Latest / New Thinking for a New World / Nothing Says “War” Like “Forever”

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Nothing Says “War” Like “Forever” · New Thinking for a New World

• 0:02
  Welcome to New Thinking for a New World, a Tällberg Foundation podcast.
• 0:06
  I am Alan Stoga, your host.
• 0:09
  Each week I bring you conversations with people who think differently about the great issues that are shaping our world.
• 0:15
  Geopolitics, disruptive tech, mass migration, the changing climate, culture wars, all of it is grist for our mill.
• 0:24
  I hope you enjoy listening.
• 0:26
  I also hope you will let me know what you think.
• 0:28
  and that you join the conversation at telbergfoundation.org.
• 0:33
  And now for today's episode of New Thinking
• 0:35
  for a New
• 0:36
  World.
• 0:40
  Hello, I'm Alan Stoga, Chairman of the Tällberg Foundation, and welcome to this conversation.
• 0:46
  When historians eventually try to figure out when the relationship between the United States and the rest of the Americas, if not the world, started to change in fundamental ways, I'm beginning to wonder if September, might turn out to be the pivot point.
• 1:03
  Consider, reportedly, the Trump administration has just told the Congress that the United States is in something that they called a, quote, non-international armed conflict, unquote, with drug cartels, who are variously described as designated or especially designated terrorist organizations, which actually are terms defined in the law, or as domestic terrorist organizations, which is a totally new invention.
• 1:31
  Further, President Trump told Congress recently that the cartels have caused the deaths of tens of thousands of American citizens each year, and that they threaten national security domestically and globally.
• 1:45
  That is practically a declaration of war, I guess.
• 1:49
  But actions speak louder than words.
• 1:51
  Recently, the United States spectacularly destroyed four boats and their crews in the Caribbean who were allegedly trafficking drugs, and you can watch on YouTube.
• 2:02
  Allegedly, those boats were all tied to Venezuela's Cartel de Soleil and to Tren de Aragua.
• 2:09
  The United States announced a fifty million dollar bounty for information leading to the arrest of Venezuelan President Maduro, whom Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said runs a cartel, not a country.
• 2:21
  And the American military has deployed in the Caribbean in strength that I was just told brings more firepower than the U.S.
• 2:29
  committed to the Battle of Midway in nineteen forty-two.
• 2:33
  There's a lot of military assets either floating around or flying over the Caribbean at the moment.
• 2:38
  What's going on and why is it happening?
• 2:42
  For insights, I'm joined today by two people with extraordinary expertise.
• 2:46
  Chris Dalby founded World of Crime and is an investigative journalist with deep expertise on the cartels.
• 2:53
  and Clionadh Raleigh, who leads ACLED and is professor of political violence and geography at the University of Sussex.
• 3:00
  Those two organizations, World of Crime and ACLED, are enormously important resources for anyone trying to understand the evolving global political and military landscape.
• 3:11
  So welcome, Chris and Clionadh, and thank you for doing this.
• 3:14
  I absolutely hate bearing the lead.
• 3:16
  I was taught not to do that a long time ago.
• 3:19
  But I don't know if we start with Maduro or trying to Argua or exploding boats or presidential messages.
• 3:26
  So maybe I'll just ask the sixty or eighty thousand dollar question.
• 3:32
  Might we be witnessing the launch of a new forever war that is some kind of marriage between what we knew in the past as the war on drugs and then the global war on terror?
• 3:43
  Is this a new potentially a new forever war?
• 3:46
  Chris?
• 3:46
  I think everything points in that direction.
• 3:50
  For all that, we like to criticize the Trump White House for its somewhat erratic foreign policy.
• 3:58
  On this, the messaging has been laser focused on.
• 4:02
  virtually the first thing that President Trump did in office is sign an executive order naming significant criminal groups as terrorist organizations.
• 4:10
  The continuation of that was the ratcheting up of sanctions and as you said, rewards for the capture of politicians, officials, leading kingpins up to the tune of fifty million dollars from Maduro.
• 4:24
  From there in August we see a massive deployment of military power to the Caribbean, including let's not forget two and a half thousand marines with an amphibious launch ability.
• 4:36
  Within weeks he uses that power and now we're seeing boats being destroyed in the Caribbean.
• 4:42
  There is no domestic or international resistance or pressure at the moment.
• 4:47
  that I believe could derail that progress, if you want to put that label on it.
• 4:52
  So I think that we need to expect an escalation.
• 4:56
  And that escalation could be snatch and grabs on Venezuelan and Colombian territory,
• 5:01
  all the
• 5:02
  way to a long-term armed invasion.
• 5:07
  And I believe that the evolution of... A Venezuelan,
• 5:11
  armed invasion.
• 5:11
  A Venezuela, but if I was Mexico, even Colombia, I would be very concerned right now.
• 5:16
  Clio, you approach all this from a very different perspective than Chris does, which is why I think having this complementary conversation is going to be fascinating.
• 5:25
  How are you thinking about all this in the world you live in?
• 5:27
  Thanks,
• 5:29
  Alan and Chris, of course.
• 5:31
  It is a very important conversation, and I understand that there is quite a lot of focus at the moment about what's been happening specifically within the kind of near abroad of the US.
• 5:41
  But these actions have multiple audiences is how I put it.
• 5:46
  They also have quite a few comparisons around the world, which is that.
• 5:51
  the first thing I would say is that the focus on definitions or the legal rights.
• 5:57
  These are justifications that will be retrofitted as and when necessary, I think, by the administration.
• 6:04
  But it brings up a really important question of what is the comparison or what are the similarities between cartel-like organizations and terrorist organizations or terrorist tactics?
• 6:15
  And I think that, for the most part, people are not... particularly put out with the notion that the cartels will be now aggressively sought after.
• 6:27
  It's often, of course, about who they're designating as these particular groups in order to justify it.
• 6:33
  But the actions and the intent are very important to, I think, get straight here, which is that often terrorist organizations will, of course, use violence towards some sort of a very specific end.
• 6:46
  often random or public violence, and we of course have seen cartel organizations drastically increase or switch or change or move their violence as is necessary in order to have both economic and political control.
• 7:03
  I think focusing on the drug smuggling element of this particular decision, as has been done in several of the national newspapers in the States, is the wrong direction because people are actually much more concerned not just about the drugs, which are a very, very serious problem within the US and elsewhere, but of course the violence that these groups are generating.
• 7:23
  But I think that one of the things that we need to really consider is that there will be widespread public support for these types of actions.
• 7:31
  Congress seems a little bit, for lack of a better term, kind of frozen in their inability to make any sort of decision, not just because the government has shut down, but there is a kind of paralysis about what to do with a problem that has outgrown law enforcement within the
• 7:49
  U.S.,
• 7:50
  but hasn't necessitated to date a military solution, which is really what the designation from a criminal problem to a terrorist problem allows for.
