Trump's Delusional Election Rant

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liberals that this year has been scaredy foreign. Thank you for having us. We got the mark here time slot. Yeah. Thanks to everyone that has been for inviting us to be here and for all of you for coming out this morning. I know it's early. We got a two part session for you. So Ben and I are going to talk a bit about President Trump's prime time address last night and claims of election interference. We're going to step back and do a little naval gazing about a U.S.

foreign policy in particular the role it may have played in the the fact that Americans no longer trust their government or trust institutions and we'll talk about foreign policies role in that erosion of trust and talk about the blob phrase coined by my co-host here. I'm going to take a quick break reset the stage and then start the official programming for today and then Ben and I are going to interview you in general assembly president, Annelina Byerbach. So excited for that as well.

But first let's talk about Trump's speech Ben last night he demanded time from the major networks

for a prime time address to talk about the top issue on the minds of every voter and election that happened six years ago. Senator Bernie Moreno previewed the speeches possibly the most important oval office address since the Cuban missile crisis. Do you think it delivered on that? Uh, that easily easily. It probably exceeded it. Remember when you didn't want to raise expectations

“in advance of a speech? Yeah. I remember that very well. What happened with that? Yeah.”

So the speech started with Trump bragging about some accomplishments about the economy. It's clear like the domestic advisors got to him and they were like, please, sir, don't make this all about 2020 like talk about the economy. But the bulk of it was about election security with the goal of drumming up political support for the save act, which is stuck in the Senate. So the election security section range from like standard concerns you could hear from any president about voting

machines and technology to what seemed like almost attacks on his old intelligence team from the

first term to these like vague demands for investigations and indictments. And then he declassified

a bunch of intelligence about election systems, vulnerabilities and electronic voting, bunch of stuff about China, um, and an investigation into voter registration groups and Michigan and then claims about non-citizens. So Ben, let's just get your reaction to the speech then I'll talk about some of the stuff I noticed within the documents. Yeah. I mean, first of all,

“I think it is relevant to talk about this at the Aspen Security Forum because it's at the”

nexus of the security of American democracy and also his claims of fraud and interference often have a kind of foreign nexus to them. Um, my overall, you know, takeaway is first of all, not surprising. There wasn't really any there. There was like, I spent a lot of time last night just trying to figure out what he was talking about and reading documents that didn't in any way validate what he had said. Um, I do think that the two main takeaways I would leave people with though are first of all,

it bears noting that he has systematically dismantled all of the tools of government that had been put in place to prevent against foreign interference. Right. So, um, all the capabilities of the intelligence community, uh, the capabilities within the justice department that are designed to detect,

a lack of capacity that he himself brought about. Uh, I think the second and more important thing

that we all have to bear in mind is all of this is just to create a pretext to preemptively so doubt, not about the 2020 election, but about the upcoming midterm election. And so, you know, we remember Tulsi Gabbard, D&I at the time participating over the season of ballot boxes in Fulton County, the intelligence communities being brought into this effort by Trump to kind of create some pretext to so doubt in the minds of at least his supporters around those midterm elections.

“And so I think unfortunately what this speech tells us is that we should expect a lot of effort”

and misinformation around foreign interference, around domestic threats, around the need to secure ties and federalize what should be state run elections, potentially pretext to seize ballot

boxes before votes have been counted. Like I see this as a warning sign that we are going to be in

it in terms of a potential democratic crisis around these midterms. Yeah. So I assumed to speech itself will be rhetoric. I did, you know, kind of like approach the documents with an open mind because they're declassified documents, maybe there's something interesting there. But as I went through a lot of it looked old, I mean a lot of experts, I follow who studied this stuff closely, say there's just not a lot of new emails or information there. Like there's some declassified

emails, there's some raw intelligence documents, but the overall assessments haven't changed and they've been publicly disclosed. So the key document regarding claims of election interference

“in 2020 is this national intelligence council report that was released in 2021. So it was”

prepared by Trump staff released by the Biden administration. It found that like there were handful of countries kind of running influence operations in support of various candidates, but none tried to change voter registration, vote counting, the vote reporting, you know, nothing to materially impact the results or to manipulate the results. That assessment found Russia tried to her Biden to help Trump, Iran tried to hurt Trump, China like probed various systems,

but decided the juice wasn't worth the squeeze if they got caught. And then there were some other like the Cubans, the Venezuelans were like kind of mucking around, but nothing of note. But again, Trump kind of released these raw documents like these emails. They're hard to vet for accuracy. There's a redacted PDB piece. There's a CIA wire report. But nothing that challenges that consensus opinion, but also the existence of those documents undercut his broader claim that

this was suppressed somehow. Like it went up in the PDB, it went in the CIA wire report, which is widely disseminated. With respect to China, the documents show some debate in the intelligence community about what China did. Like overall ICC assessment is that China considered interfering, but didn't. But there's this one intelligence officer who descended and said, quote, Beijing is taking at least some low-level exploratory steps, but not the most aggressive options. But again, we knew that.

