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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for today's show comes from EverQuote. They're kind of like Cupid, but for auto insurance. They want to help you find a better deal on your auto insurance by matching you with insurers in your area that will get you the right coverage at the right price. You can find out more about EverQuote right now if you call 833-641-EVER, E-V-E-R. That's 833-641-3837.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram, and I'm here with the hosts of Vox's Worldly podcast, Alex Ward, Zach Beecham, and Jen Williams. Welcome, all.
--:-- Alex Ward: Thanks for having us.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Let's start with you, Alex. What's the first moment in U.S. foreign policy we should remember from this year? What's the big one?
--:-- Alex Ward: Definitely that we did not go to war with North Korea. That's true. We didn't, did we? We didn't. And it looked like we might. This year. It did, didn't it? It was looking that way a lot at the end of last year. And so the fact that we're not in a nuclear hellfire, I think we can call that a success.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, so how did that go? How did we not nuclear hellfire? Was it the summit? Because that didn't work or did?
--:-- Alex Ward: So you may remember, you may not, that Kim Jong-un gave a speech on New Year's Day saying, I'm basically done with testing. I'm all about the economy now. And on top of that, would really like to be involved in that Olympics you got there going on in South Korea. And so the fact that Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, was like, hey, would love to be involved in the Olympics, that started to open the door to some sort of rapprochement to some possible ties with South Korea. And it worked. You had North Korean officials meet with South Korean officials. That cracked the door open. And then Moon Jae-in, the president of South Korea, was kind of like, hey, what if we sort to start working with the U.S. too. Like, let's make this happen, leading to what was by far the most dramatic moment of this year in the U.S.-North Korea relationship, the Singapore summit on June 12th.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There you had Kim and Trump meet privately, right, on their own with some translators. It's very unclear everything they said. But what the summit was, was amazing. I mean, it was a one-day wondrous affair, right? These insane images of Trump and Kim next to each other, shaking, embracing, meeting, eating, just everything we hadn't seen in decades of the U.S.-North Korea relationship. Generations, right. Unbelievable.
--:-- Alex Ward: And so this was supposed to set a course for the relationship to improve. They signed a declaration and it had four main points, but what you really need to know is kind of two of them. First, that North Korea would like hostilities between the powers to end. And then if that were the case, then North Korea would like to see what it calls the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. That wording is important because it's not necessarily that they give up their nuclear weapons. It's that the U.S. stopped protecting South Korea, that it have no ability to really strike North Korea with a nuclear weapon or that it's not really going after it. And then that maybe North Korea may dismantle parts of its arsenal. So it's not exactly as the U.S. has portrayed it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And how did it go? Did it work? No. We're still seeing intelligence that North Korea is improving its missile bases, its arsenal, still building more weapons. But what's interesting here is that Trump is not that upset about it, right? Because one thing that's true is that North Korea has not tested a missile since November 2017 when it tested the missile that could likely hit most of the United States, if not all of it. And so since that moment, Trump keeps pointing back to it. He's just like, look, things are better with North Korea. We don't have those tests flying over Japan. They're not really threatening anybody right now, or at least aren't actively doing so, doing anything majorly aggressive. So we're good. We've got time.
--:-- Alex Ward: So what does this mean for 2019? Is President Trump going to ask anything else of North Korea, or is he pretty much good with the status quo? Well, the administration keeps insisting that North Korea said it would give up its nuclear arsenal. It didn't. Right. And the problem then is if that angers Trump down the line. It does look like we might have Trump Kim too early in 2019. But what's actually leading to tensions between the two at the moment is that they just have made no progress in Singapore. And the sticking point going back to what I mentioned earlier is what I reported is that in that meeting with Kim, Trump promised that he would sign a peace declaration, a non-binding agreement that the U.S. won't attack North Korea, it won't be hostile towards it, and that gives Kim a political space to maybe dismantle his nuclear arsenal. Yeah. Trump has yet to sign that, and the North Koreans are pissed, and they don't really want to negotiate anything else or dismantle anything until they get what they were promised. And that's led to months and months of stalemate in these talks.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Alright, so North Korea from Alex. Zach Beecham, you're next up. What's your big foreign policy moment of 2018?
