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Foreign Affairs Fifteen: Episode 21 · John’s Newsletter

0:03
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Foreign Affairs 15,
0:05
SPEAKER_00: a quick taste of this week's foreign news and what it means for Americans.
0:09
SPEAKER_00: The podcast is free for Substack subscribers to John's newsletter
0:12
SPEAKER_00: or Based Perspectives and later released on Apple, Spotify and other platforms.
0:18
SPEAKER_02: Good morning, John.
0:19
SPEAKER_02: Good morning, Simon.
0:20
SPEAKER_01: And welcome to episode 21 of the Foreign Affairs 15.
0:22
SPEAKER_01: We're a little late this week.
0:24
SPEAKER_01: We had Columbus Day on Monday and various operational difficulties,
0:29
SPEAKER_01: but we're coming at you as we do every week.
0:32
SPEAKER_01: Trying to do the 15 minutes, seven continents.
0:34
SPEAKER_01: We're going to start with our irrelevant minute.
0:37
SPEAKER_01: Guilfoyle of Greece, John, what does that mean to you?
0:40
SPEAKER_02: Our ambassador to Greece has not been cutting a particularly impressive swath,
0:45
SPEAKER_02: and there are criticisms of And for using her position
0:49
SPEAKER_02: to further various businessmen for paying off, evidently, her Amex card.
0:54
SPEAKER_02: I've never had an Amex card that big, so that doesn't mean a lot to me.
0:57
SPEAKER_02: But there are these discussions about impropriety that we're kind of getting in the way.
1:02
SPEAKER_02: I mean, Marco Rubio gave a great speech the other day at the foot of the Acropolis.
1:06
SPEAKER_02: They want that to be the story and not what the ambassador is doing.
1:09
SPEAKER_02: So out she went.
1:11
SPEAKER_01: And I have to say, I...
1:13
SPEAKER_01: Read that speech, and it is really exceptional, and it deserves to be front and center.
1:18
SPEAKER_02: I agree, it's amazing.
1:19
SPEAKER_01: Ambassadors come and go.
1:21
SPEAKER_02: Ambassadors come and go, but good speeches are forever, Simon.
1:25
SPEAKER_01: Western values are forever, at least.
1:26
SPEAKER_01: Amen, brother.
1:27
SPEAKER_01: Let's hit our seven continents in 14 minutes,
1:31
SPEAKER_01: starting with Antarctica,
1:32
SPEAKER_01: and you'll love this, John, because I'm going to work in penguins again.
1:36
SPEAKER_01: And a new study has come out,
1:39
SPEAKER_01: this is fascinating,
1:40
SPEAKER_01: that Because penguins crap everywhere and they're not super finicky
1:44
SPEAKER_01: about cleaning up,
1:46
SPEAKER_01: they track the penguin shit along with their little feet and that creates a barrier
1:55
SPEAKER_01: which grows algae which contributes to global warming.
1:59
SPEAKER_01: How about that?
2:00
SPEAKER_02: I will not hear a word against penguins, Simon.
2:03
SPEAKER_02: I have a few red lines in life and this is one of them.
2:05
SPEAKER_02: How dare anyone question the veracity of a penguin?
2:11
SPEAKER_01: I think we're going to leave it there and move on to Africa, where Navinathem, a.k.a.
2:18
SPEAKER_01: Navi Pillai,
2:19
SPEAKER_01: who is an elderly jurist in South Africa and a member of
2:24
SPEAKER_01: the United Nations so-called Independent International Commission of Inquiry on
2:28
SPEAKER_01: the Occupied Palestinian Territory, just won the Nobel Peace Prize.
2:34
SPEAKER_01: She has had,
2:35
SPEAKER_01: just to put it mildly,
2:37
SPEAKER_01: A long record of being anti-Israel when she was at the UN High Commission
2:42
SPEAKER_01: for Human Rights.
2:44
SPEAKER_01: They passed 39 resolutions against Israel.