That was in this 2021 report that was released kind of hilariously, Trump undercut his own claim

that Russia had never interfered in our elections. He released documents that confirm Russia tried to

interfere in 2020 to hurt Biden. It says Russia tried to quote orchestrate a high-profile corruption scandal, and then push narratives about voter fraud resulting from mail-in balladning. That's like Burisma, Hunter Biden, all that stuff. And then John Solomon, who's this right-wing journalist, who has brought in to kind of create all this material. I was interviewed afterward by Vaughn Hillier at MSNow. And he said, quote, the intelligence community has zero evidence that a foreign

power flipped a vote in 2020, 2022 or 2024. And so it kind of undercut Trump's entire claim here. So I guess I guess this is why they brought in Bill Pulti to be the director of National Intelligence. I wouldn't say he's delivered yet. Yeah. Well, I look at two reflections. Like one is on this issue of election interference itself and another is on what the purpose of

“this was. On the election interference, I think one thing, because the documents show that there's”

not been any successful or even really concerted effort to affect the outcome of an election, right? The vote tabulation, the functioning of the electoral system. So all of this era of election interference, including 2016, by the way, has been principally about interference in the form of, you know, misinformation, disinformation or just outright over messaging from foreign governments or their kind of cutouts. I do think 2016 was a little bit different in that you also had

hack and release operations, right? So the reason they jumped it us. 2016 felt materially different to me is that you had efforts to hack into people's emails and release them. So you have a kind of criminal activity on behalf of an interference effort. But I've been freely acknowledged as we did at the time, despite what Trump has said, we didn't determine that Russia materially affected the vote count in 2016. Now when you look at these reports, none of this is surprising, every, you

like Biden, China kind of doesn't really have a favorite and they just want to kind of undermine

“trust in institutions, you know, Iran didn't like Trump. None of this is surprised, that's what”

those governments actually would say if they were speaking openly. And so we're living in an era where countries regularly interfere in the politics of other countries because social media makes it easy and low costs to do so. And that's just something we live with. What is a different question is whether you are literally trying to interfere in the vote count and we see no evidence that that's case. But that leads me to again, what is he doing here? It's it's tried into playbook

where he doesn't need to actually have a there there. He doesn't actually need to have some smoking gun. He just needs to create enough of an appearance of discrediting the electoral system of some semblance of a scandal that can then ricochet around his media ecosystem. It doesn't matter if people like us are persuaded or not. He just has to kind of create enough energy and doubt and distrust among his core supporters to provide a basis for, again, if we get to a place where

they're ice or military at polling stations or efforts to seize voting machines. So nobody should take comfort in the fact that this didn't land well because the purpose of this is just to create a smoke screen. Yes, long term, a White House official told Politico, it was as on the rails as possible. So that's the kind of, you know, verdict you want from your own staff about your

prime time. I was always pleased when I put it to the rails. I got that feedback.

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that's squarespace.com/world. All right, let's talk about part 2 of the blob. Then you want to define the blob for everyone here? Well, we thought we had to kind of go right right at this question. I think what I was getting at back in 2016 was a kind of group think mentality that I

at this country, like at times I was a participant and where you tend to have a bias towards intervention, be it military intervention or the imposition of sanctions. You tend to not question what you've done or own up to mistakes and you therefore tend to kind of repeat patterns of behavior that are not working, and that have been losing credibility with the public. I was doing this particularly in the context at that time of the debate over the rotten nuclear agreement, which is

because I was basically referring to the adversaries of that agreement. It was a pretty pitched

battle at that time politically. I should say it was harder to do a nuclear agreement than it was

“to take this country to war, which is something I think we all need to reflect on why is it harder”

to get a JCPOA through Congress and it is to launch a war against Iran or Libya or another country? And so that was kind of what I was trying to identify. So let's talk about the problems with the blob. The thesis here is that the blob is helping hasten this erosion of trust and faith institutions and I need to be reformed and changed. So we'll unpack some of the reasons why. Now I think one of the reasons people have frustration with the kind of permanent foreign policy

classes, it feels like there's no accountability. There's no accountability for bad policies, bad decision-making. And people just kind of hang on forever. Like take John Bolton for example. Guys been in Washington for decades. There's no country. He doesn't want to invade. There's no threat. He won't hype and yet he kind of Fox News hitted himself into becoming the National Security Advisor again until he was indicted by the president. And I think that gets at this lack of accountability.

