What Should Progressive Foreign Policy Look Like? (Crooked Con)

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You can listen to Left, Right, and Center every Friday, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, I'm Tommy Vittor. And we are live from CricodCon. This is very cool. Thank you all for being here. It has been a year since Donald Trump was elected. Kind of feels like a lifetime. And now seems like this good a time is ever to assess his foreign policy record, how Democrats should talk about it. That wasn't supposed to be a joke. What the Democratic Party's foreign policy platform and message should be going forward. So we're going to get all that done in an hour. I guess. Yeah, no problem. But before we do on it, but we're also going to welcome some great guests in a bit. Congressman Rohkahn, up in California. And Congressman Yasmine Ansari from Arizona. Why the right, Connecticut? The brain is on Arizona. But before we do that, then I just want to shoot the shit for a minute. Like we do on the show. Tom Brady announced that he cloned his dog. The story is actually so much worse, Ben. It turns out he disclosed that he cloned his dog as part of an announcement of an investment into a biotech company. You know who else is going there, dog? Have your melee of our genius. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. With some of that $20 billion bailout money that we give you, yeah, yeah, up to $40 billion. Also, did you see the Victor Orban is in Washington today? I know. Just in time for CrookedCon. Last night we brought out Obama. Ladies and gentlemen. Oh, be so funny. Okay, let's get to the show. So we're going to take a little stroll down memory lane. We're going to see if Donald Trump is living up to the campaign promises around foreign policy. The first one is that he will be the peace president. So in Trump's inauguration speech, he said we will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end. And perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into. My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and a unifier, Ben. We're going to dig into this. We're going to get to Ukraine separately because it's just a it's own thing. I do think it's just worth saying I'm not mad that Trump came in like excited to make peace. You know, you could have come in all Dick Cheney like horny for regime change. You know? Yeah, except at the same time, there's like what Trump says and then what Trump does. Well, and there's usually a fairly cavernous gap that we can talk about because in the same speech, he also exalted himself as a peacemaker and said that he was going to take back the Panama Canal. So right from the beginning, there was a little bit of, you know, whiplash, hypocrisy thing going on. Yeah, yeah, devil's in the details, I guess. Okay, so just a few examples. So we start, you and I've talked many times about the fact that we give Trump credit for putting real pressure on BB Netanyahu to get a cease fire between Israel and Hamas. That's something we wish Joe Biden had done. We think he could have done and Biden's refusal to pressure Netanyahu led to lasting damage for the people in Gaza, for the Democratic Party, for President Biden's political standing, and it's just I think a real stain that Democrats are digging out of. But on the flip side, Trump wants credit for ending the war between Israel and Iran, when in reality, he had diplomatic talks going with Iran and then he bombed them. And then he's threatening to bomb them again. And so that's not very Nobel Prizeee, I don't think. Yeah, and the other problem with this is all these, a lot of these, you know, quote unquote, "peace deals" are like very thin smoke screens, right? Because there's not really a true ceasefire even in Gaza, right? We've seen Israel go back in. We don't know what the Iranians are doing with their nuclear program and what that might lead to in the future. And so a lot of these things, I mean, look, the obvious point is that he bombed Iran and then said he ended the war that he started. That's one way to go about ending wars, I suppose. Yeah. But also like the underlying conflicts are actually festering and in some ways getting worse while he just kind of parachutes in for photo ops. Yeah. And, you know, so that's one of the many factual problems with this claim that he ended date or 10 wars or 15 wars or whatever it is at this point. And then as we speak, the administration is blowing up boats in the Caribbean and their threatening regime change of Venezuela. He's threatening to invade Nigeria. You released a random standalone video about that. The other day, the New York Times had a report two days ago about the military options that have been developed by, you know, the joint staff for Trump. I'm a email to Helene Cooper who is a great reporter at the New York Times who Ben and I know very well. And it's been like, I literally can't believe I just read your story about the actual like kind of Goldilocks-style light medium horror. Nigerian invasion plan? Yes. Nigerian vision plan. And then, you know, so I don't know, those things probably won't be popular in Oslo either. But I don't know, how are you assessing this broader set of claims that he is the peace president so far? I think there's like two things I highlight. One is that the eight wars that he gives himself credit for ending, which is a ridiculous list if you look at it, right? It includes Serbia and Kosovo, which, you know, you have to be as old as I am to remember when that war actually ended. Was Trump president in the 1990s? No. But I think he like Azerbaijan, in our media, which had already ended and we could go down the list. But I think that he likes to present himself in that way and repeat it so much and I'm sure if you watch Fox, you think, well, this is great. This guy is flying around the world. I haven't heard of most of these countries, but it seems like it's great he's ending these conflicts. While at the same time, what he's actually doing is he's expanding the forever war, right? He's brought the forever war actually here, literally to Washington DC, right? And I think what you have to connect the dots between is the fact that he's turning the military, trying to turn the military into an extension of his kind of personal interest, whether they're deploying in U.S. cities, whether they're blowing up boats in the Caribbean, whether they might be used for regime change operation in Venezuela, whether he gets somebody whispering into here about Nigeria, and suddenly we've got the special ops going there. The dangerous thing that I see that I think we all need to be concerned about and aware of is if he can essentially completely ignore Congress, completely ignore the law, domestically and internationally, and turn the military into something that just serves his interest, that's where shit gets real, you know? I mean, not that it's not already real in a lot of other ways, but that's no amount of celebration of the Armenia Azerbaijan quarter named after Donald Trump can obscure the fact that he's illegally killing people in the Caribbean right now. Yeah, as we speak, clap for that. You left