Josh Rogin
@joshrogin • 259,125 subscribers
The Cable on Substack https://t.co/yvpUraUhTX Lead Global Security Analyst, Washington Post Author, Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi & the Battle for the 21st Century
Videos
“Basically, in order to buy Scott's defense of ICE, you would have to ignore what everybody knows, which is that they set up this ICE system in a hurry, with billions of dollars, by hiring thousands of unqualified people and then denying them the proper training to do that job. And then giving them these quotas for arrests, where they let them loose on these communities in a systematic way. The direction came from the top. The system was designed from the top. And it functioned as designed, which was to terrorize these communities. And everybody knows that. And the abuses are a predictable and predicted outcome of that system, from the very beginning. And everybody knows that.”
Josh Rogin151,969 Aufrufe • vor 9 Tagen
“Somebody shorted the oil markets today by hundreds of millions of dollars exactly 20 minutes before Trump made his announcement that everything was going to be great. And if you see that once, it could be a coincidence. But that’s happened at least three times, if not more, since the war began. That’s a pattern.” “And what that suggests is that there’s rampant corruption and insider self-dealing going on with the president’s up and down predictions of what’s going to happen tomorrow in the negotiations and in the markets. And I’m sure that that’s being investigated. We can’t prove it, but it seems like the corruption that we’re seeing in our government, maybe not the President, but people who are in the know and the markets, is having a priority over the actual negotiations to end the war. And that’s a crazy thing that our system has never seen before.”
Josh Rogin2,101,950 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
“The Chinese government has a policy of state-sponsored intense competition. They create an ecosystem and flood it with money and support. But they don’t choose their winners. They let the Chinese companies compete amongst themselves. And then, once national champions emerge, they help them spread all over the world and take market share away from other countries.” “They’ll steal as much intellectual property as they can. They’ll also innovate. And then, they will use what amounts to unfair trade practices to gobble up market share anywhere they can, where they are not stopped. And that’s an industrial policy we’ve seen time and time again. We’ve seen it with EV’s, robots, drones. We’ve seen it with telecom. There’s a reason Huawei is everywhere all over the world.” “AI, in that sense, is no different. China sees it as a worldwide industrial, economic and ideological competition with the United States - that they intend to win.”
Josh Rogin30,713 Aufrufe • vor 4 Tagen
“The President has exactly two choices. He can pay Iran to open the Strait, or he can suffer the indignity of continuing this quagmire longer and longer. And because I listen to the Scott Jennings radio show religiously, I know that the White House has no intention of paying them to open up the Strait. A senior administration official told Scott Jennings exclusively, you should check it out, that they’re only going to pay them at the end of the process, not at the beginning of the process. The Iranians, by the way, are not going to go for that.” “That means this deal that they’ve been bragging about, which usually they brag about right before the markets open. It’s usually right before the markets open that there’s a lot of good news, and then somehow the markets go up. And then over the course of a couple of days, we find out that it was all BS. It turns out that that’s all BS because what’s going to happen is that they’re not going to want to strike this horrible deal, according to Scott Jennings’s top level sources. And that means that the deal is not going to be struck, and the war is going to go on, quite sadly, actually.”
Josh Rogin595,654 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
“I don’t think the European countries are going to come and bail out of this mess. You have to think about the context here. Trump just spent a year hurting their economies on purpose, threatening to attack NATO, threatening to pull out of NATO. And then the Trump administration started this war without even bothering to consult them, didn’t take their interests into account until he needed them. And their populations are at historic levels of anti-Americanism because of how we’ve treated them over the last year.” “And they are democracies, so I don’t think their leaders are going to be able to overcome that. And why would they? It’s much easier, and you’ll see a bunch of countries doing this, to negotiate with the Iranians. The Iranians are setting up a system whereby they let the ships pass that they want to let pass. Just in the last 24 hours, they let several ships pass for countries that they’re not at war with. So if you were any country in the world, depending on this Strait, it’s much easier to make a deal with the Iranians than to send your ships down the Strait, to make them sitting ducks for Iranian drones and missiles, which seems crazy reckless.”
