David Sanger

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Time is the greatest gift we can give and receive. As we turn the clocks back this fall, Bristol Meyers Squib is recognizing oncologists who help give patients something extraordinary, more time. The Time Back Campaign celebrates those everyday heroes who are working tirelessly in the pursuit of potentially helping get patients more time to experience key moments like seeing a child learned to ride a bike or a long awaited vacation. As we turn back our clocks, let's pause to thank the doctors who make a difference every day. Discover more about the Time Back Campaign and join Bristol Myers Squib and celebrating the physicians who give the gift of more time at BMS dot com slash time back.

00:00:51
Speaker 2: Pete Headseth is increasingly a political liability for him, and the evidence of that is that even Republican senators frustrated by what the absence of answers on the Venezuela stuff have begun to talk about taking measures to force the Pentagon and answers. He's clearly losing part of his own party.

00:01:13
Speaker 1: David Sanger is one of the longest serving correspondents at the New York Times, and as the White House and National Security correspondent, he has been following Donald Trump's every move for the last ten years. Given the state of the world, we have a lot to talk about, from the US bombing of votes in the Caribbean to the latest in the negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. David Sanger, it is great to see you and to talk to you. I've often wondered in recent months, what would David say about certain things that are happening in the world. I'm lucky that I'm able to read your coverage in the New York Times, but it's great to be able to unpack these issues with you face to face. Recently said that over the five presidencies that you've covered, you've never seen a president seek to completely redefine the use of the US military, not only abroad but at home in a way that Donald Trump has. What did you mean by that? Exactly, Katie.

00:02:17
Speaker 2: It's great to be back with you in conversations we've had now over many a decade. But I would say that the military has always been the last resort that a US president has turned to when you have a crisis of nine to eleven proportions, or an uprising inside the United States that cannot be contained by local police and so forth, or you have the need to go deter a major power China, Russia, and so forth. And I think the last time that I was on your show, we were discussing my new Cold Wars, which was basically about the return of great power competition. And certainly you would use the military in a deterrence mode forward deployed in Europe, in the Pacific. But President Trump's got a very different concept. It is in his mind. I think the military is there as an instrument for him to use. However, he sees fit to both centralize his own power at home and frequently as a weapon of first resort abroad. And we've seen that in recent times. So at home parts pretty obvious. He is using the emergency powers of the presidency to deploy National Guard to cities around the country, mostly democratic cities, but cities around the country where there is no noticeable emergency. There's crime. But in many of the cities he's deployed them to, including where I am right now, Wahington, DC, the crime levels have been going down. It's not like there's some sudden surge that required the presence of the National Guard. And we could debate why it is he's doing this, whether it is to establish that a federal force under his command can appear in these cities, whether it is to intimidate local leaders, whether it's to think ahead to the twenty twenty sixth election.

00:04:34
Speaker 1: Or the twenty twenty eight election.

00:04:36
Speaker 2: No, thinking ahead to twenty twenty.

00:04:37
Speaker 1: Six really the mid term, the midterms.

00:04:40
Speaker 2: And the reason I'm saying that, Katie is you may recall it during his election disputes. In the election versus Joe Biden in twenty twenty, he called for the use of the National Guard to go out and seize voting machines. Now, he never actually did this, and he was sort of held back from his aids to do it because he believed, or so he said that the vote had been tampered with, and his concept was have the National Guard deal with this. He couldn't get away with that. But there are some people who wonder if by normalizing putting the National Guard in cities, he's trying to set the predicate that the National Guard would be there in election times. We don't know this, We're just trying to figure out why it is you would want to use the National Guard more routinely in American cities.

00:05:34
Speaker 1: Why do you think it is, David, I'm just curious. I mean, you put out a couple of theories. Yeah, why do you think he is so quick to use military force or.

00:05:43
Speaker 2: To use military forces? Right? Yes, in the in the at home. He has not actually used military force at home, right he is?

00:05:52
Speaker 1: Why presence?

