1101: Rahm Emanuel is Not NOT Running for President

28:22In the end of the day, he got 300 plus electoral volts. He makes the big decision. He picked health care. We did get health care, but there was a political cost called the Tea Party. And none of these are 100 % right and zero wrong. I do believe that we should have taken on the – after both TARP, the bailout for the banks and insurance companies, and then after the Recovery Act of$1.6 trillion collectively, and that's when$1.6 trillion was real money. The political – the culture of the country needed a Old Testament justice. and you can't do you couldn't do both and the president said of the three kids cap and trade health health care and financial reform his favorite child was health care that was his joke that saturday yeah and he wasn't wrong we got it done but don't think that it doesn't come with a consequence both in the sense of straight off yeah because to pass health care the insurance companies had to sit on the same table that was the lesson from hillary care fighting banks would have been a better fight.

29:27That said, healthcare has become the kind of the beaches of Okinawa for the Republican Party. Yeah, that's right. I want to ask you one kind of LA question before we get to foreign policy. LA question? Yeah, you're in LA at the moment. I think you got a relative who works in the movie business. I think he's like a PA or something. I try to forget that he's my brother. So what do you make of this battle between Paramount and Netflix to buy warner brothers and in particular like president trump's efforts to inject himself into the process and pick the winner like i'm imagining 2010 barack obama calling up warner brothers and saying like you must green light the town too let me wait before we get to this time how many times a day do you say to yourself if we had done something every day okay like that's before 10 times before 9 a.m yeah yeah i can't believe i spent 300 000 creating a blind trust as chief executive i mean as chief of staff.

30:19I can't believe I did that. And I look at this, and also another couple hundred for ambassador, I look at people coming out of prison already nominated. I'm like, what? What am I, the schmuck in the room? We all were schmucks. One funny story. I think you're the head of the ethics at the State Department, you know, four months out, you have to do an exit ethics report. I said, I will do this, but you must be the Maytag woman, Matt. I mean, is nobody filling up? I look at all these people who've never filled out a financial form. You're chasing me four months afterwards? That's crazy. Yeah. Okay.

30:50Now, thanks for the third bit. So, one, let me go where I think the problem is. This is the Roberts Supreme Court. I blame them because with their decisions about FTC, the Securities and Exchange, their view of the unitary power of the presidency, means that the president is the ultimate judge. And he will insert himself, and it won't be the rule of law, and it won't be a nonpolitical independent body. I mean, nobody believes this Justin Perlman antitrust division. No. Okay. So they, Noah Feldman in Bloomberg had a fabulous piece yesterday that all the other justices at the Court of Appeals, you know, Circuit Court, Court of Appeals, etc., have done a fabulous job.

31:40And the Supreme Court, the leaders, have abandoned the rank and file judges on the field. This is their fault. I'm not a fan of Trump, so I don't want this to be. He has a permission slip to insert himself. and all the guardrails about concentrating power in either one person or one of the three branches of government have been eradicated. Forget the Congress because the Republicans have put their entire manhood into a lockbox. This is Robert's fault and nobody should kid themselves. The Supreme Court has made a horrendous decision about the balance of power in a country that's based on the rule of law and you've got a decision here and the president's inserting himself not only against CNN and not only on what he's rewarding friends that have rewarded him and he's going to weigh in.

32:29This is not a pop quiz. Forget that you and I, I mean, whatever I feel about Donald Trump, you have given the president, whoever he or she may be, a permission slip to have an opinion that's more powerful than the law. This is for originalists or a court system that base thinks of themselves as richest this is not anywhere close to the original founding framers of the constitution about how power exercises itself in a political system i agree so everybody's i mean i look i've read about netflix versus paramount and the concentration and i gotta and i don't you know i i don't know but what i do know is that the supreme court has allowed the opinion of a president to outweigh the law in a dramatic way, not just, and I'm putting aside Donald Trump, there will be another decision of a concentration of power, economic.

33:29And the Supreme Court has given a green light to whoever is in the presidency to make that decision, not the laws and the interests of the country. and we do have two problems i think of myself as a free market capitalist and on one side you have marxism on the other side you have monopolists and right now the monopolists are winning because that's donald trump's economic philosophy yeah and he gets to decide because he's also going to like he's doing today and i've talked about this a year ago on ezra cline show corruption is going to be the issue and and i actually think the reason mega voters feel the way they do is because they've betrayed.