out my favorite. My favorite example of a war he claims to have ended is the war between Egypt and Ethiopia, which was literally never fought. They have an ongoing diplomat. That's how effective he is. Donald Trump doesn't have a PhD in foreign affairs, he's just that good. All right, so let's talk about Ukraine. The most glaring and obvious foreign policy failure was he has not ended the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, like he said. The war is still raging for Ukrainians. I think life is as bad if not worse as it was the day he was elected. I don't think that voters really penalize him for the timeframe. I think they kind of lump it into like the bucket of Trump bullshit and hyperbole, but I think it's worth unpacking why being anti-support for Ukraine was a potent campaign message and then thinking about how Democrats could talk about it differently. So what you'd hear from Trump was kind of like a couple parts. It was one stop sending billions of dollars to Ukraine. Spend them here in America, like a timeless. The oldest, yeah. John Kerry, let's stop opening firehouses and Baghdad and you know open them here. I was literally going to that. So I get to be a little older to get that joke. To don't defend Ukraine's border when we can't control our own, I think I was like especially potent. in the later Biden years. And then three, Trump would argue that by supporting Ukraine, Biden was going to start a direct conflict with Russia, leading to World War III. And that was something you actually heard a lot from like the Joe Rogan crowd. Like it was sort of an article of faith, especially when the Biden administration allowed the Ukrainians to use what are called attack of missiles to hit targets within Russia itself. And so like when you assess the result, obviously the war's not over. I guess Trump sort of tried, like he talks to Putin now, which Biden isolated the Russians and Putin for a good reason as to the rest of the world. Trump is now having conversations, including the Alaska Summit, but they haven't accomplished anything. And then every once in a while, Trump flips out and threatens sanctions or threatens to give the Ukrainians Tomahawk missiles that can hit Moscow. Or there was this insane truth social posts the other day where Trump told Pete Hegg's F, the Secretary of War, not defense, to prepare to restart testing nuclear weapons. So I think the question then is like, what do we do with this failure? Have we turned it back on Trump and make the case that actually his failure in Ukraine has made us less safe? (audience applauds) - I think the thing about the war in Ukraine that is not well understood is, first of all, it has actually gotten much worse since Trump took office. There has been a significant escalation in Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians, significant attacks against Ukrainian infrastructure, every time, I mean, it's not subtle what Putin does, like they were ramping up their attacks right around the Alaska Summit. Like the message from Putin to the world is like, I own this guy, I can do whatever I want, and he'll still roll out the red carpet for me in Alaska, right? So the first point is that this is not only failed, it's made things worse. The second point is, I think where, and on this one, I'm sympathetic to the challenge that the Biden team was facing, but I do think one thing that was missing was a sense that the goal actually is to end the war. Like it's important to say, don't look like, you know, you want to be in this conflict. The purpose of the support for the Ukrainians is to get to a solution that is just for the Ukrainians. - I should say, that's a really important point 'cause you would hear from a lot of people, Republican and Democrat behind closed doors, like foreign policy experts who were like, pretty good that we're chewing up the Russian military, you know, they're getting decimated. It was a really like kind of bloodless, inhumane way to talk about a horrifying conflict. - That's right, and so what you would actually want is like the objective is to end this war, but to end it on terms that are acceptable to the Ukrainians. And that requires marshalling allies, which is something Trump can do. I mean, instead of coordinating before that Alaska summit, it went so catastrophically that all the Europeans had to fly here the next day to coordinate post facto to make sure that he didn't give away basically all of Ukraine to Putin, right? And so what it requires the objective being to end the war, but to end it on terms in which all the allies can get together, give the Ukrainians acceptable security guarantees, probably not gonna get everything back, obviously, but there is a way that this can end that is good for the Ukrainians. The one thing I would also say is, the Democrats, you know, to connect the two conversations we've had, we should be the party for ending forever wars, yes. We should be the party. (audience applauds) We should be the party that is for dismantling the forever war infrastructure, which includes, what do you think the equipment is at ISIS wearing, right? That is stuff that was used in Iraq and Afghanistan, right? And then third on this World War three point, I don't know, who makes you guys a little more worried about World War three? The like aging narcissist in the Oval Office who's talking about testing nuclear weapons, renaming the Department of War, do you feel comfortable with the collection of aging autocrats that are running the nuclear superpowers in the world today? I don't. And so I think the Democrats need to reclaim this space. Sometimes we're so worried about being called weak or we're so worried about, you know, what, I don't know, some hawkish op-ed writer that nobody listens to anymore is gonna say about us that we don't say we want to end wars, we want to end forever wars, we don't want World War three, we're for diplomacy, we're for alliances, and that's actually where most Americans are. Who's the guy at the Times that hates us? (audience applauds) I didn't want to take a, I didn't want to name it. Okay, okay, yeah. Yeah, no, look, yes, this like, top two priorities for Democrats, like be the anti-war party, Trump stole that mantle from us, we gotta get back. One of the areas of Trump's foreign policy that has surprised me the most is how flailing and unfocused their approach to China has been. Because when Trump took office, like, the thing that all the smart people, the very serious people, in title case, agreed on in Washington was that China was the real threat and we needed to focus on it. And Trump ran hard on China, he was constantly talking about China. Project 2025 included language about making China quote, the top priority for US defense planning. But in practice, the policy has just been a mess. So you start with the tariffs. The tariffs go up, the tariffs come down, they don't do anything, like, we give them AI chips, they give us, they buy our beans. You're today, I guy, is that a good trade? Nope, nope, nope, nope. Soy beans for AI chips. And the only problem that the tariffs are solving are the ones created by the tariffs in the first place. And