00:05:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, So the presence, I think, is to establish that it's the federal govern not the local governments. And you notice he's done this largely in cities and states that are democratic controlled can report straight to him. So to the other theories, I don't know. I mean, I can only report to you the theories that have been given to me in the course of my own reporting. Now abroad, it's a little bit more complicated as you would imagine. Usually you go on the spectrum of diplomacy first, then coercion, economic sanctions and so forth, and then the last resort is military force, because once you've used it, it's expended. In other words, it's no longer sort of the looming threat hanging behind it runs contrary to a lot of the MAGA philosophy, which is that the US should retreat behind high walls, use its military if the US is attacked, don't get involved in internet disputes. When you do, you end up in forever wars like Iraq in Afghanistan. So let's not do it. I've never believed that that is the concept of America first that Donald Trump had, from the moment that I first raised the phrase with him, before he had ever used it in an interview that Maggie Heman and I did with Trump in twenty sixteen. I don't think he's an isolationist. I think he's actually a unilateralist. And so his first big use of the military abroad as president was the decision to go bomb the three nuclear sites in Iran, But that was a case where he knew the Iranians couldn't shoot back, and in fact, they never got a shot off at the bombers or the Tomahawk missiles that were sent in. Now we have Venezuela, another country that has military forces maybe one hundred and twenty five thousand, no air Force or Navy to speak of, and he says that this is to stop the drug trade. But it's not clear why you'd bring in an aircraft carrier group to pick up small speedboats, which, as he's demonstrated, before the aircraft was on station, they could hit in other ways. So here I think it's using the military as a form of intimidation to back up his demands that he wants Maduro to leave the country. Now, in the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties and earlier when this was done by Europe and later on even by the US, it had a name. It was called gunboat diplomacy, right, and you would put your force off to intimidate a country in an outcome. In fact, the British did this with Venezuela in the eighteen nineties. And here again the question is what are the motives. Is it purely drugs, is it access to some of the world's largest oil reserves. Is it a desire to get Maduro out and sort of a bank shot for destabilizing Cuba. Again, you hear all of these different theories. What's remarkable, though, is that the president is doing this without an authorization to use military force from Congress, much less a war declaration. And you know, Defense Secretary Hegseth said at the cabinet meeting that took place just a few hours before you and I recorded this, that some of the decisions have been made in the fog of war. And I thought that was an interesting phrase for him to.

00:09:39
Speaker 1: Use, quoting Robert McNamara, right.

00:09:42
Speaker 2: Right, quoting McNamara. But there is no declared war here. In fact, what they have told Congress is that they're designating some terrorists so that they can go after individual terrorist groups or individual terrorists who are moving drugs. It's a bit of a stretch of the terrorism definition, but it's hard to have a five war if you don't have war.

00:10:08
Speaker 1: Well, I wanted to ask you about sort of all the motives and what's been happening with all these boats ostensibly carrying drugs. For administration that claims it is exhibiting unparalleled transparency, it seems to me that we're getting very little information, David, on the nature of these boats, what they were carrying, who these people are, how many boats have they struck so far? Hasn't it been more than twenty.

00:10:37
Speaker 2: More than twenty, and more than eighty dead, so it's a significant number. Look, you're not the only one to feel this frustration. Those of us who cover the White House day to day feel it, But so does Congress, which sent letters requesting information soon after the first strike, which was early September, and of the congressional committees tell me they have not received answers, even though the administration is well passed the statutory requirement of when they would have to provide answers to an oversight committee. And this isn't just like a casual request. Is there a requests from the committees that do oversight for the Pentagon. I think this administration sometimes confuses talking a lot, which the president certainly does with the press, vastly more than the Biden administration did, but certainly even more than President Obama did more than Trump did, I would argue in the first term, but they're confusing the volume of what they're saying with whether or not they're really conveying information. So they released an unclassified version of that first strike, but didn't release the information that, in fact, there was a second strike that was the one that ended up killing at least two crew members who were hanging off the side. So we went for months seeing an image that was a snapshot of that first strike. You see the boat on fire and so forth. But the critical issues that were raised if you had seen the entire video never appeared until story was broken by Washington Post a few days.

00:12:17
Speaker 1: Ago, and the Washington Post claims that Pete Hegseth ordered that second strike against that boat, and then the New York Times maybe it was your reporting. David said it was unclear if Secretary Hegseth had done that, and now he is saying it was the commanding officer, And so can you shed some light on the latest thinking. And additionally, David, can you explain why that order constitutes a war crime?

00:12:47
Speaker 2: So there are a couple of levels you have to think about. First, any strike on civilians by the military is considered a violation of the laws of war, also domestic laws and the guidance that is given to US soldiers in their training. You have seen and heard about court martials that have happened when we have had military knowingly strike civilians. So the first question is are any of these strikes legal?

00:13:17
Speaker 1: Are these people on these boats considered civilians? Isn't that the question?

