507: AOC on the World Stage, Trump Starves Cuba

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Viewers are on the list of vendors with Shopify to help each other. Welcome back to part 2 of the world I'm Ben Rhodes and right now Tommy is about 35,000 feet over civic flying back from Podsy of America's Australia and New Zealand tour. But with me today to help steer this ship is my friend, amen more healthy and amen thanks so much for being here. Great to be with you Ben thanks for having me. So amen if you're not watching he's the host of the weekend prime time which are Saturdays and Sundays on MS now at 6 p.m. Eastern.

And we are now colleagues not just at MS where I'm a contributor but now there's this crooked MS. They were crossing the streams as they say. So some crooked content is going to be on a show on MS. Maybe this, I don't know, maybe you pop up on your own network here. That would be great, yeah.

“I actually when I saw the news, I was very excited. You know, I think cross collaboration, crooked media is breaking new grounds and doing incredible things now for a couple years.”

I think there's so much synergy between the two organizations. And you know, honestly the way the media landscape is changing now people are getting information and news and content and conversations in so many different places. So the more platforms you're on and the more places you are seen, the better it is for everyone. So I can't think of a better partnership than crooked media and MS now. Yeah, you got to show up everywhere and we may have to get you here for a podcast man. Any time, any.

Got a couple of pictures, a couple of pictures for you. Well, look, we've got a great show lined up today. We're going to cover the news out of the Munich Security Conference where I saw firsthand the kind of post-grouping freak out from the Greenland desktop. We'll talk about, I really want to unpack with you Israel's escalation and the West Bank, the latest conversations with Iran. Trump's attempt to collapse the Cuban government via Oral embargo but really kind of starving the population there.

And then just briefly some success news out in North Korea. And I don't know, amen if you saw a piece about the downfall of Twitter troll and the leader of the Trump Kennedy Center Rick Renell. So hopefully we can get to that. She's construction officer is what he's going to be. He was going to be Secretary of State now he's running away.

He ran intelligence agencies for America and now he's in charge of construction projects. It just shows you what happens if you set up the Trump, it doesn't usually work out. But let's start a Munich. So I'm just going to give a little rundown here where the Security Conference took place over Valentine's Day, but no love lost between the US and Europe. And there's really nothing more romantic, amen, I've to say than being in a windowless series of rooms with a bunch of technical crats and gun officials.

Talking about the collapse of the rules based order. I will say that there were a couple of speeches that kind of shattered everything. One was JD Vance's from last year, which people were still talking about where he went there. Defended kind of right wing nationals and told the Germans to accept the far right AFD. And then Trump's usually grotesque and long-winded, scolding and self-agulating threats about Greenland Davos.

This year at the conference, the role of proxy for the Trump administration is played by Secretary Marco Rubio, who offered a more subtle version of the JD Vance message,

“although he slipped in plenty of national imperialist dog whistles after listening to crimes and his view of the post World War II National Order,”

including trade and investing in welfare states and other good things like dealing with climate change. He got down to business, so I want to play a clip from this Rubio speech for us to respond to. The United States of America will once again take on the task of renewal and restoration. While we are prepared, if necessary, to do this alone, it is our preference, and it is our hope to do this together with you. We are part of one civilization, Western civilization.

We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry. And so this is why we Americans may sometimes come off as a little direct and urgent in our council. This is why President Trump demands seriousness and reciprocity from our friends here in Europe. The reason why my friends is because we care deeply. We care deeply about your future and ours. We in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West managed decline.

All right, so I wrote something up on Sub-Second about this, but I was there in one of the strange things I noticed was on the one hand the Europeans in private, you know,

sometimes in public are furious, alarmed, freaked out about the U.S. and what Trump's doing. On the other hand, there was a lot of thank you for kicking us in the ass, and we were going to spend a little more on defense, and it's all because of you, and they gave Rubio standing a vision. It felt like a kind of abusive relationship. They've been kind of, you know, well abused, and they're now they're like kind of thanking us for kicking them in the ass.

“But I mean, what did you think of Rubio's speech and the kind of the vibes coming out of Munich?”

I mean, the first thing that comes to my mind is instead of him saying that, you know, our Americans can be a little direct and urgent at times.

It's perhaps that our Americans can be a little bit arrogant.

And you clearly see that when you are talking about American foreign policy and so many parts of the world, like what you just described in Munich. Because if you look at so many of these issues case by case, if you look at how America is dealing with Ukraine, if you look at how Donald Trump is talking about Greenland, if you look at how Donald Trump is praising people like Victor Orbond, the authoritarian leader who has rolled back democracy in Hungary. That is not about shared values. That is not about heritage and culture.

That is about autocracy, and that is about America telling the Europeans what we want them to do. And you're wrote about that a little bit in your sub-stack, right? You kind of highlighted about the perspective of America when you kind of look back at where America's viewpoints were about Ukraine during the Biden administration, and where they are now, and how much young Germans that you spoke to were saying that look the United States and by extension Europe are expecting to be in direct conflict with Russia within five years.

“You know, and I think for me that was jarring that Europeans see themselves now as the front lines of this Russian expansionist or potential war,”

and the Americans are lecturing them arrogantly about, you know, we're going to take over Greenland, we're going to take over other parts of what we need in terms of global powers whether it's Cuba, Venezuela, or elsewhere. Well, yeah, and actually, Amin Rubio went on to hungry to endorse Victor Orbond. And I'm glad you brought up Ukraine, because you know, there's the rhetoric, but then the substance in the substance there is pretty grim.

