Biden Addresses SOTU, Iran Holds Elections, Bosnia’s Pipeline Feud, and More

MCMAHON:
In the coming week, President Biden delivers the last State of the Union of his current term, Iran holds elections for its parliament and Assembly of Experts, and Bosnia and Herzegovina marks Independence Day while enmeshed in a gas pipeline feud. It's February 29, 2024 time for The World Next Week. I'm Bob McMahon.

ROBBINS:
And I'm Carla Anne Robbins.

MCMAHON:
Carla, I don't get to say this that often, but Happy Leap Day.

ROBBINS:
Nobody gets to say this very often.

MCMAHON:
No, no. And happy birthday to those who have that quadrennial birthday celebration on this day, by the way. But let's start here in Washington where President Biden's State of the Union address is scheduled for next Thursday. As we went to tape this podcast, Carla, lawmakers appeared to have put off an immediate government shutdown, but deep divisions certainly remain. And also as we were taping this podcast, both President Biden and former President Trump were making competing visits to the U.S. border with Mexico. So how to judge the State of the Union at this point, Carla?

ROBBINS:
So Bob, we are professional writers and I am always amazed at this task confronting State of the Union speech writers, the jockey inside the administration and out to get the president to talk about what they want him to talk about is always really intense. We're going to highlight my favorite program? Are you going to pitch yourself in a specific way? And this year the tension has just got to be off the charts because you've got a presidential campaign. You've just got multitude of fast moving domestic and international crises. I mean, today we have this awful massacre in Gaza versus the fact of this question whether there's going to be a ceasefire in Gaza before he speaks. You've got the chaos in Washington policymaking or not policymaking. Any drafts that are written today are inevitably going to have to be drafted and redrafted and redrafted and redrafted probably until the very last moment.

The president's aides who are most focused on the election, which I pretty much guess is everybody, are hoping to use the speech to highlight Biden's vigor and wit and possibly his Irish temper, as a way to dispel concerns including among Democrats about his age. The White House has really worked hard to beat back that special council's report that described him as a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory. And he did a great job last year. He really boxed the Republicans in. He went off script in a really great way and they're really hoping for another performance like that, but the Republicans aren't going to let that special counsel report go and Robert Hur, the special counsel, is scheduled to testify before the House Judiciary Committee five days after the State of the Union. So that's going to be a really big focus, is just really just the performance nature of it.

As for the substance, well we're going to see where we stand on the budget battles and whether Biden approaches this as a uniter or uses it to highlight GOP dysfunction. The vote on the first tranche, the thing that they seem to have made a deal on is the day after the State of the Union, and if it looks like it's going well, maybe he will be the uniter, but he's got another deadline, the 22nd, so just a few weeks after this and that's up in the air, which is why they're going to be drafting and redrafting what is going to be his tack on the budget fights. Unless there's a breakthrough, he's certainly going to be making a big push on Ukraine funding and inevitably he's going to take another run at Trump's invitation to Russia to invade some of America's closest allies. And I wouldn't be surprised if he reappraised what is this extraordinary line from a few weeks back when he declared that, "No other president in history has ever bowed down to a Russian dictator. Let me say this as clearly as I can, I never will, for God's sake. It's shameful, it's dangerous, it's un-American." I mean that's about as strong a statement, and I think you're going to hear something just like that in the speech. 

Putin's threat today in his own version of the State of the Union that Russia could use nuclear weapons if the West send troops, is almost certainly going to have to draw some sort of response. And I think that's going to be central to the State of the Union. "I, Joe Biden, am standing up to Russia and Donald Trump is not." He's going to have to showcase a laundry list of domestic accomplishments, high employment, a drop in inflation, although I think there's going to have to be a lot more empathy because I don't think Americans still yet feel this drop of inflation. And then of course the border, as you mentioned. We'll see what he says on his visit today, highlighting the fact that the Republicans could have had an immigration deal, pushing the GOP into taking, "yes," on an immigration deal when Trump told them to be, "no." I think that's also going to be a big focus for the State of the Union.