00:13:22
Speaker 2: Well, you could be a drug trafficker and still be a civilian because you are not in the military, right, Okay, So the way to think about this, Katie is supposing we saw a drug trafficker operating on the streets of Chicago. I'm making this up. Okay, it's the US responsibility first, or the responsibility of local law enforcement, to go try to arrest that person, put them through the court process, have a trial. They can't just go up in the street and execute them. When the Philippine president was doing that, a previous Philippine president a few years ago, we were filing human rights violations claims right.

00:14:03
Speaker 1: Right, and the military can't do that because it violates the Posse Coomatatis Act.

00:14:08
Speaker 2: Right, that's right. That would be in the US operating in the international waters here. It's interesting that even the Trump administration was not taking this approach through August. Instead, what they were doing was sending the Coastguards, not the Navy, the coast Guard, sometimes with Navy backup, to go hail these boats and try to board them and arrest them. Now, if the boats ran, which they frequently did, they would have a sharpshooter get up and try to take out the engine in the back, send the boat drifting, and then go over and arrest them and put them through the court process. And it's clunky and sometimes they get away. But the fact of the matter is that was how the US went about this until President Trump and Secretary hegxaith I've decided to take this somewhat more extraordinary view that you could go basically execute them, sink the boats, know that you're going to kill everyone on the boats under still classified Office of Legal Counsel judgment that these are in fact terrorists, and therefore sort of twisting the logic to get there. It would help Katie if they were going to be truly transparent, if we could see the Office of Legal Counsel authorization that is being used to justify this. They have shown that to some in Congress who've told me they find it very unconvincing, but we haven't seen it in public, so.

00:15:41
Speaker 1: We really don't know for sure if these boats that they're destroying, if they are carrying drugs, or if the people on them are drug dealers.

00:15:53
Speaker 2: Right that's right now. They say they have intelligence syndicate they are people who are familiar with this, more expert in it than I am. Make the point that if you are running drugs, you don't put eleven people on the boat, because each one of those people is taking up weight and space that could be used for more profitable things like heroin, right, so they wonder whether some of these boats are actually running illegal immigrants to Caribbean islands where they may be trying to make their way to the United States or elsewhere. But no, it's not clear to us yet that the intelligence is correct.

00:16:35
Speaker 1: Going back to who ordered that second air strike against that boat when two survivors were reportedly hanging on to the side of the boat, and someone said somehow there was a second strike that killed them as well, do you know who ordered that? Do you know what transpired?

00:16:54
Speaker 2: We know the Secretary Headset said a few hours ago that while he was watching the video live if he had left and gone on to some meeting and didn't see the two people hanging by the side of the boat, so that was kind of hanging out to dry the Special Operations commander who was running the command. We have no evidence right now that Secretary Headsets issued an order specific to a second.

00:17:20
Speaker 1: Strike, despite the Washington Post reporting from two sources.

00:17:24
Speaker 2: We have not been able to confirm that, and in fact we've had people say the opposite. But it is clear and Secretary Heagset himself concedes this that his orders were to destroy the boats, kill their occupants, sink the load of drugs. Now it might be more useful to them if they're trying to prove these were drug runners, if they actually arrested some of these because they would be low level people, tried to turn them and figure out who they're working for. Release the photograph the boat with presumably bricks full of the drugs. That's not what they're doing. What they're doing is releasing photographs of the boats burning in the ocean.

00:18:14
Speaker 1: Now we'll hear how oncologists can be supported in their critical work and the way companies like Bristol Meyers Squib are recognizing their role in helping give time back to patients. Monica, I think that sometimes we think doctors are superhuman and we forget that they are people too, just like their patients.

00:18:34
Speaker 3: I remember often the most challenging thing as my job as a doctor wasn't about whether I'd made the right diagnosis or the right treatment choice. It was the emotions that I carried home thinking about patients and their family and what they were going through. So we're really excited to unveil this new campaign. It's called a Time Back campaign. And the idea is to really acknowledge that positive side of oncologists' roles.

00:19:04
Speaker 1: Tell me a little more about this campaign, Monica, and how it came about.

00:19:10
Speaker 3: As a farceutical company, we're so passionate about the science, we live and breathe that every day, but as a very personal relationship between a patient and their oncologist, and we really wanted to take the time to celebrate.

00:19:26
Speaker 1: That and the gift they're giving so many people, the gift of time, and clearly this is something that is very personal to me. So I feel very honored and privileged to be part of this campaign. So thank you so much, doctor Monica Shah.

00:19:44
Speaker 3: Thank you so much, Katie. It's been a real pleasure. Please come and visit us at BMS dot com slash time back, and you can learn more there about our commitments oncologists and the time back that they potentially can give to patients.