“I think the primary policy example is still the Iraq War. I think self-evidently a catastrophic”

disaster. Hundreds of thousands of Rockies were killed. Thousands of US service members we wasted trillions of dollars. And yet it feels like the architects of that war have faced no professional consequences that are often treated as kind of foreign policy luminaries. While they're with these lonely voices who oppose the war or great journalists like the team at Night Ritter that were reporting on the truth and undercutting the administration's claim

and they are hardly celebrated. In fact they're largely forgotten. And so there were a couple examples frankly not to pick on anyone but here it has been this week. Kind of these advice offered some comments about Iran that I wanted to highlight. She said about the threat from Iran. When I hear it wasn't imminent, do you really want to wait until it's imminent of the nuclear deal of cutting a nuclear deal? I wouldn't buy a nuclear agreement under any circumstances. I just

let them Iran sit there and stew in their lousy economy. And then Europe's refusal to join Trump's war with Iran quote with Americans fighting whatever you say about it. This is in our war is not really a very smart thing to say. Then recounted a story about Jacques Schrock and George Schroeder opposing the Iraq war and how much it pissed off George Bush. And again I don't want to pick on Dr. Rice but I would just say like first of all that comment about the threat from Iran

sounds nearly identical to the infamous we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud

“lying about Iraq WMD which was discredited with respect to the JCPOA which I believe she”

opposed Trump tore it up. That's the problem. Now we're in the war that everyone was trying to avoid and Trump himself is building it as a new forever war. And then again when we talk about like

Iran's stewing in its bad economy I think we should be clear that 90 million people get to then

stew in that bad economy and suffer. And then finally I'm sure Bush was frustrated with Schroeder and Schrock but they were right and he was wrong. So I'm like I just I don't know the value of that anecdote all these years later so Ben again I'm not trying to be a jerk but if we can't learn from a mistake as obvious as Iraq what can we learn from? Yeah and I'll turn an internal here because the Democratic Party has its own problems in this regard. I mean you're not

shedding my sight we we've kind of defaulted to a certain perspective at times you take like a bobman end as for instance hawkish guy you know pro rock war anti JCPOA obviously corrupt and yet was allowed to continue to be the lead Democrat on the San Farm Relations Committee after narrowly averting one corruption investigation and so to me the question is because if you take Iraq I think sometimes they're often these conversations about why do Americans not appreciate

enough the role we play in the world or do they not understand that the United States has a central world of play and underpinning an international order which has now frankly unraveled when the message from the electorate for successive presidential elections has been we want accountability

over the Iraq war like Barack Obama our first boss would never have become president of the United

States without his opposition to the Iraq war there was the single policy difference with Hillary

legacy of the Iraq war that is where he caught fire and so the message from the public is we want accountability for these foreign policy disasters and for these forever wars I would say that one

“way to do that there are a couple ways to do that one is I think the people that participate”

in American Farm policy have to be more willing to acknowledge error you know when I look back on the Libya intervention in the Obama years which I supported I have to acknowledge that that turned out to be the wrong decision and it turned out to be a decision that perpetuated aspects of American Farm policy that have alienated people in this country end around the world because while I can defend it on the basis that it succeeded in a near-term objective of the

verding cadafi from masquering some civilians it created through regime change effects that have destabilized North Africa and the Sahel ever since and I think people like yes they want to see different people in positions of power and authority when it comes to farm policy they want to see generational change just as we want to see generational change with politicians they want to see generational change with the people who are responsible for American Farm policy but they also

“want to see people and I think would would show some grace to people if they were willing to”

reckon with error and and didn't feel like they had to dig in and defend everything and particularly its intervention that that we failed to reckon with like the we we've now had Afghanistan Iraq Libya and Iran which was an attempt to regime change word none of these have worked and and instead of questioning whether we can do it better we need to be questioning why

we continue to try to engage in regime change wars in the first place the problem wasn't just

the intelligence about Iraq WMD the problem was engaged or we didn't send enough troops or whatever man another challenge with the blood this would get so well you're just talking about is this some members of the kind of permanent foreign policy establishment class act like foreign policy is somehow above or separate from or immune from politics and you and I would often go to meetings in the situation room and someone would sort of performatively say like politics has no place

in these walls and like they had good intentions they're trying to signal that we are making national security determinations not you know decisions of political expediency but of course you know politics was in that room we were only allowed in that room because Barack Obama won a couple elections but you know the mentality you hear in DC is often that you know foreign policy national security these are matters that are discussed and decided by small groups of elites

intermatters you know without real input from the rest of the country and I think that can lead to

“the establishment in both parties making mistakes and ignoring the will of voters that's how you”

end up with a democratic party ripping itself apart over Gaza which is happening today or how you went up with Trump running on not starting any new regime change wars and then launching one

with Iran never mind Venezuela and so Ben how do you think about how to better incorporate the

will of the people democratize these decisions while also acknowledging that populism, nativism, isolationism those are powerful political forces that can lead to really really bad foreign policy outcomes. Yeah this is such an important question first of all the things that I think a lot of us can agree on right that you would want to function in your national order that you would want to sustain alliances that you would want to sustain certain overseas commitments foreign assistance

among them that you need to have a credible intelligence community those things depend on maintaining trust the way to defend those things is not to pull up the draw bridge from politics and public opinion and say we know better that's been a recipe for essentially the dismantling of those things because you become so distant from the people that it opens up a space for populism to kind of come directly at you in a time of anti-establishment sentiment that we've been living through for not just

a decade but I would argue since 2006 and you know Obama ran as a populist we've been living through

that I think the second thing is you do need to incorporate some respect for public opinion into

your decision making because this is a democracy and if you cannot sustain your policies because you lack public support for those policies nothing you do is going to succeed and to take it sometimes by the way the public has it right and if you look at Gaza as we were experiencing that through late 2023 into 2024 there was just no way to explain to democratic voters why this policy

an open-spig it to these really government these really government was clearly ignoring the council of the Biden administration the Biden administration was even putting out hey we really are happy with what Nenia was doing you know Biden had a really tough phone call with them and yet all the public sees is their tax dollars funding all of these weapons going to an Israeli government that is using them to destroy civilians inside Gaza right and that it's not just like when people

talk about the election it's not just whether or not there was support for that policy it's whether you could believe anything else that the administration was saying because they had lost such credibility in this space so the second point is you know sometimes the public opinion is telling