MCMAHON:
It's quite a lineup that you just went through, Carla. And you're right, for all the angst over the scripted points of the speech, it's the unscripted moments that sometimes get outsized tension as well, and both will be watched closely. You can't overestimate what's at stake in a lot of ways. It's called a very political speech in a lot of ways, and it certainly is, but it's also, it is an important speech for the country to hear. There are very few single moments where Americans gather around anything, and it's not like they're going to gather around the Super Bowl to watch the State of the Union, however there are reactions.

ROBBINS:
Unless Taylor Swift comes. Do you think Taylor Swift is going to be there?

MCMAHON:
Well, that's an interesting point there. There have been some hunches that potentially there'll be some other special guests showing up that'll get attention, potentially the widow of Alexei Navalny. We'll see. But this is going to be an important point on these areas that you mentioned. We tend to look through the foreign policy lens certainly, but really the State of the Union has a throughline to foreign policy. And so all this is going to be at stake in this speech and the entire week is going to be really packed, Carla. So we're in for a particularly intense week of politicking and maybe some policy in the process.

ROBBINS:
So the other thing that is going to be a big focus, and this is going to be reproductive rights, and that's going to get an enormous amount of focus, and we always focus on who are going to be the guests. And the first guest we heard about is Kate Cox from Dallas, and she's the woman who sued the state of Texas to terminate her non-viable pregnancy. And she's the first adult to do so since Roe v. Wade. And this whole question of IVF, which the Republicans have been really roiling about since this Alabama court ruling, and I think as you said, a big through line of this is going to be this notion that the Republicans are extreme and that Congress won't pass a bill protecting IVF. And I think whether it's on domestic issues or on international issues, it's going to be, "Why won't you take 'yes' for a reasonable answer?" And so we'll see this in the guests they invite, we'll see this in the speech, but in the end of the day, his delivery is probably going to get more of a focus than anything else.

MCMAHON:
Yeah. And it is, among the many subplots to look for, is the extent to which both parties are united or not in their various responses to themes. The Republicans, as has been said repeatedly, are really divided on foreign policy issues. It is a fairly small group that has been blocking a deal on Ukraine aid, and yet when Biden references Ukraine and support from Ukraine, it's going to be very interesting to see what the Republican response is, both from Senate and the House side, just as one example. And yeah, IVF is another issue that has a lot more delineations than some of the other policy issues. So yeah, it's going to be a temperature taking of parties and of atmospherics and as you say, of the president's own capabilities. He just had a physical the other day, it seemed to be no major issues, but presidential physicals aren't necessarily great revealers as we've learned in recent history.

ROBBINS:
So on Ukraine, the national security advisor was on the shows on Sunday and he talked about how he had spoken with speaker Johnson about it and he claimed that Johnson said he wanted to pass the Ukraine funding. And it was really interesting that Sullivan talked about how one person can bend the course of history. He said right now it comes down to his willingness to actually step up to the plate and discharge his responsibility and history is watching. It's really interesting that pitch that they're giving to him. And we might hear that from Biden as well, that history is watching what we do in Ukraine. So a lot to watch there and we'll see what the response is from, "Got more people screaming out liar." The loss of norms as well. So lots to watch there. 

So Bob, let's shift to Iran. Tomorrow, Iranians are going to elect new members to their parliament and the Assembly of Experts, and that's the body that will at some point in the next few years choose a new supreme leader. And they do that from within their own ranks. And this is the first election since protests broke out in September of '22 over the death and custody of Mahsa Amini. Everyone's saying, "Go out and vote." All the leaders are saying, "Go out and vote," but Iranians seem pretty disillusioned with their government. What are you looking for in these elections?

MCMAHON:
Well, I'm not looking for change, Carla. I think first of all, it's important to point out, as you said, it's the first vote since the death of Mahsa Amini, which triggered extraordinary protests, so extraordinary that some seasoned Iran watchers said this could really be a game changer, and yet it wasn't. But even before that set of incidents happened in 2022, there was election in the 2020 parliamentary elections and 2021 presidential vote in which really low turnout, I mean embarrassingly low turnout. There seems to be an ever-growing rift between the ruling clerics, the ruling and aging clerics and the young population. Iran has an incredibly young population who don't have much prospect for a future given the state of the economy, given the state of the clerics, the corruption, the grip on all of the power chambers. 