00:19:58
Speaker 1: As we've heard, oncologists deserve to be reminded of the gratitude we feel for the work that they do every day, so I hope you'll join me in honoring the impact they have on so many patients and their families. Time is the greatest gift we can give and receive as we turn the clocks back this fall, Bristol Meyers Squib is recognizing oncologists who help give patients something extraordinary, more time. The Time Back campaign celebrates those everyday heroes who are working tirelessly in the pursuit of potentially helping get patients more time to experience key moments like seeing a child learned to ride a bike or a long awaited vacation. As we turn back our clocks, let's pause to thank the doctors who make a difference every day. Discover more about the Time Back Campaign and join Bristol Meyers Squib and celebrating the physician who get the gift of more time at BMS dot com slash time back. Can you connect the dots for us? David? What do these boats reportedly containing drugs headed? I guess to the US, right.

00:21:28
Speaker 2: We're not certain that most of the stuff headed from the Caribbean goes to Europe.

00:21:32
Speaker 1: Okay, so even more confounding, what does that have to do with Maduro and trying to get him to exit stage left?

00:21:43
Speaker 2: Well, it's a really good question. The administration has named Meduro as the leader of a cartel of the SUNS that includes much of the Venezuelan leadership, which they maintain is profiting from the drug trade. Our reporting from the region suggests the cartel of the SUNS isn't actually a cartel, so it may be a legal construct for them to name him as a drug leader rather than as a national leader. They argue that Maduro is illegally in office because he fixed the last election. That's our reasonable argument is one the Biden administration made. What they haven't done, Katie, is give us the theory of the case about Let's say they're successful beyond their wildest dreams, and Maduro suddenly decides it really is time for that long delayed family vacation in Cuba, Okay, and he's out, maybe with our help, maybe not just as a thought experiment. Do we then own the outcome? Do you turn the country over to a political opposition that's got its own issues as well? Do you know if the military will be loyal to that opposition or loyal to Maduro or seek a third way out? In otherways? Have you triggered instability along the way? And this, of course is exactly what MAGA has rightly criticized the United States for for not thinking out ahead before Iraq, and not thinking out ahead for Afghanistan, which was supposed to be a model democracy in Southeast Asia, and so forth.

00:23:31
Speaker 1: Nobody's talking about what's next. And as Colin pal used to say, you break it, you take it.

00:23:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, and instead the Taliban took over.

00:23:39
Speaker 1: So they're not only thinking about that, but also you're wondering why this has become such a huge foreign policy priority, right, and how much of this US military action has to do with Venezuela's significant oil reserves.

00:23:57
Speaker 2: David, that's right, and the oil reserves are what present and Trump talks about a lot to his aides. We are told he does not talk about it very much in public. Certainly this is a topic he's been fixated on before. Remember with Syria that we took the oil lines you would hear during the first term, and there are similar questions here now on this topic. That then raises the question, if it's about oil, then this really is gunboat diplomacy. The US does have some access to Chevron, which still has some limited licenses in Venezuela. There is good reporting that Maduro had made an offer to the United States to give significant access to Venezuela's oil supplies in an effort to preserve his own role, and the President Trump turned that down. So it's a little hard to figure out. And of course there are people hovering around this White House who of course have interests in trying to get at some of that oil.

00:25:02
Speaker 1: Not only get it some of that oil, but some people are talking about this is really about South Florida as much as the United States. Can you explain about Marco Rubio's vested interest in Austein Maduro and why he is so joneseen to do that?

00:25:20
Speaker 2: So Rubio has been a huge critic of the Maduro presidency during even the time he was a senator. There's a lot to be critical of. Let's not put on rose colored glasses here, but sure I was going to say, yes, Maduro is a brutal, authoritarian leader who fixed elections in order to stay in power. The question is is it the role of the United States to go out and displace him militarily and as we discussed before, to own the result. We did that a lot in the nineteen fifties, and this was in the days when the CIA would overthrow governments throughout the region. It didn't work out so well, and that history is worth noting. Secret Rubio himself is the son of Cuban immigrants that came in the fifties before Castro really took over. He was born in the United States in nineteen seventy one, so it was well after all of that. But there are some who believe that, given the tight link between Cuba and Venezuela, that he's trying to break that link, and that this is truly a play about Cuba more than it is about Venezuela.

00:26:33
Speaker 1: And obviously about Castro's Cuba, right.

00:26:36
Speaker 2: Right, and the post Castro Cuba.

00:26:38
Speaker 1: Yes, exactly. You've covered so many secretaries of Defense. I've got to ask you, David, what your experience and your observations are covering Secretary Pete Hexa.