“you something that you need to listen to or frankly is giving you space to change it may have”

seemed hard to break from an Israeli government in that context but when you have your voters telling you to do it there's your basis for doing it the last thing I want to say is a policy solution is actually think it means that Congress should be more involved in foreign policy if Congress

had to vote to authorize these wars they wouldn't happen like Congress never would have voted to

authorize the war and Iran right and and so if we get back to place as intended by the founders of this country where Congress is actually the decision maker on matters of going to war or not you would end these wars right quick because after the Iraq war which ended a lot of congressional careers ever since then nobody has wanted to take a vote to authorize the war yeah so we're running long time we'll do one more complaints and then we have some you know thoughts on how to fix things

the last kind of grievance with the blob is I think there's a tendency in Washington to treat pro-war people as realistic and serious and anti-war pro-peace voices and as fringe and on serious you see that's a lot in establishing media um Lindsey Graham who recently passed away was appeared on meet the press 63 times this would have been a 64th appearance the record for the most appearances is held by John McCain I would wager that the overwhelming majority of those

media appearances focused on advocacy for war or US intervention somewhere and on the flip side

“I'm sure folks some folks might remember a congressman named Dennis Cassimich he was”

a congressman from Ohio something of a gadfly kind of perennial presidential candidate ultimately

ended up working for RFK junior somehow I don't know what happened with him but his signature idea was a bit of journey a bit of journey his signature idea was the creation of a department of peace and it was treated like a joke and I remember thinking that he was a joke and that idea was a joke and what a silly notion but I went through the bill text yesterday the mission of the department was to make peace and organizing principle of US foreign policy to promote justice,

democratic principles and expand human rights and promote conflict prevention through diplomacy I don't really get why that's a joke and why the department of war which exists and is run by Pete Heggseth is a real thing that exists in this world you mentioned the example the JCPOA ban was nitpicked to death by congress they passed a lot and make it harder to cut a deal with Iran while these wars just could kind of race through so thoughts on this sort of frustration around

“anti-war voices being treated as un-serious for its solutions yeah I think there's two quick points on”

this I mean one is just the idea that like I started in a think tank in DC and part of the issue here is that intervention is often presented as the solution to the problem but then that can create a situation where every problem is in ale and so you reach for the hammer right and so the way you show you're trying to solve a problem of a government doing something we don't like is to bomb it invade it or sanction it and so therefore these are the people with the solutions and so they're

platform where if someone's saying wait a second we shouldn't do this I mean if you look at the people that voted against the Iraq War in Congress they tend to be the people that are not taken seriously in certain elite media debates about these things but so so part of this is you got to

change the paradigm where there needs to be more skepticism that intervention is always a solution

and the person coming and arguing for bombing a country is therefore offering a solution is more credible and someone who's saying hey we shouldn't do that I would argue on our progressive side we need to get more involved in farm policy though like part of the issue is that progressives often in the past and this is changing now have focused on domestic policy and they've kind of seated the terrain in the democratic party on national security to more hawkish people that end up

running committees right you know we had Bobman and as an allied angle running the farmer's committees you know these are the hawkish parts parts of the party and so part of and this is happening now but I want like an AOC to have more of a farm policy profile right a Bernie Sanders when he moved after the 2016 election to have more of a farm policy voice was very healthy for the

create permission structures for that to happen and give them committees summons and things like that

“but you need to democratize the discourse so that it reflects the American people right”

yeah I wrote criticism of Bernie in 16 was that he didn't really have a foreign policy agenda that he was running on and that changed quickly after he lost so look we complain about the blob let's talk about how to fix it I'm gonna throw out a few thought starters then you offer your own I just think you need generational change within the kind of staff or class and more diversity of voices one way to get at that is we need more transparency and oversight

when it comes to foreign policy think tanks in Washington there is a revolving door between a lot of these think tanks and institutions and the government a lot of them have you know

funding from right wing billionaires or whatever we need fewer of those voices constantly coming

out of government and more new people I think we need stronger lobbying bands disclosure rules enforcement of phara and just you know campaign finance reform too but that's a a panel for a different day we need a bigger state department we need to build back a modernized version of USAID we need to rethink and shrink the US military footprint and spending so that we aren't just constantly adding and adding and adding without subtracting anything you know what they're currently