then, again, on AI, like, we're loosening these restrictions on Nvidia chips that are incredibly powerful, influential, and Joe Biden had put real restrictions that would prevent China from winning this AI race and Trump has to sort of erase that. The other part of it that is surprising to me is instead of building coalitions to work with, to combat China, we are terrifting them. The Japanese, the South Koreans, the Vietnamese, like insulting them, slapping their leaders around for no reason, humiliating them. And then, again, co-seeing up to, like, the King Kim Jong-un's of the world. Instead of deploying the US Navy to the South China Sea, he has sent something like 10 to 15% of all US naval assets to South and Central America to threaten Maduro with regime change. And then, fentanyl is chemicals from China that go to Mexico where they get assembled and then trafficked into the US. But instead of managing that, we are blowing up these boats off the coast of Venezuela, off the coast of Columbia and Ecuador that don't even have fentanyl in them. They're filled with cocaine. So, I'll just pause there, we could go on. But, what is your theory about how or why they have lost focus on China, and how do we capitalize on this? Because it is a concern you hear among voters. I mean, look, I have no fan of Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping. What they can teach us is, if you stand up to Trump, you can have his launch. If you look at what's happened with China, just take a couple of examples, right? He throws all these tariffs at the Chinese and to just take two examples. The soybeans, Trump creates complete havoc for American farmers and complete chaos and probably puts a lot of people out of business. And there are obviously a bunch of other small businesses suffering because of tariffs. The deal he announced involves the Chinese buying less soybeans than they did before Trump put tariffs on. And meanwhile, Chinese are working to kind of reallocate all their purchases to Brazil, right? That's a kind of a miniature what is incredibly stupid about Donald Trump's approach to tariff diplomacy. If you look at the AI piece of this in video chips or, you know, we're under these restrictions, Trump cuts a deal where they can just have them so long as like the US government gets some small cut. I wonder what else is happening in terms of who else is getting a cut? Because like every one of these AI deals that we've seen, you know, whether it was that most clearly the Emirates giving $2 billion to Trump's family crypto business and then getting all the chips that they want and the Emirates. But I think the common thread here is that Xi Jinping didn't back down when Trump put tariffs on, he put tariffs back on. He stopped allowing certain, you know, critical minerals into the US economy and Trump folded. And Trump doesn't have like some theory of the case for like Asia, you know, he's not trying to like align a group of countries to deal with and emerging and potentially more aggressive China. He doesn't care about Taiwan. All he cares about is essentially being able to say that he got a deal with Xi Jinping. Like this is what, and the media in this country, you know, not just the right-wing media is so short term that they continue to fall for it. So Trump announces trade deal with Xi Jinping. That's all Trump cares about. And the Chinese know that. So they know they can just squeeze him and squeeze him. And then the deal is better than where the thing started before the tariffs. But as long as Trump gets to stand next to Xi Jinping and say he looks like a handsome man from central casting and there's headlines all over the US. Trade deal reached with China, then it's all fine, you know. And we have to be making the point that this is hurting American workers. It's hurting American farmers. It's hurting American small businesses. And it's only helping Trump. [APPLAUSE] Do you see Xi Jinping in the president of South Korea where we're caught on a hot mic or something joking about how she had given him a phone that was filled with spyware? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, this is funny. I don't know. I wouldn't laugh at that if I were you. Xi Jinping definitely laughed. Yeah, he definitely laughed. The other time Xi was caught on a hot mic was talking to Kim Jong Un about how you can do organ transplants and live forever. So these goons are into some of your shit. [BLANK_AUDIO] - Yeah, I'm ready, but it's done. - Yeah, it should talk to Tom Brady, full circle here. Okay, final thing before we bring out our guests. We are in the building that used to house USAID. In fact, Ben was telling me on the way in, there's actually still like six dudes. - No, that's where I used to work, the Wilson Center. - Oh, and the Wilson Center, sorry. - In this building. - So the USAID got dozed, they destroyed 83% or so of the programming. The results have been catastrophic, so we have to talk about it 'cause it's, I think one of the more shocking decisions the Trump administration has made just in terms of the damage caused internationally to human lives, to our standing, and just the recklessness in idiocy of it. So there's a piece in the New Yorker today by a tool, Gawande, that folks should read, that talked about what USAID actually cost. He said it cost an average $24 per American out of the 15 grand we pay per year in taxes to save lives on just an unimaginable scale. The Lancet estimated that USAID assistance had saved 92 million lives over two decades and that by dismantling, yeah, clap it up. (audience applauding) And by dismantling USAID, we have, the United States has caused the deaths of 600,000 people so far, two thirds of them children. And that number could go up to 14 million by 2030 if things remain as they are. So I don't know Ben, when I kind of think about the worst things Trump has done, USAID, just getting destroyed is right about. - This is the most consequential in terms of human lives, if that medicine is taken away, if that nutrition assistance is taken away, in the world of finite resources, there's nothing else that can take its place. And so what you also have to realize about USAID, is it's not just like a direct package of food, it's the entire infrastructure, right? The whole supply chain, the way food and medicine flows into places that are difficult to get to, right? And so this is not just a story about, you know, big balls coming into USAID, this is a story about what the US government is telling the world at values. Elon Musk, the man who's behind the destruction of USAID, is a trillionaire as of today. And their children starving to death because of what Elon Musk did, because he wanted to save literally a fraction of his own personal net worth in the federal budget. Those are the priorities of this administration. And what we have to represent is a different set of priorities in the world, where we are going to have to build something different and better when we're back in power, that expresses that we actually value the dignity and worth of people around the world. 