34:09Rather than worried about their paycheck and their checkbook, he's worried about his paycheck and his checkbook. And they know it. Yeah, I think, look, I think point well taken on the courts. I also do blame Amazon a little bit for paying$40 million for some boring ass Melania documentary, which is self-evidently a bribe. But, you know. In broad daylight. We'll call it what it is, I guess. No, I mean, look. No accountability. This is, and I'm going to do a shout out to the American people. The Roberts Court is corrupt. Corporate America is spineless. Republicans in Congress and both branches are useless.

34:47So we're down to the judgment of the American people, and thank God for them. I know a lot of people in our party, oh, the American people, why do they vote for this guy? They are going to issue a judgment in 2026, and I'm very confident unless something dramatic happens, it is going to be a verdict of guilty on the president of the Republican Party. And thank God for them because they are the thin blue line that's going to put a stop to Donald Trump and pause it. Where Roberts, the Republicans, corporate leaders, titans of media are useless. And I'm trying to make sure that this gets through the FCC, what I'm saying, because they are useless.

35:21And I could say some other things I used to say when I was chief of staff and you walked in. I cannot stand what they have done. Every one of them have failed the test of integrity.

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37:28All right, so when we talked about setting this up, You wanted to do some foreign policy, which was music to my ears. So let's do it. Well, now that I'm a foreign policy person. You're an expert. You're an expert. I actually made one day get a double-breasted suit. There we go. Work at Foggy Bottom. In the wake of the war in Gaza on October 7th, a lot of Democrats have been saying we need to rethink U.S. policy towards Israel. Our friend and former colleague Ben Rhodes wrote this piece in The New York Times a couple weeks back. He recommended, among other things, that the U.S. cut off military support to Israel, support U.S.

38:00recognition of a Palestinian state, and refuse to take AIPAC money. Curious what you think of those recommendations and then like what changes you would propose, if any. So, Tommy, you know this. In 2009, there's only one person the prime minister of Israel calls a self-hating joke publicly. You and Axelrod, right? Yeah. Axelrod's pissed that he never gets to the recognition. I said, you're not that good at you, David. you're also not named ram israel publicly and he's also in his book the only person he attacks in the book is me his own book what did he ask you for like just that i was anti-israel you know the same stuff got it and if you remember and i think you do that battle also in the oval office where literally the president had to tell the prime minister i'm the president lay off a ram and so on and so forth i have a photo of it actually because we went toe-to-toe over the housing expansions and settlements expansion in West Bank.

38:57So here's, let me, before it's just about Israel, let's talk about the Middle East. And I'll talk about Israel in that context because I think it's the context that matters. Israel has never been more strategically secure since Ben-Gurion was dancing the horror in 1948 in Tel Aviv, but more politically vulnerable. I had never in my life that I thought that a prime minister of the state of Israel would lead Jews back into the ghetto. And that's what's happening in Israel, that's what's happening in the world, and that's what's happening around the world. Jews can't go to Europe and participate in the Eurovision, while the UAE is hosting the world financially in the F1.

39:37He has literally, in the way he has executed pieces of the last, not just the last two years, but over his time, isolated Jews in Israel. The fact of the matter is this is the best strategic terrain Israel's had since the founding. You have peace in Jordan with Israel. You have peace with Egypt. Syria and Lebanon basically call it non-belligerence. You can use whatever label, but it is in more secure place than ever before. Iran is on their back foot. but I do want to spend time on this because I think one of the most unreported stories right now is the collapse of Iran, not just strategically imploding into society.

40:25You don't really have in the near geography, a strategic threat. Second, when we were starting in politics, the Gulf was all about just oil. Today they want to be part of the world economy, which is what Israel's ACE is. The UAE, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia want to use their petrodollars to be part of the global economy and their citizens to be part of the global economy. That is an invitation for Israel. And they're pissing it away with this prime minister. Rabin understood that, and he was a statesman, and I say because we're on the 30-year eve of his assassination, to seize a moment.

41:10look these are not easy decisions you have to make compromises and then kind of leap into the strategic not only unknown but try to shape the events to your face you have the Gulf countries ready to accept Israel as part of the region which has been the dream, the nation among nations since its founding and B, you have strategic stability and you are perceived as a strategic superpower in the region and an economic superpower That is an incredible, that is as good a chessboard as Israel has ever had in 77 years. And there is nothing that this prime minister has done, whether it's with Lebanon, Syria, or the situations they have done that opened up the Gulf to seize that moment that the IDF created.

