Transcript of Foreign Policy and American Hubris with Ben Rhodes New

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They just seem to sow an increased level of chaos. So we thought, well, who, who knows about that kind of stuff? Maybe somebody who's been in the room when those interventions are being discussed. And that's who we're going to talk to today. The author of the upcoming book All We Say, writer, political commentator, national security analyst, currently co-host and Pod Save the World contributor, MSNOW, Ben Rhodes. What's happening, man?

Hey, John, good to see you.

Good to see you. Uh, now you were— you're a speechwriter for President Obama, your Deputy National Security Advisor to President Obama. Uh, in this current moment —yes, that we find ourselves, uh, where we, we are in a war to, uh, hopefully coerce the Iranian regime to give us something that vaguely resembles the JCPOA. Yes, that was negotiated how many years ago?

Uh, over 10 years now, John. 10 years. Over 10 years. Yeah. Yeah.

Uh, what has it been like for you to watch this play out, having been involved with a similar scenario of attempting to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon?

Well, I've had to do my breathing exercises and work on my serenity. If you remember the bruising debate over the JCPOA. And look, I think the couple of things I would highlight about this is, First of all, when we looked at this problem, right, let's just take the Iranian nuclear program, and we should put aside the fact that Trump clearly thought he was also going to change the Iranian regime with this war, and nobody talks about that anymore. But when we looked at this problem, we basically determined there are two ways that you could prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. One is through a nuclear deal in which, you know, they agree to accept restrictions on their program inspections on the program, but they're not going to dismantle their entire program. They just weren't going to do that. Or you could try to bomb their program out of existence. Every scenario that we looked at, every scenario we looked at, we war-gamed it. We were briefed by Bibi Netanyahu on what a great idea it would be to bomb the Iranian nuclear program. We get the same version of the same presentation Trump did.

He has a very consistent briefing on that.

Yes, it's very consistent. I mean, Obama got it so much that sometimes in these lengthy phone calls, you would see his attention wander because, you know, Bibi was going right to the same place. But every time we looked at it, what was clear is, first of all, you can't bomb a nuclear program out of existence. It's too scattered. It's knowledge that the Iranians have. It's scientists that they have. They know how to do the nuclear fuel cycle. You can't destroy that from the air. Maybe if you occupied the country, you could. And also, we saw the extraordinary costs that would come with any war. In every war game I ever looked at, the Iranians would shut down the Strait of Hormuz through which 20% of the world's fossil fuel energy flows. In every scenario, they were likely to lash out.

Oh, but Ben, that's, that's not, that's not realistic. That's, you know, that's just war games. That's just permutations from a computer. That in reality, how could they shut down the Strait of Hormuz? It would be—

it's not a very large body of water. And so what's so insane about watching all this is this was very clear to anybody who in good faith assessed the problem when we were there. And frankly, I think probably even other presidencies and administrations, probably even Trump's first term. And for some reason known only to him and maybe to Bibi Netanyahu, he decided to give it a try and see if we can eliminate this regime by bombing them and destroy their nuclear program.

Right. We could just wing it.

We could wing it. And here we are where the best ver— he's caused incalculable damage to our reputation, to the global economy. Thousands of people have been killed. I mean, real consequences. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent. And I think the cost of this war much higher than we know.

No, 20, I believe it's 25, Ben. $25 billion is— Yeah. That's all it is.

That's the official figure. Even though they asked for $200 to pay for it. You always gotta have a cushion, right?

For a little rainy day cushion.

Pete Hegseth always likes to go out with a little extra money in his pocket.

You got to have steak, lobster, and those little mini vodkas that you get from the airplane.

Exactly. But I mean, we're right back to a place where the best thing Trump could get, literally the best thing that he could get out of this war, which still I don't think would have been worth anywhere near the cost that we paid, is something approximating the Iran nuclear deal, the JCPOA, in which they Guess what they did under the deal, John? They shipped their stockpile out of the country. What? The dust, the nuclear dust that Trump keeps talking about, that was routinely shipped out of the country.

Plus, they only— it was enriched at what, 3%? Yes. During the deal? That's right. And there was an inspection regime, yes, that went in and checked on all these things for the Iranians?

There was an inspection regime.

Or they never got in?

They always got in and they inspect because some of it was inspectors, like people, some of it was cameras. We had inspections of their uranium mines and mills so we could make sure they weren't diverting their uranium to some covert program, the enrichment facilities, to storage facilities where the centrifuges were. All these places were inspected. They had limitations on how many centrifuges they could operate. They shipped the stockpile out of the country. They destroyed their plutonium reactor so that they didn't have that as a possibility for getting a weapon. All of these restrictions, but importantly, you also had the UN Security Council, Russia, China, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, European Union in on the deal, and the International Atomic Energy Agency verifying the deal. Now you've got Steve Whitkopf and Jared Kushner flying to Pakistan for reasons that are mysterious, unless you think that it's because Pakistan has invested in Trump crypto. So you don't have the whole world in on even what's happening. And so the best thing he can get is, you know, something that is very much like the deal he pulled out of.

And why do we go through this? Which he won't take. I mean, part of it is he's hemmed in by his, his dislike of Obama. I mean, unfortunately, his ego has created an environment where he is unable to make decisions based on the kind of realpolitik or what he can get because he's already come out and said, well, we can't give the Iranians their money back because Obama gave them, what, $1.7 billion?

Yeah, and he, he claims that every, you know, dollar in the banks in Washington, which is just a completely made-up story. But, but I— you're right, he, he, he— the only thing he— the deal is what we did, you know, the Iranians get some money, like they get some unfrozen assets, their own money, by the way, is, is what we provided them with. It wasn't U.S. taxpayer money at all. It was they sell oil on the market and that money gets frozen in accounts because of our sanctions. So you release some of that to the Iranians, or the $1.7 billion was money that we owed them from the pre-1979 when the Shah bought a bunch of military equipment from us that we never delivered. Right. It was a refund on military equipment. It was because they sued us in international court. But anyway, the point is, you're right. He keeps wanting there to be some military action he takes that kind of forces the appearance that the Iranians have lost somehow and they come, come out with their hands up and surrender something. But the reality is he can't do that because he's killed some of the Iranian leadership.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is the most hardline aspect of that regime, is calling the shots. They're the one who've closed the straits. They're not going to want to concede anything that, you know, goes beyond something like the JCPOA. And so Trump either has to kind of take his vast military armada and go home, having humiliated himself before the entire world, done none of the things he promised when he launched this war from his golf club. And he kind of can't come to terms with that. And so we're in this crazy place where we're on the precipice of like a potential global economic calamity if these shortages continue to persist in countries around the world. Americans can't afford the price of gas, never mind fertilizer and other things that depend on that strait. And so he's caught between the huge political costs he's going to pay, um, if this continues, and he's already paying, and his ego. And, and it's an uncomfortable place for the entire world to be stuck.

And did he— you know, hasn't this war to some extent had the sort of counterintuitive effect of, by raising the price of oil to such an extent, has he not replenished some of the coffers in Iran, you know, far beyond $1.7 billion that he would complain about, wouldn't he?

Yes, even beyond that, he's raised the price of oil, which benefits not just Iran but Putin, but Russia. Importantly, what Iran has done is they've begun to treat the Strait of Hormuz like a toll road. You know, they're already getting paid just to let tankers through.

In crypto, mostly. Yeah. Melania coin. I think they get Melania coin.

Well, they've done what Trump did. Hey, we've got a coin too. And sure, it's not, you know, it just for history, it's kind of what the Egyptians did with the Suez Canal after they fought a war in which they wanted to nationalize the Suez Canal. And they're still getting paid.