Trump wants a 1.5 trillion dollar Pentagon budget that is crazy you mentioned this the AOMF we need to repeal the post 9/11 authorizations for the use of military force and then Congress needs to put some real teeth into the war powers act and clarify it so that it doesn't just get ignored over and over again including by Barack Obama and then arm sales I just would love to see Congress vote up or down on arm sales why is there not more scrutiny of like massive

“major arms packages to countries around the world but then your thoughts. I think that's a really”

good list and we're sure on time because and I don't want to just echo it I will say just a couple things on this the first is the democratizing who who does foreign policy it's generational change but it is very much like different recruitment pipelines it is both older but it's also a very white establishment and if you were able to diversify the voices and the perspectives that are informing American foreign policy you would get different outcomes as well and so and then I think

it critically important is I just say that a lot of the common threads to what you said because

I throw into that the permanent sanctions regimes we sanctioned countries in the sanctions never

go away you know like so we're just building sanction upon to sanction top sanction until by the way we're going to lose the dollars reserve currency and things are going to get real here very fast because we cannot sustain our standards a living without that but in order to do things like repeal the AMF get Congress involved in the declaration or authorization of the use of military

“force restrict arm sales countries engaged in human rights violations you need to end this mindset”

where it is more of a political risk to take those positions than it is to advocate for sanctions and for military intervention and the reason that should not be hard is that is where public opinion is yet political leaders are often far too afraid of being called weak on national security than they are and taking principal positions against those things public opinion keeps telling us you will be rewarded for doing this don't be afraid to have fights on these issues because if you

do and start to win those fights that's how the title effects have fights because it draws attention to these issues as we saw with Barack Obama and we saw with Donald Trump okay that's it for this section of the show thank you for being here we're going to take a quick break reset the stage and then we come back you'll hear our conversation with onelina buyer box so please come for that too Potsay of the world is brought to you by him's ED is more common than guys talk about the good

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thank you so much madam president for joining us for this conversation I admired your work it's leader at the German Greens and as far minister i i want to start by just talking a little bit about the role of the united nations and and then later we'll get to some some specific things you're working on i speak as a huge supporter of the UN system and i i i i i wanted to kind of frame this around the fact that we i've been watching like everybody else the negotiations

around uh the Iran war playout and a kind of fairly improvisational is a word you might use of manner um you know in Islamabad and Qatar and other places and and i've noticed the kind of absence of a UN participation in those talks whereas during the j-c-p-o-i the UN kind of had a formal role because it was UN security council permit five that were um in the negotiations along with Germany um what what does that say

how how do we get to a place where the UN is kind of reinserted into uh international diplomacy on the leading piece of security issues you've looked at this as the perspective of far minister and now as the perspective of the UN officer um how can we revitalize the role of the UN international diplomacy good morning and thank you for having me uh and this wonderful and beautiful uh landscape well obviously the world is uh not in a good shape to put it very uh diplomatic

and obviously it's a huge challenge for the United uh nations and third point obviously the UN needs a deep reform and we come back to that later so don't get me wrong that i want to

“sugarcoat anything with regard to the United Nations however i think we always have to get uh”

the context right uh because context meta a lot if we all know so in a situation where key drivers of the security council are not only um challenging the charter but attacking the charter it is impossible for an institution like the UN of 1953 member states and five permanent members of the security council who do have a feature power to solve a war where some feature powers are

involved so in the end the UN is always the sum of its 1953 but this does not mean at all that the

UN cannot do anything and we might come back to that later as well i mean there's now total revitalization of the general assembly and the narrative of saying we live in a polarized world one against the other in my point of view is totally under complex we are in a multipolarized world and we have for two-thirds majority for kind of everything what holds us well together from the SDG to fighting climate crisis to governance structure for AI and also on peace and security because most of the

countries in the world know the UN charter is their life insurance if we would exact that uh might is right again this would be the death sentence for almost everybody my country including and i would even say for those strongest armies as we can see right now with the straighter from us do you cannot end this alone with military force and obviously this has a deep effect for your own economy so in a nutshell yes the charter is on the pressure the UN is working in

council if this two-thirds majority deaths and this comes to a deeper point now you mentioned the

“war of Iran we know the effects we saw yesterday night again on all the neighboring countries varies”

strong Gulf countries but when we had the discussions about resolution be it on Gaza be it on the board of peace be it on the straighter from us who dares to stand up and speak up i leave it there because on the president of the gentleman assembly was 1953 member states but individual leadership matters i would say more than ever and if individual leaders join forces if two-thirds majority in the individual leaders join forces i would say then can move hardly anything but obviously for

some of the big crisis at the moments it's uh not possible and this is why we have to keep on not only reforming the UN but also asking every individual country do you step up in your own interest for the principles of the chata every day yeah let me ask you one fall upon on reform then because and i it's interesting point about the the democratic body the general assembly kind of taking more of a role given the divisions in the security council i have often defended the