• 8:01
  military support in dealing with it.
• 8:05
  And I think that that opens up a whole different kind of worms, which is partially being used to pressure Mexico.
• 8:13
  It's partially being used, I think, because Trump thinks I have this tool.
• 8:18
  Why can't I use it?
• 8:20
  And as we can see, that will lead to a whole lot of both intended and unintended outcomes that I think I hope to discuss here.
• 8:29
  But one of my biggest worries, of course, is that the cartels are particularly adept at evolving and adapting.
• 8:37
  And so what the next stage is of their actions is what concerns me quite a bit, because what the next stages of Trump's actions is, you know, it will be arrests, murders, incursions, things like that.
• 8:50
  Things that we kind of know, but the unknowns are, of course, how the governments of these countries will act, but also, of course, how the cartels themselves will operate.
• 9:02
  There's a lot to unpack there, and we could be here for days doing so, but let me... I was gonna say the original sin.
• 9:10
  I don't think it was an original sin.
• 9:11
  Let me start with the original action, which was the designation of cartels as terrorist organizations.
• 9:18
  I know you both have views on that.
• 9:21
  Chris, did it make sense to you?
• 9:24
  And Cleo, there's a so what?
• 9:26
  Okay, having done that, what is that?
• 9:28
  You mentioned open up capabilities, but Chris, why don't you start with, do you think it was a sensible thing to have done?
• 9:33
  At a theoretical level, I'm not opposed to it.
• 9:36
  If we measure a terrorist group by the amount of damage and death that it can cause to national security and to citizens of a country, then by any measure, some, I emphasize, some of the groups that were designated made sense.
• 9:50
  CJNG, Sinaloa, Golf Cartel.
• 9:53
  Other groups that were designated did not pose the same threat.
• 9:58
  MS-III, Anton Der Agua.
• 10:00
  Right, from the point of view of violence.
• 10:02
  From the point of view of violence?
• 10:05
  The Mexican cartels have caused untold death and destruction in North America.
• 10:10
  So in Der Agua, yes, absolutely has a body count to it across Latin America, but not even on the same in the same orbit as the cartels.
• 10:18
  And MS-XIII, of course, has now been significantly redefined by the actions of Bukele and El Salvador.
• 10:24
  But what that confluence does is it goes to a point that I've been trying to make for two years, which is approaching cartels as one size fits all is a critical error.
• 10:35
  Cartels, even if we just look at Mexicans, have different social, economic, political goals, different criminal economies that they operate under.
• 10:44
  They are more or less fragmented, more or less united.
• 10:47
  The response to this terrorist designation, and now this escalation, is you've actually strengthened the cartels.
• 10:55
  We're seeing a unification of cartels after almost ten years of fragmentation, right?
• 11:02
  The CJNG and the chapitos fighting side by side.
• 11:07
  Trump's designation was not the only reason that happened, but it's certainly one of them, right?
• 11:12
  If you're suddenly afraid of the hundred-and-first airborne being your adversaries as opposed to, you know, the Sakaris from across the valley, It's a different attitude to recruitment, it's a different attitude to armament.
• 11:23
  And while the cartels are not the Houthis or ISIS or Al Qaeda in their firepower, they can certainly unify to present a significant threat for any type of incursion, which is not the same for Tenderagua and the GoFast boats in Venezuela.
• 11:37
  So we're dealing with two different security dynamics.
• 11:40
  But in the outward messaging of the White House, that's all blurred into a, I think, quite intentional mess.
• 11:48
  Many things to pull there, but Clio, this is both a rhetorical designation, essentially what you just said.
• 11:56
  It's about speeches.
• 11:57
  It's about trying to get people to think that these Isis and Sinovola are the same thing, never mind trying to arc, etc.
• 12:05
  But the so what question do you, Clio?
• 12:08
  There's consequences to these designations.
• 12:12
  There are, but it depends to whom.
• 12:14
  And to Chris's point, I think that if you were to take a cut of the events, for example, that a cartel, a large cartel, or even a small potential cartelito was pursuing, and you took any of the more established political violence groups around the world, you would not find a huge amount of difference in how they pursue and conduct violence.
• 12:39
  You would find a lot of difference in how they organize themselves and what the ultimate purpose of that violence was, but it doesn't look different on the ground.
• 12:51
  And that's an important designation because, I mean, I have complicated feelings about the designation of the word terrorist, but I certainly don't about groups that commit a higher than average rate of violence against civilians, often within public places.
• 13:06
  and in an attempt to undermine public authority.
• 13:10
  And both cartels of all sizes, and of course, jihadi groups or nationalist rebels groups or even militias do the same thing.
• 13:19
  So I don't think that the crux of this is a distinction of the violence, right?
• 13:26
  What it in part is, of course, is how to approach dismantling these groups.
• 13:31
  And I would say that, unfortunately, many, many groups don't dismantle because they are fought with to the point where they, for example, lose a conflict.
• 13:44
  That's actually quite a rare designation.
• 13:47
  But often violence becomes too expensive, as opposed to different forms of either anti-government engagements or acquiring political power is done through other means.
• 14:03
  I guess I would turn to Kristen and ask, what is effective against cartels?
• 14:09
  Especially if one of the designations that I would question is, with cartels, we see a far lower rate of government cartel violence as in the violence in which the government plays a part compared to other, let's say, an insurgent group that has some terrorist activity like maybe Al-Shabaab.
• 14:28
  But my bigger concern is that even with overwhelming amounts of state violence towards groups, it's still quite difficult to stop their behavior.
• 14:37
  They evolve.
• 14:38
  Like I said, rebel groups evolve, cartel groups evolve.
• 14:41
  I just think that cartels have, because of their motivation being primarily an economic or business one, a much wider range of evolutions than these other groups do.
• 14:52
  Thank you, Theo.
• 14:54
  I completely agree with you that cartels are interested in doing business.
• 14:58
  Following the money is the only thing that has ever worked, whether it's the Mexican cartels, whether even prior to Mano Dura and El Salvador, going after MS-III's ability to send remittances, going after front companies, shell companies.
• 15:15
  I see from my friend Victor in the comments questions about PCC and Red Command in Brazil, going after their ability to take over state functions and offer public services.
• 15:27
  in Rio, in Sao Paulo and other cities.
• 15:30
  Closing off those aspects requires dramatic and rapid shifting from the cartels, which they are not always able to do.
• 15:39
  There's this old adage, which is true, that organized crime is the most adaptable form of business in the world.
• 15:44
  Absolutely.
• 15:45
  But a wholesale economic shift away from models that allow the cartel to pay their soldiers, to pay their carpo's, to keep the edifice.
• 15:55
  going.
• 15:56
  because let's be clear.
• 15:57
  There's no ideological loyalty to a cartel.
• 16:00
  There might be loyalty to a man, but it's loyalty to money.