41:57Now, I would do things that are very clear as it relates to Israel. You've crossed the line on the settlements. Unacceptable. I said this when I was ambassador to Japan to members of the Biden administration. Any settler who's involved in any violence on the West Bank is on a no-fly zone. Put them on a no-fly zone. Nothing would make them more upset that they can't come, go to Brooklyn, go to any part of America or go to Europe. Just no-fly zone. Biden sort of started some of that process, but Trump walked it back, right? You want to go further. Okay. Without calling it out, there are people that know that I want to go much further.

42:34Got it. Two, you know, and you and I worked on this. President Obama signed the largest security defense package in Israel's history. I would continue that, but there are going to be restraints and boundaries on that. And third, you're either going to make the most of this strategic opportunity, but you will not hold America's foreign policy. You will not hold our strategic interests. I think all the others in the Trump administration that basically want to just be hemispheric, you do not want to give up our position in the Middle East. I think that's a foolish idea and strategically flawed. And I would say this is where we're going.

43:12And you can either be a part of it or you can be on your own. So if you want, Mr. Prime Minister, you want a Sparta nation, let me not stop you. But you're going to realize that's a losing bet. Well, but isn't, I mean, like a lot of people sort of default to the two-state solution, right? But Netanyahu says he opposes a Palestinian state. The Knesset just voted to annex the West Bank. We've been dealing with this right-wing government in Israel for 15 years. It's only getting worse. It's like Ben Gavir and Basil Smotrich are now extremists who are members. Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority has no credibility.

43:45It's been undercut. Yeah, they don't get a pass because they missed three from Camp David with Echel Barak and Yasser Arafat to what ulert offered him to six years later it's all the same but they they have missed many opportunity and israel has since those times and other events and you know from bombs in disney off square to october 7th have to legitimize their position of non-dialogue but it's not a choice right and so like i guess what i'm getting at is it feels like look a lot of democrats in the u.s just say oh we need a two-state solution we need to negotiate that it feels like that's just a way to punt and will perpetuate the status quo at some point don't we need to use our leverage where we can to try to push or pressure netanyahu into making better decisions well here's the one thing the and since netanyahu's decided to play in american politics i have no problem discussing what the first step on that journey and i give naftali ben david the former prime minister that it was kind of the one prime minister interrupting Bibi's 17 year run, is legitimizing the Arab Israelis to be part of the coalition government.

45:00They were, they had 10 seats. That would reduce the stigma, but also legitimize the Arab participant, I mean, one third of the, not one third, 20 % of the population is Arab Israelis. That's first step. Second, there are boundaries. I would and this was also part of the camp the housing fight that Mitchell and I were not on the same page that he thought I was too strident about this at that time I haven't seen the law since you used to be able in America to get a tax write-off if you contribute to building settlements in Israel who eliminate it I don't know if it has been eliminated but back then it wasn't that was my position to you cross the line totally unacceptable three you're part of any violence, you're on a no-fly zone.

45:46You have to impose political, not just economic, but there are some economic costs to violating the two-state solution. Because, look, there will never be a river to the sea, and there will never be a greater Israel, which is the inverse of the river to the sea. There's the same thing. Both parties have to give up their extremist position and learn how to live together. There is a legitimate concern by Israel in the sense of a Palestinian authority that can be a legitimate partner with the interest of finding how to work with the state of Israel. You and I sit here in Beverly Hills as we're taping this.

46:31Hollywood, sure. Okay, Hollywood. The trauma on Israel post-October 7th. Horrifying. Unimaginable. It took us a decade on September 11. Post-Burl 11, yes. And you can't, if you're navigating a democracy, you can't basically ignore that trauma. I agree. And it's real. It's viscerally real. I agree. Finding up, and there's a sad twist of irony because the kibbutzim on the border of Gaza, when you look at the vote totals, were the most progressive in Israel politics. The most committed to peace. And they destroyed, not just Hamas, but the attacks in Dizzingov going back 20 years ago, destroyed any center of gravity in Israel for finding a partner for peace.