00:26:52
Speaker 2: Well, I haven't had much experience covering Secretary Hegseth because I've never talked to him. You saw what happened to what he called mainstream media, and he first ousted our Pentagon reporters. I've never had a Pentagon pass so I was not involved in this. From the press room inside the Pentagon, where The Times has had a desk, I think since the Pentagon opened in nineteen forty nine. The place could use a good cleaning, so you know, having everybody move out wasn't all about.

00:27:25
Speaker 1: I covered the Pentagon, and you're right. I covered it with Fred Francis, who chained smoked Salem cigarettes all day long in a tiny little space, and you're right, not the most glamorous working conditions. But in all seriousness, I found it outrageous what this current administration did, specifically Pete Hegseth, when it came to the Pentagon press Corps asking them to sign a paper or to go to the Pentagon to get clearance for any story they were covering or going to be reporting on, and not only limiting their ability to move around the Pentagon. I mean, that is much less repugnant to me than this idea of getting approval from the Pentagon itself for their reporting. It is so outrageous, so offensive, and so wrong. I was surprised that people weren't up in arms.

00:28:21
Speaker 2: More about that, well, first, Katie, I'm savoring the image of you in the disgusting confines of the Pentagon press room here. This is a dissonant concept in my mind. I would pay a lot for photos from that era I.

00:28:39
Speaker 1: Learned a lot, and I loved covering the Pentagon. Ya.

00:28:41
Speaker 2: I'm sure you did, and we all have. I've not covered the Pentagon day to day by.

00:28:46
Speaker 1: Colleagues, but you're obviously a national security experts, so you have very good sources in that building.

00:28:51
Speaker 2: I'm sure I've got a few. And what's interesting is I think you've seen from all the reporting on Venezuela, and we were discussing moving the reporters out of the pentic Gon did not solve Secretary headcess problem of people in his building talking right, those stories have appeared from some place. To your more serious point, I can't imagine anything more at odds with the First Amendment, the traditions of a free and independent press, the concept that to have a free society you need a free press. Then a Secretary of Defense asking news organizations to sign an agreement that says you will not solicit information, not just classified information, but even unclassified information from people other than the Pentagon Press Office, which is to say you will cease reporting exactly. That was essentially the message of that, and it was so outrageous, Katie, the guess who wouldn't sign it. It wasn't just the New York Times. It wasn't just the Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal. It wasn't just the Weston Post Fox News, where the last time I checked, Pete Hegseth worked for many years as a commentator, refused to sign the document and turned in their press pass with everybody else and left the building. That tells you something.

00:30:20
Speaker 1: I'd love your very candid response to this question, David, is Pete Hegseth on thin ice in your view?

00:30:27
Speaker 2: Hard to know? President Trump has said repeatedly to some of his aides that he thinks a mistake he made in the first turn was firing members of his cabinet, his national security staff when they came under pressure, and that it just to his mind, led his adversaries to seek blood elsewhere, and so he wasn't going to give in. And in fact, with the exception of his first national security advisor who was moved to the United Nations, he has not fired anybody in his cabinet. Right, and I'm not just talking in the national security sphere. A Robert F. Kennedy Junior still has a job, right. Pete Hegseth still has a job, and many others still have a job. Who have been in plenty of controversies along the way. What I would say, and what I wrote in The Times yesterday with Helene Cooper, is that Pete Hegseth is increasingly a political liability for him. And the evidence of that is that even Republican senators frustrated by what the absence of answers on the Venezuela stuff, have begun to talk about taking measures to force the Pentagon and answers. He's clearly losing part of his own party. You briefly raised, and I didn't answer for you, Katie, a really good question, which is, even if you accept that the US military should be doing what it's doing in Venezuela, if we set that aside, is this where you want to go focus your military force? I mean, the National Security strategy issued in the first Trump administration when hr McMaster was the National Security Advisor, rightly said that the major challenges facing the United States are an incredibly increasingly powerful China with new nuclear capability ahead on many key technologies, including military technologies, a fast growing military budget, and an increasingly aggressive Russia that of course was at the time threatening had not yet taken over parts of Ukraine. If you're thinking that that is actually where you need to focus your attention, and I think the first Trump administration was dead on right on that topic. It does raise the question, why are you keeping fifteen sixteen percent of your naval force in the Caribbean to go deal with Venezuela.

00:33:06
Speaker 1: Well, let me ask you that question. Why are they.

00:33:09
Speaker 2: It does not fit the national security strategy and priorities that were set in the first administration. In the second administration, if you listen to Marco Rubio, it's a little bit more of a we're going to focus on the Western hemisphere first we live here, which to some officials sounds more like the old spheres of influence concept, again from the eighteen hundreds, but in this case, where Russia would be the biggest power near Europe, disturbing to our NATO allies, China would be the biggest power in the Pacific, we would be the biggest power in the Atlantic Transatlantic area and this hemisphere, and you kind of divide up the world. I'm not sure that worked in the eighteen hundreds. It certainly doesn't work in the twenty twenties. Why, Because we are a global economy, we worked from global technology. Our interests are around the world. And every time that we have thought that if we just proceeded to our shores protected by oceans in our concept, that we would avoid being dragged into greater conflicts, it never worked. It didn't work. Back then Teddy Roosevelt and William McKinley ended up taking over what the Philippines wamb So War and so on. We got sucked into World War One, we got sucked into World War Two, We got sucked into the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and post nine to eleven, the wars in the Middle East. All of that suggests to you that we need to think not about the world as you would define it by slicing up a globe, as if it was an orange, but instead how you deal with the interconnections of these economies. In the old concept of this, China was not one of the world's great economic and trading powers and financial powers today it is even in the old the first Cold War, we didn't need anything from our main adversary, the Soviet Union, with the possible exception of vodka and caviat And you know, we wouldn't want to go give that up for sure. But if you had to live without it, you could. You can't live without some of the things that we buy from China, including the rare oaths, and they can't live without some of the technology they buy from US.

00:35:47
Speaker 1: What do you make of this retreat for the United States as a global leader, Trump has diminished the importance of NATO. I think in some ways it's appropriate that they're paying more right their fair share. I think a lot of people sort of agreed with him on that. But in terms of retreating not just the world's policemen, which many people objected to, but as a real leader, or do you think the US has I mean, Trump keeps saying how he has solved how many seven or eight wars around the world.

00:36:24
Speaker 2: The number keeps moving, Yeah.

00:36:26
Speaker 1: Right, And I guess you would say that he took a big important role in the Middle East with Israel and Gaza. He is taking a big role with Ukraine and Russia. But this focus on the Western hemisphere at the risk of not minding the store elsewhere, seems perplexing. In many ways.

00:36:48
Speaker 2: It is perplexing. First of all, you've just mentioned a bunch of conflicts the president has entered into either diplomatically or militarily in the case of Iran. As I started here, that are well outside the hemisphere. So I'm not sure that Donald Trump believes in this hemispheric spheres of influence concept because he's obviously operated outside the Western hemosphere. Second, I think what you have seen him do is dismantle the system that the US set up after World War Two that was supposed to keep us from falling into another World war. We had just fought two of them in the space of thirty or forty years and began to use the instruments of institutions that were dominated by American values to keep the peace. And that was the era when NATO was created in the late nineteen forties, the World Bank, the IMF, all these international institutions which the president believes got twisted to the point that the US was paying and others were free riding. And I agree with you. I think one of the best things that he did in his first year here was pushed the Europeans to pay for more of their own defense, and certainly that was long overdue. We'd heard it from Obama, We'd heard it from President Trump in the first term, we heard it from Biden. He actually began to get traction. But there's a fine line between that and then pulling back from institutions that actually benefit the United States along the way. I was trained by Joe ni the man known for the creation of the phrase soft power, when I was an undergrad, and went on to a long and fruitful many decades of working alongside Joe. And he just passed away a few months ago or earlier this year. But he had this great phrase, which is when the Berlin Wall came down, it wasn't because we aimed our biggest missiles and our air power at it. It's because it was taken apart from the inside, brick by brick, by people who had grown up listening to the BBC and Voice of America. And I think we've forgotten that somewhere along the way.

00:39:17
Speaker 1: If you want to get smarter every morning with a breakdown of the news and fascinating takes on health and wellness and pop culture, sign up for our daily newsletter Wake Up Call by going to Katiecuric dot com. Let me ask you about a couple of other kind of stories in your Baileywick if you will, David before we go, because I know you have work to do and things to report on. But one was this whole Ukraine Russia agreement. I know that Special ENVOYE. Steve Wickcough along with Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son in law. They're both meeting with Vladimir Putin in Moscow to discuss the administration's latest peace proposal an earlier one. The twenty eight points you wrote in the earlier plan, you said readlight. They had been drafted in the Kremlin. I think many many people agree with you on that assessment.

00:40:22
Speaker 2: And you know what, it turned out parts of it had been as we right, right well.