2:48
SPEAKER_01: They passed only six against North Korea and only four against Iran.
2:53
SPEAKER_01: Cuba, China, Pakistan, Russia, Qatar and Turkey got exactly zero UN resolutions.
2:59
SPEAKER_01: So what do you think about this Nobel Prize?
3:02
SPEAKER_02: I think a bunch of left wing European social democrats giving a left wing jurist
3:06
SPEAKER_02: who works for a left wing organization an award shouldn't worry the rest of us.
3:12
SPEAKER_02: We have to stop giving these people the airspace they deserve.
3:15
SPEAKER_02: This woman is a classic card-carrying anti-Israeli, quasi-bigot.
3:21
SPEAKER_02: And to give her the award is offensive,
3:23
SPEAKER_02: if I cared, but all these left-wing people give each other awards.
3:27
SPEAKER_02: I blame the rest of us for caring.
3:29
SPEAKER_02: They are what they are.
3:30
SPEAKER_02: The way to deal with them is to ignore their hatefulness and spitefulness and go on
3:35
SPEAKER_02: with the rest of the world.
3:36
SPEAKER_02: I think it's appalling on one level,
3:38
SPEAKER_02: but that a bunch of lefty Europeans give a lefty ICC person
3:42
SPEAKER_02: an award should be us rolling our eyes and moving on to the next cup of coffee.
3:46
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, two things strike me from this, and I agree with your general assessment.
3:50
SPEAKER_01: One is that she is pushing this idea of a genocide being committed by the Israelis.
3:56
SPEAKER_01: And we could do a whole multiple episodes on Israeli foreign policy
4:00
SPEAKER_01: and what they're doing in Gaza, what they're doing in the West Bank.
4:02
SPEAKER_01: But by no,
4:03
SPEAKER_01: as we said last time in last time's show,
4:05
SPEAKER_01: there's no conceivable way that that fits within the definition of genocide.
4:09
SPEAKER_01: And one of the things that Pillai is trying to do is change the definition.
4:13
SPEAKER_01: Is lower that definition.
4:14
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
4:15
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
4:15
SPEAKER_02: I mean, she wants the words to change in an Orwellian way.
4:19
SPEAKER_02: And last week we did this,
4:20
SPEAKER_02: I think,
4:20
SPEAKER_02: very good job of saying the problem is the definition of genocide is quite clear.
4:25
SPEAKER_02: And only by lowering it,
4:26
SPEAKER_02: changing the words,
4:28
SPEAKER_02: do you get to meaning people are treating people meanly in the rest of the world,
4:31
SPEAKER_02: rather than they are meeting together to eradicate a group of people from the face
4:36
SPEAKER_02: of the earth.
4:37
SPEAKER_02: And as they did at Vance, when the Nazis got together and said, how do we kill all the Jews?
4:42
SPEAKER_02: That is genocide.
4:43
SPEAKER_02: By definition,
4:44
SPEAKER_02: what happened at Vons, say,
4:45
SPEAKER_02: I've been to the museum there,
4:46
SPEAKER_02: it's amazing, where Heydrich did the meeting, and you explain exactly what it is.
4:52
SPEAKER_02: She wants to lower that standard so she can go after Israel,
4:56
SPEAKER_02: while she doesn't go after Cuba,
4:57
SPEAKER_02: North Korea, or a lot of other really horrendous groups.
5:00
SPEAKER_02: She's a professional left-wing anti-Israeli performance artist,
5:05
SPEAKER_02: and we shouldn't take this seriously.
5:07
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I agree.
5:08
SPEAKER_01: And look, words have meanings.
5:09
SPEAKER_01: You know, we see,
5:10
SPEAKER_01: by the way,
5:11
SPEAKER_01: excuse my next door neighbors digging a septic and going
5:14
SPEAKER_01: through some very large rocks.
5:15
SPEAKER_01: So we'll just have to live with that.