And, you know, Zelensky showed up. He tried to talk about new packages of support for Europe ahead of the fourth anniversary of the war, but really they're dealing with a relentless attacks on their power grid. Russian Ukraine met on Tuesday and Switzerland for more talks, but we don't really see it in the war on site. I didn't hear anything in Munich. There was optimistic at all about either the battlefield or the talks. There's a feeling that, you know, the US isn't obviously providing the same kind of assistance that Biden administration did.

And, as you said, I was really struck, Amin, that when you're in Europe, there are these Russian sabotage operations happening. I mean, in Poland, the whole shopping mall was burned down by Russian agents. And yeah, I met with some Germans who were literally thinking that they're already in an asymmetric war with cyber attacks in sabotage. I mean, you've been following Ukraine. Where do you see this going? I mean, do you have any hope for an end of the war in 2026? How are you thinking about Ukraine these days?

If you look at it from the perspective of an American vantage point, the idea that you would let a country like Ukraine,

even if, by the worst description, it can be considered a fragile democracy or a budding democracy. The idea that you would rather see a country and its territorial integrity completely broken up, and setting new precedent in which a country like Russia can take sovereign territory by force.

“And what that means for other countries around the world, I think, is extremely dangerous.”

So I think from an American, you know, just from an American perspective, that's not the type of precedent that you want to set. And look, there's other examples that we can talk about in the Middle East, China's watching this closely. A lot of countries are watching what the United States does because if the United States is willing to wake up and say, you know what?

Russia can take that territory by force. We tried to stop it, we couldn't stop it.

Then you're really saying a dangerous precedent for what happens next in a series of dominant effects in Europe. From a European perspective, I think that what you were describing, this idea that Donald Trump is kicking us in the ass to kind of wake us up and take our security. It's so humiliating, right? It's so humiliating that the Europeans are being kicked in the ass by the Americans to wake up and realize that they have to take care of their own territory, not just by the way from Russia right now, but watching Donald Trump talk about taking over Greenland and being, you know,

hell bent on taking over Greenland really puts Europe at large in a very interesting position, because let's say hypothetically the US does take control of Greenland and they do so for the articulated reason that it's good for American national security and potential confronting Russia or potentially confronting China. Where does that put Europe? Where does that put Europe? It puts Europe in the middle of this unbelievable fight cross fight that's going to potentially happen between the United States and Russia

and the Europeans are just sitting there ducks with no say whatsoever, and you can kind of attribute that to Europe over the last several years, just conceding more ground to the Americans, letting the Americans run all over them in a series of issues, whether it's foreign policy in the Middle East, whether it's things in Central Asia, whether it is by what we see now in Ukraine and elsewhere in Europe.

That's the end result of always acquiescing to the United States, and specifically with somebody like Donald Trump who doesn't give a damn about European alliances or transatlantic relations,

only cares about enriching his pockets and his family's pockets, and putting America on this path of, I would argue, just complete and sheer corruption on our scale that we've never seen before,

“putting America on a path of totalitarianism and authoritarianism that I think is extremely dangerous.”

Yeah, I mean, you mentioned the precedent set by kind of validating the annexation of big chunks of Ukraine. I mean, maybe that's a precedent for Greenland annexation of the U.S. And look, one more thing, while I also say, by the way, the defense spending thing that every was growing about, it's going to take years for you to do that if they do. It's not going to be relevant to Ukraine, but speaking of the future, one more thing from Munich, I wanted to get to, which is that there were as many as eight potential 2028 Democrats,

people who might run for President 2020, who are at the conference. There was a lot of buzz about this, Europeans were very curious about these people because they don't know all of them, particularly well. So we had Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York, obviously, we had governors Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer, Centers Ruben Gaigon, Mark Kelly, who is now dipping his toe in the water, Chris Murphy of Connecticut. We'll seslock it in Michigan and former Congress Secretary Gina Romando.

I will say that all the buzz in Munich was about AOC because she had not been on the world stage this way. She spoke about what you mentioned, which is the danger of Tharternism. She also had some missteps. I want to play a clip that has kind of both the strength and the thing that people are picking on her about from AOC. So let's hear that clip.

“I think one of the connections and relationships that is under-discussed, particularly in the security space,”

is the fact that I believe we're seeing an economy across the economy around the world, including the United States, that extreme levels of income inequality lead to social instability and drives in a sense in authoritarianism, right-wing populism, and very dangerous domestic internal politics. And that is a direct outcome of not just income inequality, but the failure of democracies over decades to deliver. Would and should the U.S. actually commit U.S. troops to defend Taiwan if China were to move?

You know, I think that this is such a -- you know, I think that this is a -- this is of course a very long-standing policy of the United States.

where are you guys what's the plan? In a way, we're like the Europeans, and I'm the Democrat, you're the journalists, but like we haven't figured out a way to stand up to Trump either. I will say there was a lot of excitement about AOC. She's just as popular with young Europeans, issues with young Americans.

And I just -- from my perspective, you know, I thought a presentation on a third turn was really strong.

Yeah, she flopped the Taiwan question, but look, the benefit for her is to just get some reps, right? She's out there. She's not been in a conference like this.

“You're not going to nail every answer. She does need to bump on Taiwan, but like, I'm glad she was there. What did you think of AOC?”

And what did you think of kind of the way in which the Democrats seem to be grouping for not just the person for 2020, but some a message that can resonate on the world stage? Actually, I think there -- you know, I'm glad that you picked examples for AOC for two reasons.

And I actually think two of AOC's most strongest soundbites or comments were not the ones that you played.