47:11That's just a fact for their psyche and their dynamics of their politics. The history of America with Israel is we do, America does things to create a space for a prime minister to take the risky political steps. Coddling prime minister saying yes to his actions is not in Israel's self interest. That has not worked. And this course will not work. you will not repress the palestinian aspiration for a state on the other hand the palestinians have to accept a two-state solution not a river to the sea solution but would you want to condition military aids that is not used in the west bank for example like you know you've seen the videos i've seen the smotris handing out american machine guns to extremists in the west bank like shouldn't there be some strings attached to that money a small why yes as it relates to the west bank etc I get what you're saying.

48:08As it relates to the security of Israel and in the relationship, because the biggest conflict right now in Israel is Gaza. It's not kind of Iran, although Iran is a very serious threat, but I'm saying in the sense of Haat or Lebanon.

48:24So, without going this policy, there has to be a cost-benefit to making sure that Israel realizes the decisions they make to continually repress a Palestinian aspiration. And we're paying for it. America's paying for it. And I think Israel's paying for it through their isolation, both political, strategic, and economically. I mean, look, Israeli symphony can't go perform somewhere in Europe, and a singer can't perform somewhere in Europe. People, academics can't participate in conferences on biomedicine and some of the great biomedicists and life sciences are being done in Israel or in AI technology.

49:08That isolation is going to come with a consequence. And forget that I said it. I'd like to remind the prime minister, Israel is now facing, for the first time, a net emigration. your best young minds in this series of science and technology are leaving and they're going to berlin which has its own twist of irony i said yeah you want to keep doing this go ahead because we're not going to bankroll this because you're bankrupting your own country and you have to be nothing helps as somebody who took on bb in 2009 with a lot of other people were lip-syncing the talking points out of APEC, nothing helps Israel by saying yes to them automatically.

49:48There's a cost to this, and we can't keep covering up that cost. So whether your manifestation of is it restrictions on weapons, I'm finding a series of other things that I think would hit a nerve politically and culturally in Israel, that this is not the cost we should be paying. This is not the Rubicon. I'm not disagreeing with you. The question is, which of these restrictions costs would hit the nerve to get them to wake up because right now they're living in an illusion that there is no choice they have to make the choice you're making which you think is no choice comes at a huge consequence and i'm i'm not covering that bill for you when i say i meaning the americans anymore agreed with that uh last little thing on this because i we're doing things if you want to isolate israel and you mr prime minister give this stupid speech about sparta That's you.

50:36We're not going to isolate ourselves. And what you're doing, we're not going to keep covering because we're not going to get isolated with you. That's not how we're doing this score. Yeah. Last little thing on this. So speaking of Ben Rhodes. President Clinton, who is the superpower here? The fucking superpower here, Nanyano. We're going to take a quick break. But before we do, please listen for 30 more seconds. That's your gift to me this holiday season. If you like Crooked Media, if you want to support the work we're doing, please consider becoming a subscriber. Go to crooked.com slash friends.

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52:28Ben Rhodes wrote in his book that you once jokingly referred to him as Hamas. People on the left have taken this anecdote and interpreted it as showing that you didn't care about Palestinian rights. People on the right seem to think they like to throw it in Ben's face and suggest you think he was a literal terrorist sympathizer. Do you want to clarify whether in that moment you thought Ben was living in a tunnel somewhere? I still think academia is a tunnel. No, well, first of all, you are talking about John Kerry is chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, calls the presidents on the road. He says, Hamas wants to hand me a letter.

53:00I said, well, take it. Fact. I said, bring it, bring it back so we can see it. I said, don't cut off the communication. And as soon as the president was back, it was a domestic trip. I said, I approve this. And he says, good. So that's my background. I don't remember that anecdote, but it sounds kind of accurate, so it's hard for me to argue about it. Sounds like a harmless joke. No. Well, yeah, it was probably harmless, but obviously it cut a nerve with Ben because he remembers it. But look, we had disagreements, which is what you're supposed to have on policy and how best to the goal of what we were both trying to achieve.

53:34And I don't mean just isolating this to Ben and I. It's ironic. Ben would say what he said about me and then Bibi would say what I said. I think I'm perfectly positioned. You mentioned Iran a couple of times. Do you think President Trump was right to bomb Iran's nuclear sites?