• 16:04
  So going after money is the only way to do it.
• 16:08
  Since the Obama administration, we have seen very limited attempts to go after the money.
• 16:14
  There's been some work in Mexico by their financial intelligence unit, which has done great work.
• 16:19
  Brazil independently has done very well with seizing assets belonging to their criminal groups, but internationally, very little.
• 16:28
  Yet we understand it more than ever.
• 16:31
  Our ability to witness the blockchain, to witness cryptocurrencies and follow those is there.
• 16:37
  Investigative journalists like Insight Crime have done amazing work at connecting the suppliers in China that are providing chemical precursors.
• 16:45
  Yet the actual enforcement of that information and that visualization has not been happening.
• 16:52
  And certainly one of the biggest letdowns under the current administration in the US is the very weak interest in going after the money.
• 17:00
  Is it because there is a preference for violence?
• 17:05
  Is it because they don't have the financial tools?
• 17:07
  Is it because to go after the money you actually need to work closely with allies?
• 17:14
  And the United States, for several administrations, not least the current one, doesn't play well with its friends.
• 17:21
  I'll just pop in here because I do think that, to some degree, just to show a force is what Trump is particularly interested in.
• 17:28
  There may be, in fact, much more sophisticated geopolitical options on the table for other members of the administration or even elites within the new abroad governments.
• 17:38
  But I think that for Trump, he sees examples like Duterte, in the Philippines and he thinks, yeah, I can do that.
• 17:46
  I can go after these drug smugglers or these cartel members with overwhelming violence that I have at my disposal because of the security state.
• 17:56
  And he wants to use it.
• 17:57
  And people, the general public wants to see some sort of action related to the very, very serious drug problems within the states.
• 18:08
  And the sophisticated financial work that Chris is speaking about is largely invisible.
• 18:13
  So there isn't a huge amount of glory in saying, we closed down the bank accounts that allowed these groups to operate, even if that's far more effective.
• 18:25
  So I would say that what's happening with ICE and what's happening potentially with much more aggressive... policing and potentially military activity increasing within the region is related to just a simple show of force that will be poorly applied in a lot of cases and leading to very high numbers of deaths, but very unlikely to lead to denting this problem.
• 18:54
  But to Chris's point, this is not only the current administration.
• 18:59
  It's become an American habit for now, quite a long time.
• 19:04
  Obama's two terms, Trump's first term, Biden's term, and now.
• 19:09
  So we've, at the very moment where we have more financial transparency and more financial tools, we're not using them.
• 19:17
  Famously, every American knows that Al Capone goes to jail not for murdering people, but for not paying taxes while he murdered people.
• 19:25
  So it's long established that that is an effective.
• 19:29
  But I want to push maybe Chris or whichever.
• 19:32
  Why aren't we doing that?
• 19:34
  It may just be because it's more spectacular.
• 19:37
  It may just be because we have this incredible, we the United States, this incredibly dominant military power, as Madeline Albright famously said, why not use it?
• 19:48
  You've also fired a lot of the experts that could have done this, right?
• 19:53
  And replaced them with either yes men or favorized or glamorized, as we've seen from Secretary Haguesev's speech to the Assemble Generals, a rejection of pacifism as being un-American.
• 20:07
  But let's look at the Inderego, just for a slight sidestep.
• 20:11
  The Inderego is absolutely a threat to America at a far smaller level than the Trump administration is saying.
• 20:18
  But they're not a threat in killing Americans or in selling vast quantities of cocaine.
• 20:23
  They're a threat because they're bringing back old mafia tactics, you know, extortion, sex trafficking, you know, using nightclubs, entertainment venues as fronts and as planning areas, you know, shaking down construction sites.
• 20:40
  And they're doing it in small town America.
• 20:42
  But Chris, I want to just interrupt.
• 20:44
  Can you dimension sort of how big what is trying to argo?
• 20:48
  Criteria
• 20:48
  what today is a very different beast than it was even two years ago, right?
• 20:51
  They exploded onto the scene as a Venezuelan prison gang that saw a unique opportunity in the exile, the exodus of millions of Venezuelans, right?
• 21:00
  First to Colombia, then Peru, Ecuador, Chile, and then North Costa Rica, Mexico, the US.
• 21:07
  And it's the same playbook when they embed themselves in these movements of Venezuelans.
• 21:13
  They offer them safe passage.
• 21:17
  across borders.
• 21:18
  They offer them jobs and places to stay and contacts when they get into cities with existing Venezuelan populations.
• 21:25
  But the price of that is that you're on their hook.
• 21:28
  And then they can use you for drug trafficking, for extortion, for sex trafficking.
• 21:33
  And when I say drug trafficking, I mean local drug sales of drugs like ketamine or pink cocaine or toothy, not cocaine and fentanyl.
• 21:41
  And what you see in these cities, so New Jersey, Baton Rouge, Nashville, Bozeman, Montana, cities with long-term Venezuelan diasporas, and that's what's in their agro-operates.
• 21:53
  Now, yes, that has been significantly weakened by the massive ice operations, so certainly a convenient by-product for the administration, but they're doing economic crime.
• 22:03
  They're not doing, you know, they're not going up against the cartels or, you know, all the Dominicans on the East Coast or the Colombians in South America.
• 22:13
  They never had the firepower to do so.
• 22:16
  Just on that note, so I fully agree that there's an element of, we've got the force, why don't we use it?
• 22:23
  But there's also a sense that, as you mentioned, during both the Obama, but far more so the Biden administration, there was an explosion of violence globally.
• 22:32
  And there was also an explosion of gun violence within the US.
• 22:36
  that is only this year likely to reach twenty twenty four levels.
• 22:41
  which are still far higher than twenty nineteen levels.
• 22:45
  So there was a reluctance of different administrations to use their own security forces to counter what are known problems.
• 22:54
  Now to Chris's point, I don't think that those gun deaths are related necessarily to drugs, although the drug crimes in the states are pretty significant as are the drug deaths.
• 23:05
  And I don't think we can take away from that.
• 23:07
  That's one of the reasons why I think The Trump administration has a little bit of a carte blanche here for the American public because they don't want this problem to expand.
• 23:16
  With synthetic drugs coming in, there's unbelievable possibilities that this problem will get far worse than better.
• 23:24
  But I will say that when it comes to the distinction or the designation of these groups.
• 23:31
  like that, it's also part of a well-established and I think pretty accurate assumption that Many of the governments for whom this is a domestic problem, the violence, as Chris mentioned, or the cartels, they are incapable of dealing with this, right?
• 23:46
  These groups have gone from strength to strength, and there is an exhaustion with states that are not choosing quite extreme ways to deal with it.
• 23:55
  So, for example, Obviously, El Salvador is up there.
• 23:58
  Even if the solution is wrong, it still feels like they're doing something in order to counter what is an extreme problem.