And those were good for the reasons that you outlined, but there's two other important ones. One, she talks about the rules-based order not working for everyone. A couple of weeks ago, you know, Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, spoke at Davos. And he talked the rules-based order is done and that it's, you know, right versus might. And right now, what we thought is the international rules-based order of the last several decades since World War II has collapsed or was on the verge of collapsing.

And a lot of people took issue with that because it was only when Canada or European countries became in the cross-airs of America and Russia or powerful countries are on the world when it came to the issue of trade did he then speak up.

But nobody was talking about the collapse of the rules-based order from any of these Western world leaders over the last two years when we were watching the genocide in Gaza.

So what AOC did was actually smart and I think that's part of the reason why young people in Europe like young people here in the United States are drawn to her. She speaks with a little bit of moral clarity and the issue of Taiwan is a political issue and perhaps there is some moral issue to it, but it's certainly a national security issue. And so as you said, she needs to kind of flush out that idea and see how the Taiwan issue fits into a moral foreign policy in which you could have had a very strong international rules-based order because you could have said,

"Look, if we would have upheld international rules and norms and order, we would have been able to have a much stronger alliance to say to China you cannot overtake Taiwan with military force. But because the rules-based order has been eroded and destroyed for a variety of reasons, that idea of like the only way to defend other territory right now is purely by American committing troops.

“And I think that's why that answer landed flat. The second part of the sound that you played, which was good, I think it was really important.”

But another sound that she talked about that was so important, which I think is why young people are drawn to her, is that she said the United States has effectively enabled the genocide in Gaza for the past two years without any restrictions on weapons to Israel. And again, it's a moral litmus test. And that's why when young people who are consuming news and are much more plugged into the world in a globalized way, are listening and watching what is happening coming out of places like Sudan and Gaza and Congo, they're questioning what is happening at the highest levels of government.

And when she talked about that, when she made that point and that connection between the United States and the genocide in Gaza, I think that's why she has such an appeal and such a buzz. Could you potentially get a presidential candidate who is going to run on the major Democratic Party ticket and speak with such moral clarity and authoritative, you know, nuance on some of these issues? I think is why she has such an appeal. And I've got to say, you know, I've watched Gavin Newsom and I think he's done an amazing job on so many issues and he is a no data contender and he has such a smart appeal in the way that he's speaking to Donald Trump and communicating in an effective way.

But he also has an effectively communicated on a lot of issues regarding the Middle East and certainly not when it comes to Israel or APAC or dark money in the United States. And you know, I don't know if he thinks that there's an added value in speaking to Ben Shapiro or other conservatives, but that's a whole other ballgame, you know, but but I'm just giving you like I know there's buzz up around the two of them.

“But I think that's what I kind of walked away from having listened to AOC at the Munich Security Conference.”

Yeah, they were definitely the two people that Europeans were in prison. And in an estranged way, I mean, it's super early, but they feel like the two most interesting people to be watching now, you're right about Gaza and I mean, to me it's not just Gaza as important as the issue is more about to talk about Gaza and the West Bank. It's also that is the litness test to me as to whether you have any morality in your front policy.

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We are deepening our roots in all parts of the land of Israel, and he sees West Bank as part of Israel. And we are bearing the idea of a Palestinian state, so this is not subtle. I want to go through these moves and then ask you about them. And these may sound a little bureaucratic. And the press are often described as administrative, even though they're really about annexation of other people's land. And chemilively, they're just destroying what has ever left of the idea of the Palestinian state.

So first, to give people some context, the Islo Quards divided the West Bank into three areas.

Area A, which is 18% of the West Bank. That's under the control of the PA, the Palestinian Authority. Area B, that's 22% of the West Bank, that's joint control of the PA in Israel. Area C, that's 60% of the West Bank. That's under Israeli control. So first of all, people don't know this. The Israel controls most of the West Bank. People like to talk about the weak, fat-less Palestinian Authority. Well, one of the reasons are weak and fat-less is they don't even control the territory that they're supposed to.

But now that changes in the last couple weeks, these really government has made a series of announcements to make it easier for Israelis to purchase land from Palestinians to expand Israeli enforcement, including the power to demolish Palestinian buildings, which they regularly do, into areas A and B. So the Palestinian control areas for violations involving, to quote the Wall Street Journal, "What are related offenses damaged archeological sites and environmental hazards?" So basically pretexts for them to just go in and demolish Palestinian structures.

“Made Israel the sole authority for planning permission near important religious sites of which they're many.”

And for the first time since 1967, Israel will begin to designate large portions of area C as state land. And the goal is 15% of area C in the next few years. Unless the current Palestinians can prove their ownership. And as these really organization piece now notes, that process requires landowners to prove ownership in ways that are really almost impossible for Palestinians to do so. Look, what do you make of these steps and what's been going on in the West Bank recently? Something that doesn't get as much attention as it should.

And again, you know, I don't want to sound, you know, repetitive here, but there are a few ways to look at it.

“The Israeli government has always been particularly this right wing government, the most extreme in Israel's history has always been heldband on annexing the West Bank.”

Yeah, it's in the party platform of the Lakood Charter that there will only be Jewish sovereignty from the river to the sea. That is not new Israeli politicians Benjamin Netanyahu, Ben Gavir, Smotridge. They've all talked openly about how Israel will incorporate all of the West Bank. And as we saw previously with the Trump administration overtaking the go land heights. So the idea of territorial acquisition for Israel is nothing new.

The way they do it over the years and the decades has changed. Sometimes they pay lip service to Western diplomacy and they say we're going to go along with the Oslo process or the peace process.