53:52So, the decision, yes, but let me walk back where I think we are. One is, we made this threat by all means. Both Democrat and Republican presidents have said all options are on the table. Here was an option, and you had a chance for once in a while, because if you didn't do it, you definitely would have been shorter than where we are from a strategic setback. I actually think one of the things, Tommy, that's underappreciated right now, and you have a lot of news around Ukraine, you have what China's doing vis-a-vis Japan and or Taiwan right now. I think the split between society and the government in Iran is an underappreciated, underreported story.

54:35I don't think three years from now, Iran's going to be what you and I are sitting here today. There's a massive drought where they're talking about moving the capital out of Tehran. Huge drought. I don't know if anybody knows this, but that's not a minor story. Two, there are bars popping up all over the place, and the government can't and won't and will not shut them down. Women now are fully dressing and doing whatever they want as it relates to the hajib law that we talk about from cosmetics, etc. Fourth, music concerts that were restricted by that are happening all over the place. fifth there was recently a marathon run in which women were not were dressing like as if they were any western city there is a gulf of legitimacy between the society and the government that is wider than we've ever experienced now a lot of people said the revolution or the collapse of the government is right around the corner so that i could also be the 20th wrong predictor but It's in the last dozen years, you've had three separate manifestations of domestic civil unrest.

55:51Something is bubbling. You've also had the economic pressure by the West led by the United States. And you have, given that the government and most importantly the security apparatus, failed in its ability to protect the country, I think the religious, and you have, lastly, I should just say, a head of state who's 80 plus years old, too old, and there's a transition of power. All those data points, always historically, but in this point to something dramatically about to happen. So the breaking. Yeah, I don't know. It doesn't mean that it goes reformist. and i should probably add the president of iran just said i can't fix this yeah that was a weird quote that was yeah that we would you and i would have grabbed the president well by the collar pulled him back into the oh we're not saying that that's no i don't know what what happened with the truth medication but we're changing the dosage here uh no i think so what something is something's not good in denmark uh to quote william shakespeare so something is amiss there and it's not on anybody's radar screen as like the last proposal between the russians and ukrainians for good reason but something long short and medium term is happening there of massive significance where the relationship between society and government is under a fundamental change does it lead to revolution i don't know but uh when you have that transition of power there's going to be a break that's my prediction so i'll just on the iranian front you think uh I mean, do you think that's a wrong analysis?

57:32No, I think it's an interesting analysis. I'm watching as closely as you are. I just think on the nuclear front, I mean, you know, the tail of the tape is, you're right, everyone, every Democrat, Obama included, Republicans said, all options are on the table. Then Obama cuts the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal. The U.S. pulls out of it unilaterally, even though the Iranians are complying. His own staff, his national security team is like, don't do this. This is making us safer. then he gets into these talks with the iranians you know sort of this iteration this last year he says he wants to cut a deal but now they're the trump administration is like bragging to the press about how they were actually lying and they were just saying they wanted more talks to you know give the israelis covers to go bomb the shit out of them that's crazy and i just worry about american credibility because who's going to cut a deal with well here's the thing though so let's take the credibility and thread it i happen to think when president obama uh said to Syria that you're gonna cross a red line and we didn't execute on that it hurt America's credibility you have a situation Israel's debombing what they're doing etc we always have said all options on the table had we not chosen to do that I don't I think American credibility would it take it a hit I'm not wrong about look I supported the agreement with Iran it's a 51 49 but I leaned on the 51.

58:52It was not a 80-20. It wasn't a 60-40. That's just my view. It was a close call. It was a bet that if you stymied the nuclear piece, that this thing that I'm talking about that's happening now, because of the demographics of Iran, the youth who wanted to be part of the world would desire. That was the basic bet. Now, what it didn't do was deal with the shiite crescent from hezbollah to syria etc and what it didn't do was deal with the technology on missile delivery which are faults to that agreement there were blemishes on that agreement they were part of it right i mean look every everything yeah as i you know i don't know if you know this but the obamacare didn't do everything exactly right you just basically you make a decision that this loaf of this slice of the loaf of the bread is good if not good enough okay and that those were two things that were big problems you had to make a decision were they problems enough not to do it.

59:49And that's why I say the president was right to do it, but I'm conscious of it. It's a 51-49 call. That was his option on the table, but he always said to get there, the military kinetic option had to be there. There was a chance, given that what Iran was doing in the final three months prior to that, of not participating in the international community and not really opening up the full kimono, you could set back their nuclear timeline. and so again that too the bombing was a 51 49 decision if you asked me i think it was the right decision i'm sure we're going to be doing it again pretty soon but you know we'll see i do that's actually the two things i'd keep a flashing light as gaza stalls and israel gets filled with their hubris specifically the prime minister and not make a not have the courage to make the most of the strategic window he has that the IDF gave him.