• 24:06
  And of course, now we see that Ecuador has the second highest murder rate in the region.
• 24:11
  And it's in part because these groups and the governments that, of course, have overseen this happen, have transnational dimensions.
• 24:19
  So the Colombians, for example, within Ecuador.
• 24:22
  So there's a real sense that The governments themselves don't know what to do, and the US is the receiving end of quite a bit of the market, no question about that, but also that it could get far worse unless they do something.
• 24:38
  And of course, as we all know, the corruption within the systems that have allowed many of these cartels to have significant political support, or at least actions, is why... there does need to be a pretty extreme solution to what's happening within the region.
• 24:54
  Whether or not this is the right solution, that's to be debated.
• 24:58
  But I think the problem of people criticizing it is that there hasn't been a viable solution to date, except as Chris noted, certainly for the business aspect, being going after financial crimes.
• 25:12
  But even that, of course, is causing adaptation rather than cessation of all abilities.
• 25:19
  Several of the questions relate to what happens next.
• 25:23
  That is to say, would one expect the U.S.
• 25:27
  to designate other organizations, other cartels as terrorist organizations, is this focused on a very specific moment and problem, or is it as both the original war on drugs and the original global war on terror, infinitely expandable?
• 25:47
  in terms of both targets and purposes.
• 25:51
  I think in terms of expansion of the target list, that may be a logistical cap, right?
• 25:58
  You don't necessarily want to threaten incursions or invasions on a country like Brazil, for example.
• 26:04
  In May, the White House asked Brazil to name its top two criminal groups, the PCC and the Red Command.
• 26:10
  As terrorist organizations, the ruler government flatly rejected it.
• 26:14
  There's been, I think, not much escalation on that, certainly in terms of the publicly facing escalation.
• 26:21
  The Brazilian threat obviously is much more distant than the US.
• 26:24
  The PCC is much more focused on Europe and expansion into Portugal.
• 26:29
  So it's not the same level of threat.
• 26:31
  However, as the situation in Haiti continues to descend into utter anarchy, if certainly that steps into the Dominican Republic, These are countries which are much closer to America.
• 26:43
  These are countries, you know, the Dominican Republic is a common tourist destination for Americans.
• 26:47
  That would not surprise me to see, you know, the likes of barbecue or the G-Nine or the or the or the Viva Som being the next target.
• 26:56
  I think it depends at what level he want they want to engage.
• 27:00
  If they see an ability to go for Venezuela, remove Maduro, and that's a campaign, a focused campaign, that might detract attention away from other countries.
• 27:10
  If it's If it remains at a, I hate to say it, at a surface level, blowing up go fast boats or snatching drug traffickers off the beach, then you could see a horizontal expansion geographically.
• 27:23
  One of the problems with both the drug war originally and the global war on terror is there was never a definition of victory, right?
• 27:33
  There's no end state that you can say, oh, the drug problem is solved.
• 27:36
  Oh, the terrorism problem is solved.
• 27:38
  We can go home and have a parade.
• 27:40
  In fact, you've sort of just touched on that.
• 27:43
  Is the purpose to someday say, trying to, does not exist anymore?
• 27:50
  Is that possible?
• 27:53
  Is this, which goes partially to also the other way to look at the question of, do you keep on expanding it?
• 27:58
  Do you target others, whether in Somalia or Brazil or in West Africa?
• 28:04
  All of that one part of the question.
• 28:06
  And the other part's going to be, Are there any allies in this potential war?
• 28:12
  Are there other countries that are going to say, this is a great idea?
• 28:16
  Send us in, coach.
• 28:17
  Clio.
• 28:18
  So I would say that we should consider what happened with the designation of jihadi groups, especially, of course, around two thousand in that period, which is that a lot of governments took that upon themselves to designate all of their problems as terrorist groups.
• 28:34
  Because even though they did not expect the US to come in, It granted them a huge amount of ally power with the US administration at the time for weapons, for all sorts of support, et cetera, if you did so.
• 28:49
  And so while that might not be in Brazil's favor at the moment, it will a hundred percent be in a lot of people's favor.
• 28:56
  to start saying, I'm happy to designate this group that is actually my opposition, but has a militia, let's say, operating in a rural area as a terrorist organization.
• 29:07
  because because that makes it seem like not only do I support the Trump administration's perspective rather than actions, but perspective on things, but it also reframes the power relationship, which is, I think, what actually Trump is trying to offer these other potential leaders or leaders themselves within countries.
• 29:26
  They're trying to say, this problem has gotten too much for us, which is not untrue.
• 29:32
  It's not a problem that they've managed to solve or even contain.
• 29:36
  It's gotten too much for us.
• 29:37
  We must try something else.
• 29:41
  I mean, his reading of international terrorism might be slightly different than mine, but maybe he thinks that it's now a controllable problem.
• 29:48
  But my point being is that they're saying, let's use what we have.
• 29:52
  What is our comparative advantage?
• 29:54
  We have militaries, and we should use them.
• 29:58
  That is how they're going to approach this.
• 30:00
  And hopefully, of course, with the significant financial work that is also really pivotal in both finding and, of course, eradicating some of the more productive parts of the system.
• 30:12
  But I would imagine that you will be appalled slash shocked at the sign up to this from other leaders.
• 30:21
  Just to bounce off what was very well articulated is that we see a already.
• 30:27
  dramatic weakening of police ability, investigative ability in the US, or a willingness to do sloppy police work.
• 30:38
  For example, Trinidad Agua was presented federally as a threat, as a Venezuelan criminal threat invading America with very little specificity about what they were doing.
• 30:48
  I tracked, when I was writing the book last year about Trinidad Agua, dozens of arrests of Venezuelan people, and I'm not commenting on the legitimacy of the arrests.
• 30:56
  Let's assume they were guilty of what they were arrested to have done, but on immigration crime, on traffic violations, on retail theft, I mean literally like grocery store snatching, and within a day they were alleged to have done that.
• 31:09
  Within an hour they were alleged to have done that.
• 31:12
  That is a police, and I had police sheriffs off the record tell me, why wouldn't we say they would have done that?
• 31:19
  A, they might be, B, it gets us attention, C, I get promotions, D, we get access to federal budgets for our police force.
• 31:26
  There was zero incentive for them not to lie.
• 31:31
  And we see that same logic applied to the international stage.
• 31:35
  Who knows who was on those GoFast boats?
• 31:37
  Not the Venezuelans, not the Colombians, not the Americans.
• 31:40
  On top of that, the complexity of those boats, it's simple, right?
• 31:43
  They would they would drug traffickers carrying cocaine to the Caribbean.
• 31:46
  Likely, possibly.
• 31:47
  Let's assume again, let's be nice and generous and assume that all those boats had cocaine and drug traffickers on them.
• 31:52
  If they did, they were the lowest rung on the criminal hierarchy.
• 31:56
  And those GoFast boats are used by illegal migration or coyotes.
