Josh Rogin
@joshrogin • 259,950 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
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“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 Rogin2,102,582 views • 6 months ago
“What Trump is doing is he's instituting a worldwide trade extortion scheme. The tariffs are not about any particular outcome. They're about going to each country and saying, ‘Hey, nice country you got there. Would be a shame if something happened to it.’ And what he's seeking from each of these countries is submission. He wants them to submit their economic Independence and sovereignty to him.” “And of course, the effect that that has in those countries is the opposite of what he wants. It puts the incentive to all of the politicians in Canada to oppose him, because if they do submit, they'd be thrown out of office right away. So what he's done is he's ensured the failure of his own policy and in doing so, ensured that the retaliation will come.” “Now, while it's true that Canada will suffer more than the Americans, it's also true that the Canadians are so pissed off at us right now - 80% of Canadians are against the United States, for the first time in living memory - that they're willing to suffer more for the point of maintaining their sovereignty and standing up to Trump. And that's not the case in Michigan. That's not the case in Maine. People in America are not a fan of these trade wars. They’re not on board with Trump’s strategy.” “So there will be political consequences, not for Trump, because he is not running, but for Republicans. But it's pretty clear that Trump doesn't care about that.”
Josh Rogin483,912 views • 1 month ago
“In any normal world, the President of the United States addressing the United Nations, threatening war crimes, celebrating the plunder of another country, and then threatening to start another war on top of that, would be considered unusual. It would be considered shocking. And what was most shocking to me about today’s speech is that it wasn’t shocking. Everybody heard Trump threaten war crimes, celebrate the plunder of a country, threaten to attack another country. And everyone was like ‘Meh, that’s just Trump being Trump.’” “And the reaction, of course, from the Iranians and everyone else to his threat to commit these war crimes was like, ‘Oh, he’s bluffing.’ Because everybody knows he’s bluffing. Because he’s done it so many times. So he destroyed the credibility and morality of the U.S. message at the United Nations for nothing. Because everybody knows he doesn’t want to escalate. We don’t have the munitions. He doesn’t want to do more damage to the economy.” “And after the midterm elections, nothing changes. Trump is still going to want to bluff and he’s still going to want demands from the Iranians that they are never going to agree to. But nothing changes on the Iranian side either. They’re not going to change their desire to stick it to Trump and to stick it to the United States. And that’s the quagmire that some of us have been predicting for the last seven months. We’re in it now.”
Josh Rogin183,382 views • 25 days ago
“It’s pretty amazing that the Treasury Secretary announced an economic ‘D-Day’ on Sunday. And then on Monday, when ‘D-Day’ was supposed to come, he didn't announce what it was. There were no specifics. There was no actual action. It's just a empty threat at this point. If that had happened in the original ‘D-Day” we would all be speaking German right now.” “This is not a serious effort until there's an actual serious action. And until then, the credibility of the Trump administration is understandably not taken very seriously after all this time. So why would the Iranians take it seriously? Why would the Canadians take it seriously? Why would the Chinese take it seriously? Everybody knows that Trump always chickens out.” “So if he's going to announce an economic ‘D-Day’ and not follow through on that economic ‘D-Day,’ he's again undermined his own purpose, which is to raise the pressure on Iran. And that's not to say it would have worked even if he had done it.”
Josh Rogin382,881 views • 1 month ago
Taiwan does not need to declare independence. Taiwan is already an independent country. “President Trump already conceded a huge point to President Xi on Taiwan. By saying Taiwan's a negotiating chip, he changed 50 years of U.S. policy. We're supposed to support Taiwan's defense, regardless of what Beijing thinks. They're not supposed to have a say in it. So already that's a big concession.” “Now going forward, what Xi Jinping wants is for President Trump to say that the U.S. ‘opposes’ Taiwan independence. Right now, the language is we ‘do not support’ Taiwanese independence. And that change is really important to the Chinese for some reason. And so Trump might do it.” “But it's not really important to the Taiwanese, because they're not about to declare independence. And Taiwanese President Lai has made it very clear that Taiwan is already independent. It's an independent country. It acts like an independent country. And so they don't have to declare independence.” “But this is an obsession with the Chinese Communist Party. So it's something that Xi wants. I don't know if President Trump is going to concede it. He very well might.”
Josh Rogin133,086 views • 21 days ago
“I've interviewed President Trump about his relationship with Xi Jinping. President Trump thinks they are friends. He thinks they really like each other. And he thinks that this friendship can get all sorts of things for him and for the United States. He thinks that President Xi is not going to attack Taiwan, because he wouldn't do that to his friend Donald Trump. That's how trump really thinks about it.” “Trump is also not a China hawk. In his first term, he had a lot of China hawks around, Pompeo and Pence and these kinds of guys. Not not so much anymore. And what Trump believes is that the U.S. and China should have sort of an agreement to sort of divvy up the world - spheres of influence - and then just sort of get along as much as possible. That's also what XI jinping believes.” “Now, the problem, of course, is that the on the Chinese side, they're doing a lot of things that threaten our national security, our public health, our prosperity. Then why the praise? Well, because Trump is not a China hawk. He doesn't really care about that kind of stuff. He thinks it's about business. It's about investment. It's about keeping the relationship in check so that he can pursue his other adventures, like in Iran, et cetera.” “And you could say that plays into XI Jinping’s hands. Because if you think about the things that are really threatening us. China's expanding militarily. They're interfering in democracies. They're stealing our intellectual property. They're providing intelligence to the Iranians to kill Americans in the Middle East. It's really hard to address those things when the main goal of your policy is just to keep everything copacetic.”