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(audience applauding) - All right, well, we're very glad to welcome you both here. I wanted to start with you, Yasemin, who I should just say, if there's one thing that I think the Democratic Party needs the most, it's generational change, you represent that. (audience cheering) And, but I wanted to start, you're in Arizona. You know, one piece of our foreign policy that it comes out of the USAD conversation is who we are to the world, right? The most powerful thing America has generally had throughout history is our example. You have a lot of communities I know who are being threatened or targeted for ICE deportations. You've been in some of these facilities. Can you just describe us how you think about the connection between what is happening in our communities with these crackdowns and what message that sends to the world? - Yeah, absolutely. So not from Connecticut, from Arizona. - I don't know, I don't know why I wrote that down. - Yes, Connecticut on the brain, crazy. - Thanks for the question, Ben. You know, immigration is so often discussed as a domestic issue, but more and more, immigration is very much a foreign policy issue and very much a human rights issue in terms of how the rest of the world sees the United States. We know that so many of the forces that are driving people to our borders, first of all, are global issues, whether it's climate catastrophe, economic collapse, cartels, authoritarian regimes. I'm the product of that myself. My parents came to the United States from Iran in the '70s. So it is very much a global issue and how we respond to all of that is very much reflective of how the rest of the world will perceive the United States. Recently, I've been going to the ICE detention centers in Arizona, I've visited three times. There's a place, one hour outside of Phoenix called the Eloy detention center. I just went there on Wednesday. And I just want to say, you know, I know everyone, there's a lot of, you know, thank God, there's a lot of videos of ICE on the streets and, you know, people are recording and we're seeing how ICE is terrorizing people on the streets of our cities or in daycares or, you know, at schools, but there's very little visibility inside the detention centers in the United States. And I can tell you that the conditions inside these centers are horrific, horrific. There are two major private prison companies that are benefiting. So it's also part of the corruption story of the Trump administration. And honestly, before that, Core Civic and Geo Group, they're making billions of dollars as we ramp up detention center capacity. I have a constituent in Eloy who is a leukemia patient. She was a green card holder, detained back in February, has lost 70 pounds while she's been inside this detention center. I've seen her twice now. She has bruises all over her body. She, I had heard, she described that she vomits blood. On Wednesday, I saw her vomit blood. And it took us months of advocacy and months of public pressure from a member of Congress for them to allow her to see an oncologist. She was detained in February, and it wasn't until October 8th that I finally let her see an oncologist. Then I had to sit there with her for two hours on Wednesday, begging this woman who works inside the facility to let her see her medical records. And I'm describing this in detail because I've also, first of all, I've also talked to dozens of women inside the facility who've described abuse, dehumanizing, and racist treatment, neglect in terms of not getting clean water, getting used underwear that's causing them to get rashes and infections all over their bodies. And all of that is how the world is going to see us now. And to me, that means that authoritarian regimes around the world are very clearly going to be able to say that democracy is a facade. Look at what the United States is doing to human beings. So why can't we do the same or worse? And so as I'm thinking about a post-Trump world, I think it's extremely important that we look at the issue of our borders and security and all of that. Say, yes, of course we need secure borders, but we cannot have security without human dignity and without stability. We need to end for-profit detentions. We need much faster-- [APPLAUSE] --much faster processing for asylum seekers. There's endless backlogs. I mean, many people are stuck inside these attention centers for months on end just to wait to see an immigration judge to determine their case. And by the way, the Republicans won't fund the asylum judges. It could accelerate the price, because the chaos and allows them to do this private detentions. Yeah. And the budget that Republicans passed four months ago, we're giving $40 billion more dollars to ICE to ramp up detention center capacity. So instead of $40,000, which is currently capacity for what we have to hold people daily, they want capacity to be $100,000, so they can meet Stephen Miller's insane quotas of three million people deported. Quite frankly, I don't think that ICE is reformable. I think that we're going to need to have a brand new immigration system in the future. (audience applauding) Congressman Connor, President Biden's handling of the war in Gaza and Bebe Netanyahu enraged a lot of progressives. And I think fundamentally made a lot of people in the Democratic Party, especially younger voters, question the party's commitment to diplomatic solutions to wars, to human rights, and to international institutions and the rule of law more broadly. How do you think we can build back that trust? And how do you right size the US-Israel relationship to make it more rational and human rights-focused? - You start out on the tough, tough issues. (audience laughing) I'm a press, there's a full house, and I love the two ladies here with their sweaters. - That was a great name. - I love that. Look, we have to start with the truth. President Biden mishandled Gaza. He was wrong. (audience applauding) We should never have given a blank check. There were 37 Democrats who voted against the 14 billion aid to Netanyahu. That should have been every person in the Democratic caucus. (audience applauding) Those who voted for that aid made as much of a blunder as those who supported the war in Iraq. We need to have moral clarity going forward. We need to say no military sales to Israel and Netanyahu and get on Delia Ramirez as no bombs act. We need to say that we will recognize what the UN, what the ICJ is recognizing that what happened there was a genocide. We need to say very clearly that the United States should follow 150 other countries and recognize Palestinian self-determination and a Palestinian state with a secure Israel. Here's what I know. You may disagree with where I stand, but young people are tired of the platitudes. They're tired of people saying, "We want peace. "We want justice. "We want human rights." What does that mean? Where do you stand? Where do you stand specifically? Enough of the word salads, enough of the platitudes. We need to be a party of moral courage. (audience applauding) - Yes, I wanna, somehow in the conflict in Gaza also became, as we were saying before, the U.S. bombing Iran. And I wanted to ask you, you mentioned your parents