• 32:01
  They're used to move fuel.
• 32:02
  They're used to move guns.
• 32:03
  And they're also used on occasion by legitimate enterprises who want to stay off the radar.
• 32:09
  The first boat he sank had eleven people.
• 32:11
  That's a hell of a lot of people to move drugs, right?
• 32:12
  That on a GoFast boat, you're reducing the amount of space you have to move the profitable stuff.
• 32:17
  So it's likely that a high percentage of the people who were killed on those boats had nothing to do with drug trafficking at all.
• 32:23
  But it makes for a spectacular video.
• 32:26
  For sure.
• 32:26
  The question becomes, does it make for a next step of policy?
• 32:31
  And that goes in two directions.
• 32:32
  You've both suggested that there are going to be no shortage of countries around.
• 32:36
  that will say, we can join this crusade because it's in our interest.
• 32:41
  Either our political interest, our social interest, our military interest, maybe are legitimate before all of those words, maybe not so legitimate.
• 32:49
  But in Europe, I was just thinking that... Chris and I might agree or disagree with this, but there is an enormous public problem with migration, especially within the UK.
• 33:04
  Part of that is that it's been elevated to now kind of a public emergency, and part of it is that there was largely unrestricted movements post-COVID.
• 33:17
  There would need to be some pretty fundamental changes in everybody's perspective to treat that like a law enforcement issue rather than a home office immigration issue.
• 33:35
  Chris, what do you think?
• 33:37
  I absolutely agree with John.
• 33:38
  There is a major migration-related crime issue across Europe.
• 33:45
  The problem is... the cost that it takes on democracy to treat migration as a fundamental criminal problem.
• 33:54
  There's an alarming situation happening in Belgium right now.
• 33:57
  Over the last few years, the mistreatment of legal asylum seekers in Belgium and the failure to provide basic services means that the Supreme Court in Belgium and top other courts have fined the government to the tune of sixteen million euros for the sloppy handling of prison and migration centre.
• 34:14
  There's still a basic level of human rights that you have to achieve.
• 34:18
  This week, the migration minister said, we're not paying.
• 34:21
  This week, the migration minister says, I have a limited budget.
• 34:24
  Screw your fines.
• 34:25
  I'm ignoring the judiciary.
• 34:28
  That's the constitutional crisis right there.
• 34:30
  You've just undermined your three top courts, and it's a member of the cabinet in the EU, in the heart of the EU.
• 34:37
  Yes, it's a right wing nationalist government, Flemish nationalist party, currently majority coalition party in Belgium.
• 34:43
  But Jesus, that is a... really worry present that nobody is picked up on.
• 34:49
  So I like the way Sweden has articulated it.
• 34:53
  Sweden has absolutely toughened up and cracked down on crime and needing to do so with a lot of presence of Kurdish and Turkish and Iranian organized crime in Sweden.
• 35:04
  But they've done it, I think, without compromising their core values.
• 35:08
  Now, you can say that's a small country, limited population.
• 35:12
  easier to act.
• 35:13
  But I think it is a model that you can recognize a migration element that is involved in organized crime, crack down on it, go after the money, identify the ringleaders without resorting to whistle, you know, to a dog whistle.
• 35:29
  Although you're not seen it imitated widely in Europe, never mind beyond Europe.
• 35:34
  I mean, but I would say that... It's not because they don't want to.
• 35:40
  I think Chris's point about the cost that they think it will assume for their democracy is unprecedented, I guess is maybe a word for it, as is the problem itself, like the magnitude of the problem itself.
• 35:55
  But I mean, what I guess I would say is that the worrying part here is not necessarily just that illegal migration is a crime.
• 36:08
  as a permanent migrant.
• 36:10
  I can tell you that if I tried to get into the US without the requisite paperwork, I know I would be committing a crime.
• 36:19
  The problem, I think, is that the freedom that Chris alluded to earlier of associating that crime, which is a civil crime, with one that is associated with a violent network, which is, of course, the organized crime, is maybe breaking down at a quicker rate.
• 36:37
  then anticipated, especially as people have kind of just gotten around thinking of illegal migration as a crime, whereas before, like I said, you know, it was kind of treated like the equivalent of a parking ticket.
• 36:50
  So that jump is kind of a classic Trump administration thing, which is that there are some obvious elements, especially with traffickers, that you can associate with those things.
• 37:02
  But now, But now there's been a much broader application of a pretty extreme rule, and we all have to now get our heads around it.
• 37:12
  Even if, as I mentioned before, it is not strictly legal.
• 37:16
  It's not illegal either.
• 37:17
  And so that's, I mean, that's the Trump administration all over the first and the second terms, had been a stretching of these norm.
• 37:25
  slash rules with impunity.
• 37:28
  With impunity, that's the most important thing.
• 37:31
  No one's going to go No one's going to get in trouble for stretching this to its limit by any stretch of the imagination.
• 37:41
  What do war lessons from Gaza, rethinking education, peace in Ukraine, and visionary leadership have in common?
• 37:49
  They are all themes from recent episodes of this podcast.
• 37:53
  Check out more episodes on tellbergfoundation.org or on a platform of your choice.
• 38:01
  Where does this go?
• 38:03
  You already made some suggestions that there will be an embracing from some governments around the world because it's coincident with where they need to go or want to go.
• 38:13
  Chris, early on you said the cartels maybe are starting to understand they have more in common than they thought they had, especially now.
• 38:21
  So there's an obvious question of what do they do?
• 38:25
  Both the, well, established cartels as well as the newer ones.
• 38:29
  Is there a potential for... If you call them terrorists, maybe they become terrorists.
• 38:37
  Is there potential for there to be an evolution of how they think about their allies, their purpose, et cetera?
• 38:47
  Let's talk about dominoes and how they might
• 38:50
  tip
• 38:51
  or interact with each other.
• 38:52
  There are a lot of news stories out there.
• 38:57
  They get a lot of attention about the evolution of military power of the cartels.
• 39:03
  We hear about drones, we hear about, you know, sending people to Ukraine, we hear about, you know, the diversion of arms trafficking.
• 39:11
  That is all true.
• 39:13
  True and warfare is now commonplace in Mexico.
• 39:16
  But we have to remember the reasons cartels fight.
• 39:21
  And that doesn't necessarily change even if we see the hundred and first airborne parachutes in Laos.
• 39:27
  Cartels fight to control territory.
• 39:29
  cartels fight to control routes, and cartels fight to do business with impunity, to be left alone, to do whether that's oil theft, whether that's extortion, whether that's kidnapping, whether that's migrant exploitation, whether that's drug trafficking.
• 39:43
  Those are the core reasons cartels fight, and that remains true.
• 39:48
  Nothing that the Trump White House is currently threatening but a full blown invasion of Mexico, which I don't think is going to happen.