We're going to do the quartet. We're going to do whatever that we can keep the international community believing that we're committed to a two state solution. But in reality, we determine what happens on the ground and what happens on the ground is that we can build settlements, we can build roads, we can create apartheid like systems, we control the lives of the millions of Palestinians who live in the West Bank in East Jerusalem. And of course, the Gaza Strip. So what you're seeing now is the kind of the veil has been lifted and now the state is now embarking on this annexation process. And they're kind of doing it peace mail just to see to what extent the international community is going to speak up or try to do something about it.

And they realize that Donald Trump is spread thin. In fact, Donald Trump who is openly against annexation has said, look, we've got so much going on right now. We don't have time to think about the West Bank. And that is exactly what these really wanted to hear.

“They wanted to hear an American president say, because they don't care about whether he likes annexation or not.”

They just wanted to hear him say, I've got so much on my plate right now. I can't even deal about the West Bank because then in their minds are like, this is the perfect time.

Let's go ahead and start this process of annexing the West Bank and making Israel completely sovereign take over the complete territory of the West Bank and making it part of Israeli sovereignty. And look, I think as somebody who believes in a one democratic state that incorporates all of the Palestinians and Jews that live from the river to the sea and have equal rights and the ability to vote, I'm not against them. I know this sounds kind of controversial. I'm not against the visuals annexing the West Bank.

I'm against the idea that Israel's annexing the West Bank, but preserving this apartheid system that exists, which again is what human rights organizations around the world have described, is in place in the West Bank. And so you have this system that's in place there, Palestinians don't have equal rights.

“Their homes are demolished, their land is confiscated, they're arbitrarily arrested. I can go on and on and on and there's another system of hierarchy that allows Jewish citizens of the state of Israel to build and develop and grow and flourish.”

Because of that, we have what we have right now, which is Israel controls the entire territory from the river to the sea in a hierarchical structure based on religion and ethnicity. And that's why we have the system that we have in the international community, by the way, completely sleep at the wheel, completely sleep at the wheel, condemnation statements from the UN Secretary General, but other than that, nothing, maybe a statement here or there, Israel doesn't care about statements. As we were just talking about in the case of Europe and the rules-based order, nobody's going to step in and stop Israel from doing what they're just doing right now.

Yeah, I mean, you're describing the dynamic exactly. And again, it connects to the Ukraine and Greenland point. I mean, now is the era of no rules, and now is the era of annexation. Now is the time to grab while the grabbing is good, you know. And you mentioned some of these responses. I mean, Trump says I'm against annexation. We have enough things to think about now. I mean, that's not exactly coming down hard. That's not like, you know, conditioning assistance Israel are using real leverage. The United States, that he has to have a meeting portfolio. It's not like you only don't, you know, you don't just, you're not in charge of like two or three things at a time. You actually do have to deal with all the world crises.

Yeah, including one where, you know, you presumably have a lot of leverage on Israel. The UN Secretary General condemned the decision, but I mean, the Israelis just flattened the UN facility needs Jerusalem for Enra, it literally people should look at this online. It's completely destroyed. The UN headquarters there. That tells you how much sway the UN has there. The Arab States released a statement, you know, saying Israel is accelerating in terms of illegal annexation and the displacement of Palestinian people, but okay, that's another set of words. So it does feel like there's not really any pushback to these, these Israelis are pushing and testing.

That does, I want to bring in Gaza here too, because in Gaza, we've seen just, I'd say violations of the ceasefire from Israel repeatedly, but it's not even really a ceasefire if you're just allowed to periodically bomb Gaza and kill hundreds of people now.

“The mass is also said that they're not going to disarm in these circumstances. Netanyahu said over the weekend that Israel would refuse to move to the next phase of the ceasefire without that disarmament.”

Netanyahu's cabinet secretary has said, on Monday, that the Trump administration has asked for a 60-day grace period for Hamas to disarm and if they failed to do so, then he says, quote, "The idea for opt to complete the mission, not sure what the mission is, other than kind of the complete further destruction of Gaza." So it doesn't feel like the whole, you know, peace plan is going well. We have this meeting of the board of peace. I want to just throw one more thing into this mix in in which is, there's one man who's very excited about what's happening over there and that's Lindsey Graham.

He made another trip just really seems to go there more than South Carolina. He's very excited about all the wars that could be upcoming. I want to play a clip here from Lindsey Graham.

The wars of the future are being planned here in Israel because if you're not one step ahead of the enemy, you suffer.

“The most clever, creative military forces on the planet are here in Israel because they have to be disrevive.”

So what we're looking at is that Israel is advancing down the road of new weaponry far beyond us and it would be nice to have a process where we could be partners.

So the wars of the future being planned in Israel, man, I'm not telling you like it. There's nothing like a U.S. senator going overseas to take a jab at America's own military.

There's nothing that sounds more America first than going to Israel and say, "Hey, these guys really are doing such a great job with their military equipment. I wish we could learn from them. Let's try to partner up with them." I mean, it's just like the optics of it, right? I mean, it used to be a time that when you're a senator, a Republican senator from South Carolina or from elsewhere, that you would talk about the strength of the American military and how America's military is a force for good or what have you.

Not go to Israel and say, "We've got to learn from them. These guys are such amazing warriors, not like ours, back home in the U.S."

Yeah, I mean, he's just cabaretly contained his excitement. I mean, you cover Gaza's just as well as any journalist over the last 15 years.

“I mean, when you look at this board of peace meeting, what do you expect out of that?”