And so we should note that the crackdown that happened after the Mahsa Amini protests resulted in something like five hundred protestors killed. Thousands were arrested. The country continues to execute prisoners at one of the highest rates in the world, and it's among the reasons including its ongoing nuclear program that it faces sanctions. Iran and Russia are the most sanctioned countries in the world. And so that has obviously had a strong effect, much more of an effect, on its economy seemingly than Russia's, although Iranian energy still seems to get out into certain markets including to China. 

But I'll focus on the Assembly of Experts first because this is, as you said, the body whose main task is to choose the next supreme leader. Ayatollah Khamenei is eight-four, going to be eighty-five in April. He's been said to be ailing for years. So this is seen to be the election that will pick the next leader. Reportedly, there are already intense discussions going on behind closed doors in Iran about who will succeed the supreme leader. It has been bandied about that the current President Raisi might be among those who are candidates or Khamenei's son, his name has surfaced as candidate. 

He's been the supreme leader since '89 and he's ruled deftly if you consider the way he's been able to hold onto power play, power centers against each other. And now you have in Iran, again, this very conservative-aligned presidency, parliament, judiciary. He has the Iranian Revolutionary Guard force that reports directly to him, the supreme leader. And so he's lined up things in which seemingly no, let's say pragmatist forces...Pragmatist is a term that in Iran means something different than maybe other places but at the very least it means not the hardcore conservative line, but even that is being affected. 

The former president, Hassan Rouhani, who's considered a moderate in the Iranian context, was actually disqualified from running again in the assembly of experts vote. So he had been serving on it for a number of years, and he's protested that, but it's seeming like they're trying to stack the deck so that there are conservatives who will walk in lockstep with whatever the supreme leader wants in terms of a succession plan, and then that happened as smoothly as possible. So that's a long-winded way of saying to your question, Carla, I don't expect any changes and I think we should just be looking to see which individuals might emerge from these elections in any extra prominence and that those are the ones we should start focusing on in the rundown to the new supreme leader.

ROBBINS:
So in this parliamentary election, there's just a huge number of candidates.

MCMAHON:
Yes. One of the things that experts are saying is that they deliberately allowed an extra amount of candidates in there to try to show, in some way, of countering this sense that they are aloof and out of touch with the people, that they're going to allow more people to run, professionals, independents.

ROBBINS:
What is it, fifteen thousand candidates?

MCMAHON:
Fifteen thousand for 290 seats, yeah. So they're going to be a lot of professionals. You've got doctors, you've got teachers, you've got engineers. You've got 1,700 women approved to run as candidates. But let's be clear, these are people who have been heavily vetted and you're not going to see, at least on the surface, they're pretty confident you're going to have a group of conservative people coming into office. There's always surprises, even in Iran's system, they feel like they need to hold these elections for the sake of legitimacy. But even with the broad field of candidates running in the parliament, just the dye seems to be cast for a consolidation of conservative forces in Iran. And the parliament's abilities are circumscribed in other ways too, especially by the Council of Guardians, which is a group of jurists that help vet the Parliament.

ROBBINS:
It's an interesting notion. If you have fifteen thousand candidates for 290 seats, there are two ways of looking at that, I suppose, that lots of people get to participate in the process even though nobody gets to run unless they are vetted and agreed by the powers that be that they could run in the first place.

MCMAHON:
We should note that fifteen thousand came out of forty-nine thousand who had put their bid in. So they approved fifteen out of forty-nine thousand who had sought to run.

ROBBINS:
Are there forty-nine thousand people who believe in the system or they're tweaking the system or challenging it? It's interesting why you would throw your name in in the first place, but fifteen thousand candidates for 290 seats. Does that mean more participatory democracy or does it mean less? Because you're so overwhelmed by this, how can you possibly make a rational choice when you go in to vote? How could you possibly know who they are or what they stand for, what they could possibly deliver? Someplace like New York City where I live, and I think, and I've sat on an editorial board where we made endorsements for a long time, most people say, "Who's my assembly member? Who's my state senator?" All of these candidates. I mean, do people even read the list? I mean, this is an overwhelming number.