• 39:55
  will not change the economic engine of the cartels.
• 39:57
  It might change the way they temporarily do business, but the revenue streams of cartels will remain the same.
• 40:03
  Americans are not going to stop using drugs because cartel people are dying.
• 40:09
  So I think that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, as we might be seeing in the short term.
• 40:16
  By the way, massive recruitment spike right now for cartels.
• 40:20
  I am doing a project on tracking social media activity of recruitment for cartels off the charts.
• 40:26
  Obviously, existential threat.
• 40:28
  The US might invade, right?
• 40:30
  Come, come work for us, come defend your country.
• 40:32
  We need more bodies.
• 40:35
  So that's the short-term impact.
• 40:36
  So I think we, it's more likely we see an increase in violence in Mexico, which consistently happens as a result of American policy.
• 40:44
  Again, capturing El Mayo last year, one of the biggest kingpins in Mexican history, needed, absolutely needed to take him off the board, put him in court, find out what he knows.
• 40:54
  Murders in Sinaloa, which was actually mid-table for Mexican violence in the Mexican States, up four hundred percent in a year because of his removal.
• 41:03
  So the knock-on effect of strong judicial or military action is inevitably more violence.
• 41:12
  I don't think the Mexicans are accounting terrorist attacks in the US.
• 41:17
  They don't have the infrastructure to do so.
• 41:19
  Yeah, to support that I would say that what we've noticed before even when more established wars get negotiated or there's a peace resolution within Latin America is that the groups don't.
• 41:36
  No, they don't say, well, that was great.
• 41:38
  I was a rebel and now I'm going to be an accountant.
• 41:41
  They changed the format in which they're going to use violence for the promotion of other activities.
• 41:47
  So we've seen that in Colombia and elsewhere.
• 41:50
  So you might guess, you know, twenty small groups as opposed to one coordinated large group.
• 41:54
  And so that kind of waxing and waning of the number of groups and what they're willing to do and what territory they're hoping to control is a very, very common.
• 42:04
  obviously cartel occurrence, but equally, I think, within the more established traditional political violence world.
• 42:12
  What I really am concerned about is, again, as Chris noted, the violence can dramatically expand even if you use classic counterterrorist moves like taking the kingpin out.
• 42:27
  That happens much more, that happens far quicker in a cartel environment than it would in, for example, a terrorist environment or one involving more traditional organized political violence.
• 42:39
  And the price of the goods tends to stay pretty stable even after massive attempts to counter that particular component of the cost of doing cartel work.
• 42:53
  So innovations, whether it's moving into a new area or finding a new supplier or root or, of course, using synthetic materials to manufacture these drugs, that doesn't seem to be affected by... military actions towards the cartels and that's super concerning.
• 43:16
  There is, I think, always to the cartels a very attractive option of moving into West Africa, in which they would find far fewer obstacles to their activity and a much better route into Europe.
• 43:31
  However, I guess I would say that that's a big step and to your point, Alan, that's a big... change because then you would be collaborating with established international terrorist groups in particular, Jane and IS.
• 43:50
  And that's a totally new bulging.
• 43:53
  And again, they've proven very bad at being able to counter both of those groups and their operations within coastal
• 44:01
  West Africa.
• 44:01
  Chris,
• 44:03
  from a European perspective, and this went very under the radar.
• 44:08
  We know, if we compare Venezuela in Africa, I would point to Sierra Leone, where you have a ruling family that is absolutely embedded in the organized crime trade.
• 44:17
  They're regulating criminal rules of the country.
• 44:19
  In fact, the most wanted man in the Netherlands, a drug trafficker by the name of Jos Leidek, which I think is a name we're going to be hearing a lot more about in the next couple of years, just had a kid with the daughter of the ruling Sierra Leone president after being sort of announced.
• 44:36
  as the son-in-law in January, which had the kid together.
• 44:40
  This is a known fugitive, you know, close to Ridwantagi jail last year as one of the most dangerous kingpins in Europe.
• 44:48
  So Europe is facing similar problems.
• 44:50
  It's not that Sierra Leone is going to have a gang entering Europe, but Sierra Leone as a safe harbor for South American drug traffickers and European drug traffickers to do business, to refuel their ships, to then get into Europe is a crisis point.
• 45:06
  Your point about a kingpin strategy and it's it's pernicious Not intended consequences is obviously the story Chris that you told about the Mexican cartels.
• 45:17
  It is one of the consequences of all those wars against cartels is that there's more cartels and they're more violent and they're then they're more deadweight.
• 45:24
  It's it's a bit of a feedback loop and it's it's a common tool Used by critics of a muscular policy against the cartels that if you remove the kingpin you create more kills.
• 45:36
  It is true.
• 45:38
  But does that mean that you should leave the kingpin in place and offer them impunity because removing them might have consequences?
• 45:44
  It's ethically that becomes dodgy, right?
• 45:46
  Elmayo was responsible for manufacturing and selling drugs that killed tens of thousands of Americans and certainly causing- Truly
• 45:55
  evil, man.
• 45:56
  There's no- Absolutely,
• 45:57
  yeah.
• 45:58
  A word
• 45:58
  evil applies there, absolutely.
• 45:59
  Absolutely.
• 46:01
  Similarly, El Mensho.
• 46:02
  El Mensho is removed, the head of the Halisqaqata new generation.
• 46:05
  The Halisqaqata uploads overnight.
• 46:08
  And we're going to see what happens inevitably when you remove a kingpin of that level, which is more groups fighting more violently for a smaller piece of the pie.
• 46:17
  Does that mean you can't remove Mensho?
• 46:19
  No.
• 46:21
  And which is why we have to go after the money?
• 46:24
  Which is why we have to create socioeconomic alternatives?
• 46:29
  to allow young children for whom, or young men especially, for whom joining the cartel is not seen as a step into criminality.
• 46:38
  It's the logical next step, if not the only one.
• 46:42
  You know, sometimes people say, well, all right, if this group has a very large territorial footprint, why don't we just hand over governance?
• 46:50
  It's very difficult to be an extremist when you've got to make sure that the buses run on time, right?
• 47:00
  The unfortunate example of that is a situation like Hamas and Gaza, which is that I'm not even sure, in fact, I would be sure that it's not the case.
• 47:09
  The cartels don't want to run the place.
• 47:11
  As Chris mentioned, they want to be left alone.
• 47:14
  to have this.
• 47:15
  And they consider this violence a cost of doing business, right?
• 47:18
  And if the cost of doing business drastically increases, they will find a different way to do business.
• 47:24
  But getting rid of drug cartels and drug use is a very different problem to getting rid of violence, even if they are in some ways combined for this tactical advantage that both the cartels and terrorist groups use.
• 47:38
  So I would say that there is a solution.
• 47:42
  and that there are extremely uncomfortable trade-offs that each and every one of us will have to confront with this solution, extremely uncomfortable ones.