5:18
SPEAKER_01: We've seemed to have redefined rape now as Something that you can change your mind
5:25
SPEAKER_01: about five days later based on your mood as opposed to a crime that has
5:30
SPEAKER_01: a very particular set of definitions and should be punished accordingly.
5:35
SPEAKER_01: Let's leave it there and go on to Asia.
5:38
SPEAKER_01: Saudi Arabia, john,
5:39
SPEAKER_01: if you were just about to board your fly to buy flight last week,
5:44
SPEAKER_01: you might have been in the airport when it was struck by some missiles,
5:48
SPEAKER_01: projectiles,
5:49
SPEAKER_01: drones, whatever they were fired by the Houthis, the arch enemy of Saudi Arabia.
5:53
SPEAKER_01: But that was Riyadh's main airport.
5:56
SPEAKER_01: And this does seem to be a pretty serious problem for the Saudis.
5:59
SPEAKER_01: What do you think?
6:00
SPEAKER_02: Well, it is.
6:00
SPEAKER_02: I mean, they've been fighting in Yemen on and off for a generation and it's their Vietnam.
6:05
SPEAKER_02: People in the region have said this.
6:06
SPEAKER_02: They can't get out.
6:08
SPEAKER_02: And the Houthis,
6:08
SPEAKER_02: of course,
6:09
SPEAKER_02: are aggrieved because the Saudis have flown over and bombed them
6:12
SPEAKER_02: during their civil war with the government of Yemen,
6:14
SPEAKER_02: which is run by the Saudis, which is a very close ally of the Saudis.
6:18
SPEAKER_02: What this is, is the Houthis saying, we can get you anywhere.
6:22
SPEAKER_02: We can come for you.
6:23
SPEAKER_02: It's not just the Bab al-Mandab.
6:25
SPEAKER_02: It's not just the oil.
6:26
SPEAKER_02: It's not just the Red Sea.
6:27
SPEAKER_02: We can come for you in Saudi Arabia proper itself.
6:32
SPEAKER_02: And so you can you can inflict damage on us, but we can inflict damage on you.
6:37
SPEAKER_02: We think we can outweigh you and endure more damage than you can.
6:41
SPEAKER_02: And in the chaos of what's going on in the region, that's their play.
6:47
SPEAKER_01: And look, like the Afghans, the Houthis are really good at two things.
6:51
SPEAKER_01: One is making other little Houthis, and the other is fighting.
6:55
SPEAKER_01: And the Saudis have been outsourcing everything for a generation now.
7:00
SPEAKER_01: They've got Indian doctors and Pakistani engineers and American petroleum workers.
7:06
SPEAKER_01: This one they can't outsource.
7:07
SPEAKER_01: They're going to have to fight this one to the bitter end or make
7:10
SPEAKER_01: a deal that's probably in favor of the Houthis is the way I see it.
7:14
SPEAKER_02: No, that's exactly right.
7:15
SPEAKER_02: Every Saudi could fly an F-16 and there wouldn't be enough of them to do this.
7:19
SPEAKER_02: This is the problem.
7:20
SPEAKER_02: They're going to have to make a deal.
7:22
SPEAKER_02: The sooner they do that, the better for stability in the region.
7:26
SPEAKER_02: And they're not going to eradicate the Houthis from dominating where they are.
7:30
SPEAKER_02: And the Houthis are just reminding us, here we are, guys, come and get us.
7:34
SPEAKER_01: Well, let's move over to Europe.
7:36
SPEAKER_01: And we're going to start with or we're going to end with the riots in France,
7:39
SPEAKER_01: which I've been covering obsessively.
7:41
SPEAKER_01: I know you have because it's something that symbolizes the problem with France and
7:48
SPEAKER_01: with Europe in general.
7:50
SPEAKER_01: You're always talking about the big three.
7:51
SPEAKER_01: And I appreciate this.
7:53
SPEAKER_01: I've ripped this off.
7:53
SPEAKER_01: Sorry.