Now, I thought there was a— isn't there a maritime treaty that suggests free navigation and that charging those types of tolls, is that against international law? Yes, but guess what?

So is invading and bombing another country. Wait, what? When you dispense of international law, guess your adversaries also stop paying attention to international law.

Interesting.

And I think this is important too, though, because the Iranians have now demonstrated that their ability to control that strait is kind of like a nuclear deterrent, right? Is America likely to attack them again? I don't think so after how this one went. And so we've given them also not just additional revenue sources, we've actually given them in some ways greater security. Because they've demonstrated a deterrent that they have through that strait.

And because they've demonstrated that, then they've sort of— now, UAE, Oman, I guess they also border that strait. Do they think, well, geez, why didn't do that? Or is the part that they're at just too wide for them to be able to get a cut of that?

Well, it's— Oman is closer, right? But it's also just the fact that they're stakeholders in the American-led petrodollar security in global economy, right? So they, um, they, they're playing by the rules, um, and, and they also don't have the kind of military strength that everything is traded in petrodollars coming, coming through there. Exactly. And that, that the transaction— because this is another thing, a geopolitical thing that is happening, which is that the Chinese have wanted to do trades not in the dollar to weaken our control of the global economy. The Iranians want that, the Russians want that, and increasingly other countries are like, "Ah, I'm not sure why I want to give the Americans control over our economy," because that's what the dollar gives us. We can sanction whoever we want. But importantly, I think those other countries, particularly in different ways, the UAE, Saudi, and Qatar, are likely to kind of look at us who we're their security guarantor. Their whole model is, we have these monarchies, we get to stay in power, the Americans provide our security, and we provide our people with a measure of prosperity and stability. That model's been kind of shattered by this war.

And so you could start to see them hedging against us and drawing closer to China or Russia, or just looking for other options so that they're not overly reliant on a country, the United States, that started a war that caused predictably drones and missiles to rain down on them, right?

Because they are, you know, they're, they're sort of presenting themselves as the cities of the future, these sort of you know, Jetsons-esque. We're going to build islands out of nothing in the sand. We're going to build buildings. And then when you see drones and missiles hitting those cities and people fleeing the— these casinos of wealth and power, uh, it does tend to diminish it.

It does. I mean, the Dubai model, uh, that's the UAE's, like, you know, that's the, the ultimate Jetsons city. That's their, their jewel. Their model depends upon the idea that this is a safe place to visit. This is a desirable place to live. If you're an oligarch, come live here and put your money here.

Come do business here. Duty-free. It's a duty-free shop. The entire city. It's a duty-free shop.

Yes. And it's gone from the situation being that the Emirates would literally pay influencers to come and post pictures of themselves on social media enjoying Dubai to nobody there is allowed to post anything or else they get arrested.

I was going to say, to jailing influencers for doing that.

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The reality is that the damage done to US facilities, military bases, and diplomatic facilities across the Gulf, and I think to these Gulf countries, is much worse than we know. We're not being given accurate battle damage assessments from the Pentagon about our facilities. And the fact that these countries won't allow people to even post pictures of what's gone on there tells you something about the fact that a lot of those Iranian drones and some of those Iranian missiles got through. And it's talk— we're talking on order of billions and billions of dollars of repairs that are going to be needed, but also incalculable damage to their economies because, you know, just take Qatar, the liquid natural gas field that is the biggest in the world. Iran bombed that gas field that Qatar uses, took it offline. That's going to take years to get that up and running, the entire infrastructure of it, in a scenario where the war ends. And because that's offline, not only is Qatar taking an economic hit, but, you know, there are people that, you know, in the UK that are sliding into poverty because they're dependent on that gas for power.

And it's going to create food shortages and all kinds of different scenarios. So have we— is the upshot of this war that we have created a new regional hegemon in Iran? And just out of curiosity, you know, Saudi Arabia buys billions and billions of dollars of the highest tech military equipment that the United States can possibly produce. You know, I understand we are their security guarantors, but, um, have they unwrapped any of that shit? Yeah, yeah. Do they, do they gas it up? Like, or did they use it all on Yemen? Like, you know, we have military bases all over there, we sell them a ton of military hardware, the most sophisticated stuff in the world, and then something finally happens in the region well, not something happened. We, we, Israel and the United States, you know, just decide to go on a bombing spree. Where, where are these guys? Why are they so passive?

I mean, you know, they, they do not like to get directly into conflict with a country like Iran for a number of reasons. Uh, if you're, if you're sitting in Saudi Arabia, um, one of which is just, yeah, like, they, they're, their militaries are kind of designed to be plugged into ours, to kind of work off of our military. And, you know, they joined us in something like the counter-ISIS campaign, right, when we're taking out, you know, terrorist infrastructure. But Iran is a country of 94 million people that is right across a body of water from them. And if you look at how Iran has conducted itself in this war, the most hawkish Gulf state is the UAE. They're the ones that led the Abraham Accords alliance with Israel. They're the ones that have been the most active in places like Yemen and Sudan and Libya. Right.

And have been apparently attacking Iran, you know, secretly for the past couple of months.

Yeah. And here's the thing. If you look at who Iran has hit, they've hit all these Gulf states, but they've hit the UAE much more than anybody else. Sure. They could— there's a kind of quiet signaling that happens between these countries where the Saudis know that Iran could do far more damage to their energy infrastructure. Saudi's also not reliant on the Strait of Hormuz to get its oil out because it has overland pipelines. Um, and so I think what's happening in part is if the Saudis know that if they dive into this, the drones are going to rain down on their pipelines, get hit. Exactly, exactly.

But why are we so pissed off that, you know, we're so pissed off at the Sweden and Denmark for not jumping in. What, you know, our NATO allies haven't, uh, in any way stepped up to the plate, uh, with Trump utterly misunderstanding what the NATO alliance is, apparently.

Uh, yes, a defensive alliance.

The Gulf states don't jump in at all, and, and yet there's been very little pressure put on them to do so. There's only just the occasional leak that says, uh, the Saudis complained when Trump wanted to escort vessels out of the Strait of Hormuz. And so he stopped.

Well, the cynic in me might suggest that Sweden has not made a $2 billion investment in Jared Kushner's investment fund.

That's what Trump wants NATO to do. Just kick in some money to Kushner's—

Well, I— look, the Gulf states have invested a lot in what Trump cares about, which is like his businesses, his family businesses, his crypto. He got a new plane from the Qataris. The Emiratis kicked in a lot for his crypto venture. And I think the reality is that the paradigm for these countries for a long time has basically been like, what they give us is money. And not just the direct payments to the Kushner and Trump and Whitkopf families, 'Cause remember Steve Wickoff's kid is also in on the crypto business. But also, you know, they buy all this high-end military equipment that you mentioned. Well, the implicit deal is kind of like, that's good for our economy, in defense contractors in particular, if they're buying tens of billions of dollars worth of planes that they're not really going to use in a conflict. The kind of implicit thing is the Americans are kind of the security guarantor They're the ones that fight the wars. They're the ones that kind of intimidate our enemies. We're kind of paying into the deal with the defense equipment we buy and the other investments we make in the United States.

And we're also going to spread some money around Trump and his associates too. And look, that model is going to be something everybody looks at. I don't think necessarily that Iran is going to be a hegemon because they've suffered too. I mean, their economy is a mess. You know, their military capabilities have been somewhat diminished. However, what they've kind of demonstrated is we are not a regime that you can kind of come and knock over with your bombing campaigns. Right. We are a country of 94 million people. We have not just a religious theocracy, we have a military dictatorship.