UN by suggesting to people that if the member states particularly on the security council particularly the veto wielding members of the security council disagree the system can't really function the way that we wanted to that said we are kind of living in a reality in which that doesn't feel like it's changing anytime soon and so when you talk about reform essentially the way which the UN has a voice the way in which component parts of the United Nations are functioning

how can the UN reform absent any kind of consensus among particularly the United States Russian China what can be done by the UN itself as an organization in a context when it's kind of leading board members to take a phrase are adults with each other so they had different

parts of reform let me start with the political one first we saw what member states can do

a year ago at the beginning of the high level week where i took over the presidency where one day before the official opening happened this was on Tuesday morning we had the Monday morning first celebrating at third years of Beijing women rights and security also

“very important topic maybe you could touch that later as well but then we had the two state”

solution conference organized and set up by Saudi Arabia and France interesting again coalition in these times and the US was totally against it they didn't even participate yet and here comes my two-thirds majority example 142 member states adopted a resolution which was a detailed plan for how to end the war in Gaza actually something I've worked before for a couple of years since the 7 of October with the core group again a core group this is why i'm such a fan in these times

of fund runners and collisions not of the willing this is a bit similar from from another time but a coalition of those who believe that they can really do something so it has concrete steps disarmament of hummus withdrawal from the Israeli army from Gaza access of humanitarian steps towards the governing sir from the Palestinian themselves so it's all in there and this was adopted and if you would look at the video from that day again it was a celebration of the UN itself

I've never felt an atmosphere like this in this room because it really showed to members that

while this is our house this is our house of humanity and we can do something we do something together and this mood and again politics in these times is different than in 1970 guys all over social media

“I think some who weren't there have watched that very carefully also how to one president was there”

and the other was a foreign minister two person were celebrated at this event because then the next day we had the official speeches by heads of states and then we had a meeting in the security council now at first we had an invitation to DC and then we had a meeting in the security council and then we had to step towards the board of peace but this last step would not have happened if we wouldn't have that that Monday and the two states solution and there you see all the power

yeah and there you see also that and this is my theory no single country in the world in this time can move in total isolation so if there's this strength so this is not an institutional reform we don't have to change anything in the security council for that we just need leadership and we just need coalitions for protecting the charter having said this obviously

if I were a professor and sometimes journalists pretend they are professors and then they say

but madam president yeah don't you see that we need a reform of the security council that the veto is totally blocking peace well obviously I see it but then I ask back to them since you're also having eyes don't you see in the world that it's almost impossible at this moment to take away the veto right and all of those who said maybe the UN has failed we have to build something new yeah there was effort to build something new it was called Board of Peace did you see that the

veto power was taken away well the veto power was even increased because there's no single veto power that not only one country but one person has an individual veto power so all these theoretical discussions about maybe we just build something new I mean this would be the end of multilateralism

bringing me to the third point of the reform reform is boring being a national politics before

nobody applaud you of saying you know what I've had wonderful idea we just change the rules of procedures and please vote for me at the next election for that one but as you also know those in administrations these reforms and rules of procedures matter heavily so this is what we are working on nobody reports about it maybe this is also good because then nobody is like making fake news on social media about it but the deep reform obviously of the security council the first steps are right

now how do we get more justice of Africa having a seat for example at the security council yeah this would open slightly the door it would not change the veto power but at least it would give

“more credibility to this institution other reforms even more boring but heavily crucial how”

do we take away this overload I mean this is where especially the US is definitely right there's an inefficiency which I could not believe has a German because we love bureaucracy and Germany yeah but now I found a place where I don't love it anymore so we really have to do something about it and this is again a deep structural challenge which is not so easy to solve you don't have any checks and balances within the UN yes so there is no finance committee challenging the government

saying well this is a bit inefficient it's all the members dates and again and theory it's very easy just get rid of many many of the USG's and AGs for those who are experts in the United Nations yeah the highest positions in the security in the UN yet they are all political you gave one to that country you gave another one to that country so every individual post is already a geopolitical challenge yet this is what we have to do also the next secretary general and yeah maybe can go into

that deeper but if we are not reforming this house from inside it will collapse given the challenges from outside positive world is brought to you by helix got a helix mattress i forget the

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in Gaza but it does seem like it's trying to supplant or replace some of the core functions of the UN and so far the board of peace has been a failure almost none of the pledge money is materialized I read recently that the international security force that they're pulling together currently has four members I believe they're supposed to provide security within Gaza so I just want to

UN. Well after a couple of months no because it proved what I just said that obviously it's not so

easy to build another institution and for sure it can never ever replace United Nations yet in the

moment when we had the discussions and again my role is now President of the General Assembly and I represent 193 obviously there's hardly any consensus so I always say I swam I also on the charter and I speak on the charter because this is the base for 193 and in the frame of the charter I said at the beginning when there were discussions about the board of peace there's the reason why we do have a body for peace and security where every country no matter how big or small

how powerful or rich has seen at the table and an equal voice and vote at the table so you can

understand this and obviously something else hasn't but I was one of the few who said anything about it