7:55
SPEAKER_01: Economic growth.
7:57
SPEAKER_01: Energy independence and mass migration.
7:59
SPEAKER_01: They've got not enough growth,
8:01
SPEAKER_01: not enough energy independence, and too much mass migration that's unassimilated.
8:05
SPEAKER_01: That's the core of the problem across Europe.
8:07
SPEAKER_01: And in France, the welfare state bloat.
8:11
SPEAKER_01: Budget deficits,
8:12
SPEAKER_01: I think for 50 years they haven't balanced a budget,
8:15
SPEAKER_01: is sooner or later going to collapse this fifth republic,
8:20
SPEAKER_01: and Melenchon is actually out there talking about having a new republic,
8:23
SPEAKER_01: that's what the French get to do every time they screw it up badly enough,
8:26
SPEAKER_01: we're stuck with the original.
8:29
SPEAKER_01: Do you see now Greta Thunberg showing up?
8:32
SPEAKER_01: Is that jumping the shark on this riot thing or how much longer are we going
8:36
SPEAKER_01: to see this and how does it end?
8:37
SPEAKER_02: Yeah,
8:38
SPEAKER_02: the professional protester without the high school education who wanted to deal
8:41
SPEAKER_02: with global warming without talking to the Chinese.
8:44
SPEAKER_02: I mean, Ricky Gervais' comments best when he's talking to Hollywood.
8:47
SPEAKER_02: He said, you've been in school less time than Greta Thunberg.
8:50
SPEAKER_02: I mean, and I think that you can't better that line.
8:54
SPEAKER_02: No, I mean, the problem is that there's no hope of reform.
8:57
SPEAKER_02: I mean, the French are arguing about and in fact,
9:00
SPEAKER_02: both Le Pen and Melenchon are for lowering incredibly the retirement age
9:04
SPEAKER_02: in France today.
9:05
SPEAKER_02: They're for lowering the retirement age, I assume from being a toddler to being a fetus.
9:10
SPEAKER_02: I assume that's where the lowering will go on.
9:12
SPEAKER_02: This is just not remotely serious,
9:14
SPEAKER_02: and the bond yields will continue to rise,
9:16
SPEAKER_02: not just for the big three of the structural problems all over Europe,
9:20
SPEAKER_02: particularly in France, but everywhere.
9:22
SPEAKER_02: That's why all the elites are failing in Europe.
9:24
SPEAKER_02: But the specific French thing is 57% of GDP is spent on government spending.
9:30
SPEAKER_02: It's the highest in the advanced world.
9:32
SPEAKER_02: Any effort to roll that back,
9:34
SPEAKER_02: any effort is met by Molotov cocktails in the streets by students saying,
9:38
SPEAKER_02: we care about education so much, we're going to burn our schools down.
9:41
SPEAKER_02: This is absolutely unserious.
9:44
SPEAKER_02: And both Melenchon and Le Pen are frankly unserious economically about dealing with it.
9:49
SPEAKER_02: So the bond markets act as they do, raise French rates.
9:53
SPEAKER_02: And so the French election next year and the bond markets colliding at once is a perfect storm.
9:59
SPEAKER_02: And you watch for a new republic.
10:00
SPEAKER_02: The French are the thin end of the wedge in Europe for indeed
10:03
SPEAKER_02: the EU itself being called into question in its present form.
10:07
SPEAKER_02: Everything is riding on France.
10:09
SPEAKER_02: I mean, my firm, God bless us, three years ago said, watch the French for this reason.
10:14
SPEAKER_02: It's not just that they're in trouble.
10:16
SPEAKER_02: It's that they have no impetus to reform at all.
10:19
SPEAKER_01: None.
10:20
SPEAKER_01: And they are one of the two pillars of the European Union.
10:23
SPEAKER_01: The whole edifice is built on German money and French commitment to Europe.
10:27
SPEAKER_01: If the French go down and the Germans run out of money, it's over.
10:31
SPEAKER_01: All right.
10:31
SPEAKER_01: Well, let's move over to North America.
10:33
SPEAKER_01: I was going to talk about your friend Justin Trudeau,
10:35
SPEAKER_01: some revelations about him weeping in cabinet meetings,
10:40
SPEAKER_01: but I want to talk instead about Ilhan Omar,
10:42
SPEAKER_01: representative from Minnesota, Minneapolis district, something or other.
10:49
SPEAKER_01: So her house was recently raided in D.C.
10:52
SPEAKER_01: She has a house and I guess another one back in her constituency.
10:57
SPEAKER_01: And there's a lot of speculation about why.
10:59
SPEAKER_01: But some of the facts that we are allegations out there that seem credible to me,
11:03
SPEAKER_01: having done a lot of visa interviews and been in high fraud countries,
11:07
SPEAKER_01: are that she at some point lied about her date of birth in a material way,
11:12
SPEAKER_01: meaning she gained an immigration benefit by doing that, knowing she was doing it.
11:16
SPEAKER_01: And two,
11:17
SPEAKER_01: that in 2009,
11:18
SPEAKER_01: she allegedly married her brother,
11:20
SPEAKER_01: who was somehow a UK national at that point,
11:23
SPEAKER_01: in order to ease his way into the United States.
11:25
SPEAKER_01: But I do think there's some pretty basic constitutional questions here.
11:28
SPEAKER_01: The left, of course, is saying this is lawfare.
11:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think so.
11:32
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I don't think that's true at all.
11:33
SPEAKER_01: I mean, if we're going to play that game, she's an anti-American and has made that very clear.
11:47
SPEAKER_02: I mean, she said that in those words.
11:50
SPEAKER_02: I'm not putting words in her mouth.
11:53
SPEAKER_02: More importantly, though, she's probably lied about her coming in and why and where.
11:58
SPEAKER_02: And marrying your brother is beyond being an escalant tragedy.
12:01
SPEAKER_02: Simon is our whatever was, of course, gaming out a system.
12:05
SPEAKER_02: And that's what she is the queen of gaming out the system to suck the marrow out of
12:10
SPEAKER_02: the United States while not giving one jot about the country.
12:13
SPEAKER_02: She's a walking ad for why mass migration is a bad idea.
12:17
SPEAKER_02: And finally,
12:18
SPEAKER_02: the mills of God,
12:18
SPEAKER_02: which grind exceedingly fine or catch, although slowly are catching up to her.
12:23
SPEAKER_02: This is well deserved.
12:24
SPEAKER_02: And I'm looking forward with popcorn.
12:26
SPEAKER_02: You and I are watching this one down the road.
12:28
SPEAKER_02: She deserves everything coming at her.
12:32
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I'll talk about this probably another episode,
12:35
SPEAKER_01: but she's representative of something we're seeing across Europe too,
12:39
SPEAKER_01: of micro constituencies elected essentially with a bloc vote,
12:43
SPEAKER_01: where all the Somalis vote for the Somali,
12:45
SPEAKER_01: as long as it's, you know, the right clan, they have to figure that out first.
12:48
SPEAKER_01: And it has nothing to do with what politics they support or,
12:50
SPEAKER_01: you know, what their views are on taxes or benefits or foreign policy.
12:56
SPEAKER_01: It just comes down to, that's my guy.
12:58
SPEAKER_01: And we have seen that with other ethnic...
13:00
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's Lebanon.
13:01
SPEAKER_02: That's the Lebanese system.
13:03
SPEAKER_02: And that's not what I want to go forward, given the chaos of Lebanon.
13:07
SPEAKER_02: That's not what we should be feuding,
13:09
SPEAKER_02: rooting for that we somehow don't care about what we're saying and doing.
13:14
SPEAKER_02: And we just vote and block en masse.
13:16
SPEAKER_02: That's giving up on the principles of Jeffersonian democracy and becoming Lebanon,
13:20
SPEAKER_02: not a model anybody should be trying to follow.