That's the IRGC. I think it's probably more military dictatorship than religious theocracy at this point. It's more, you know, IRGC and Basiji. Yes, it is. Than it is. Council of mullahs.

And that's changed, right? In some ways, that could make the Iranian government more dangerous because, you know, the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was no good guy at all. But when you kill the 86-year-old Supreme Leader, you kill a guy named Larijani, who was also seen as the kind of key political operator behind the scenes, a guy that you would have negotiated with. Um, and you demonstrate that the only people that can stand up to the Americans, control the Strait of Hormuz, and inflict this pain on their neighbors is the IRGC. Those are the ones that churn out the Shahzad drones. The besieged militia that you mentioned are the ones that terrorize the population to not rise up, as Trump seemed to, you know, think they were going to do because he called on them to do that. Um, I think you leave behind a government that is actually, um, more— I don't want to say radical, but more militarized for certain, um, in the IRGC and with more credibility amongst this population.

I mean, it's similar in some ways to what Israel's actions did for Hezbollah and for Hamas by, you know, invading Lebanon and disastrously so, you know, and the Lebanese government being so divided and weakened and Hezbollah standing up for the Lebanese people, you know, they gave them their actions and hostilities, gave those groups which are corrupt and murderous credibility amongst the people. We've done the opposite of what we were trying to do.

That's right. I mean, I think Israel, you know, it seems like Trump, in part because, you know, he's not surrounded by expertise, there's no process to make decisions. And in his first term, he had some experts around who told him not to do things like this. Right. But he seemed to believe that the regime would collapse and there'd be be some transition to something else. I think, I find it hard to believe that the Israelis, given how much they understand about that region, actually believed that, you know, Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed Shah who's lived in Northern Virginia for decades, was gonna, you know, ride in on a white horse and usher in democracy.

Maybe they were gonna bring Chalabi back from Iraq. Yeah, yeah. Maybe curveball could get it done.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think that, they probably thought that the regime would collapse and that you'd have kind of a violent, chaotic situation like you kind of have had in places like Lebanon, which gives the Israeli government more freedom of action, which diminishes Iran as a threat.

What do the Israelis believe? Like, as somebody who— I'm assuming you've dealt with that administration. Are they messianic? Are they controlled by— I find it very hard to understand their so-called strategy of security, especially given the way that they build settlements. I mean, if you're going to disarm Hamas and Hezbollah, don't you have to disarm your own settlers? Like, aren't they the ones creating havoc in the occupied territories? And why would you even allow settlements if your main concern is security? Surely settlements in no way, you know, the amount of money and military you need to protect them surely takes away from the security. So have they been lying the whole time? Is, is their aim the whole time, Judea and Samaria, we're getting the whole thing, we're the chosen people, this is for us, and also maybe a little piece of Syria and a little piece of Lebanon? And if you don't mind, I wouldn't mind the Sinai. Like, what are we dealing with?

Well, I mean, First of all, just on your tactical point, one of the things that happened on October 7th is the border with Gaza was less defended because a lot of the IDF was up in the West Bank defending the settlers who were terrorizing the Palestinians. Right. So to your point, it does deter. Now, look, Israel is many things, right? I mean, Yitzhak Rabin would, you know, be agreeing with you. We need to disarm these settlers and dismantle these settlements.

And we all know what happened there.

Exactly, right? And so I think I think if you look at Israel today, there are different strains. Now, there are some, you know, the Ben-Gvir and Smotriches, that these are the more extreme ministers in the Netanyahu government, but they're the finance minister and the national security minister, so not fringe characters.

Yeah, they're not marginalized figures by any stretch of the imagination. They're not subtle.

Every, you know, time and again we've heard them say, we want full annexation of the West Bank, we want to take southern Lebanon, we want to take, you know, southern Syria. We want Gaza to be ethnically cleansed and we want to just settle that. That is a very real strain in Israeli politics that has frankly been the ascendant strain in Israeli politics. And America, a lot of Americans don't want to deal with that. They want to look at Israel and see, you know, Golda Meir or Yitzhak Rabin when you have Bibi Netanyahu running a government with these people in it.

And by the way, Meir and Rabin also a little more complicated as well when you really dig into you know, some of the attacks that they were a part of. Oh yeah. On Palestinian settlements. I mean, let's— we have to be honest about what the entire project entailed. I— and look, I think part—

what we cannot look away from is that the project clearly entails taking the entirety of the West Bank, um, taking— I mean, right now in southern Lebanon, just to give you an example too, um, they're not just ethnically cleansing the population, They are rendering it uninhabitable. They're destroying tens of thousands of olive trees. You know, they're making it so people can't come back and live there. And so some of this is just pure territorial expansionism, like, we want this additional land, whether people live in the West Bank or they live in southern Syria or they live in southern Lebanon or Gaza or not.

And it is. And again, it's what is the claim? It's ours. How do you know that? There's this book. And, you know, if you really look into it, it says, I mean, it's kind of insanity that we are not just allowing it, but enabling it. Yes.

Now, we are. It could not happen without us. And look, I think on Netanyahu, on Netanyahu, I think this is another piece of this. Number one, I think he's accepted a secure— Israel used to want stability, right? We have a peace treaty with Jordan, we have a peace treaty with Egypt, it keeps a lid on things. Now it seems like that's shifted to, we want chaos and violence because it gives us this freedom of action. Like, there's a war in Iran, there's, there's a war in Lebanon, uh, pay no attention to what the settlers are doing in the West Bank. You know, if none of this was happening, maybe there'd be a little bit more international attention on the fact that Palestinians are being evicted from their homes and some of them are being killed. Like land is being taken.

They're bombing the shit out of Lebanon and Gaza. Yeah.

In a ceasefire. In a ceasefire. In a ceasefire. Okay. Beirut is getting bombed in a ceasefire. Right. You know, aid is not getting into Gaza. And so I think Netanyahu is kind of fully shifted away from being, you know, kind of playing between different sides to saying, all right, all bets are off.

But he did that a while ago. He did that. Yeah, he did.

That's been going on now for quite some time. But it's what allows him to stay in power, you know, because a permanent war constant fearmongering about enemies, compromises with these extremists in his own government has allowed him to become Israel's longest serving prime minister.

And making sure Hamas is fully funded. Like, this has been a double game. Yep. For a very long time. And unfortunately, I think it's cost them, you know, forget about the moral high ground that was dispensed with years ago. The support of the world and more importantly, the support of the United States and support of the Jewish community within the United States. No question. Well, yeah, that's cost him.

Yeah. Yeah. Because— and it's cost him. And look, the Hamas piece of this in the Obama years, you know, what I could not help but notice is he would relentlessly undermine, humiliate the Palestinian Authority while, you know, he at times would empower Hamas. I mean, he did one deal where he gave Hamas 1,000 prisoners in exchange for one, right? And really elevated Hamas's stature. Well, that's because if he can point to the Palestinians and say, uh, they're led by Hamas, um, he doesn't have to have any pressure internationally to do a peace deal, right? If he wanted a peace deal, he'd be trying to empower the Palestinian Authority, but he never did that.

Well, Sharon gave him a perfect chance for a double-blind study. You know, if you say we're going to pull out of Gaza and Hamas That's the extremists, and we'll see what happens there. But the moderates in the West Bank, if they had worked with them, it's a perfect double-blind study. You say, well, yeah, so you're showing the Palestinians that, oh, if you cooperate with us and you have a more moderate government, look how life improves, as opposed to what's going on in Gaza where they're run by extremists and so life doesn't improve. But then they didn't improve lives in the West Bank. They didn't allow that to happen. So what The message is to the Palestinians is you can't win no matter what the fuck you do.