“also from the UN family and this is I think I mean some things as I said we cannot change we cannot”

change the video power at the moment but we can change every day if we dare to speak up and if in a situation whether UN is so heavily under pressure because obviously it was a momentum where some thought we show now how easy peace and security can be built and those from different countries here yeah I mean there was an invitation and I was not the Foreign Minister anymore but I just said by the way and this is a good thing when you have media access I just wanted to remind that in the German

constitution I don't even see how Germany could participate in this because of our history we are bound to act for peace and security only within international organizations reach no ones European Union Council of Europe and international ones obviously the United Nations but I felt it was a need for saying this that we do have a constitution but people were like really searching for arguments because my point of view could not just say this simple thing of saying

“well there's a security council there's a general assembly just take these forums and I think”

this is also when we speak about Iran again it's not as easy as we see in the headlines yeah the UN failed because it didn't deal with it the topic of Iran was not even brought to the security council when remember Iraq there was a heavy debate in the security council again you can have different political opinions about who was right and who was wrong in this one of the foreign ministers from my country back then said with all due respect I'm not convinced but he could

only say that because the topic wasn't the security council this time it wasn't even in the security council and I think this is really the point if we just sort of bypassing an institution obviously cannot act it can still fail in their action but the biggest threat is that we pretend we have a easy way out and as you said now we're a couple months afterwards even the funding is not there because all the complexity and sometimes all to bureaucracy of the UN was all the different

agencies has a region because we have specialized agencies who can go into Gaza we have specialized agencies for health for education and obviously a new set up where you just say we just collect money

“and somehow we throw it into an area does not work at all because you need to structure in the ground”

and it's even there you don't even have the money I mean we need billions and I think we have

what 23 million so far collected not enough you guys were right about a rock by the way we were

wrong there I want to ask you a question about yeah it was putting on your hat as a former German lawmaker I mean there's the far right AFD party someone say you know extremist or neo-Nazi party seems to send it in Germany it's polling at record levels in a number of different opinion polls now several German states have elections in 2026 there's concern that the AFD could win outright in some of those regions historically speaking as you know you know other German parties

have kept the AFD out of power by refusing to work with them to keep the so-called firewall up but there's also concern that the firewall may be breaking down how worried are you and should we be about the AFD's rise and potential of you know attaining real power in Germany because I'm not a fan of claiming that politicians are presidents of the general assembly of answers for anything I don't have an answer and this is my biggest fear I really don't understand

have everything even health access for everybody in your country so this narrative about everything is falling apart and I'm such a deep fan about multilateralism about an interconnected world because it broadens your horizon so much obviously you learn when you travel and when you're an international context and this is again at the UN yeah seeing and understanding the cultural background

“from every country but no more in an easy way yeah when you travel abroad and I think the bit best”

answer to fight extremism and fascism is you enable every school kit at the age of 16 to spend half a year in a different country not only that you understand the culture there you feel what it means to be a foreigner I was with 16 in the US and now I'm back obviously yeah and I totally remember

the first time I had to go to a doctor how shy I was yeah because I didn't know the system I

didn't know what to say then I was making friends with a German who I would have hardly spoken to in Germany because I didn't like her at all but at least she understood my problems yeah so when you have sometimes here in your own country people saying so why don't they speak German yeah why they come from Turkey and they don't speak German in our subway I mean I don't speak English with my children because I say it's very embarrassing but you're German accents if you people

hear that so all these kind of experience what it means I mean totally changes your mindset that's now coming to Germany in the extreme right also how you see your own country I mean when I'm abroad taking the doctor's example again yeah even though I would be paid back at my situation right now I'm thinking if I go miss my kid to the doctor to put cash on the table so

“I value our health system a lot even though I would complain in Germany again so I think this”

attitude of really trying to educate global citizens is crucial and we should never give up on this

and if it's low everybody the narrative of my country first also on the European continent this is the toxic fix that but it takes time and now coming to your concrete questions right now this is obviously a challenge because we cannot do the education right now in sports and this is why at the moment we have to hold this fire walls as we call it currently in Germany and we had a discussion with a couple of colleagues yesterday night there's a difference

with the extreme right party in Germany I mean this is based on the facials we had 80 years ago yeah this is a tradition because we have also other extreme right parties and other countryside discussed also a lot of with other European colleagues about it in some for example in Finland with the true friends they formed a coalition with a theory of if they are in government maybe they show that they are not so anti EU because and most of them actually did it in government

but this is really different with at least part of the AFD but they had the core they are anti constitutional we have set up because of our horrible crimes in the past we have a body called fafasm short so protection of our constitution I mean they are reports about this party

“that this is against our constitution we have in our constitution if this happens you have to”

defend your constitution that never ever something happens again like the holocaust and all the

crimes like the second world war before so yes we had a crucial moment and again it needs

backbone leadership or just moral human sense to say whatever the outcome is the good thing is again in a democracy yeah you need a majority even if they are running first in some of the federal states you are saying now in Germany you still need at least 50 percent so then you would need a coalition from all of the other party this is not a nice at all I was in the coalition with three parties obviously it didn't end at a bit earlier but then we have to do

it yeah I always said UN was not built for the easy times it was built for the hard times it's exactly for right now and it's the same for democracy democracy is easy and easy times yeah but it's tested in challenging times and this is when you really see if you are true democratic leader so one last question because I know you know we were chatting and you want to mentioned the secretary general selection process but one way to kind of frame the question coming off