00:40:25
Speaker 1: And then given to President Trump right somehow, or or Witkoff who brought them to President Trump. So what the hell is going on here, David? With the Russia Ukraine negotiations, most people thought Ukraine, they're the good guys in this scenario. Why are they getting screwed?

00:40:47
Speaker 2: The view of Ukraine has changed with President Trump's election. I mean jd Vance was always of the view that the US should not be expending money technology defending Ukraine.

00:41:03
Speaker 1: Was he okay with Russia and vading Ukraine.

00:41:06
Speaker 2: It's interesting because you've heard both him and President Trump, mostly President Trump work on this narrative in which we created the conditions that forced Russia to go do this right, expanding NATO to the east, which was a long debate in the US. You remember it and covered it when that was underway, as did I. That Ukraine's increasing drift toward the European Union and all forced Russia's hand, which is essentially the narrative that Vladimir Putin promotes himself.

00:41:41
Speaker 1: Do you think that's bullshit?

00:41:43
Speaker 2: My own view is Ukraine was an independent country. That's what happened when the Soviet Union broke up. I realized that Putin believes that that was one of the great disasters of modern times. But the result was it had sovereign rights as an independent country. And when you read the twenty eight points in that leaked early proposed agreement, the reason it seemed so objectionable was not only the land issues, which involved giving to Russia all the territory it had taken and some of the territory it hadn't even taken yet, but also because of its loss of sovereignty. So as you read through the points, what did it require that Ukraine could not have a military force larger than six hundred thousand, that it could not have missiles that would have the range to reach Moscow in Saint Petersburg, that it had to hold an election within one hundred days, which I think Putin was guessing that President Lensky would probably lose. There was no restriction in it on the size of the Russian military, there was no restriction on the range of the Russian missile force.

00:42:58
Speaker 1: And also by the way Ukraine could join NATO.

00:43:01
Speaker 2: Ukraine couldn't join NATO. There was no requirement that Russia holds free elections within one hundred days, right, So it was a quite one sided Putin's view of the world kind of agreement. I think that was pretty shocking. And that's when you saw Marco Rubio, who you recall was a big supporter of Ukraine when he was in the Senate, sort of step in and get the thing rewritten down to about twenty points and put in brackets, which is to say, to be negotiated later all of these points of contention. The problem is, as he made the agreement more and more acceptable to the Ukrainians, it became less and less acceptable to Vladimir Putin. And while we don't know what happened in the meeting yet, between mister Witkoff and mister Putin, I think it's a pretty good bet that the United States will not see Putin call up and say, yeah, where do I sign? You're going to see him push back really hard. And the real question is does President Trump care that much about what the provisions of a piece agreement are or would he just like to get a piece agreement this month so that when we look at the year twenty twenty five and his nomination goes for the Nobel Peace Prize, he will have that one to add to that list of six or seven.

00:44:23
Speaker 1: Do you really think that's what is motivating him?

00:44:26
Speaker 2: Look, he has explicitly said this would be the big one in his list in the nomination.

00:44:32
Speaker 1: I mean, it's so sick to be strategizing and executing foreign policy based on one man's rabid and insatiable desire to get the Nobel Peace Prize.

00:44:47
Speaker 2: It is an extraordinary set of objectives.

00:44:52
Speaker 1: Spoken like a true New York Times reporter.

00:44:56
Speaker 2: You do have to say that there was an American president the Nobel Peace Prize for ending a war with Russia. It was Teddy Roosevelt in nineteen oh four for the Treaty of Portsmouth, which ended the Russo Japanese War. Was a little before year in my time for coverage of this stuff.

00:45:16
Speaker 1: Okay, but was he like desperately campaigning for it?

00:45:19
Speaker 2: No, I don't think he openly campaigned for it, at least not from what history I have read. I could be wrong on that, but I can tell you that Donald Trump knows that. And I can tell you that Donald Trump knows that Barack Obama won a Nobel Peace Prize just for not being George W. Bush early in his presidency, so this is high up on his list.

00:45:41
Speaker 1: Can I, in the minutes we have left, just ask you about the shooting of these two National Guard troops. One woman was killed a National Guard member. The other I believe is still in critical condition in the hospital. I'm not sure what the latest is on his condition, but this shooting was by an Afghan national. He once served in a CIA supported zero unit. Can you tell me about the work he did in Afghanistan and the reaction to this killing if you believe it's commensurate with this crime in terms of what the administration wants to do with many Afghan nationals that were brought here after the end of that war.