Yes, exactly. Because your life in the West Bank, where you've accepted Israel, recognized its right to exist, all those things won't be any better anyway. You have checkpoints, you have humiliation, right? You might get your home destroyed by, burned by settlers, and then the IDF comes and you get arrested. Right. And I think what Americans have to reckon with, because sometimes people say, well, why do you focus so much on this? None of this could happen without us. Like, we have provided— I've lost track of the billions of dollars. Their war machine, it's both financing billions of dollars in assistance that they get, but it's also arms sales. You know, we tend to not sell weapons to governments that commit war crimes as a matter of American and international law. And we have completely thrown that out the door since, you know, Netanyahu's launched these wars.

I love the idea that we tend not to. Yeah.

Well, unfortunately I have to say it that way. Yeah.

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Even vegans could feel like they had a chocolate. You'll find vegan options at Whole Foods, or get $5 off your next order at magicspoon.com/tws. That's magicspoon.com/tws for $5 off. You know, Ben, I'm curious. So you've been in these rooms, obviously, where all the ramifications and wargaming happens. Right. And I'm curious if you could take us through some of the mechanics of— it's a very complicated world because what I want to get into is, is the idea of what strategies are still available to us because we've tried everything. We've tried invading countries and staying there as their security net until they can rebuild a more stable and democratic society. We've tried bombing the shit out of them from the air until such chaos ensues that there is a coup and that ends up with warlordism. Or we've tried sanctioning to the point where the citizens themselves are suffering, but we entrench. I want to walk us through a little bit of the kind of grounding and foundation of American foreign policy, that what options— what can we do anymore? Is it still our hubris that is creating all these difficult situations? Do you understand where I'm going with this?

I do understand what you're going, and, and I want to kind of get us to how— why I think we need to completely dismantle, uh, a bunch of the infrastructure of American foreign policy. All right, let's go, because that's the only way to change things. But to get there first, I think what you have to realize is the United States government is a massive machine, and for well over 20 years since 9/11, um, we've been building infrastructure to kill people and bomb people and spy on people across a vast swath of territory that runs through North Africa, the Middle East, and into South Asia and Afghanistan, Pakistan. And one of the things that happens is when you build that kind of infrastructure of bases, of intelligence platforms, of special forces, you're constantly seeing enemies, right? Look, these guys in Somalia, they just gained some territory. We better go after them. Or there's some bad guy that just popped up in Mali. You know, we have to deal with him. Or, you know, lo and behold, you know, Netanyahu comes and says, look, you've got the table all set here to encircle the Iranians and deliver a blow at them.

The problem is you build this massive machinery, it becomes kind of self-sustaining. You can find a threat anywhere, or all it takes is, you know, apparently Donald Trump waking up with the wrong idea in his head and starting a war in Iran. And I think we just have to stop, right? Like, this is— nobody wants this. Americans don't want to pay for this. The people in these countries are tired of violence. The war on terror, has created the refugee crisis. Tens of millions of people displaced in the wake of American violence. That's radicalized European politics to the far right. I mean, you know, and the machinery came home because we had the equipment. You know, what do you think ICE— why they look so scary? Because the equipment that we used in wars, we bring home and give to police forces and ICE, and suddenly you've got armored vehicles and dudes in body armor. And some of those guys in ICE were, you know, trained in counterinsurgency tactics in Baghdad, and then they're doing them in Minneapolis. Like, this is what the entire edifice of the war on terror is. And I actually don't think— and if I fault, you know, my administration, we tried to rein it in and bring some of the troops home and follow the law more to the letter.

I think it's time to just say we need to just stop doing this. And guess what? We would save, you know, tens and tens of billions of dollars. We could focus on other things. And if people say, well, Ben, what about the terrorist threat? You know what? I think we can deal with it without fighting wars, right? Like, 9/11 happened. You and I are New Yorkers. Like, it was horrible. I witnessed 9/11. I started this career because of it. I think we can prevent a catastrophic attack like that without having, you know, this sprawling edifice that defines our foreign policy and keeps getting us into these wars.

Well, you also have a situation where there is no battle you could fight and win that would prevent 19 people who've gathered in some rooms from plotting harm to something. There has to be a reasonable standard of risk that unfortunately we do our best to mitigate. But at a certain point, you cannot, as you said earlier, bomb your way out of not just a nuclear threat, but of really any threat. You know, that seems to be the posture.

Yeah. And look, you know, occasionally I'm sure there might be some terrorist training camp that raises sufficient alarm bells that you might have to do something. I'm not suggesting that we're in a world of pacifism. I am suggesting, though, that— and, and the, the legal authorization, the authorization to use military force for all these counterterrorism activities is still in place from 2002. And that— and if the president needs to take action against some terrorist cell, make him go back to Congress and make a case again. Like, bring a bunch of this infrastructure home.

It almost strikes me as John Kerry in 2004 when he was running against George W. Bush. He had a vision for Special Forces being that the idea would be let's lower our footprint and use targeted Special Forces when we need to disrupt certain plots, but let's remove this idea of America as being able to control, as opposed— and he was ridiculed for that.

Yeah, yeah. Bush told them that there was a— that was a law enforcement approach. And then remember, John, the, the last ad of the of the 2004 campaign, they were like some wolves in a forest or something, and that was supposed to scare us.

Yeah, the Dick Cheney. Yep.

Yeah, but here's the thing, and this is where I lose patience with Democrats. We act like the politics are frozen in time from that John Kerry election. I mean, when in fact Americans have been telling us, you know, Barack Obama ran in '08 as an anti-war candidate. He ran in 2012 as the more dovish candidate to Mitt Romney. Donald Trump ran as the person who was going to keep us out of forever wars. Like, Americans keep trying to elect leaders who will stop doing this, and then the leaders keep doing it. And Trump's done it on steroids, and it hasn't worked.

So talk to me about why that is, because it's— all right, so let's go through, you know, I think we all understand that Trump, even George W. Bush, tried to build a coalition to do that. And Trump is certainly is making these decisions seemingly more impulsively and with less planning and with less ideas of how to get out. But let's go through— so Barack Obama is surrounded by experts, right? You're wargaming all these different things, but he's still making those same decisions that, you know, let's go through Libya. So Libya has, I guess, terror cells, and we think Gaddafi's obviously a bad actor. But Gaddafi says, okay, I get it, I'm not going to try for nuclear weapons. I apologize, I was a bad guy. Let me put on my, you know, sarong or whatever it is that he wears that make him his caftan. And we still end up utterly screwing the pooch on that one. So we did. Talk about then, because we keep saying, why does America keep getting into these situations? So how did we get into that situation?

Libya was interestingly a different situation that highlights a different problem in American foreign policy because it was not about terrorism. People may not remember, and again, I think it was a mistake. So I agree with the premise of the question. but to explain it, it's the Arab Spring, right? There are these uprisings, people seem like they're trying to throw off authoritarianism, they want a future of democracy. In Libya, this becomes ground zero for the Arab Spring, and different parts of Libya rise up sufficiently that essentially the government lost control. Benghazi is actually a city, it's not a scandal, it's actually a city of several hundred thousand people, and it was the center of opposition to Gaddafi. And so that city essentially threw off the regime, and then Gaddafi massed an army and was marching on Benghazi to basically crush his opposition. So there's nothing about terrorism or anything. It's just like, this bad guy who's kind of been an adversary of the United States, and we know what he does to his enemies, he tends to kill them, is going, and there's going to be a bloodbath in this place, and we should stop it.