came here from Iran to get away from that regime. And I think what is complicated for some people to understand is that bombing a country, this shouldn't be that complicated, frankly, but somehow that bombing a country is not helpful to human rights. (audience laughing) But I wanted to ask you this question because you've been very outspoken behalf of the Women Life Freedom Movement, which I think people don't realize has made extraordinary changes in Iran. I mean, watch the videos. People are walking around without cover. And at the same time, you did not support bombing Iran. How do we think about supporting human rights in places like Iran that are not kind of militarized or hijacked for some other agenda? How do you square the fact that you want to see women life freedom movements like that advance? You want to see greater freedom and dignity for the people of Iran. But then the U.S., you know, our track record of bringing that with bombs is not that great. - Yeah, you know, it's another easy question. (audience laughing) I've thought about this a lot because there actually tends to be a lot of support from populations or diaspora populations in particular around like there's no question that people see the United States. Still, even in this moment, as this like beacon of hope and feel that the United States could bring them that sort of future and prosperity. And I, to color that a little bit, like I remember when I was in college, I lived in Jordan and I worked at refugee camps where a lot of Syrian refugees were during the height of the conflict and Assad's crackdown. And I remember the refugees there asking me, why isn't the United States doing anything? Why is nobody helping us? Why is nobody seeing us? Similarly, Iranians, whether inside the country or outside, seem to have that same question, right? They think that the United States is kind of this all-powerful, capable, like we can just pop in, you know, make a change, get rid of this awful theocratic, oppressive, Islamic Republic, and it's all gonna be good. But think of, you know, if you've studied history or foreign policy, you know that that is not actually our history and it's much more complicated than that. So during this, you know, period, those 12 days where, you know, Israel bombed Iran and then the United and the Donald Trump was taking to truth social every other day and literally like going from telling Tehran, which is a city of 10 million people to evacuate without, you know, just in all caps to then the next day, you know, saying that there's gonna be regime change and then the next day saying we want peace. First of all, I don't trust Donald Trump in handling any sort of, you know, anything but regime change, you know, any Iran. But I think there's ways that the United States can support the Iranian people without taking direct military action. Like one very important method of resistance in Iran and in many countries that have authoritarian regimes as access to the internet and making sure that people can have access even when the government is cracking down and trying to restrict that access. There are bills in Congress around internet freedom in Iran with real money that could potentially be put behind it so that, you know, we're playing a role there. I'm sorry, one of the, something I proposed during the NDA reauthorization was to have a special envoy for women and girls in Iran as part of the State Department. So having dedicated, you know, foreign policy expertise on this issue. And thank you for giving a shout out to Iranian women because they really led that women life freedom movement couple of years ago. And it did change everything. It did change a lot. I mean, women, you know, now the Islamic Republic has essentially given up on trying to enforce the hijab laws. And I don't know if people saw there was recently a viral video of women and people just dancing in the streets. And that humanity is something really important just to remember that, you know, like everywhere, just like we are not our government right now. You know, Iranian people are in their government. But I just think, you know, as we talk about no more endless wars, we have to make sure to remember that we just have not been successful in that realm. And there's other ways to support the people against their authoritarian regimes. This podcast is sponsored by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform designed to elevate your online presence and drive your success. 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Tune in on Mondays to long play series on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. (upbeat music) - Just to follow up on that. I mean, look, the night Donald Trump decided to bomb Iran. I lost my mind on Twitter. I was terrified that we were going to get sucked into another quagmire in the Middle East that he was going to, you know, the Iranians would fire missiles at, you know, Americans on bases in the region that Iranian civilians were going to get killed. And a lot of very bad things happened on the ground in Iran. I don't think we know the school, like 1000 people, we don't know the full, I think, scale of the civilian death on the ground, but civilians did die. But the worst case did not come to be, like we didn't get sucked into a regime-change war in Iran. For example, no Americans were killed. And I think there was a sentiment in Washington that wars are no big deal if it's just a few airstrikes. And I say that, I observe that with great humility given the Obama administration's record of drone strikes and stretching the AUMF to hit targets for al-Qaeda affiliates that did not exist when that law was passed, right? So I'm like asking this with knowing that we are part of the problem here. But I'm just wondering, how do you think we can change that mindset? Because I do think that we are still operating in kind of a post-9/11 foreign policy framework where militarism equals strength. And there's a lot of Democrats who feel like we need to be strong, to be credible on foreign policy. First of all, I think the activism in the country prevented a longer regime-change war in Iran. From not just from the left, but also from the right. When Thomas Massey and I introduced the war power's resolution to stop the President from bombing, it wasn't just that. There were a lot of mega voices, there were a lot of podcasters, there were a lot of people from the left saying, let's not have an endless war. So while I agree with you that he should have come to Congress and that we still have too many of these strikes, the citizen activism on this makes a difference. Second, we can't just say, okay, we don't want militarism and then our party keeps voting for a Pentagon budget that is over a trillion dollars. And this is where I talked about the hypocrisy that young people see. You know, they, okay, we want to be the party of peace and endless war as well. You're the party that under the previous Biden administration was kept pushing the Pentagon budget up. And now half your caucus is voting to have a trillion dollar Pentagon budget. Bill Clinton ran on cutting the Pentagon budget back in 1992. And so we need