1:00:46I worry about his decision, what he's going to do with Hezbollah up in Lebanon, and what he's going to do that he thinks he has an opportunity to continue to keep Iran on their back heel. And I do worry about that. That's why I think America's power is not to say us closely aligned, but here is our position. And anytime you're going to endanger our strategic position, that's when we have a gulf between us. it's not our job to stay close to you it's your job to stay close to us yeah yeah um i'm going super long so you tell me when you gotta go i gotta catch a flight what time is 10 56 okay you get like we're gonna do um five no more than 10 minutes but okay great okay all right so fast around let's go world so you were biden's ambassador to japan uh rumor has it you're still an ally you're still an ally you had doubts tommy you did not think that i could go three years little three months is an ally.

1:01:38God bless you. There's a lot of turnover over there. Didn't notice that. So they have a new prime minister, Sanai Takaichi. She's the first woman to serve as prime minister. Interesting person, ultra conservative, kind of wonky nationalist like Shinzo Abe protege. But she made waves right out of the gate by saying that the Chinese invade Taiwan. That is like a so-called existential threat which would allow Japan under their constitution to deploy troops and use force. That didn't go over well in Beijing. There led to this war of words, diplomatic crisis. and then earlier this month, Tokyo says Chinese fighter jets locked radar on their F-15s for like 30 minutes.

1:02:14And it took the United States 10 days, two weeks to say to the long pole, our most entrusted ally, that we're going to stand behind you. Which is crazy. With a B-52 and some exercises. Which is crazy. Yes. And I'm wondering... And everybody in the rest of the region was watching the United States fumble the ball. Well, so that's kind of the bigger point. Like, first of all, was this a rookie move on her part? How did you read what she said? And also, how worried are we that we got like rising china increasingly nationalist and militarized japan and then the u.s who seemed willing to just like sell out taiwan and walk away if we can get an economic deal from the chinese i don't know you just saw the military package by the president that was pretty robust on the congress right it did go 11 billion dollars it was kind of robust yes it was you might be right i thought it was announced by the administration maybe i'm good i could be wrong okay so let's but let's go on the core here.

1:03:04I don't think her move was rookie. She actually enunciated what had been the policy. And I actually think what China's upset is now it's explicit. What China never wanted was the cost to be explicit. And it isolated China in the region. My constant refrain when I was in the administration and I think we were there, not that I shaped it, but I, not that I declared it, but I influenced it, which was our goal is to isolate the isolator. China's strategy is to constantly take one country, use political, economic, and other type of power to isolate them. But by building the coalition of Australia, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, India, Canada, that China's the isolator, and they knew it.

1:03:50That's why, so I think what she did is the right, she said what was always implied, never clear, and now China knows the cost. Second, they're doing a series of things on the island chains of Okinawa that go all the way to within 67 miles of Taiwan that things that we worked on that I thought would take a decade are happening. Third, my guess is what Xi is doing helps him at home and what she's doing is helping her at home politically because she's in the 70s. As I said, she's the only head of state in the entire developed world that's above 50 % and that's a telling sign. And I think she's done a unique thing.

1:04:29As a woman, she's gotten the urban centers of Japan excited about this change. On the other hand, her policies are all very old and traditional and conservative. So she's kept the LDP's rural base and brought them back into the fold when they were fading away. So she's got this kind of very interesting, solid position based on the fact that both by person and by policy, she's put together a coalition that the LDP has been struggling for 20 years to get politically.

1:05:01Third, Japan is the long pole of America's policy in the Pacific. Yeah, a lot of troops. And for her to say, one, they went up under our watch from 1 % to 2 % of GDP to defense spending from the ninth to the third largest capabilities. They just did something recently that everybody would have said you couldn't do without a constitutional change. They're selling military equipment to Australia. That used to be banned. So they are crossing thresholds because of the security threat. Now, if the United States was all in giving confidence to our allies, Korea, Japan, Australia, not doing what we did in India, which is ridiculous, we would have a partner now for a robust strategy that would say to China, here are the costs for what you're going to do.