13:24
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
13:24
SPEAKER_01: I mean, show me a Somali who believe American of Somali descent who believes
13:29
SPEAKER_01: in balanced budgets and secure borders and separation of churches and I'll vote
13:33
SPEAKER_01: for them.
13:34
SPEAKER_02: That's not me too.
13:35
SPEAKER_01: That's the way it should be.
13:36
SPEAKER_01: It's not like, oh, that's my guy.
13:38
SPEAKER_01: I only vote for for someone exactly like me.
13:40
SPEAKER_01: But that that does worry me.
13:42
SPEAKER_01: We're moving on to Oceania, and you probably are familiar with the story of Amelia Earhart.
13:48
SPEAKER_01: I am.
13:49
SPEAKER_01: The famous female navigator, what's it, what is the word for that?
13:54
SPEAKER_01: Aviatrix.
13:55
SPEAKER_01: Aviatrix, thank you.
13:58
SPEAKER_01: 1937 was trying to be the first woman to fly around the world.
14:01
SPEAKER_01: When they got out of the South Pacific,
14:04
SPEAKER_01: her Lockheed Electra 10 twin engine plane basically disappeared,
14:09
SPEAKER_01: and people have been trying to find it ever since.
14:11
SPEAKER_01: It's a bit like a Bermuda Triangle.
14:14
SPEAKER_01: And in fact,
14:17
SPEAKER_01: a guy named Rick Gillespie,
14:19
SPEAKER_01: who's the acknowledged expert on Amelia Earhart,
14:22
SPEAKER_01: thinks that it did crash on the Nikumaroro Atoll, part of the...
14:30
SPEAKER_01: Island nation of Kiribati,
14:32
SPEAKER_01: which we talked about before,
14:33
SPEAKER_01: I think,
14:34
SPEAKER_01: but that it probably washed off into the sea and will never be seen anymore.
14:38
SPEAKER_01: And yet Purdue University is sending out,
14:40
SPEAKER_01: they're spending $900,000 to send a team out to look for what,
14:46
SPEAKER_01: and I love this quote from Gillespie.
14:48
SPEAKER_01: He says, it's a tree.
14:50
SPEAKER_01: You can see the root ball.
14:51
SPEAKER_01: You can see the branches.
14:53
SPEAKER_01: It's a tree.
14:54
SPEAKER_01: People see what they want to see,
14:55
SPEAKER_01: especially if they've got $900,000 of someone else's money to blow.
14:58
SPEAKER_01: What do you think?
15:00
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, it's a great story.
15:01
SPEAKER_02: I mean, as you say,
15:02
SPEAKER_02: it's a mix of the Loch Ness Monster, the Bermuda Triangle all rolled together.
15:05
SPEAKER_02: Did she make it to Howland Island?
15:06
SPEAKER_02: You know, there are all kinds of stories.
15:08
SPEAKER_02: The Japanese get her, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, doing this.
15:13
SPEAKER_02: But his approach is kind of the accepted scholarly one.
15:16
SPEAKER_02: And I've actually followed the aviatrix.
15:18
SPEAKER_02: I want to say the word again.
15:21
SPEAKER_02: And by the way, she was a terrible pilot.
15:23
SPEAKER_02: A lot of this was PR.
15:24
SPEAKER_02: She was a really bad pilot.
15:27
SPEAKER_02: But but she married a guy who was very good at PR.
15:30
SPEAKER_02: And she was flying around the world to do this.
15:32
SPEAKER_02: And she lost her bearings, which is easy enough to do.
15:35
SPEAKER_02: So they had to do it by eye for needles and haystack islands.
15:39
SPEAKER_02: She seems to have been lost and desperate, running out of water and fuel.
15:42
SPEAKER_02: She probably made it to this island and then was washed off from that.
15:46
SPEAKER_02: But meaning we'll never find it.
15:48
SPEAKER_02: But these are the kind of stories.