to be, have our actions meet our rhetoric. Third, you know, we need to be for a lounder about what is going on in these boats in Venezuela. [ Applause ] Obviously, we should do whatever we can to take action against the narcotics trade. But that is not a death penalty. Right now you have the United States government basically deciding on all of our behalf to kill people without any standard. The Colombian president says there was a boat fisherman who was killed with nothing to do with narcotics. We don't have an answer. This is fundamentally eroding our moral standing in the world. And I heard your earlier conversation about China. You know, one of the things that's helping China, both because of our policy in Gaza and because of things like what we're doing in Venezuela, they're going around to countries around the world and saying we are offering moral leadership not the United States. Well, the United States should be offering moral leadership in the world standing up for human rights if we want to lead the world in the 21st century. [ Applause ] You know, one thing I just add too is the strikes were supposed to have a purpose other than just being like a TV show, right? And the purpose was supposed to destroy the Iranian nuclear program. And Trump had to fire the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency for actually writing a report that said maybe he set it back a few months. And now the Iranians are saying they'll never do a deal with the United States and God only knows what's going on with the nuclear program. So we also have to remember that strikes have a purpose other than just being good television, which is sometimes how it seems to be on Fox News. >> Especially in Venezuela. >> I do want to ask-- yeah, Venezuela especially where these kind of snuff films get put out. I want to make sure we have talk about this so, yes, because you and I met each other originally because you worked on climate change, remember when we cared about that. And actually to Rose Point, I mean, one of the amazing things to consider is that we spend a trillion dollars on the Department of War budget. When if you actually stack up the threats to the American people, climate change is a far more severe threat than anything that's going to be dealt with by that Pentagon budget. And yet right now this week, some of you may know, some of you may not know because it's not getting a lot of attention. There's the annual COP summit, which is the UN summit that is, you know, the Paris Agreement was a part of this, brings people together from around the world to kind of consistently raise the ambition to deal with climate change. The United States is absent from that summit. It's actually lobbying in pressuring countries to not make commitments to do more to fight climate change. It's been announced that the target of limiting climate change to 1.5 degrees Celsius increase is out the window and actually we're not even on track to come anywhere close to that. And so the question is, look, like a lot of things Democrats are going to inherit if we can get back power next year in 2028, you know, essentially the cupboard is going to be empty in terms of how we deal with climate change. It feels to me like the old way is not going to work any more anyway, you know, just the Paris Agreement and you get over together and you make these announcements because we need approaches both for reducing emissions and a clean energy transition, but also for dealing with the effects of climate change right now that are causing conflict. I mean, how do you, as someone who kind of your background before politics was in the climate space, what would you like to see the Democratic Party's message and policy agenda be on climate going forward? Yeah, so I think for far too long climate change, and this is also a result of success on the right in terms of defining climate and us and Democrats as they are very successful at doing across the board, climate change has been kind of, okay, you know, polar bears and ice caps. We finally evolved, you know, people thought about reducing emissions, et cetera, et cetera, but I think when we move towards, again, a post-Trump world talking about the climate crisis, we need to make sure that people understand that climate policy is very much national security policy. It's actually the US military apparatus in the 70s that first started talking about this, the US Navy, the US Department of Defense, had deep analysis and studies about climate change as a threat multiplier for our national security. It's a massive, massive issue, even just for the operations of the US military establishment and, of course, threats around the world, climate change driving migration and conflict, and so much more. And so I think when we think about what are we going to do next, it's going to be a lot more than just rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement, right, in 2029. It has to be about making sure the US is leading in terms of responding to the threat of the climate crisis and being prepared and making sure that we are as resilient and possible. And I think that we can play a really important leadership role in all of this. I've been thinking about this idea of a climate security core here in the United States, essentially kind of like a mix of a civilian, humanitarian, national guard type approach for not only responding to climate disasters, but building resilience to it, right? So in Arizona and Phoenix, we have, you know, deal with extreme heat every year, 600 people die in the summertime because of extreme heat. Could we have this climate security core come to Phoenix and pop up cooling centers across the city in a rapid manner? Can they, you know, jump to a place post-natural disaster and immediately respond and be prepared? Make sure that our grid is modernized and, you know, people can rely on power. And that leads also to the domestic issue. The reason we no longer are talking much about climate change is again because the right has been very successful in filling the vacuum with their right wing authoritarian talking points about the need for moral oil and gas. I sit on the, I'm the ranking member, which means like you're the top Democrat of the energy and mineral resources subcommittee in Congress overseeing our energy and all we are talking about now is more oil and gas. They will say we need all options on the table, but they don't really mean that. They're getting rid of everything that has to do with wind and solar and canceling projects when there are 80% completion and moving entirely towards oil and gas, which quite frankly is not, first of all, not going to bring costs down for Americans at all. And second of all, it's not going to be secure and it's not going to help our energy security challenges. And then finally, I think in the future, again, post-Trump, when we are back in power, we can really build strong alliances around climate stability and resilience, like how can we work with Canada and Mexico in terms of our grid security, how can we work on water security issues together. How can we support? import the global south or countries in the Middle East with issues around climate because again so much of what's driving migration across the world, across borders, climate refugees now, even here in the United States, are these climate disasters. So I think thinking about resilience and national security when we talk about climate is how I'm seeing it. Today's episode is sponsored by strawberry.me. It's time to come clean with yourself. Be honest, are you happy with your job? Like, really happy. A lot of us can't say yes to that. We're stuck in jobs without grown. We're never wanted in the first place, but we stay and we tell ourselves things like, what if the next move is worse? I've already put years into this. I can't afford to make a mistake or the classic isn't everyone kind of miserable at work. But there's a difference between reasons for staying and excuses for not leaving. It's time to come clean. It's time for strawberry.me. 