00:46:29
Speaker 2: Well, first, let's say this was a huge and awful tragedy. And my office here in Washington is right near the site, and when you walk by it these days I just did a few hours ago. You see the flowers that are set up there where these two wonderful young Guard troops were ambushed. I mean, that's the only word you can use for it. You can't go walk by it without your heart being wrenched and a tear coming to your eye, right outside the subway metro entrance here in DC. I was not here the day that it happened, but some of my colleagues actually heard the shots. This was clearly a highly disturbed person. He was vetted, and obviously there are holes in the vetting system when he came over, But it looks like that most of the symptoms that he developed on basing this on the reporting of others, I have not done any came after he arrived in the United States. He was ultimately given asylum during the Trump administration. During this Trump administration earlier this year, at least as far as I have read, again, I was away during the Thanksgiving holiday and was not doing any independent reporting on this. We owe the people of Afghanistan who worked with the CIA, with the military, with news organizations a huge debt, and worked really hard to get them out of Afghanistan when the Taliban were taking over. There were a lot of mistakes made both during the first Trump turn in getting them out earlier despite what the laws of Congress had passed, some of which were overly complicated. The Biden administration moved too slowly, clearly executed incredibly badly on the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Actually, I argued in my book it was such a disaster it actually made them work better when Ukraine happened and the invasion and the team came and coalesced. But you're always going to make mistakes. The history of the people who we let in to the country and these is that very very few of them get into serious trouble. So then the question is is it the right response to then turn around and block a whole group of people from coming in based on their nationality, their religious belief whether they come from what the President has referred to in recent times as hellhole countries and so forth. And I just don't see that you solve your problem that way. There are certainly issues with vetting and certainly issues with mental health care. But I'm not sure you take that out on an entire class of people who were not involved in this tragic incident.

00:49:26
Speaker 1: Not only that, David, but my understanding is that many of these Afghans who were really critical to the US mission in Afghanistan after the US left, would face almost certain death, yes, from the Taliban, and I think that is being left out of some of the reporting when we're talking about these refugees. I want to read to you what the Wall Street Journal editorial board recently wrote. Quote. Some will say this means the US should never admit such refuge jeez. But the alternative is abandoning allies who assist Americans in war to the retribution of our enemies. The fate of Afghans men and women who worked with the US has often been brutal. You can be sure Americans will fight overseas again, and our troops will need allies on the ground to succeed. How many will assist us if they believe there will be no exit for them if the US leaves with the enemy Triumphant.

00:50:29
Speaker 2: Couldn't imagine a more cogent argument exactly right. I mean, you're not going to win wars, conflicts, or prevent wars without allies, and sometimes you have to make promises to take care of them and their families if things go south. We made that promise to the Afghans.

00:50:50
Speaker 1: David, what about when Donald Trump is no longer president? Will the old world order, so to speak, be back in vogue.

00:50:58
Speaker 2: That's a great question question I'd been trying to struggle with as I think about the world as it's unfolded since Nicold Wars came out a year ago, because the greatest force of disruption in the world, the Western world anyway, at that time, has been us, which we're not always one hundred percent accustomed to. The best comparison, the best analogy I can give to you, Katie, is the White House itself. The next president can come and scrape the gold off the Oval Office walls. It's pretty striking when you step in there. These days. The next president can undo executive orders, but the next president can't rebuild institutions that have been completely dismantled. And when you rebuild them, you would want to rebuild them for the current era, not for the era in which they were created. Just as the next president will not be able to go rebuild the East wing of the White House, right, You're going to end up with a ballroom, and you're either going to have to amend it or deal with it, or live it. And the fact of matter is some of the changes that that Trump administration is making you will not be able to go undo, and some of them you might not even want to undo, but you would want to rebuild something. What strikes me the most about this administration is we understand what they want to tear down USAID, Voice of America Aid to Ukraine. We don't understand what they want to go build to enhance American power for the next century. They are much more clear about what they don't like than what their plan is for the future.

00:52:40
Speaker 1: David Sanger, it's so great to see you. Thank you so much for thank you your insights and for this conversation. I'm grateful for your reporting and for the hard work you put in every single day. Thank you well.

00:52:55
Speaker 2: Thank you Katie. As you know from having had these jobs, it is is one of the great privileges in American journalism but also in American society that we have a First Amendment that lets us keep doing this, and it's one of our most treasured remnants of the Constitution and one that I think through whatever administration is in place, we have to be sure to protect. And so we've all got to go to work each day with that in mind.

00:53:29
Speaker 1: Amen to that. Amen to that. Thanks David.

00:53:33
Speaker 2: Great to see you, Katie, Take care.

00:53:38
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