15:49
SPEAKER_02: It's like Mallory and Everest to keep us awake at night.
15:52
SPEAKER_02: These are why we're human beings.
15:53
SPEAKER_02: Simon, it's a good thing.
15:55
SPEAKER_01: Agreed.
15:55
SPEAKER_01: I mean, she had a pair, let's put it that way, to go out there.
16:00
SPEAKER_01: No GPS, no one coming to the rescue.
16:02
SPEAKER_01: She was one of our brave explorers.
16:05
SPEAKER_01: I was at the Wright Brothers site in Kitty Hawk.
16:08
SPEAKER_01: And they had a 25th anniversary celebration there.
16:11
SPEAKER_01: And Amelia Earhart was there along with Hiram Bingham and the Wright Brothers and
16:15
SPEAKER_01: a bunch of other people.
16:16
SPEAKER_01: Well, I don't know if the Wright brothers are still around then, but I think they were.
16:19
SPEAKER_01: And yeah,
16:19
SPEAKER_01: she goes down in the pantheon of people with guts who pushed the envelope
16:24
SPEAKER_01: of human experience and was a wonderful American example for all of us.
16:31
SPEAKER_01: El Salvador is our South American case today.
16:35
SPEAKER_01: And I had a debate recently with somebody who was talking about how awful it was
16:39
SPEAKER_01: in El Salvador and how people deserve temporary protected status and needed
16:43
SPEAKER_01: to be given asylum and And brought in his refugees.
16:47
SPEAKER_01: And I pointed out to him, that's probably true some time ago, but it ain't true now.
16:52
SPEAKER_01: Bukele, the president,
16:54
SPEAKER_01: has the crime rate down to like,
16:56
SPEAKER_01: I would say Swedish levels, but Sweden's turned into the El Salvador of Europe.
17:01
SPEAKER_01: Let's say Swiss levels of violence.
17:04
SPEAKER_01: And he's actually said, please come back.
17:06
SPEAKER_01: We have factories, we have investment now that desperately need skilled labor.
17:11
SPEAKER_01: So if you're in America,
17:12
SPEAKER_01: you can bring two cars, all your property, tax free, come back, all is forgiven.
17:18
SPEAKER_01: And I don't think that message has gotten out yet.
17:21
SPEAKER_02: No.
17:21
SPEAKER_02: And the thing is, if Bukele is so awful, why does he keep winning elections?
17:26
SPEAKER_02: He's overwhelmingly popular.
17:28
SPEAKER_02: And we've talked about this before in the hemisphere.
17:31
SPEAKER_02: USAID no longer funding our left wing anti-American sponsors.
17:36
SPEAKER_02: We see that eight elections in a row and you and I are fascinated.
17:39
SPEAKER_02: Yes, causation and correlation may be different,
17:41
SPEAKER_02: but eight out of eight makes me begin to wonder.
17:44
SPEAKER_02: And so when we're not funding our anti-American left wing foes, look what happens.
17:49
SPEAKER_02: But the main issue here isn't really Trump.
17:51
SPEAKER_02: It has to do with crime internally.
17:53
SPEAKER_02: And you don't want your grandmother beaten up, going to a favela.
17:56
SPEAKER_02: And that's true of almost everyone.
17:58
SPEAKER_02: You want aspiration, capitalism, and stability.
18:01
SPEAKER_02: And Bukele is given a country that was way beyond chaos and made it a law-abiding,
18:07
SPEAKER_02: decent place to live in and invest in.
18:09
SPEAKER_02: That's the next step.
18:11
SPEAKER_02: And him doing that has been universally popular.
18:14
SPEAKER_02: He's not rigging anything,
18:15
SPEAKER_02: even his most left-wing opponents accept that he's not rigging anything.
18:20
SPEAKER_02: He's popular because he's lowered the crime rate.
18:22
SPEAKER_02: We have to go back to Occam's Razor.
18:24
SPEAKER_02: The simplest answer here is best.