And I actually think the Europeans They were the most gung-ho about this, the French and British, in part because they really let Gaddafi in from the cold and they'd done all kinds of deals with him. I think Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France, ended up going to prison because of some of his own dealings with Gaddafi. And so the idea is, well, let's— this could be a humanitarian intervention. We can all get together, pass a UN Security Council resolution. So it would be legal under international law authorizing the use of force. And NATO's going to go in and stop Gaddafi. Outside of the gates of Benghazi, save the people in that city. The problem is twofold. One, once we did that, it was like, well, we can't leave him in power. He's a terrible guy. And so we went down this slippery slope of we're not just stopping him there, we're essentially going to keep this up until the Libyans oust him. But I think the main lesson, John, is that whether it's the terrorism issue we've talked about the nuclear issue we've talked about, or this kind of issue where it's the politics of a country, we cannot engineer those politics through bombing campaigns and through our military.

It doesn't work. There's not a record of a regime change, you know, supported by the United States through military force that made a place better. And so I think what we have, have had trouble coming to terms with is We like to think, and a lot of people frankly that work in foreign policy, they sit in Washington, like to think that they can move some pieces around a board and sanction these people and they'll do, you know, something, or bomb these people and they'll do something. That's the mindset that has failed. I'd like to introduce sanctions to this conversation. The most heavily sanctioned countries in the world by the United States in the 21st century have been Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia. Have those— has that worked? Are those places better?

I think we're, we're all friends now, aren't we? We are. Yeah.

And their governments are less— the governments are more repressive and more adversarial to us. So I think we should be open to radically different approaches where you may look at Iran and say, you know what might work better? And again, this will be really controversial. I just want to try to stretch the conversation here. It might be better to lift sanctions on these people. Because putting sanctions on this government has made it more repressive, has empowered the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps that knows how to, you know, trade on the black market and have revenue. It's Iranian people that get screwed. And so this is connected to Libya because it's just this— it's that fallacy that we can engineer the politics of other countries because we're America. Better to do that over time by setting an example and following international law and trading and conducting diplomacy the ways that most countries try to influence other countries, that tends to work better. But America gets impatient and we're like, we don't like what you did, we're going to sanction you or bomb you. And there's just not a track record of that working.

Do we get impatient or are we arrogant? Because you just said influence. But what we do is we try and control. And the way we control is almost entirely through military. You know, China's developed Belt and Road and they'll go in and I'm not saying they're not as exploitative as the next guy, but at least somebody gets a road out of it. We go in and give whatever repressive governments of Africa need weaponry and let them just do what, what they will with it. My question to you is there must be something in the process that continually leads us to the same result. So we keep talking about, look, we war game these things out and we all sit around, but there must be something in that process that removes the barriers to action because Barack Obama bombed Libya. Yeah, he— that's what he did. And Gaddafi was decapitated, taken out, and it created a warlord situation. Uh, we armed rebel armies, oftentimes Islamist armies, in Syria. That was the methodology there. That's how we were going to deal with Assad. We— Crimea, Russia just went in and took Crimea and we sanctioned.

But to be honest, and, and, but here's where we got to be honest about Crimea too. Yeah, because sometimes people— it was interesting because people didn't like Libya because we intervened there, but then didn't like our Syria policy because we didn't intervene there and thought that we should have done something to stop Crimea. And, and, and, and it's that Crimea piece that is I would always, you know, tell people, "Mm-hmm." "How were we going to stop them? Do you want to go to war with Russia over that?" You know? And by the way, by the time we learned that it had happened, it had happened. You know, I say that because part of it is accepting the limitations of control, right? That, you know, sometimes bad things happen in the world.

Say that again. Say that again. Yeah. We— Say that again.

We need to accept limitations that we can control events. And to actually, to get your question about where, why you're not stopped, Libya is an interesting example because there's a way that we might be able to stop this. Okay. In Libya, we actually got the UN Security Council resolution. We did not get an authorization from Congress. And interestingly, when Obama was, you know, under pressure and frankly inclined himself to bomb Syria after a chemical weapons attack in 2013, the infamous red line incident. What he did is he went to Congress and said, "Okay, if you wanted me to do this, you need to authorize it because that's what the Constitution says," and Congress would not vote to authorize it. Marco Rubio, right, who had been castigating Obama for his weakness and passivity and not attacking Assad, came out and said he would vote against congressional authorization, because members of Congress know that war is ultimately unpopular, because it costs money, it can cost American lives, and it's just bad. I think you don't have to be an expert to know that war is bad. And so the way you stop it is you insist that there will not be a war without congressional authorization, and if there is, the president will be impeached, which is, by the way, what's in the Constitution and implicit in the War Powers Act passed by Congress, because if presidents had to ask for permission from the people's elected representatives before every use of military force, we would use it a lot less.

Frankly, the founders left it— it's right there in front of our eyes, John. Like, there'd be no war in Iran if Trump needed a vote from Congress before he bombed Iran. If we just followed the, the way the law, the way that the founders intended— they were pretty smart, those guys— we wouldn't be doing this.

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Then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. But that can't be the discussion in, in the Situation Room. Like, I can't imagine that that's in any way the discussion in the Situation Room, that in the Situation Room— because America has proffered these interventions, whether it be through military or through covert action, Look, Iran is a perfect example. The whole reason we got in this situation in the first place is we enabled a coup in Iran in 1953. Yes. And so then we installed a dictator, and that's kind of got the ball rolling. And we've done that throughout Central America and South America and all kinds of other places. It seems like absolute power corrupts absolutely. Yeah. And that anybody who sits in that chair suddenly finds the desire to pull strings around the world in a way that I think maybe is a post-World War II— maybe we got the wrong message from World War II, that if, you know, we can control the world and then just rebuild it through a little Marshall Plan, Yeah. And so we're a lot more in control of events than we actually are.

That's right. I, I think, look, I think we have to come to terms with the fact that we have an empire. Um, we've been acting as if we do, you know, because if I talk to some friends from other places, you know, I have a lot of friends from Afghanistan, and what they say to me is, you know, this is what you want. This is what empires do. They break things on the periphery. They keep the rest of the world violent and chaotic so that you can dominate things. And so in some ways, what look like messy outcomes to us— oh, all these countries are such a mess— that is kind of how empires tend to operate. You know, we have our core, and our core has been Europe and parts of East Asia, And then if everything else is kind of a mess, um, that implicitly advantages us. It certainly advantages fossil fuel companies and arms dealers and people who do finance capitalism where they sit around and just bet on currencies on computer screens all day to enrich themselves while everything costs more for the American working class. It's not the intention. And what I would always have to explain to friends of mine like this is, I was never in a meeting where people were like, "Let's create chaos today in the world." People were well-intentioned.

It was like, "Well, let's try to train these security forces and let's try to have the recipe for stability over here, or even let's intervene in Libya to try to prevent a massacre and support the forces of democracy there." But the reality is the machine functions like an empire, and an empire tends to create chaos along its periphery. And to your point, Jon, I think everybody's sick of it. Americans are sick of paying for it. You know, I talked to Graham Platner recently and he said, look, you don't have to be a genius politician to know that saying to people, hey, we should spend less money on bombs and more on schools and hospitals is a winning message right, left, or center, right? Americans are sick of it. People around the world are definitely sick of it. Now they're kind of scared of the insane person that is running this whole edifice. And, and, you know, is Greenland next? Is Panama next? Is Canada next? And it's, it's your point, it's like someone needs to put an arm around us and say, you don't control things, you know, like, like, come sit over here, let me talk to you about the fact that you need to invest in education in your country, like you need to— like, I, I think we're at that point.