• 47:54
  Because it would also be as much as what Duterte, for example, did in the Philippines was truly atrocious because of the extreme way that he went about handling the opposition, of course, his purported enemies.
• 48:10
  He is never considered to be a bad president for how he dealt with the drug war, which of course was at a much earlier stage than some of this use is across the US and other places.
• 48:27
  So what I would say is that If we're going to criticize the Trump administration's approach to this and their valid criticisms, then dealing with the problem as it is, rather than how we want it to be, is one of the first stages to do that.
• 48:42
  And I don't think that there are many, many other viable solutions.
• 48:46
  Outside of the fact that there a hundred percent should be a focus on the criminal finances of how this works, alongside a much more rigorous approach to the violence that these groups are able to enact upon communities.
• 49:01
  I agree with the term that clue use, which is there are some very uncomfortable realities that we have to confront.
• 49:09
  I am often called naive when I when I'm asked that question, is there no hope?
• 49:14
  Is it hopeless?
• 49:14
  Short term, maybe.
• 49:16
  Short term, maybe.
• 49:18
  But if we look back, thirty, forty years, how many countries that are now relatively stable in Latin America were certainly not, whether it was military dictatorship, whether it was, you know, narco states, whether it was corporate abuse, whether it was, you know, higher levels of violence.
• 49:36
  Of course, there are countries that have declined catastrophically, Haiti, Venezuela.
• 49:42
  But if you look at Panama, Costa Rica, Chile, Argentina, even Brazil, even Brazil, there are hopeful examples in the region.
• 49:53
  They were different.
• 49:54
  That their change required a political shift, sometimes armed, sometimes peacefully.
• 50:01
  It's much more insidious with the cartels.
• 50:04
  But again, barring my own men's show, most of these people would choose an alternative.
• 50:11
  I've spoken to cartel members, I've been in prisons, I've been talking to them, some who've reformed, and all of them would welcome an alternative.
• 50:21
  I know it's naïve to say, but these are people, and that's what I try and tell in the books, that these are people who at some point, whether forced into it or by choice, went down a horrific path and should be absolutely punished for what they've done and in many cases that is sadly a violent end to what they do.
• 50:43
  But that's not how you fix things long term.
• 50:46
  I believe that there are institutions in America that understand that.
• 50:54
  Is Trump creating a forever war?
• 50:55
  Maybe because then it becomes a sunk cost fallacy, right?
• 50:58
  We've invested X billion into blowing up ships in the Caribbean.
• 51:01
  We're going to keep going because retreat is seen as somehow un-American or un-Republican or un-Patriotic.
• 51:07
  And that's the spiral that is more dangerous to me than what the cartels are doing.
• 51:13
  I want to circle back, Cleo, to your work and your reference that earlier you have demonstrated rise in violence, conflict.
• 51:25
  over the last several years around the world.
• 51:26
  Almost no one is exempt.
• 51:28
  We clearly are moving in, have moved, not are moving, have moved into a more violent era.
• 51:35
  Chris is looking for some optimism here.
• 51:38
  And I'm having trouble, I haven't trouble buying into it.
• 51:41
  And part- In
• 51:42
  the wrong person.
• 51:43
  That's why I'm asking you.
• 51:44
  That's probably because of your work.
• 51:45
  Your work suggests that there is a breakup going on of social contracts, of social order in a lot of places.
• 51:53
  and that the American response, and as you both pointed out, it has antecedents in the Biden and Trump one in Obama.
• 52:03
  The American response has been part and parcel of this more violent world.
• 52:09
  I guess what I would say is that there's two things at play here.
• 52:13
  One is that the drastic rise in violence is because of far more state violence than has been perpetrated before.
• 52:19
  And a huge proportion of that, of course, is both Russia and Israel.
• 52:23
  But a lot of states have decided to take a much more muscular approach to how they deal with levels of conflict within their region.
• 52:33
  And there is, I really do want to emphasize, they're not going for total peace, that what they want is a manageable amount of violence within their territories.
• 52:42
  And they have decided to go about that through the increase to use of bombing in particular.
• 52:47
  So they're not, you know, they're not.
• 52:50
  engaging in combat with many of these groups, but they are trying to effectively clear the slate of those that think, those that go beyond what they would consider to be a, I mean, I hesitate to use this term, but I do think it's a reasonable amount of political violence that many countries are fine with or relatively fine with.
• 53:14
  And I consider, especially with the rise of the BRICS and some other, let's say, interests within the system, for that violence to continue.
• 53:24
  State violence will undoubtedly increase, likely far more than we would expect, into the near future.
• 53:32
  And it's a retraction, or rather, it's kind of a dismissal of what the US has been trying to build up.
• 53:41
  in the last two decades, for example, around the world.
• 53:43
  But it's also seen as a very clear indication that that didn't work.
• 53:48
  The notion about stabilization or inclusive political governments or development as a precursor to disability, none of that turned out to be as true as I think many of its adherents wanted them to be.
• 54:02
  And so we are likely to see a drastic increase in state violence.
• 54:06
  And with this, Chris would know this well, quite a lot of the accoutrement that comes with that, paramilitaries or militias that are being used by different elites in order to secure political power because that's going to be the resource, right?
• 54:21
  That's what's going to be.
• 54:21
  the only way that you actually can assume some sort of authority within a stage is to go through the stage itself.
• 54:30
  Yeah, it's worrying times, I guess, for that reason.
• 54:36
  It's sorry, Chris.
• 54:38
  That's really interesting.
• 54:39
  How
• 54:39
  far you go, Chris?
• 54:40
  I'm tempted to summarize what you just said, I think, this way.
• 54:45
  We have lived in an era where people thought there was a, by definition, a war had a beginning, a middle, and an end.
• 54:52
  That is a uniquely modern phenomenon, I would argue.
• 54:56
  My reading of history, the Hundred Years War, is a perfect example.
• 55:01
  the fifty years war.
• 55:02
  Though the war used to be a more permanent condition, violence used to be a more permanent condition, we thought the war to end all wars and then the second war to end all wars would end all wars.
• 55:15
  and it hasn't.
• 55:17
  And the things we've built up to try to prevent conflict, the monster we aren't preventing conflict.
• 55:27
  So again, I asked the question, and maybe that's as we wind up, maybe the forever war framing is the wrong framing because we still want to think of it as somebody wins a war and then it ends and then you go on and you have peace.
• 55:41
  This democratization of weaponry, of technology and of war, it seems to be the character of our times.
• 55:51
  I would point to one more worrying thing, which in a... I thought
• 55:54
  you were going to tell me I was wrong.
• 55:55
  I'm worried too much.
• 55:57
  No, I think you are correct.
• 55:59
  I'll make a negative point and then move to a positive.
• 56:04
  The blurring of lines between what is organized crime and what is politics is going to get ever blurrier.