--:-- Zach Beecham: Donald Trump's withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal. It really stands out to me. And I feel like that happened so long ago. When exactly did that happen again?
--:-- Alex Ward: Yeah, the actual withdrawal happened in early May. It's hard to remember that far back given the kind of year that we've had.
--:-- Zach Beecham: But then after that, that led to the U.S. reimposing sanctions on Iran and generally the U.S. falling out of compliance with its end of the historic nuclear agreement. Yeah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what might this mean for the future of our relationship with Iran and Iran's relationship with the Middle East?
--:-- Zach Beecham: The question really is whether Iran restarts its nuclear program right? Because the way the deal is supposed to work is the U.S. and the international community take off their sanctions, which allows investment to flow into Iran in exchange for them freezing their nuclear program and rolling it back in large parts, making it much harder for them to get a nuclear weapon. Okay. They haven't significantly restarted their nuclear program as far as we know. They're banking on continued cooperation from the Europeans who are also in the deal to make it worth their while to stay in. But that could change basically at any minute.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: US sanctions make it much harder for European companies to do business in Iran, not entirely impossible but more difficult for a lot of them. So Iran might decide that it's not worth the trouble to keep doing this. And if they do that and they restart a bunch of their nuclear stuff, then we're back where we were before the nuclear deal was with a choice of either letting Iran get a nuclear weapon or really close to it or else having to go to war. And those are both really, really bad outcomes.
--:-- Zach Beecham: And we're more likely to get one of those bad outcomes than we were before the Trump presidency.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What exactly is the United States' relationship with Iran at this point? The Trump administration clearly sees Iran as its number one strategic enemy in the Middle East. This isn't a surprise. Iran really is a strategic rival of the United States, but the Obama plan was to try to tame that through diplomacy when it could. Trump seems to think that there's now a need to do full-on military, political, economic containment and rollback of Iranian influence, which ranges from pulling out of the nuclear deal to supporting Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen, which is tangentially related to Iran. Basically, it's just full-on enemies now.
--:-- Zach Beecham: Okay.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Alright, Jen Williams, what is your moment in 2018?
--:-- Jen Williams: So mine is the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Of course. Jamal Khashoggi is this journalist. He's a dissident. He was living in the U.S. as a resident. He had fled when he saw kind of other journalists and other kind of dissidents in Saudi Arabia starting to get like thrown in prison, rounded up and threatened by like the crown prince regime. Right. Essentially. So he flees. He goes to Turkey where his fiancée is from. He goes into the consulate because he needs to get some documents from the Saudi consulate there in Turkey. Never comes out. And it turns out that he was basically brutally murdered and maybe dismembered. So it was a horrific killing. Right. And it really sparked this kind of huge outcry where people were like, look, this is just brutal. Like you can't do this. And it really shined a light on Mohammed bin Salman's just complete disregard for any sort of like international law, norms or just like basic humanity.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what repercussions will his death have? I know there's been movement in the United States and all over Western Europe to hold Saudi Arabia accountable here. Will anyone actually do that?
--:-- Jen Williams: Well, it remains to be seen. So, you know, like you mentioned last week, the U.S. Senate passed this resolution that essentially demands that the Trump administration stop all U.S. military support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. Where that goes, you know, Trump can still veto, things like that. We don't really know for sure if that will actually end up with the U.S. actually pulling out of the war effort. But if that does happen, that would be a really huge development.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Alright, so we talked in the first part of the show about international events that the United States was involved in. But I thought for the second half, we could talk about things that had nothing to do with the United States and the world. And what were the most important examples of those? Jen, let's start with you. What do you got?