1:05:53You better think about this. And remember one other thing. China's, in my view, first strategy vis-a-vis Taiwan is going to be more of a kind of quarantine. Yeah, we'll block it. You cannot do that given where we are in the Philippines and where Japan is on the southern islands of Okinawa that come part of that first island chain. It is not impossible, but very difficult once those capacities are fully mobilized. and so to me to short end of your comments is i think that uh it wasn't a rookie mistake and i think it's incumbent upon us not to make her look like she has to back down to china because that will not stay in the japan periphery that will reverberate in the region and if we look like we're weak and we look like we're not a permanent pacific power and presence there is no way that countries in that region and i'm thinking of korea and japan don't think over the next 10 years that they have to go nuclear yeah the if you think the cost of non-proliferation is expensive you're going to get sticker shock on proliferation no shit yeah real scary last question gotta get to a flight yeah i've been thinking a lot about like early obama era counterterrorism policies a lot of critics say there are way too many drone strikes um i the further i get from that time of government i tend to agree with them really and well i tend to feel like the so-called you know war on terror writ large has been an abject failure when you see al-qaeda like affiliates isis spreading everywhere right now the counterpoint to that is when you were chief of staff 2009 2010 there were some real deal scary threats to the united states you know the christmas day bomber uh times square bomber the guy from colorado i'll walk you through that story.

1:07:41Najibul Azazi, right? That's right. I'll never forget. Yes. Near misses. Like we luck saved us from catastrophe. Right. And then there were these counterterrorism policies and a lot of those things haven't happened again. So I'm just curious when you reflect on that time and you think about how you'd keep the country safe from terrorism, how that informs your thinking. I've always, so I don't know if you remember this story. some young man in the NSA picked up a word on the telecommunications that said the marriage worked. And he just caught him and says, nobody says that. And then he starts to unravel this and where the call was originated made.

1:08:23Now, all the smarty pants poo-pooed this kid. well i said and i not just me but the president myself but you know biden the uh well run it down turns out they find out he goes to walmart buys 10 backpacks he goes to one of those kind of bulk buying you know when you buy stuff for the beauty show all these giant cases that are essential materials for homemade bombs and then all the smarty pants who thought the kid was out of his mind because he caught the word the marriage worked that's what you say after 20 years not in 10 seconds that he was on to something then we put we started finding other stuff in his credit card and then we put helicopters and we find out he's starting to drive to new york to new york yeah and we had cars to new jersey so i'll never forget that 96 hours i must have aged and I think the president did too.

1:09:20And we aged, although we had confidence we had him, in a sense we had him in our line of vision. But that was breathtaking. And there were other events that you have identified. There's a guy named Najib Ulazazi who, along with two friends, was going to blow up the New York City subway. I don't know if you remember, but the FBI got ahead of the police department. Or, no, I think the police department. No, the police department moved ahead. And it is a classic case of the FBI and local law enforcement not exactly being on the same page. But that said, got him before anything. And the imam, it's not clear whether he knew it or was protecting him or was acting like he didn't know him, etc., or what his intent was.

1:09:58So to me, I haven't, you know, Tommy, I've got to be honest. I hadn't really thought about it in the sense, did our actions have a reaction that made the situation worse? I do think you have to think about two things. One, people are trying to do harm to the United States. our border, specifically on the South, have been used by enemies for their advantage. And you have to be, that doesn't, Donald Trump pulling people's green cards, not letting kids go to school, that's not the end of the South. But I haven't thought a lot recently about whether the policies we were pursuing in the quote-unquote, in the name of the war on terror, both overseas and here, actually perpetuated or accentuated, because I think actually on one scorecard, we haven't really had a local terrorism attack vis-a-vis kind of a 9-11 line.

1:10:51So at one level from a homeland front, it has worked. Whether it has created its own,

1:11:00the terrorist cells, there's as many before, there's just more of them spread out and smaller. That just may be what both of those are happening in real time, which is we've protected the home front, but we've created more threats overseas. Yeah, it's a complicated story. Rahm Emanuel, thank you so much for sitting down. Yeah, thank you. Appreciate it. Great to see you. Could ask you another hour. Happy and a healthy new year. And Mazel Tov to you and your wife and the young kids. Thank you. If you want to listen to Pod Save America ad-free and get access to exclusive podcasts, go to crooked.com slash friends to subscribe on Supercast, Substack, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts.

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