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He'd Hegseth summons like every single leader in the U.S. military to listen to his speech where he yelled at them about haircuts. That's a thing that happened. They are restricting press access to the Pentagon. Hegseth has fired top generals, as Ben mentioned, for telling the truth about the Iran strikes. In other cases, it's just for being a woman, like the head of the Navy or for being black, like the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, CQ Brown. When I look at this magnification of the military, it worries me a lot. You can imagine a worst-case scenario that spirals out, like it's really troubling. I wonder how you view these reforms, how durable you think these changes that they're making are and what the long-term impact is on recruiting, for example, when people see what Pete Hegseth is doing and who that might draw to be a part of the U.S. military versus who it might make stay away. On someone on the Armed Services Committee for nine years, I'll tell you that their Republicans and Democrats were horrified with what's happening. Some of the Republicans may be more in private than public, but when you have people like General Hawk who have given their lives to this country for 30 years, and what it takes to reach the rank to be the general in charge of cyber command, be fired, summarily, because Laura Lumer puts out some tweet. I mean, look at the denigration of public service, and then you have Admiral Holsey who gets dismissed because he's raising legitimate questions about following the law in the strikes in Venezuela. Look, I talked to a prominent Republican, I'm not going to mention who, who said that he was with Hegseth and JD Bands and Trump and others talking about the strikes in Venezuela and it was like they were playing video games, that that's how they were looking at this, with jokes and with the same kind of callousness. There have always been two traditions in American history. There has been the tradition of conquest, which makes us like any other country. You know, we had the illegal Mexican-American war, and if Trump was president then we would have had the illegal Canadian-American war. He wasn't. But here is the more fundamental point. Those who have stood for morality in our foreign policy, who have stood for a military that defends ourselves but also is used to promote human rights, are the same leaders who have stood for morality in our domestic politics. It's not coincidental that Abraham Lincoln opposes the Mexican-American war and talks about justice in the United States and equality in the United States. It's not coincidental that Dr. King opposes militarism abroad and Vietnam and talks about justice and dignity here. You cannot divorce the morality of America's foreign policy from our morality as a multiracial democracy. And that is, I think, the vision that the Democratic Party needs to offer. And just to follow up on that, and Yasmine jumping, too, but I want to just pick up. I've been a little surprised that Democrats are not more outspoken about the boat strikes. Because there's a lot of issues. There's the killing of people that may be innocent. There's the fact that it's illegal under domestic or national law. There's the fact that Congress has not really been brought into this at all. There's also the fact that I look at this and he's not described any policy for Venezuela, but we might be on the precipice of a regime change operation there. We also know that he's threatened strikes in Mexico. We know that he wants to take back the Panama Canal. This could be like the beginning of a much bigger thing in Latin America. Why do you think what more can Democrats be saying about this? And I know there's so much to talk about, so I get that. But for both of you, what is an argument that you think that when you're talking to your constituents, for instance, how do you get people to focus on this? Might not just be a few one-off boat strikes, but there's a lot to be concerned about here. I'd love Yasmine's perspective, but I'll tell you what I think it is. We look at polls, and there's no secret politicians should look at polls, and I'm not saying that you should be totally data blind, and then you ask, well, what do people care about? And of course, what they care most about is their kids having good jobs and the cost of living being lower. And of course, we should be talking about those issues, and people say, well, foreign policy doesn't matter. And in the details of exactly what the trade agreement with each country looks like, a few people aren't putting that right at the top, or they're not looking at exactly what our policy is on NATO. But what they don't calculate is voters ultimately care most about what America represents. What our values are, whether it's ice raids, whether it's how we're acting in the world. If you look at people like who you work for President Obama, yes, he had an economic policy, but he had a vision of what America should be here at home. And I think when you talk about Gaza or when you're talking about Venezuela and you're speaking up, you're speaking to people's souls about what America should be. Donald Trump is doing that in a negative sense. He's saying what America should be is a country that acquires things, and that exerts power, and that that's our glory. That's how we're going to come back. That's how we're going to build strength. We need to capture what true strength and patriotism looks like. The alternative tradition from King and Douglas and Lincoln, and articulate that as a vision. And if we don't articulate that in the context of foreign policy, we're not speaking to what America should be, and ultimately that's what inspires people to get out. It's what inspired people to get out for Zoran Mamdani. So I'm obviously, I'm new. I'm 10 months into my freshman term, so everything is from that perspective. But your question actually makes me think of that amazing clip between Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz, where does everyone remember what I'm talking about? One of my favorites. Yeah, yeah. You don't know the population of the country. You seek to topple. The truth is that issue, I think, is very prevalent on both sides. The issue being, and this is