Josh Rogin131,991 views • 23 days ago
“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 Rogin1,109,640 views • 7 months ago
“Benjamin Netanyahu says that New York Jews tell him that New York's not safe. I know a lot of Jews in New York. I talk to them. I'm related to some of them. They have lots of different views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, all over the map. And many of them are horrified by what Israel has done. And many of them support Israel. So he doesn't speak for New York Jews. Nobody really does.” “And I think what you're seeing here is that he's reacting personally to Mamdani’s attacks and failing to realize that actually, Israel's support amongst young people, not just in New York but on the left and the right in America, is going down. But he doesn't want to deal with that. He can't help fighting the personal battle.”
Josh Rogin110,721 views • 23 days ago
“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 views • 4 months ago
“When the Iranians rose up against their brutal regime and were slaughtered in the streets, Trump said help is on the way, and help was not on the way. And then he told the Iranians to rise up, and then he threw them under the bus. He didn't give any economic or political support to the actual Iranian opposition.” “What's he doing right now? What he's doing is he's essentially trying to make a deal with the IRGC, which is the same regime. He killed the Ayatollah and now he wants to make a deal with the Ayatollah. The same thing he did in Venezuela. He promised democracy and he delivered an actual entrenchment of the authoritarian tyrants.” “And that is what Trump is about. He's about deals and corruption and not about democracy and human rights. We see it in in Venezuela and Iran. And we may see it in Cuba also soon.”
Josh Rogin161,265 views • 1 month ago
“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 Rogin153,011 views • 2 months ago
“This idea that if we regulate AI, that China will win, is not true. And the way that we know that is because China regulates AI. They have the most regulation of their AI than any country in the world. And they're moving very, very fast. They're almost at where we are or maybe going to beat us. And they have a ton of regulation.” “So the tech bros in the U.S. that say if we regulate AI, the Chinese going to win - that’s a self-serving argument. That isn't true. But at the same time, we have to understand that Chinese regulation of AI is meant to protect the Chinese Communist Party. When we talk about regulation of AI, we're talking about protecting our privacy, our citizens, our data, our democracy. They don't care about that in China. They don't have that.”
Josh Rogin55,324 views • 1 month ago
“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 Rogin448,921 views • 9 months ago
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 views • 7 months ago
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 Rogin861,573 views • 2 years ago
“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 views • 2 months ago
We can regulate AI and also win the race with China. It’s a false choice. “The U.S. tech bros and the Trump people, they're basically in it for the money. The Chinese Communist Party is a genocidal dictatorship that's in it for their own power - and they mean us harm. That's worse. So we don't want that to happen.” “And if if they were to win, it basically means that all the other countries of the world are going to build their tech stacks on Chinese tech rather than American tech. That's a big threat. We don't want the Global South and Europe and Asia to be riddled with Chinese AI, because then China's going to be able to assert a great amount of power.” “At the same time, anyone who tells you that means we should just let American tech companies run wild with no regulation is trying to fool you into thinking that's actually the solution to the problem. There’s a middle ground - where we regulate AI and still win the race - that’s what we have to try to figure out.”
Josh Rogin32,314 views • 28 days ago
“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 views • 6 months ago
“You don't need a classified report to know that the military is under great strain. Six months of war, 18 U.S. Service members dead, 750 plus wounded, 18 U.S. bases damaged. We hear the stories from service members and their families every single day. It's all over the media. It's all over social media. It's obvious and clear and public that the military is under great, great strain.” “Now, you can argue that that's worth it or that's not worth it. That's an opinion. But it's a fact that the military is under great strain. And what we learned from my Washington Post colleagues is that our military commanders agree with that, as well they should. And Trump can't say that he's not aware of that, because it was in the Washington Post.” “So he is aware of it. It doesn't seem like he cares. It doesn't seem like he's going to do anything about it. He believes that his objectives, whatever they may be on any given day, are worth it. But the fact is that the longer this goes on, the higher the strain on our military and their families, and the more it takes away from all the other threats.” “And there's a reason that Putin is escalating in Ukraine, because he knows that we don't have the ability to keep Ukraine flush with interceptors. And there's a reason the Chinese are increasing pressure on Taiwan, because they know we're withdrawing troops from the region. So all of these things are connected, and all of these costs have consequences.”
Josh Rogin40,929 views • 1 month ago
“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 Rogin63,629 views • 2 months ago