--:-- Jen Williams: So mine is Brexit. I've heard of it. You may remember that Britain voted to pull out of the European Union, right? That process, not going so well. No. No. There's a lot of great GIFs online of like my impression of Brexit. And it's a guy taking like a swing on a golf ball on a frozen lake and then missing the ball and falling into the lake, stuff like that. Right. Or like throwing a bottle against the wall and it bounces and hits him in the face. Yes, exactly. Essentially, it's an own goal, right? Like the British people – and it's not necessarily their fault. They were promised a lot of things. They were told that Brexit would do a lot of things that it probably won't actually do for them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But a majority of people in the UK voted to essentially shoot their economy in the foot. So right now we're currently in the process of Prime Minister Theresa May is trying to sell this Brexit deal. Basically this deal with the European Union that outlines the terms of the divorce, right? And her own party is such a fan of this deal she's negotiated that they almost voted her out of office last week. Yeah. So nobody likes her plan that she's worked out with the EU. She's trying to sell it back home now, and pretty much everybody hates it for different reasons, including a lot of people in her own party. A lot of them are what we call hard Brexiteers, meaning they wanted a much stronger, fuller break with the EU than what her plan currently is.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So they called a no-confidence vote, which is essentially her own party saying, we don't have confidence in your ability to lead our party. She managed to scrape by the skin of her teeth and won. So she's going to stay in power, at least through the rest of the Brexit negotiations. But it's not a ringing endorsement, right? She's trying to sell this deal and it's clear that her own party doesn't even support her. It doesn't seem like she's gonna get any movement on that. And the EU has been really, really clear that like, well, it's this deal or no deal. Like we're not gonna renegotiate this just because you can't get your people to sign off on it. And the actual Brexit deadline is looming. And if they hit that deadline without having a deal that everybody has signed off on and agreed to and, you know, put the bows on, there's going to be what's called a no-deal Brexit, which means they just straight up, like, plummet out of the EU.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Stores are literally, like, starting to stockpile food because they don't know if, like, shipments of food from other parts of the EU are going to be allowed in because of customs rules. Can they just 86 the whole thing before that happens? So there's a growing movement of people who would like to do a redo, basically, Brexit redux, and have a second referendum and say, look, we wanted, you know, now that we know how this has gone, now that we kind of have a little clearer sense of what this could do to our economy, what if we call another referendum and just vote again on whether to stay or leave? There is support for that among some people in the UK. There are also plenty of people who point out that that's kind of undemocratic. Like, we had this vote already once. You know, sorry, you didn't like the result, but that was the result. And you don't get to just keep doing do-overs until you get the one that you want. Like, that's not how democracy works.
--:-- Jen Williams: So from the U.S. perspective, it's kind of like you know we're watching going holy shit this country is just like spiraling into chaos before our eyes and it's kind of like haha oh my god look what's going on in Britain huh but like this is a very serious issue for like tens of thousands of people and like real human lives are being impacted so the GIFs are about to get a lot less funny yeah the GIFs are gonna be a lot less funny although the Brits have you know a famous sense of humor so you know I don't know they'll probably still take it with a stiff upper lip.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So Zach Beecham, you're next. What's something that happened in the world in 2018 that had nothing to really do with the United States that you think was momentous?
--:-- Zach Beecham: Brazil's election of Jair Bolsonaro, a politician who openly sympathizes with the country's not so long ago military dictatorship, has to be in the top list. And we did an episode about him, but remind listeners who he is.
--:-- Jen Williams: Right. So the too simple line is that he's the Trump of the tropics. But the actual reality is that this is a guy who's been a longtime political figure in Brazil but rose to power in this year's election on the basis of dissatisfaction with the country's economic performance, frustration with corruption inside its elite and a general sense that the current parties are just not up to the task of fixing the country.