• 56:13
  It'll sell the door?
• 56:14
  Absolutely.
• 56:16
  Crime has gone down, violent crime has gone down massively, murder, rape, extortion.
• 56:21
  But who's carrying out the extortion now?
• 56:23
  It's not MS-XIII, it's not Bari di Sioccio, it's elements of the... Salvadoran military and police and anybody who resists are told Oh, we can just throw you in in secote as a terrorist if you if you don't pay up.
• 56:36
  We see it in Venezuela.
• 56:37
  Most blatantly.
• 56:38
  We know Nicaragua.
• 56:40
  There's a comment about about al-Shabaab in the comments and certainly there we see a blurring of political and crime in Brazil.
• 56:48
  at a local level when the biggest organized crime groups in the country are provided a building buildings and renting out apartments and providing internet and gas and car parking spaces and controlling, you know, who can have internet, building their own apps for Uber replacements.
• 57:05
  You have, I think, the topic of criminal governance, whether it's traditional politics moving into organized crime to fund themselves, or whether it's organized crime, unlike in Mexico, who see political power as a way of cementing their criminal gains.
• 57:21
  I think that's... a major geopolitical trend in the next decade or two.
• 57:27
  As a positive, and this is absolutely naive in a certain way, we have built examples of institutions that collaboratively do work and do bring about prolonged periods of socio-economic growth and low crime.
• 57:39
  Violent crime is trending downwards.
• 57:43
  Let's perhaps the last year, let's so.
• 57:46
  In the US, in Europe, certainly in other parts of the world, there are possible where violent crime is trending downwards.
• 57:53
  That is replaced with, sadly, a sort of background acceptance of corruption and cronyism, which can absolutely then revert, if they're left alone too long, reverse the benefits that you've had in terms of violent crime.
• 58:11
  Chris, I must say, before I ask Cleo, of all the words I used to describe you, naive has never been one that isn't in the list.
• 58:18
  Thank you, Al.
• 58:20
  Cleo.
• 58:21
  That's a really good point.
• 58:23
  I think that the one of the problems I have with the version that you know the point about violent crime going down is that it's going down from quite a high right as in like it really went up especially around COVID and since and now it's kind of it's going it's showing some small regressions but certainly not back to the main and I can't I perhaps Chris knows this better than others, but I'm not sure that there is a plausible explanation why it increased so much, or a plausible explanation as to why it decreased, or what laws or patterns this crime is trying to emulate.
• 59:07
  But what I would say is that I found it disturbing that the gun violence rates in the States is matching global political violence when these two phenomena have nothing to do with each other.
• 59:18
  really nothing to do because in the done.
• 59:20
  violence in the states is overwhelmingly obviously a criminal, a criminal issue.
• 59:25
  Whereas the organized political violence that is globally referenced is done by much more traditionally understood groups rather than crime.
• 59:33
  But to underscore your point, I think that as you get more states engaging in political violence, you will get more organized criminal groups doing the same and offering political services, as we've just discussed.
• 59:49
  I'm always a little bit reluctant to talk about criminal governments because I think they couldn't be bothered governing getting drunk in a bar, let alone, you know, an actual country.
• 59:59
  So, but I think that everybody's in for a pretty rough time.
• 1:00:03
  We might look back to your point earlier, Alan, at September, as the beginning, but a pretty gentle beginning to what's coming.
• 1:00:13
  Let me ask a last unfair question of both of you.
• 1:00:16
  If a miracle happens, we hang up from this conversation, and your next call is from Donald Trump, and asks you, Cleo, asks you, Chris, for advice.
• 1:00:26
  What do I do next?
• 1:00:29
  What advice did you give him?
• 1:00:31
  Cleo.
• 1:00:31
  Okay.
• 1:00:33
  He would never... You're a gentleman.
• 1:00:34
  See, I did naive... Not.
• 1:00:37
  I guess what I would suggest is that he replaced the Secretary of Defense.
• 1:00:41
  And the reason being is that I do think that... Secretary
• 1:00:44
  of War.
• 1:00:44
  Sorry.
• 1:00:45
  Secretary of War.
• 1:00:47
  That's to be precise.
• 1:00:48
  What I do think that needs to happen is that there does need to be a very robust security sector, not just reform, but change to understand the threats that are likely to affect both the American people, but equally in the sense of the federal government and of course the... Department of War, to make the US understand the threats to themselves and others, but also to help prepare others for what what threat is going to look like.
• 1:01:17
  And I think that the US remains, you know, a potential incredibly important force in trying to put some sort of a lid on that on the level of violence that that's likely to emanate.
• 1:01:31
  But I would also suggest that to say that, you know, Other leaders who engage in violence to which they have large-scale impunity are simply setting the scene for more.
• 1:01:44
  And so there needs to be a much more aggressive response to how those leaders are dealt with.
• 1:01:49
  Chris, what's your advice?
• 1:01:50
  I would
• 1:01:51
  say, in unity lies strength.
• 1:01:53
  You can go after, and I will say, the drug policies the US have not worked.
• 1:01:58
  Drug seizures are not a deterrent.
• 1:01:59
  Arrests and expeditions are not a deterrent.
• 1:02:02
  You want to make a military statement?
• 1:02:03
  Make a military statement.
• 1:02:04
  but make it with the backed up cooperation of Canada, of Colombia, of Mexico.
• 1:02:10
  They know better than you who to target.
• 1:02:13
  They know better than you where the big major air quotes bad guys are.
• 1:02:16
  And at the same time, that level of collaboration on you want to show that you're that you're militarily strong.
• 1:02:22
  That unlocks the long term efficacy, which is going after the money, which is understanding who the real actors are.
• 1:02:32
  And also, yes, absolutely, for your Secretary of War, he's an idiot.
• 1:02:36
  I want to thank you both for that advice, because I think both of your advice ought to be taken.
• 1:02:42
  I am not naive for better or for worse.
• 1:02:44
  I doubt if it's going to be taken.
• 1:02:46
  So I suspect we're in for a lot more of this.
• 1:02:50
  And as you, Cleo, said as well, we may look back and say that this is the opening, sorry, shot.
• 1:02:58
  in something that doesn't end, just continues to metastasize over time.
• 1:03:04
  So thank you, Cleo Raleh, Chris Dalby.
• 1:03:08
  And as I said at the start, both of your organizations are doing fabulous work.
• 1:03:13
  And I hope everyone who has been listening to this is online checking you out as we end.
• 1:03:20
  Thank you very much.
• 1:03:21
  Thanks, Alan.
• 1:03:22
  Thanks, Chris.
• 1:03:23
  Thank you very much.
• 1:03:26
  Thank you for listening to this episode of New Thinking for New World.
• 1:03:30
  I'm Alan Stoga, podcast host, and I look forward to your joining our next conversation.
• 1:03:35
  Remember, tell us what you think at tellbergfoundation.org.