Josh Rogin1,109,413 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten
“I think Trump is stuck in Iran. The president knows that he has no clear path out of this war that he started. He understands intellectually that this is terrible for his party. But he's not willing to do what's necessary to help the party and help the country, by getting us out of this thing as quickly as possible, in the most dignified way as possible. And I believe him. He said he doesn't care. I believe him, he doesn't care about the midterms. He doesn't care about the Republican party. Let's take the President at his word.” “It’s terrible for the Republicans, but it’s not going to really affect Trump that much. He's not running. Mike Johnson? He's got a different problem. He's going to lose his majority. He's going to lose his speakership, potentially, because gas prices are too high and because Americans are suffering and inflation is out of control and people are dissatisfied with our foreign policy. And all of those things are under Trump’s control. But he refuses to lift a finger to help his party out. Whether or not that's in his self-interest or he's just too stubborn to admit that he's wrong, I guess really doesn't matter the end of the day.”
Josh Rogin102,359 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
“Here we are, six years after the coronavirus outbreak, and we still don’t know for sure how it started. Which is kind of important, because if we don’t know how it started, we can’t really know how to prevent the next one. And for a lot of reasons, that issue got completely politicized over the last six years. And this hearing didn’t help in that regard. It’s Kabuki. It’s a show. On both sides, actually… It’s a lot of heat and no light.” “When it comes to Fauci, in any normal situation, you could say, well, if he’s got nothing to hide, he could just talk. But we’re not in a normal environment. We’re in an environment where the Justice Department indicted Comey for an Instagram post on the beach. Fauci has a pardon, it’s not a future pardon. He doesn’t have immunity. If Rand Paul really wanted answers, he could give him immunity, but he didn’t do that. So, knowing that he could be indicted for almost anything in this era, I completely understand why he took the fifth.” “There’s a lot of evidence that Fauci seriously considered the lab leak theory, in private. But he and his friends, in public, always poo-pooed it and talked it down… There’s a ton of U.S. government information that we still have not seen. And that’s the information that led the FBI, the Department of Energy, and more recently the CIA to conclude that there’s a preponderance of evidence, not proof, but more evidence than not that the bat coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan was somehow related to the bat coronavirus labs in Wuhan.” “There’s a lot of research that American and Chinese researchers were doing in Wuhan on making bat coronaviruses more dangerous. You can call it Gain of Function or not, it doesn’t matter what you call it… The idea was to figure out how viruses might evolve so that we could prevent them. But if the viruses broke out of the lab, then we actually caused the pandemic, which is a tough thing to wrap your head around.” “This was government-sponsored research by scientists in America and China who were trying to do the right thing. They weren’t trying to start a pandemic. But they may have started a pandemic. And the fact that this is politicized means we can’t get to those answers. But those answers are still there. Something happened in Wuhan. We need to figure out what it was, so we can prevent the next pandemic.” Watch my entire segment about the Rand-Fauci hearing battle with Boris Sanchez on CNN News Central.
Josh Rogin63,503 Aufrufe • vor 24 Tagen
“What's going on here is very clear. It's a targeting of the Somali and Somali American communities that was directed by the President of the United States in public, on television, repeatedly. He called them garbage. He said they should go back to where they came from. And then all of the sudden, you've got the Treasury Secretary, HHS, DHS, the FBI, and every MAGA YouTuber flooding the Somali community is obviously a targeted attack on this community, which by the way the vast majority are American citizens. And that's not the way that law enforcement is supposed to work. Law enforcement is evidence based, not identity based in the country of the United States of America, as far as I'm aware.”