--:-- Zach Beecham: And comparing him to Trump feels unfair to Trump because he actually will just walk around and like threaten to punch female politicians and stuff like that. Like stuff that Trump probably couldn't get away with. Setting that aside he also openly pro-not just like, would it be great if I could prosecute my enemies, but he has said the problem with Brazil's military dictatorship is and I paraphrasing that they tortured instead of killed. He said they brought prosperity to the country. He genuinely seems to be an opponent of democracy, like straight up, like someone who has considered views on this and is basically a neo-fascist.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I know I said this wasn't going to be about the United States, but to just bring it back to our relationship with Bolsonaro, I wonder. I think the Trump administration said vaguely positive things about him, right?
--:-- Zach Beecham: Yeah, unsurprisingly. They have this tendency to congratulate authoritarians when they win electoral victories. Like when the Turkish president managed to consolidate a bunch of powers in his office, Trump congratulated him when everybody was like, no, you can't do that. This is an authoritarian move. It's bad. B-A-D. And it's a similar situation in Brazil?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, pretty much. Trump seemed to praise him. Bolsonaro seems to like Trump back. And this could lead to a kind of weird authoritarian axis in politics in the Americas and in sort of Pan-American organizations. We'll see how that works.
--:-- Alex Ward: Alright, Alex Ward, we started with you. Let's end with you. What is the last thing we should think about the world as we head into a new year?
--:-- Alex Ward: It should be that there will be a dictator for life in China. Right. We did that one too. Yes. Xi Jinping, arguably the most powerful leader in China since Mao Zedong, had his party give him the authority to rule forever. They got rid of term limits. And this guy is no joke. This is a guy who wants to reestablish China's dominance both militarily and economically, does not see the U.S. really as a friend. is getting closer to Russia, to Iran, to a bunch of America's quote-unquote adversaries. And so regardless of whether it's Trump or whoever else is in the White House, they're probably going to have to deal with Xi for many years. And not only just Xi, but what looks like a growing and more aggressive China.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what is Xi going to do as China grows, as his relationships with our adversaries strengthen? What he's going to do is form alliances with countries that probably aren't super pro-American, right? Russia, Iran, et cetera. He's going to try to unleash his economy primarily through technology firms, try to get other kinds of industries up and going. He's already modernizing the military, trying to make it look actually more American in structure. And on top of that, buying new weapons and improving weapons that they have to keep U.S. boats from coming near it in case of a war, which seems very unlikely at this point, but also to threaten countries around the area, which are American allies like Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, etc.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The three of you focus so much on the world, but oftentimes on national security. Do you feel better about the world at the end of 2018 than you did at the end of 2017 as far as security, harmony, something like, I don't know, peace is concerned?
--:-- Alex Ward: I feel that the world has gotten worse security-wise, but I feel it's gotten better in terms of not getting nuked. That's a win.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How do you feel, Jen?
--:-- Jen Williams: Not so well. People are being lifted out of poverty and rates of diseases are declining globally, and that's great. But there are also horrific wars and people being repressed. I think this is like the highest number of journalists in prison right now that we've seen in like decades. But, you know, people have the will to change things and I still have hope.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And how about you, Zach?
--:-- Zach Beecham: How did we do in 2018? In terms of peace, you know, we're living through one of the best times in human history. Violence is down relative to the historic average. Life expectancy is up. War deaths are at some of the lowest points in history. Not the absolute lowest but pretty damn low. And that to me suggests that we're still in a good place. Now, there are developments in 2018 that bother me, that threaten this kind of long-term trend, most notably the things that uphold peace and stability, nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, international institutions, the U.S. as a global leader. These things are all fraying. So the question is not 2018 versus 2017, I think, in the best frame. It's are we doing enough to prevent a massive deviation from a historically great time? Or are we going in the wrong direction in the long run? And on that scale, we might be.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Alex Ward, Jen Williams, and Zach Beecham are the three hosts of the Worldly Podcast from Vox. I'm Sean Rameswaram from this is Today Explained. One last shout out to EverQuote. EverQuote wants to find you your perfect, ideal car insurance. What they do is they find out what you need and they match you with insurers in your area to find the right coverage for you at the right price. You can find out more about EverQuote right now at 833-641-EVER. That's 833-641-3837.