But these are, these are the kind of messaging, you know, we talk about it all the time that You know, you never go wrong with the message of let's take that money and focus it on the American people. But the truth is, that's not how it works out. And there's never been an NDAA that got shot down. And now they're going for another $500 billion off of a trillion-dollar budget that's already 10 times what all the other countries spend on military combined. Because for some reason, in the heart and soul of the American people, we believe that we are the most endangered country in the world that has to have the most military in the world. And so I want to address like some of the contradictions that occur in all that. Like, I'm always of the impression that for business, stability and certainty is the greatest asset that they can have, whether it be volatile tariff policy or whether it be chaos in certain markets and things, that security is It feels like the result of our search for security is instability because of our cavalier attitude about what those interventions regarding security do.

You made the point earlier that I thought was the perfect point. Our interventions in, uh, the Middle East created a migration crisis that actually creates instability and political unrest in Europe. Yes. And so, yeah, when you're in those rooms and these questions come up, does anyone say this is going to create instability, or do they all go, I get it, there'll be instability and it's going to cost a lot of money, but it's worth it? Yeah, it's always worth it because, because action is better than inaction.

I think that in— so in The Room, yeah, um, I, I think that the problem is that people become fixated on finding some formula to deal with a problem without seeing the whole picture in the sense of we're talking about Syria today in the Situation Room. What are our levers? Sanctions or arming the opposition or bombing them or diplomacy with the Russians? And everybody's kind of hyperfocused on this country as if it's something that we control, or if we pull the right levers, X will happen and lead to Y. And again, what is absent is why are we talking about this at all? Like, why do we control— why do we think we can control what happens in Syria? And that if we do these actions, it's good, like, it's going to cause all these second-order effects, like a migration crisis. Now, the pressure at the time, John, is why isn't Obama doing anything about Syria? People are being killed there. This is horrible. He's weak. He's not standing up to Assad. 'You know, and so then it becomes— there's a pressure to do something.' Like, American politics— not American people, and this is where I would actually challenge Democrats to get a spine on this stuff— it's kind of this weird mix of the pundit class and the, you know, uh, the, the think tank world.

And, and this, you know, I called it the blob, right? But this, this kind of discourse, uh, machine in Washington demands that you you solve Syria, you know. And so then you start pulling the levers that you think will make, you know, and what are those levers doing? They're making it more violent. And then there's refugees flowing in into Europe. And then you, then we better get a plan to, to deal with Erdoğan to, to host these refugees. And then Europeans are paying him. And, and you're constantly, you're chasing your own foreign policy around the map. And, and if you look at Iran, and this is what's so insane, and I think where we have to not let Trump off the hook on this thing is let's say he gets the dust out, right? And he's unleashed chaos on a global scale and instability on a global scale. And what worries me in my darkest moments, John, is that the stock market's gone up. Maybe the reason this keeps happening is because the people that are actually powerful are insulated from the instability. Right. Because they're trading currencies and they're trading oil futures. And so if financial capitalism can run, if the arms dealers can make their profits, if AIPAC is happy because Israel wanted this war, if all these— and it's multiple powerful interests here, you know, this is— so it's actually to the Tucker version that this is just AIPAC kind of ignores the capitalism part and the arms dealer part and the fossil fuel companies part.

But it's all these powerful interests that finance our politics that benefit from the instability while like literally everybody else in the world is getting screwed.

And a media that demands action and doesn't— Yes. It never holds itself accountable for the results of the things that it too created the momentum for. But you would expect our political leaders to be able to resist narrative momentum as opposed to actual, you know, you know, issues there. So, you know, all of those elements combine to push us towards that action is somehow always better than inaction, which creates all these downstream chaotic kinds of effects. I had— I had—

that's so, so right. And, and, and you've been on this better than anyone, but I, I had a friend in Europe once explained something to me that was, I thought, really interesting, which is, you know, you Americans are crazy, and there are a lot of reasons why. And, and, and one of them is like, if a bad thing happens in the world, right? Yeah. I think this was around like 2013. Like, pick any one of these countries. In our, in our, you know, media, there's like 5 paragraphs that describe the bad thing that happened and why it happened. And then by paragraph 6, it's like, and, you know, what, what could we possibly perhaps do to help address this issue. In America, it's like, "Bad thing happened, where's Obama?" This kind of bizarre— and again, this really is the media, and I don't fully understand why. I mean, I remember in Libya, Jake Tapper yelling in the briefing room like, "How many more have to die before you put in place the no-fly zone?" And we did. But I remember thinking, like, I'm glad he cares about the people of Libya today, you know, but, um, it's a strange impulse that, that the media thinks its job is to hold the president accountable for every bad thing that's happening in the world.

And I know I'm sounding sour grapes here. I'm not, because I actually think this is a structural problem. This is not an Obama issue or even a Trump issue or Like, why is it that we insist that our presidents— I think this may be a post-World War II, a Cold War kind of fear thing where it's like, why, why do we insist that our presidents— I mean, is another thing Platner told me, like, there's this literally like kind of a commander-in-chief test where you have to show that you're willing to bomb civilians to be credible or something, you know, that, that if you don't 'Today's the day you became president because you bombed a country,' or something. I think we have to fundamentally change our foreign policy, but we can't do that unless we kind of shift this presumption that we are in control of events. Right.

Well, it's an arrogance, I think. There's a primacy that we are the leader of the free world, but the only one that could possibly accomplish it. But on the flip side of that, the president of the United States should not be able to be bullied by Jake Tapper or any of the news organizations. And, and it, you know, look, here's what it should be. The American— the bar for intervention in foreign countries, militarily and otherwise, should be the same as the bar to release the Epstein files. Like, if they can hold off on that, then surely they can hold the line on, on bombing, on dumb wars, on dumb wars and all these other countries. But everybody talks about it all the time, and yet the military budgets continue to go up and continue to soar, and our military interventionism, or our covert interventionism, continues to expand. And I'm not even arguing an idea of let's pretend the rest of the world doesn't exist. No, quite the opposite.

Right. Let's engage the rest of the world like grownups. There you go. Let's trade with them and have diplomacy with them and fight climate change with them and, and regulate artificial intelligence with them. Like the opposite of isolationism. Let's actually rejoin the world, you know, as a normal place.

And that's not giving them control over what we do. Yeah, but it's very clear that our current strategy, a strategy that we've been, you know, I think pushing now for, as you said, more than 2 or 3 decades, is an engine of instability and chaos that makes the entire world more volatile, and then ultimately Americans less safe. And now we're caught in that battle of, well, if we're left safe, then, then I guess we got to increase our defense budget. And now we're in the cycle.

Yeah, and we've spent $6 trillion— with $6 trillion on the war on terror, like, imagine what that could have paid for, just a fraction of that.

Mind-boggling. And, and what have we gotten? And it is, it is maybe the largest overreaction in the history of, you know, military. And I say that as a New Yorker. The idea that we went into two countries— like, think of, think of how many more people we ourselves kill as Americans with gun violence every year. And we don't do shit about that. Yeah. So, I mean, that, that's the part that's just—

I think people are ready to hear this, you know, in a way. I mean, to, to show a little grace to my former boss, like, yeah, yeah, the politics in, you know, around 2009 were still kind of hyper, you know, you know, zero tolerance of terrorists. I remember the guy— I remember when the guy, uh, tried to light his underpants on fire on a plane. Sure. And actually, I remember, like, it was Christmas and this guy gets on a plane, he tries to light his, uh, something on fire, and basically all he succeeds in doing is lighting his you know, his— that part of his body on fire. Nobody's hurt.