this is I could argue one of the reasons why there's been a loss of faith in democracy

and other parties is because there's a sense that decisions are now made in an opaque way that corruption has really entered decision making inside of governments you know whether we're here in the United States or inside the international community itself in terms of how decisions are made that people don't feel like these institutions that are supposed to be responsive to them have their interests in mind that rather there's some background somewhere where somebody's making a

judgment and so in that context you know one of the main ways in which the UN presents itself to the world is in the selection of a secretary general what can you tell us about the process that is underway of selecting the next secretary general what can be done to the maximum extent possible within the kind of rules of the UN to democratize that to make it feel like a selection process is not either corrupt or just some very powerful

countries getting together and kind of forcing their candidate through. First of all I would disagree that the rise of the rights is related to corruption I mean I'm not speaking for my own country so obviously good leadership is the best promotion for democratic parties yeah so if you're not a good leader and if you're even corrupted even worse people don't trust you but if you would look maybe

also a bit here or in another reason the opposite not always the same true yeah you could also

spread fake news if not to say lie which is obviously also not a good leadership but still people follow but I mean we cannot change people's minds and again I would also give responsibility to citizens yeah I mean democracy depends on active citizenship yeah and if you don't want to

“live in a dictatorship you have to do the support democracy and I heard always in Germany”

yeah but I don't like this party because the dreams they are way too much on climate change yeah and I don't like the conservatives because they don't take the battle with the old companies and I don't like the ones in the middle and I always say well this is democracy it's a compromise if you want to wash your clothes to don't have dirty clothes you go to the supermarket yeah I also could say I don't like this washing powder because it's too expensive I don't like the

others because it's not biological as a green politician but then if I take the other one my children say it doesn't smell right in the end I have to fight the compromise because I need washing powder for my clothes and it's the same for democracy yeah if you want to more

“to see you have to decide in the same what is the compromise you take for yourself in this moment”

and the good thing is at the next election yeah you could take the other party because you said well obviously this isn't washed as I wished for four years or five years long so now coming to the UN obviously they are we have also now different candidates and the promotion here we have a town hall which is kind of like a presidential debate next week in the general assembly it is being broadcasted also by a big broadcaster television show so you can see it and again the question

is so who who or which secretary general do the people eight billion people want and the

broader membership made very clear two years ago that after 80 years it should be time for a woman because in 80 years we didn't have a female secretary general and not only because I am a woman which I obviously am but because I defend the credibility and here comes your point the credibility

“of the UN I think it's really hard to explain if by consensus two years ago the broader membership”

called for a female secretary general and then suddenly two years later when we have four women all in national leadership presidents for ministers one and two men for the moment and then you explain afterwards like many main politicians did in the past unfortunately we could not find a qualified woman yeah I mean it was wrong already 10 years ago but these times I think it's really really difficult and this comes to the point of trust I think even the strongest supporter of the

UN which I'm most of the time younger people people who are really engaged in human rights also many in women rights because UN has done so many things also for women I mean if then members states would have to explain how they could not find a qualified woman if in theory

of four billion potential candidates out there in the world I think this will be a challenge of

and this is why I'm addressing it here I'm addressing it every time in the general assembly

“obviously it's in the hand of member states obviously it's a president I'm neutral but obviously”

I'm only describing facts that four billion people are women and it's very hard to explain why

after 80 years still they are not at the top of this helmet and this comes also to other points yeah now is the moment where member states could say well for us it's crystal clear because the general assembly has the last say again in theory you would say it's a security council the P5 they have to make the proposal but if you say very clearly we as a broader membership we as

“Africans Europeans Latin Americans or just we who believe in the UN cannot vote for a person”

who is not supporting the charter that you're not allowed to invade another country if it's

not based on international law we cannot support a person who's denying climate change if you see that half of the force is dying right in our in front of our eyes we cannot support a person who's questioning the sustainable development goals because they won't then we won't have any peace and security so there's a deep power within the general assembly and it has shown that before

“when coffee an an was being appointed a secretary a general the African group made very clear”

if this is not an African because it was their turn yeah then we won't vote for that person so

you see the so-called soft power if you really join forces again it's a very very strong power and this is what we need at this moment that we are not sitting here next year again and then you would ask me I'm not an officer that anymore but if you would ask me while you said that the UN is not perfect but it's the only institution which can stand up for peace and security for everybody in the world and I would say unfortunately it didn't select a secretary or general who believes in it

so I trust on the broader wisdom of the general assembly and the broader membership to understand that obviously we need a candidate which is a compromise for many people this is also very clear we won't have the perfect person but we need a person who is standing with both of her feet on the Chata of the United Nations Thank you madam president for being here today thank you to the Aspen Institute for having us we're out of time so see you the next panel

positive world is a quick immediate production our show is produced by Alonum and Kofsky Michael Goldsmith and the Nisha Bonnergy our team includes Matt DeGrope and Hethcote Jordan Canter canymoffit David Tolls and Ryan Young her staff is proud of the unionized with the writer's guild of America East.