18:29
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
18:29
SPEAKER_01: And sometimes a success story is real.
18:33
SPEAKER_01: And we can't always look for doom and gloom in Latin America.
18:36
SPEAKER_01: They're young people, but they have a lot of potential.
18:39
SPEAKER_01: And if properly led, there's nothing they can't do.
18:43
SPEAKER_01: John, that brings us to the end of the seven continents.
18:46
SPEAKER_01: My red herring is the Cornell 8 case,
18:48
SPEAKER_01: which I've been following along with a lot of other people.
18:52
SPEAKER_01: And I'll reserve my opinions and thoughts at this point to just commenting that
18:58
SPEAKER_01: the place where the students are out there protesting
19:01
SPEAKER_01: against injustice is called Ho Plaza.
19:04
SPEAKER_01: And I think that kind of sums it up for me.
19:07
SPEAKER_01: Landmine, John.
19:09
SPEAKER_01: Is budget deficits.
19:11
SPEAKER_01: We talked about a little bit for France, but I'll give you the last word.
19:14
SPEAKER_01: The Social Security cliff is coming up in what 2032 in the US.
19:18
SPEAKER_01: What are the odds?
19:19
SPEAKER_01: What are the odds Congress is going to do anything about it?
19:22
SPEAKER_02: Nothing.
19:23
SPEAKER_02: And this is one of those times, and I mean, I'm an old Eisenhower fiscal conservative guy.
19:28
SPEAKER_02: This is one of those times, though, that I'll be, dare I say it, Leninist.
19:32
SPEAKER_02: Things have to get worse before they get better.
19:34
SPEAKER_02: I really don't think Congress is capable of foresight.
19:37
SPEAKER_02: Both parties to me are fiscally irresponsible.
19:41
SPEAKER_02: And have been now for generations.
19:43
SPEAKER_02: It needs to get worse till we see this isn't theoretical but affecting real people
19:47
SPEAKER_02: before we deal with it.
19:48
SPEAKER_02: I wish to God that weren't true.
19:49
SPEAKER_02: I wish I were wrong.
19:51
SPEAKER_02: I feel that way a lot of times in my risk business.
19:54
SPEAKER_02: But I think it's got to get worse before it gets better.
19:56
SPEAKER_02: We need to get right up to the cliff before anybody will do anything about it.
19:59
SPEAKER_02: And more is the pity.
20:01
SPEAKER_02: We should do better for our children and our grandchildren than that.
20:04
SPEAKER_02: And we're not and we'll pay a greater price down the road than if we began to rip
20:07
SPEAKER_02: the Band-Aid now.
20:08
SPEAKER_02: But we're not going to.
20:11
SPEAKER_01: I'll leave it at that, John, because I think it's a pessimistic note, but it's a realistic one.
20:15
SPEAKER_01: And we are, after all, realists.
20:17
SPEAKER_02: We are, my brother.
20:18
SPEAKER_02: We are.
20:20
SPEAKER_01: I'll leave it at that.
20:21
SPEAKER_01: And thank you for being part of episode 21 and looking forward to episode 22 on Monday.
20:26
SPEAKER_02: No, exactly.
20:26
SPEAKER_02: We'll go back to our normal time.
20:28
SPEAKER_02: And this has been great.
20:29
SPEAKER_02: And we will go back to the home base then.
20:30
SPEAKER_02: And not too long.
20:31
SPEAKER_02: I'll be in Washington with you, Simon.
20:32
SPEAKER_02: Not too many more weeks.
20:34
SPEAKER_01: Looking forward to that one.
20:35
SPEAKER_01: All right.
20:35
SPEAKER_01: Take it easy, John.
20:36
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to The Foreign Affairs 15.
20:39
SPEAKER_00: The podcast is a joint production of John C. Holzman Enterprises and Base Perspectives LLC.
20:45
SPEAKER_00: We receive production support from the Ben Franklin Fellowship
20:48
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