Well, it is a wick, you know, for many people.

Yeah, I remember getting the call and hearing, okay, well, great, like, you know, I'm glad that didn't happen. And it was like a five-alarm fire for weeks of like the Christmas Day bomber and how did he get on that plane and ah, we're afraid. And, and, and, and I think now people are like ready to hear like, you know what, Guys, like, if we have to be able to live with a little bit more risk on the terrorism front and not spend $6 trillion and create chaos around the world, right?

Somebody— I think they're looking for effective deterrence, but not, uh, this kind of all-encompassing Skynet deterrence that costs a lot of money, doesn't appear to be as effective anyway, and creates collateral damage in all kinds of, of other areas. Yes.

And I think, I think people are ready for some— somebody show up and talk to them like a grown-up.

Boy, that'd be nice.

And the Democrats too, because they have this thing that they do— not all of them— but even when this war started, it was so clearly dumb and it was so clearly illegal, but you know, they got a throat clear for several paragraphs about how horrible the Iranian regime is and they must be dealt with but not this way. And right, it just like, just, just let's just take that. It's not that they're not horrible. They are. But like, you're, you're kind of feeding the beast here, you know, like everybody's, you know.

Well, that's the problem is, yeah, not only are they horrible, but we do deals with horrible people all the time.

We have horrible people.

Like, the Iranians are horrible, but I'm gonna sponsor the Saudi Arabian golf tournament.

Exactly. Okay, exactly. Sure, why not? Exactly.

Uh, Ben, what is your— you're also— didn't you just write a book?

I did, I did. It's coming out in, uh, on May 26th, so we're in the 2-week window. It's beautiful. It's a— I basically wanted to understand the intensity, uh, and existential feeling of the argument we're having in this country right now politically by going all the way back to the beginning. And through 15 speeches, I tell the story of essentially the argument we've been having about American identity. And the shorthand is it starts with Benjamin Franklin at the Constitutional Convention basically giving a speech in which he doesn't even mention the Constitution. He just defends the virtue of compromise. And on the one hand, that was what allowed us to form a union. On the other hand, we compromised about some pretty big things, like who is an American, who gets to decide that, right? And basically, by, you know, looking at this mix of, you know, people you know, like Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King, "I Have a Dream," or people you don't know, like an abolitionist or the vice president of the Confederacy or a Kansas populist, I wanted to kind of trace how this argument has taken different forms all the way until today.

And I definitely learned a lot and had a lot of fun on the journey of writing this.

Man, is that up my alley? I have to tell you, like, not to kiss your ass, but like, that's the kind of thing I would— I love that sort of thing. The thing I would ask you is, because what I feel like I've noticed is our ability for argumentation has utterly diminished. Yes. The manner— when I watch news programs from the 1960s and '70s, I am stunned at the level of, quite frankly, like, honest discussion that has occurred and the way that people used to talk to each other.

So this is really important because part of what's happened is, you know, Americans used to give speeches that were reprinted in newspapers. And they really favored argument. And then there was a speaker circuit. That's what people like Frederick Douglass were on, where they traveled the country and gave these speeches days on end. Then there was radio, and that favored the kind of clear explanation of an FDR. Then there was television, and you had the kind of charisma and spectacle of a King or a Kennedy. Part of what's happened to us is, because the internet has created infinite attention, you know, competition for attention, because social media's kind of polarized us in these algorithmically designed tribes, we can't make or listen to an argument. All the information we receive is in bite-sized pieces that are meant to make us angry or fearful or energized. When's the last time you listened to an entire speech delivered by a politician? And the fact that that sounds quaint, I think, shows that we kind of might need that again. Because speeches, in writing this book, I realized how much— imagine American history without speeches, without Lincoln's Second Inaugural, or King's "I Have a Dream," or Reagan's "Time for Choosing," or Obama's speech at the Democratic Convention.

Reagan and Obama are impossible without speeches. That's where we tell stories about who we are and where we're going. And I think part of why our politics is so disorienting right now And I really didn't realize this until writing this book, is that we've lost that. And when you lose that ability to make an argument, your argument gets poorer because you're not trying to persuade anybody anymore. You're just talking to the people that already agree with you. And you don't listen because, like, you never have to sit and actually absorb, you know, ideas. And so I think actually part of what we need is that the storytelling that comes through speeches.

And even argument now is reduced to, you know, Jubilee sessions where you sit. Yes. And like 20 people raise flags and run in and hit you with, you know, the one sentence that's going to own you. The viral moment. Yeah, we've lost any ability to that. Well, I can't wait to read it. And I really appreciate you being here. As always, a fascinating conversation. Ben Rhodes, he's author of the upcoming book Always Say, writer, political commentator, and obviously national security analyst, co-host of Pod Save the World. Um, thanks a lot, man.

Really appreciate it. Thanks, John. Let's go Knicks!

Let's go Knicks! Hello. Uh, first I just want to say for the people at home, Lauren was unable to join us, uh, for today. She'll be back for, for obviously for our next one. But guys, I, you know, it's whenever I'm talking to somebody who's been in the room, I don't want to go all Hamilton on you guys.

The room where it occurs.

Thank you. It's harder to rhyme, but okay, that's fine. I'm always struck by that where they like the conventional wisdom is always like, yeah, we've been doing this wrong forever. And we shouldn't be doing that. We shouldn't be doing this. Like, so in the room, does anyone go, I have a question. Should we even be doing this?

There are a bunch of girls being like, I can fix him.

Is that what our foreign policy has become? I'm drawn to Iran. Iran is the bad boy.

It's going to be different for me, but it'll be different when I bomb it.

I can change him.

Yes. Oh, dear Lord. Um, maybe that is it. Maybe, maybe we now start to realize, like, maybe Iran's just not that into us and we have to back away.

But I do think it's a really important conversation to be having of what a more progressive foreign policy can look like, because it feels like we've— we really gave this version a go, and Trump came up and it was America first. You know, we thought it was going to be different, but right here we are, back to square one of intervention in the Middle East.

It really does feel like that if you have those buttons that you can push, you ultimately end up pushing them. The siren song of— the thing that I was trying to get at is we've pushed every fucking button on the remote and none of them work.

And the point that Ben made about, um, sanctions We have— the countries that we have sanctioned are some of the worst actors in the world right now. And all we've done is entrenched these really bad regimes and made life worse for the people of these countries.

Bars, bars, children. Unfortunately. Unfortunately. So we've— we've— we're exhausting all those. And then the one thing we did do that seemingly had a stabilizing effect which was sending AIDS drugs to children in Africa. That's the one thing where we're like, yeah, fuck that, that we can't do.

No more freebies for you all.

That's, that's where the real corruption is. That, that, you know, $10 million we spent on iodine to put in so people don't get rickets anymore or whatever. That's the thing we got to do. But give me $500 more million so I can hire my son's drone company to work at the Pentagon.

We got monies for that.

Yeah, we, we'll let China build the roads and we'll just go ahead and bomb them.

You know what, maybe that's the game, Jillian. Is that the game? China builds the roads, we bomb them, they have to go back in and build them, we get a kickback. Maybe, maybe we're playing a two-man game with China right now, Jillian.

We're keeping them busy while we do other stuff.

You're, you're now you're in that 4 or 5-dimensional chess area that I hadn't considered before. Very, very, very interesting. Brittany, what do the kids want? All right.

We got 3 questions for you today. All right.

Let's bring them. Let's bring them.

John, you can only make one media bet on DraftKings. Would you bet on Barry Wise or Stephen Colbert?

Oh, come on. That's like the Knicks versus the Sixers. I mean—

No, that's like, that's like the Harlem Globetrotters versus the Washington Generals. Like, that's, that's not even— modern NBA competition. That's old school, uh, classic, uh, king v. clown. Uh, so yeah, Colbert is, is generational broadcaster, talented in so many different dimensions, a lovely human being, not chasing some, uh, outdated kind of, I don't know, preconceived notion of centrism or whatever the fuck it is that they're doing over there. And meanwhile, just nodding to— no, that's, that's not even— although, to be fair, uh, Stephen also would have fired everybody at 60 Minutes, just not out of ideology, pure vengeance and spite.

I always got that vibe from him.

Yeah, bet on Colbert all day long, baby. All day long.

All right, next up, John, have you ever wanted to 86 something?

You know, in restaurant terms, I've 86'd things. You know how many Mexican restaurants I worked in? Do you know how many times I've had to 86 the— either the guacamole or, you know, uh, shrimp quesadilla because we run out of— you know, which, by the way, shrimp quesadilla Do we really need to shrimp everything in this country?

Cheese and fish?

We're not doing that. No shrimp quesadilla. No. And have you guys worked in restaurants?

Yeah. No, I still get nightmares.

Brittany, you've never worked in a restaurant?

I've never— no, I was a retail gal.

Really? Yeah. Have you ever been fired? No. You've never been fired?

Are you firing me right now?

No.

No, let's do it live.

Wouldn't that have been a really cool way to do it? You're going to do it.

He's going to 86 Britney on this episode. Have you ever been fired?

No. Well, today's your lucky day. You've been 86'd. Jillian, did you work retail?

No, I worked in— I worked restaurants, coffee shops. I still— do you still get the nightmares? I get nightmares where I'm just working all night and you have like tables asking for things to get sent back. You're like behind. You're— I don't know if those will ever go away.

I don't think people understand. And there is a whole lingo of, like, behind. I'm in the weeds. You got to 86 that. Like, it's all—

you got to marry these ketchups. Anytime I walk by somebody, I'm behind, behind, behind.

Hold on. Or coming out of the corner. Right. Corner. Behind. I find now that whenever ketchup is running out, I'm like, somebody marry these.

Yes. Yeah. Sidework. Got to do your sidework.

You take your side where you used to take the two ketchup bottles back when they would leave just the bottle on the table. They didn't have the little refillable plastic and you would plop them on top of each other and just let them. And like it was the long laboratory at the end of it. And I always used to think to myself, like, that's not sanitary in any way. That's like— No.

And yet it hasn't changed the way I eat out at all. Like, I still trust the ketchup implicitly.

I don't know why that is. Why shouldn't you? What's a little food poisoning amongst condiment friends? By the way, I've worked retail and restaurants and, if I may add, been fired from all disciplines. I've probably been fired from more jobs than you two have had. That's how bad I was in the, in the early days where, like, there was just a kind of like 3 months in, they would just be like, hey, Thanks so much for coming in at 5 AM to clean all the pans at the bakery, but you put soap in there and that got in the bread and you gotta go.

Well, it worked out in the end.

Did it though? Wait, did you fold shirts?

Oh yeah, I was a stock boy in Woolworth's in— oh yeah, there was a place called Jekyll's Hide is leather. Uh, I worked in there for a while. Ormond's— do you ever remember a store named Ormond's?

No. You've had a lot of jobs.

Yeah, a lot of jobs.

And look at you now, kid.

And until I found— until I found liquor store, none of them worked out.

Um, something just popped into my mind. Yes, both Jillian and I were fired, um, specifically by you previously.

Wait, what? No, you weren't. That a show being removed is not the same as being fired. I had that thought.

I wasn't gonna say it. No, I was like, wait a second.

Outrageous stretching of the definition of fired. You were not fired. You abandoned ship with me when Apple made it untenable for us to continue doing our show, The Problem. For those who don't know, Jillian and Brittany and I worked on The Problem together. And, uh, Jillian and Brittany were superstars, uh, at The Problem. And then Apple fired me. Well, they didn't really fire me. They just told me, uh, that to work there, I would, uh, have to disown everything that I ever held dear. And, and so I left. But we, we weren't— we, you know, we, we— that's not considered being fired.

It was consciously uncoupling. Yes. Yeah.

Thank you. You know what it was? It was self-care. Yes. It was walking out of what was becoming an abusive relationship. And if you've ever been in an abusive relationship with a multinational conglomerate— who hasn't? I mean, you know, the hard part about breaking up with Apple is, uh, all the breakup songs are on their technology. It's almost impossible to avoid. Uh, very difficult. All right, what else they want? What else?

All right, last one. All right. Uh, John, what makes New Jersey so special that it's the only state that won't allow people to pump their own gas?

First of all, it's an excellent question because people are always stunned by that, and I'll tell you why that is. The customer service in New Jersey is second to none. What do you need? Gas? You need anything? We are a state that just wants— we are— New Jersey is just a state filled with butlers waiting that whatever your desires— when you're born in New Jersey, everybody gets a little bell.

Oh, it's a very refined society in New Jersey. Yes, Jillian, you get it.

And if you ever need anything, whether it's gas or you need your windows washed or You need to scrape the carcinogens off your car. If you happen to live in that area of the— you ring the little bell and someone will show up and say, what can I do for you? Can I help you? You don't have to tip. You don't have to do anything. We just take care of everything. We want to be that state where all— there's no self-serve bullshit in— we are a full-service State.

Full-service state. I love that.

Come down. What do you need? Here's your gas. It's going to be sunny out. You want to put a little SPF on you? You want me to get that? That's what we do too, although people generally don't take us up on that one as much because it's creepy. But the gas thing, people love. Do they do that? They don't do— in, in Long Island, they certainly don't do that.

No, you're getting out.

Are we really the only state that does that? I think so.

Yeah, I believe so.

It's like deeply uncomfortable too. Oh really?

Can I tell you something? It's not uncomfortable for me at all. And not only that, when it's happening, I always maintain eye contact with whoever it is that's pumping the gas so that we just sit there looking at each other like this.

Yeah, that's why you do it. Yeah, for that quality eye contact.

Yeah. And then Weirdly enough, whenever you get your gas pumped in New Jersey and you make eye contact, Afternoon Delight plays over the speakers. It's this weird— what an experience. Oh, it's— listen, man, there's no state like New Jersey. Uh, all right, kids, very, very nice. Uh, how do they keep in touch with us, Brittany?

Uh, Twitter, we are @weeklyshowpod. Instagram, Threads, TikTok, Blue Sky, we are @weeklyshowpodcast. And you can like, subscribe, and comment on our YouTube channel, The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart.

Oh, for God's sakes. Fantastic. Uh, as always, couldn't do it without lead producer Lauren Walker, producer Brittany Mamedovic, producer Jillian Spear, video editor and engineer Rob Vitola, audio editor and engineer Nicole Boyson, our executive producers Chris McShane and Katie Gray. Uh, we'll see you guys— do we have one next week? We do, right? Yeah. All right, we'll see you guys next week. Bully. The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart is a Comedy Central podcast. It's produced by Paramount Audio and Busboy Productions.

Paramount Podcasts.