Where do you see this ceasefire process going in the next few weeks? So I think I'll start with where I think the ceasefire is the so-called ceasefire, because I totally agree with you. I don't think it's a ceasefire. Israel's been acting with impunity has violated it every step of the way, has not even implemented it, let alone violated it. When it comes to the issue of Gaza, you don't have to take my word for it. You just have to listen to Israeli security and intelligence officials who are very clear that there is no way to destroy the idea of Hamas inside of Gaza.

Israel's security officials are openly talking about how they've destroyed the entire upper echelon of Hamas's rank and command structure, if you will, or command and control structure, if you will. They've killed all the senior leaders, political leaders, military leaders, Muhammad that they, if you name it, they've killed them. And yet the organization has persisted in its ability to retain whatever control of Gaza exists, it still has battalions of fighters on the ground. American intelligence has assessed that Hamas in the span of two years of going through this genocide has managed to recruit and fill its ranks with the same number of people that Israel has allegedly killed over the course of those two years.

So as a net hold, the organization maybe has suffered in its capabilities and has been degraded, no doubt about that, but has not been destroyed. And the idea that has given birth to Hamas is still very much planted in Gaza. And it's not an idea is something that is going to be uprooted with bombs and drones and surveillance and what we've seen over the past two years. Again, that is literally the assessment of both American intelligence officials as well as Israeli intelligence officials. What Nanyahu is doing is he knows very well that there is an attempt to try and stabilize the situation in Gaza.

I mean, by stabilise is to try to contain Israel from resuming full-scale, full-blown war. And you know, he's got people in his right wing government that are agitating to resettle to repopulate Gaza with Jewish settlers and to make Gaza part of greater Israel.

Technology corridors and parks and amazing, you know, they just basically want to take a genocide and the ruins of a genocide and just completely whitewash it with tourism parks and surf clubs and who knows what else they have in store for Gaza. Look, these are these are deranged ideas, deranged ideas. And as you said, the board of pieces is the least of those deranged ideas. And I know a lot of people who've been talking to me unofficially about it. Nobody takes the board of peace seriously. People are indulging Donald Trump very much like the president of FIFA gave him a trophy calling him, you know, the FIFA Peace Prize, right? It's the board of pieces no different. These are world leaders who are preoccupied with governing their countries trying to deal with all kinds of issues domestically and internationally.

And they have to deal with a narcissistic American president who just wants to constantly make himself King of the world. And so instead of standing up to him and confronting him much to our detriment as American citizens who would like to see the world also stand up to an American president. They have to kind of go along with it because they have to take care of their constituents and in some cases these countries just don't want to be in an open direct confrontation with the United States rhetorically or even economically, right? I mean, some of the policies that these countries are embarking on.

I think that the board of peace is going to deliver on anything. I personally don't. I don't know anyone who's purely optimistic about it other than Jared Kushner, but again, I think he's selling a real estate plan. I don't think he's genuinely selling any kind of just mechanism for the Palestinian people or security for where is really people.

“One thing, and I constantly point this out to one sign that when moving different stage would be if they actually let international journalists into Gaza to see what happened there. And that still has not happened.”

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“Let's talk about the latest in Iran, which is, you know, you're not talking to people in the region. That's what everybody is very worried about right now and focused on.”

There's this ongoing threat of U.S. military action. There's a lot of U.S. military assets in the region. And there've been these indirect nuclear negotiations between the U.S. and the Iranian government, which have been mediated by a man. On Tuesday, there were talks in Switzerland. They ended after what a man's farm minister called Good Progress. But we don't really know what that means. The Iranian foreign minister said that both sides had agreed to quote a set of guiding principles and told state TV that this round of talks were more constructive and the progress is made.

The buzzwords of diplomacy with that in details. This round of negotiations came after a visit to the White House by Benjamin Netanyahu last week. At that meeting Trump and Netanyahu apparently agreed to ramp up the economic pressure as if there's anything more you can do to sanction the Iranians. But they talked about targeting oil sales to China, which would be, you know, would involve sanctions on the Chinese, which would be further strain on the global economy. I will say also that nobody's talking about the protesters anymore who, you know, clearly there were thousands of people killed. That was the basis under which Trump said he was going to take military action.

But now we're just talking about nuclear issues and ballistic missiles.

“I know we're reading T-Leasier and but what is your read on the kind of state of play with Iran? What are you hearing from the region about, you know, people's concerns or maybe hopes for what's happening?”

Yeah, I mean, I listen, I definitely want to answer that, but I was going to actually ask you because, you know, Reza Palavi was speaking in the community security conference. And I actually was going to ask you about that in terms of, I don't know if you had a chance to hear of him talk, but I'm curious to get your thoughts about how he's kind of been elevated on the global stage now, right? All of a sudden.

And look, he's always had his followers. The monarch is always supported him and they've always kind of thought of him as a legitimate replacement to the regime.

I think a lot of people in the Iranian diaspora, even in the Iranian opposition, necessarily took him seriously. But in the last couple of weeks and certainly in the last couple of months, there has been this kind of concerted push to elevate him by Western leaders. And so how was he received it? Yeah. The young security conference. So what did he say?

“Because I think there's been criticism that he's being put in these platforms.”

He's not being really tested with the questions that he's being asked. He's not giving a very clear vision about what he wants to do because the way that I kind of look at Iran.

And I can talk about this in the second is, it's kind of about the three D's, right?