Josh Rogin448,777 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten
Me: “You have to ask yourself the question, if Trump says the war is going to end ‘very soon,’ then what’s the $200 billion for? Because if the war is going to end very soon, then it doesn’t cost $200 billion. And he gave us a hint. He said, ‘Oh, I want you to fund the next war.’ What’s that one? ‘Oh, it’s Cuba.’ What are you going to do? ‘Oh, I’m going to take Cuba.’ What does that mean? ‘Don’t worry about it.’” Moynihan: Don’t you think we don’t want to telegraph to the enemy our exact timeline? Me: “I wish they would at least tell the president, because he doesn’t seem to know how long this is going to to take.”
Josh Rogin252,835 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten
“If bombing the Iranians was going to solve the problem, the problem would have been solved by now. We know for a fact that just bombing them is not going to solve the problem and we haven’t heard any alternative from the president about what he’s going to do to get us out of this war, which has already cost a lot of American lives and treasure.” “Trump bluffed. They called his bluff and now he’s stuck. And all of his threats are falling on deaf ears and he’s getting frustrated. And we have to start to entertain the possibility that Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff don’t know what they’re doing. Because they got us into this. They have no way to get us out. And we either have to double down or go home and neither of those is a really good option.”
Josh Rogin66,599 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Today I visited my alma mater Gorzów University to see for myself what these protests and the tent encampment was really all about. People are free to make their own judgments based on what they see in this video, but here are some of my impressions. First of all, the protesters were not violent, not anti-Semitic, and nothing around the protests made me as a journalist or a Jew or a random passer by feel unsafe. There were about 200 people, 3 dozen tents, and a visible but quiet police presence at every entry point to the “encampment,” which is surrounded by metal gates. The protesters inside the gates have been there for more than 2 days, don’t have anywhere to go to the bathroom, and have no intention of leaving anytime soon. Those outside the gates can’t get in, meaning the encampment itself won’t grow although tents are popping up around it. The leaders held a press conference and said they won’t leave until their demands are met, which include the university divesting of all financial connections to what they called the “Zionist regime.” They said 9 GW students have been suspended for protesting. They said the president of the university refused to speak with them. They called for the police to leave campus. They emphasized that they believe antisemitism is wrong but anti Zionism is right. Their chants speak for themselves. If you are asking me, I don’t personally agree with what they are chanting. Specifically, I don’t think the term “genocide” is right but I do think there is lots of evidence the Israeli forces may have committed war crimes in Gaza and those alleged crimes must be investigated. But I was not there to express my views. I was there to observe and tell you my readers what I saw. I saw lots of young people who have lost all hope that the system will do anything to address their grievances or the suffering of their community members. At the same time, I saw a protest effort that is demanding things it must know it cannot achieve through these means. That tells me this is only the beginning and the goal of finding any common ground between these communities is tragically getting farther and farther from reach. #gaza #palestine #israel #gw
Josh Rogin861,494 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren
“Trump was bluffing. They called his bluff. And he backed down. And you can say that he was doing this to soothe the markets. Another way to say that is that he’s doing this to manipulate the markets. And what have we seen? We’ve seen the president completely change his explanation of what he wants. Just days ago, he was calling for unconditional surrender. Now he’s saying, okay, we want to make a deal with such and such terms. And this is complete strategic incoherence. And despite the fact that we have a military that can hit any target that trump tells it to hit, if we have no strategic direction, then there’s no clear way to get to the end of this war.” “Now, it’s a good thing, I think, that Trump has realized that he’s going to have to deal with the Iranians. But to do so in a way that has no coherence and no actual plan for extricating the U.S. out of this war is is diplomatic malpractice.”
Josh Rogin158,744 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten
Ukraine’s head of the presidential office Kyrylo Budanov addresses the McCain Institute Sedona Forum and says Ukraine doesn’t believe Putin really wants a ceasefire: “We completely understand the real purpose of Putin's call to President Trump on April 29 - they want the May 9 parade in Moscow to proceedpeacefully for a few hours and then they will resumethe attacks.” “We do not want any truce to become a tactical deception by the Russian Federation. At the same time, we always respond positively to proposals for a real truce with the Russian Federation, if there are any.”