understandable. We all come to Congress with a very different set of expertise. Some people, if someone has been a teacher, they're obviously super knowledgeable on education in a way that I am not, and will never be. I have a climate background, so I know XYZ, but I know nothing about so many topics that we're dealing with. And I think foreign policy is honestly one of those topics that even for the smartest member of Congress can be daunting. And people just don't know a lot about, and I've seen that myself on Iran as an example. even within our own party. There is so much much misinformation, misunderstanding, lack of knowledge about history or domestic politics, again, understandable, but it's just the reality, and I think it prevents people from feeling comfortable or confident, talking or speaking out on certain issues. Also to your point of like just the vast array of things we're dealing with right now in this kind of flood the zone environment. So I've been thinking about that in the sense of like one, I think it would be great to have more people with foreign policy expertise of some sort coming into Congress and there are organizations now, I know Ben, you're on one of the boards foreign policy for America that tries to get people into the fold. I think that is super helpful going into 2026 and beyond, like thinking about all of the you know federal workers who are at USAID or the State Department, like these people should think about running for office because that would be super helpful as we're trying to build for the future. And then I think, you know, when there, like for my experience again, just these first ten months, if there's a topic I don't know that much about, I try to look at those leaders within my caucus who are experts on it, who have a track record to seek out that knowledge and then it helps me feel a little bit more comfortable. And Ben, as well as an example, definitely not an expert. I have definitely spoken up on it though because I understand, you know, that it's important, but I think that that could be just where some of that gap is. Yeah. Final question for you. We have three and a half minutes left where Austin gives me a literal hook. Let's say one or both of you was advising a presidential candidate in 2028 or running yourself. You're in Iowa. You get stuck in an elevator with a very influential activist for 30 to 60 seconds who cares deeply about foreign policy. What's the pitch for the Democratic Party's foreign policy vision, why it's better and how we're going to win? We've got to become the party, the anti-war party again with moral clarity on our policy in Gaza and the Middle East as a start proof point. But I'll say in 30 seconds what inspired me. My first, one of my first jobs in politics was an intern at the Carter Center. And I still remember President Carter, barbarally, and I went down to see him preach. He used to preach on Sundays every day. And he said, you know, we're a superpower. America is a great superpower, and I'm proud of that. And the President Carter had served in the Navy. And he said, but you know what, I'd really like which would make us a superpower if leaders around the world would call the American President to say, this is how we bring peace. This is how we stand up for human rights. This is how we solve the world's problems. We've had a century in the 20th century of colonialism. My grandfather spent four years in jail alongside Gandhi. We had two world wars. We had a Cold War. Shame on us if a multiracial America repeats the mistakes of the 20th century. We need to be the party that stands for human rights and peace around the world. Echo all of that, 100%. I would also say anti-corruption, not just in terms of our domestic politics, but our foreign policy as well. Right now we have Donald Trump essentially trying to build his empire for himself and his family, cozying up to oligarchs, oil and gas, you know, oligarchies and billionaires around the world are just making record profits and we're going to see the results for many years. So I think really just thinking about those democratic alliances, anti-corruption alliances. And again, I think climate, whether or not we use the word, climate security is national security. It's going to be a threat multiplier for a long time to come because we're not likely going to meet the targets that are set by science. And so I think that is going to be really important to root out the corruption in everything that we do around the world. Well said. I'm going to, I'm going to grab 30 seconds here and I'm not running for president. I think the other thing that people need to understand is that this is all connected. There's no foreign and domestic policy. The corruption is at home and it's abroad. The autocracy is at home and it's abroad. The dehumanization of people because of how they look is at home and it's abroad. The oligarch class and the tech companies that don't have to play by any rules is at home and it's abroad. So I think we really need to absorb as progressives, as activists, as politicians. The extent to which there's no longer this kind of artificial divide and a bunch of nerds thinking about NATO and other acronyms somewhere else, there's just one big fucking problem that we're dealing with. Okay? And we need to win this fight here and we have to win it abroad. Yeah. There we go. We've got all the nerds under one roof tonight. Thank you for coming out to CrookedCon. Thank you for coming to a conversation about foreign policy at 9.30 in the morning that warms my little heart. Thank you, Congressman Connor. Thank you, Congressman. I'm sorry. See you soon. Pots of the world is a crooked media production. Our senior producer is Alonam and Cowsky. Our associate producer is Michael Goldsmith. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vittor, and Ben Rhodes. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Canter is our audio engineer, audio support by Kyle Segglin and Charlotte Landis. Thanks to our digital team, Ben Hefkoat, Mia Kelman, William Jones, David Tolls, and Ryan Young. Groat is our head of production. Adrian Hills, our senior vice president of news and politics. If you want to listen to Pots of the world, add free and get access to exclusive podcasts. Go to Crooked.com/friends to subscribe on Supercast, Substack, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts. Don't forget to follow us at CrookedMedia on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter for more original content, host takeovers, and other community events. Plus find Pots of the world on YouTube for access to full episodes, bonus content, and much more. And if like us, your opinionated leave us a review. Our production staff is proudly unionized by the writers' guild of America East. Longplay, our docu-series exploring the people and forces shaping the South is back. We're in the final stretch of the midterms, and the political map has only gotten more competitive with new states and districts emerging as potential flips. I'm Erin Haines, journalist and expert on all things Southern politics. Tune in on Mondays to Longplay Series on YouTube for wherever you get your podcasts.