Like the day of a potential collapse of a regime, the day after and then the decade after. What happens in those three periods of time? The day that the regime has gone, the day after the regime has gone and then the decade after. And I have my reservations about how it will look like. But what was your take from listening to Shahraza speaker?

Yeah. Yeah. It was fascinating because first of all, inside the security conference and all the side events. Look, really, the focus was on Ukraine and European defense spending and these issues, you know, Greenland. But outside, there were like, you know, tens and tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people there to see Reza Palavi speak. He was kind of, that was, he was on the world stage.

He was meeting with leaders. He met with Zelensky, you know, trying to kind of obviously be on the right side of Trump. We've seen Palavi with Netanyahu.

So first of all, the read in the rooms that I was in was that this guy can't really be.

Nobody could really explain the scenario by which he's going to somehow become a leader inside of Iran. Like, like literally nobody had talked to seem to think there was like a practical way in which, you know, the US bombs Iran. And then, and I should say what Palavi was saying was, you know, militarily intervene. So it's kind of a strange situation where you have somebody asking the US to bomb his country. That's his, you know, that's where he's putting all of his cards, you know, like we need intervention.

And then he's, he basically was promising, you know, then you'll have a good regime. And he was saying, not only is that right for the protesters, not only is that delivering democracy. But he was saying, I will be your strategic partner, you know, their oil will be available, you know, and actually a lot of people were, were speculating. Well, maybe Trump's real interest in Iran is that oil, which is actually not something that's discussed a lot publicly, but, you know, that it's not the nuclear issue and it's not the human rights concerns.

So that, that was kind of the, the, the, the mood music. I think there's also another interesting dynamic in where, you know, he has gotten a lot of support in the diaspora.

But a lot of people I talk to were like, I don't know that that's the same as in the country. And yet people in the country absolutely want change. They're sick of this regime. They want how many gone like these old, he's been around forever. But there was a sense that there's this growing gap that's maybe not particularly healthy between the diaspora that is kind of going along with the Polavi play and people inside the country. So that that was kind of the read I got.

“Yeah, and listen, I think that's exactly what this issue is. And we can be mature and whole two separate ideas.”

The people of Iran want this regime gone and the people of Iran deserve to have their aspirations heard and fulfilled and they should determine their own future.

They are entitled to self-determination free from autocracy, theocracy, like any other grouping of people in the world. Nobody that has spoken about this issue has offered a clear and concise plan as to what the day after the collapse of a regime looks like. And you know, I covered the Iraq war. I remember a lot of Iraqi opposition figures who wanted American military intervention to destroy Saddam Hussein and his regime to get rid of the the Baptist regime in Iraq. And so what I as a journalist learned covering the Iraq war was that for America and American military might it's probably pretty easy to destroy a regime.

“It's probably pretty easy to kill the senior leadership of the Iranian regime. And in fact, Israel demonstrated that they were able to do that in July.”

Relatively easily, I would say, but it did not destroy the regime. And so any American military involvement to try to top of this regime. Cannot just be about killing senior figures who run ministries or run governments or run various security apparatuses or religious organizations and institutions. You're talking about a regime that has been entrenched in Iranian society for almost 47 years.

You're talking about a country of 90 million people that has a regime structure that probably includes about 20 million people.

Maybe if you say 10 million of them or 15 million of them are just servants of the state and or civil servants of the state are not not hardcore loyalists. What happens to the two million or three million loyalists of the regime once the regime is collapsed. And then they are now inside this country and are not allowed to be a part of a political process or not allowed to be a part of any kind of process in which a leader is imposed on them and they now reject that leader. What happens in Iraq now, are you telling me that the Iraqi people are heavily armed and they're heavily armed.

Yeah, they were heavily armed. Paul Bremer in the CPA, of course, at the time dissolve the entire state dissolved the back of this. And so you had you woke up one day and all the people who were working in this state picked up arms and started fighting the Americans. So unless you're willing to put American troops on the ground inside of Iran to preserve the integrity of the state. A lot of questions as to whether or not the state will fracture along ethnic lines and you'll have separatist movements in various parts of the country.

We're already hearing some troubling language coming out from various parts of the Iranian diaspora that speak to this ethnic division. You know, it's it's important whoever emerges as a potential leader for the Iranian people to emphasize territorial integrity to emphasize a cohesive country that incorporates Iran's diversity.

“But I think people who are just saying like, oh, let's get rid of the regime and plant a new opposition leader who's going to be a transitional leader, but offer no plan and offer no system and offer no insight.”

And not be tested and not even talk about what kind of infrastructure that leader has currently inside Iran. I think that's very troubling and I think it puts a lot of the countries in the region on edge because if you thought the Iraq war and the refugee crisis that it created across the region for countries like Jordan for countries like Turkey for countries in Europe for countries in the Gulf. If you thought that was a problem imagine a country of 90 million people including Iranians spilling over all across the area and having porous borders with Afghanistan or Pakistan or elsewhere and see then what kind of crises may emerge in terms of national transnational security issues whether it's in Europe or in the Gulf.

Yeah, I mean this came up and you don't see it discussed much but you know four times the size of Syria and if you have an implosion and Iran you could have refugee millions of refugees into Europe into Afghanistan right.

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Look, we have a depressing theme here because now we're on Cuba and the theme is places that are on the verge of collapse here. In Latin America, we should note, you know, this is kind of clearly where post the Maduro Oster, Trump is in Ruanca Rubio focused on Cuba. And really have cracked down on it's already you know decades long embargo on Cuba briefly interrupted by me in your by me years for a couple of years. When we normalize things and open things up a bit, but Cubans are suffering immensely and I just want to spotlight how much Cubans are suffering from this kind of blockade that is now spread very much to cutting off any oil getting in gas and fuel supplies have been cut off.