Josh Rogin93,552 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
“Trump’s message is, ‘Don’t believe your eyes. Everything’s fine. We’re very close.’ That’s obviously not true. And what Vance offered is a slightly more honest picture, which is that this could take several months. The problem is that Vance doesn’t seem to think that’s a bad thing. He doesn’t seem to realize that Americans are suffering. Our allies are getting bombed. Our alliances are getting weakened. And the war is dragging our economy into an abyss.” “And just to say, it could take a couple of days or a week or several months is a completely unacceptable answer to the American people after they entered a war with no justification, no legal explanation, no strategy, and no realistic plan for getting us out of this thing.”
Josh Rogin61,960 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
“Of course, President Trump would like to have some help from China. But here’s the problem. China is Iran’s ally. They’re on the other side of this. China, Iran, Russia, North Korea, that’s that team. We’re on the other team. So it’s very unlikely that China is going to help Trump get himself out of the mess that he created.” “Napoleon once said, once your enemy is making a mistake, never interrupt them. And that’s XI jinping’s strategy here, to let America continue to commit superpower suicide, because all China has to do is sit back and collect the benefits.”
Josh Rogin77,142 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
“President Trump would like the war to be over soon. He’s clearly signaling he wants the war to be over soon. But the Iranians have a different strategy. Their strategy is to stretch this out as long as possible. Their strategy is to inflict as much pain on the U.S. and the world economy as possible. And that’s why Trump’s strategy of blockading their blockade really doesn’t make any sense when you think about it. They’re going to blockade the Strait, so we’re going to blockade the Strait to counter their blockade of the Strait? It’s a recipe for continued stalemate.”
Josh Rogin92,298 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
“The real cost is not to the United States, it’s to the Iranian people. Because Trump said, ‘Help is on the way.” And help was not on the way. And now this deal will enshrine the Iranian regime, for a generation, with American support and cooperation, and send a message to people all over the world who are brave enough to stand up to their dictators and despots, that when America says help is on the way, that doesn’t mean anything.” “And that’s the real cost of this. It’s that we’ve promised the Iranian people that we care about their lives, and now we are throwing them to the wolves. No matter what happens with the $300 billion or the Strait of Hormuz, those people will have to wait another several years before they get another chance at dignity. And it’s partially our fault, for raising their hopes and then squashing them unceremoniously because Trump just changed his mind and doesn’t care anymore.”
Josh Rogin39,979 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
“If you would have told me a year ago that zelensky would be up and Bibi would be down, in Trump’s estimation, I would have said you were crazy. But that’s exactly what happened today. Trump is very enthused about the way that Ukraine is doing in its war, and he's not happy with Bibi at all. And he said so many, many times.” “The bottom line is that he's not going to escalate. He's not going to attack a mountain. It's a mountain, by the way. You can bomb it all you want, it’s still going to be a mountain. So it doesn't really make a lot of sense in the first place. But even if you could, Trump’s not going to do it. And so he sent Bibi packing.” “Everybody knows that the Iranians are waiting, because they don't care about economic pain, because it's a dictatorship and they can suffer economic pain for years and years and years. They're not coming up for election. You know who's coming up for election? Republicans in November. And the Iranians are going to keep the pressure on those Republicans and on the administration until November, if they can. It's a very obvious and smart strategy.”
Josh Rogin16,676 Aufrufe • vor 24 Tagen
What I heard most from Europeans here at the Munich Security Conference is how do we protect ourselves from the United States. They call it “de-risking.” They are reducing their dependence on us because they don’t see us as a reliable ally. And who could blame them? #msc2026
Josh Rogin95,551 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten
Maher Tarabishi is in ICE detention. He was the primary caregiver for his chronically ill son Wael. Wael died yesterday, needlessly, without being able to say goodbye to his father. Is this what we want America to be? Maher Tarabishi should be released now. He should be able to attend his son’s funeral. #FreeMaherTarabishi
Josh Rogin75,636 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten