted you and you said that on part. i was like, yeah, because know what? this time this is where i'm going to. be a little like, you know, i'll speak a language like like what? we don't know. i fault us in the obama administration and i fault successive american administrations. why do we self-censor? the chinese don't self-censor. how they talk about us. watch chinese media and hear what they say about our politics. but we're careful about how we talk about tibet or how we talk about hong kong. or can nancy possible, if nancy pelosi or any of you in this room want to travel to taiwan, why should we not go? because that offends the chinese. that is giving them a veto over like our own actions. mind taiwan's and what i worry

about, though, is i am not convinced that the united states would go to war. china, on behalf of taiwan unless we can collectively make a political decision to take that step, i would not want lead the taiwanese to believe. yeah, the fifth fleet or you know the seventh fleet or be there, you know, like this. so i think in the interim we have to be doing everything we can to get them in. what they say is if the faster you arm us and train us, the harder the chinese have to think twice about doing something that to me feels like like the right course. what i don't agree with is mike pompeo going over there and saying, you know, we should recognize taiwan is independent nation tomorrow because that's us choosing to force the issue. right. the taiwanese should decide. and i think what they're likely to decide is like, let's just try to avoid this and. wait, wait out the chinese and, see if something changes, you know, another agreement. you could have written up for the bulwark. okay, i'm going to find a

disagreement. i think biden is in almost a really quite a good job in foreign policy. i think the one area where our narrative that we're going to stand you and we're going to stand with people who have threats to their deep threats to their freedom where that narrative cracked was afghanistan. i thought the pullout from afghanistan was a nightmare and that it was operationally handled poorly. it sent the wrong the wrong message. people and countries that want to help us, our allies, the translators, all the folks in afghanistan that spent two decades helping us. like what is your you know, it doesn't feel like the biden administration wants to, like, own up to that at all and like really brush it off. what's your sense for whether that had any impact on all this this conversation around the world beyond the obvious impact on the women and people living in afghanistan? here's the impact it had because. there are two things and i'm going do something i used to hate when i was in government, but now i get to do it because of not anymore. because i'm going to say like the idea that needed to get

americans withdrawal from afghanistan completely at some point and i'm not suggesting on that that the kind of artificial september 11 timeline is something agree with. and i'll come back to why a second the way we did it and the speed with which we did it and the kind of, you know, seeming. callousness and, i don't as i don't think they're callous in the bush administration, but the we we knew that we we knew who had to get out. we knew the translators were. we knew who the civil society we knew who the women who would be in danger were. and we just really didn't start trying to get them out until like the last week when everything started collapsing. what that's done, where that's hurt, i don't think it's hurt us from some strategic position because. the reality is actually being out of afghanistan has made it a lot easier for us to ukraine because if you talk to the people in government, we have we're giving all of our small all of our stocks, all this stuff is going to ukraine to the

point that having to replenish our own stocks, in fact, it's hard get taiwan what they need because we're sending so much to ukraine and a lot of that stuff that we're sending was in afghanistan that and this is the progressive argument against what we did in afghanistan. the message it's been taken from all around the world is you don't care about brown. you know, you care about the ukrainians. they're white. interesting when people ask why, you know, the world is not united. ukraine, i hear the whole world is the whole world is not all of europe and the united states and like japan and canada are on board. but, you know, everybody else is buying russian oil. everybody else is busting sanctions. nobody else is speaking out against the war, really. and africa and asia and most of latin america. and i think part of that is, this feeling that this is a big old double standard and you guys, you know, didn't value the

lives of these people that had sacrificed for you and then you kind of blamed them. i mean, the thing that administration, i think that they really didn't agree with is messaging of, well, it's the afghans fault. they didn't fight. well, we built their military and we i, i mean part of the collective to only be able to operate with us tail support us contractors resupply so once we take all that away like are we surprised that these guys are like well you know i can either fight the taliban and have them go kill my mother and sister at home or i can go home and try to blend in with my mother and sister. they should have kept bagram open, should have got more people out and done this on a timeline. i still think though, at the end of day, we need to leave that country and. and so i don't fault the decision, but i think the way that that went about is cost problems. can we only have one minute left ask or so? i'm going to give you one easy one, one hard 130 seconds each. i'm putting a quarter. how scared you are about the

saudis, nbc and how awful. it's what they're doing with their global influence. i it's very scary because. this is a guy with trillions of dollars bottomless and he knows that wealth can influence and can can shut people up or bring people to his side. he is the reason does like a live golf tour. the reason he does all these things is he wants prove that we care more about than values and we if that's true then we should not take that money and we should not be chasing like a sociopath $1,000,000,000,000 around for his support. amen. right. i ask your colleague. amen. yeah. let's clap for that. amen. jon. for jon favreau to give me one hard question for you. so here we go, 25 seconds from jon favreau. say one nice thing about bibi netanyahu. he's a very effective troll. yeah, yeah, yeah. we could do hour on israel down the line.

i'm letting you off the hook. thank you all so much for coming. so gre