That's causing long blackouts, that's leading to fuel shortages, Havana's airport is out of jet fuel. There is a reason not bad from two friends of mine, Emily Madralah and Maria Jose Espinoza and El Pais, there was published today. They kind of go through this humanitarian crisis, they analyze satellite imagery and they found for instance that light levels. Of electricity fell by 50% in January, right? So people don't have electricity, you know, that has impacts on hospitals, that has impacts on people's ability to have basic needs met.

You've had this kind of collapse in Cuba's GDP.

“You've had Cubans protesting, but you know, as and around, like the government still has the guns, right?”

And so you're seeing more and more people criticizing this in your national community, the UN Human Rights Chief Vocal Church has criticized the sanctions and asked the country's not whole-back oil deliveries to Cuba and line with Trump's demands. Mexico is providing some humanitarian aid. Claudia Shainbounds have been outspoken about this, Pedro Sanchez and Spain I saw is going to start to provide some assistance. But really, it feels like we're reaching some kind of breaking point. Now, Trump was asked about this on Air Force 1 yesterday.

Here's what he had to say.

Cuba is right now a failed nation, and they don't even have jet fuel to get for airplanes to take off. They're plugging up their runway.

We're talking to Cuba right now and Marco Rubio talking to Cuba right now, and they should absolutely make a deal because it's a humanitarian threat. And we have a lot of great Cuba in Americans and they're going to be very happy when they're going to be able to go back and say hello to their relatives and do things that they should have been allowed to do for a long time.

“Can the deal look on me when you consider an operation with the one in Venezuela?”

I don't want to answer that. Why would I answer that? If I could, if I was, it wouldn't be a very tough operation.

As you can figure, I don't think that'll be necessary.

All right, and you know, you really like Iran, right? I mean, there's not really a government, I mean, you can't just move a government from Miami down to Cuba. The place and clothes we're going to have refugees into the United States, we could have kind of a Haiti, 90 miles from Florida. What do you make of where this Cuba thing is going? And why do you think it's not getting more attention, you know? I mean, can I just say really quickly two things, one Donald Trump suddenly caring about Cuban Americans being able to hire the relatives? Is that just absurd idea?

Well, he's still waiting now. That takes exactly what President Obama did.

President Obama made it possible for Cuban Americans to go down and say hello to their relatives and actually try to cooperate with them. And they did. And they did. It drives me, you're, you're hitting my buttons man because it drives you fucking nuts because those things were happening. And he's making it sound like he's doing it for humanitarian purposes, right? He's like, oh, we want them to be able to go down there and say hi to their relatives because it's a mess. Well, hey, there's a similarity between the mess that you're seeing in Cuba and the mess that you're seeing in Iran.

“Because all you have to do is listen to Scott Besett, the Treasury Secretary, who basically said, look, we collapsed the Iranian currency, which led to the protest taking to the streets.”

And now you're seeing the same playbook in Cuba, which is we are the ones who are making the economic conditions so miserable for the people in Cuba that they're going to go out to the streets to protest. And what's going to happen is they're going to get gun down and killed because of a policy that we're trying to implement by collapsing their economies. So let's just be very clear about that and speak very clearly about what the United States is doing in Cuba and Iran is implode these countries economically, make the people suffer.

They go out to the streets to demand a better country, they get gun down and we abandon them. As we are now currently doing it Iran, we'll see you further the present when he said, you know, we're locked and loaded or we're ready to help. We'll see what that actually means and we'll see what that happens, what that means actually in Cuba. But the idea that the United States and for me, look, the administration is trying to portray Cuba as a threat to America, right, as a national security threat. That's a joke. Let's just be very clear about that. Cuba is not a threat to the United States of America.

This is just something that Marco Rubio is personally obsessed with. Marco Rubio wants to deliver the collapse of Cuba to to the United States. And by the way, I get I love that Donald Trump says Castro is it like we're talking to Castro. It doesn't even know that the president of Cuba is no longer Castro is not even his brother. So like here he is kind of just a clueless, absolutely clueless. A president who's running the country that is clueless, but you have Marco Rubio who's hell bent on regime change in Cuba just the same way that you have these really prime minister Benjamin Nanyahu hell bent on regime change in Iran.

“And that's what scares me the most is that these people are just out this, you know, either they're doing this for either personal gripes or for whatever ideological reasons.”

But it's clear that Cuba is not a threat to the United States of America. It will be if it collapses in as you said thousands if not tens of thousands of refugees stream across into the United States. And again, Donald Trump doesn't give a damn about Cubans migrants. He doesn't care about Venezuela. And he revoked their TPS their temporary protective status in the United States. He's done that for Haitians. He's done he's deporting people back to the Middle East. He's deporting Iranians back to the regime in Iran.

He doesn't care about these people. Give me a break. Yeah. I mean, all right. I'm going to just, you know, say one thing about this because this drives me nuts, but because first of all, you're right about the National Security threat. There is none from Cuba. None. They can't even identify. And that's what's interesting about these talks because with Iran, you at least know they could be talking about nuclear weapons or ballistic missiles. Cuba has nothing to trade away in talks. There's no threat. They don't support drug, they actually very anti drug trafficking. So what you're trying to negotiate, I guess, is regime change, which is, you know, how does a regime negotiate its own collapse?

Maybe they can come up with something and, like, really, some political prisoners. I don't know what, but it's not going to be enough for Mark Rubio because he wants regime change. And the thing I'm just going to, like, complain about here, amen, is it like, you know, in the bomb years, we get all the scrutiny about, you know, what are you doing on the human rights questions? And we did a lot, by the way, we got a lot of political prisoners out, we get internet into that country. But you know what, like, you get this focus on, like, the treatment of dissidents in Cuba, that's important. But starving millions of people is worse for human rights than even, like, dozens of dissidents being imprisoned.

Cubans don't have a strong political constituency in the United States.

Yeah, they don't. And the constituency that is is harder line in sports, Ruby, and I get it. Like, the Cuban government has been, they've missed managed things, they have outdated economic models, they repress people. It's also the case that if you put a total embargo on a country, they can't change, you know, you're fossilizing it.

“And there's a reason they drive old cars from the 50s because they can't get parts for any new cars, right?”

And it's same thing to with politics. If you can't get exposed to different ideas and different people, like, how are you going to evolve? But anyway, I could talk about Cuba all day. Just on our tour of repressive regimes, this one I just want to give a quick update, South Korea's intelligence service has said that girl dad Kim Jong-un is selecting his 13-year-old daughter Kim Ju-ai as his heir, which, you know, I guess is the most progressive thing we've seen out of North Korea in a while, but I don't have a lot of hope for change. She's been showing up at events with Kim, you know, that means she shows up and looks at things with him, which, you know, seems she's being groomed to be a successor.

The telegraph breathlessly reported that this could spark a power struggle, though, between the 13-year-old and her 38-year-old aunt Kim Jong-un, who had previously been thought of as a potential kind of power behind the throne of not successor, who the paper claims is scheming for the position herself. So we'll see the soap opera that is the succession in North Korea. I mean, this matter is, by the way, just because Kim does not look like he's in perfect health, and I don't know what you think here.

But anyway, well, unless they've managed to smuggle in those epic into the country, I don't think he's...

“I mean, I guess, you know, the optics of it just does not look like he's in healthy shape, you know?”

No. In fact, it's like he's one-on-one with Dennis Rodman that we don't know about, and is like slowing down. He's one of the few leaders you still see, like, smoking in public at events. Right, exactly. I want to end on one positive note here, because we've had a dark thing, and we're going to pour one out for Rick Grinnell.

Twitter troll, you know, previously bastard Germany in the first term term acting director of national intelligence, the supporter of the big lie after the 2020 election.

One of the most nasty dishonest people I've ever encountered by friend of the pod season rice, who got to know him in the UN context. Look, I don't want to go through Grinnell's bio here, but there've been a number of stories recently that say that he's clearly falling out of circles. He overplayed his hand. He offended Susie Wiles, the White House Chief of Staff.

“You know, she seems to hate his guts. One embarrassing example that came out recently, I think, was in the Daily Mail.”

Grinnell thought he arranged for the Serbian President to meet Trump in Florida, but Susie Wiles blocked the meeting, which left Grinnell look like an idiot. He can't even seem to do his corruption right. He was working on that half a billion dollar real estate deal in Serbia with Jared Kushner. That's now been called off, Kushner's pulled out of it, so it's not going well for Rick other than the Trump County Center renovation here. Amen. My question, do you, did you ever cross paths with Grinnell and are you feeling sorry? Not personally, but we've exchanged messages on, I think he attacked me on Twitter back in the club.

I would expect when it was related to Gaza and Israel coverage, of course. Look, Rick Grinnell is a joke of an official on every level. I know people who've had to deal with him.

I have never heard anyone in the spaces that I have interacted with both at the United Nations, in global diplomacy, who have had to say any nice things about Rick Grinnell.

He is a laughing stock and he's, to some extent, he, this is kind of like a perfect end to his career with the Trump administration. This was a man who was kind of like trying to boast about potentially being a vice presidential candidate, and then was parked at the Kennedy Center and then the Kennedy Center wasn't selling tickets. Nobody wanted to attend anything big acts were canceling and Rick Grinnell was just like sitting there in the Kennedy Center, all by himself so much so that they were like, you know what, let's just renovate the Kennedy Center to make it look like the Kennedy Center is closed for renovations.

How do we all know that the reason why the Kennedy Center is closed is because it was once a source of national pride and now it is a source of humiliation when people look at it and be like, we can't believe that this institution of the performing arts that buried the name of one of America's great presidents or certainly one of its most progressive presidents has to now share that with the Trump family. Now the most despised person within this administration, even according to Susie Wiles who in that article, I mean, you know, we don't hate each other, but you know, we don't necessarily have a long more or less.

You know, he is a deep, longstanding patron of the arts, so maybe, you know, he'll carry out his passions there, but it is not always nice to see that there is, you know, accountability that circles back to some of these people. Look, Amy, I want to thank you so much for, you know, walking through all this for a coasting today. Again, people can watch you on MS, where you host the weekend, prime time, which are Saturdays and Sundays at 6 eastern. Also, maybe, you know, some of the content will make its way on MS now.

Is there anything else you're up to anywhere else people can follow you that we should be looking for? Listen, I'm very active on social media, so on Instagram, amen M. I post a lot of stuff. I do a lot of commentary there. We have a lot of clips of the show.

“I write for a digital column. I have an op-ed that I write for MS now, so you can read monthly columns there and everywhere else, you know, try to be as everywhere as possible these days.”

Yeah, no, sure up over here. Well, look, thank you for showing up here. We really appreciate it, and we will see you all next week. Time will be back. Thanks very much.

Absolutely, thanks Ben. See ya.

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