MCMAHON:
Yeah. Again, many Iran watchers just say, "It is for show." There's one I follow at the Middle East Institute, Alex Vantanka, who basically said these elections are set to break records for pointlessness because of the way it's been engineered and because he expects voter turnout to be particularly low. So it is a lot for show, and again, it does indicate that the regime is interested in having turnout. Turnout is the one number to look for, I guess, in this election. The supreme leader himself has talked about it being a "jihad to vote," that it's important for the Iranians to express their will and vote for these candidates who have been carefully selected, and they will be sure to blame low turnout against Western or opposition forces or other nefarious outside actors who are against the will of the Iranian people. So it's part of the stage-managed approach, somewhat similar to what we'll see in a different context in Russia in a couple of weeks too, Carla.

ROBBINS:
And because leading opposition figures have called for a boycott of the vote as the only way that you can really express your dissent, and there are some really incredibly grim numbers here. I mean, more than six hundred prisoners have been executed in response to the Mahsa Amini protests and twenty thousand people were arrested originally. More than five hundred people were killed during the protests. We got lots of people running for this, but the fundamental repression of this government cannot be denied.

MCMAHON:
Exactly. I mean, the one critic you'll see from some Iran watchers is that this opposition continues to just not be organized in any effective way. Now, whether it's you're talking about diaspora Iranians or anybody who are still inside the country, inside the country, it's pretty difficult to form any organized structures given the numbers you just cited. By the way, those Mahsa Amini protests were not well organized. It was a real spontaneous outpouring of outrage, which is again, why a number of experts had thought that maybe something different was happening. So again, elections do have consequences, even bogus ones. And so we'll take a look and see what happens in the course of the next several days because the elections are taking place soon. 

All right, Carla. Well, speaking of fraught situations, let's go to the Balkans, shall we? Tomorrow, Bosnia and Herzegovina marks thirty-two years of independence from Yugoslavia. Bosnia and Herzegovina does remain caught up in geopolitical feuds, however, and Bosnia and Herzegovina itself is not a unified state in any fashion. The latest feud though, involves gas, as in a gas pipeline. The country at the moment has been dependent on Russia for its natural gas supplies. The United States and European Union leaders have been pushing to try to minimize that influence by installing a U.S.-funded natural gas pipeline running from Croatia, a NATO member. This plan has roadblocks and has spurred a number of squabbles in the country. So can you tell us a bit about what's stopping the pipeline from going forward?

ROBBINS:
So first we need to give credit to Andy Higgins and the New York Times who really wrote a great piece about this. And there was a time in my life when Bosnia was all I thought about, because in the early nineties when the unraveling of the Soviet Bloc, it was a major focus of U.S. policy during the Clinton administration, and it was a major test also of NATO. This was the first conflict at the end of the Cold War that NATO had to decide whether or not it was going to get involved in.

MCMAHON:
And a dark moment of UN peacekeeping as well, we should note too.

ROBBINS:
And an incredible test that the EU failed as well. We were reminded why we needed NATO in a very small way by comparison with what's going on in the world right then. But it really was the first post-Cold War test for NATO. This celebration here as such it is, is celebrating the independence of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina from Yugoslavia in 1992 was also the start of this incredibly bloody Bosnia war, Srebrenica massacres and terrible things that happened there. And it was finally brought to an end with NATO bombing, U.S. and European sanctions, of course, the Dayton Peace Accords. And what happened afterwards, nearly thirty years later, this agreement that was negotiated really, it brought an end to the killing, but it didn't bring an end to the profound ethnic feuding. And part of that is a structural problem because they divided up all the institutions among the three ethnic groups there, including this presidency, they have this tripartite presidency.

MCMAHON:
This is the process that ended the war, right? This is the Dayton Accords that put this in place?

ROBBINS:
With the expectation that they would get past it someday. And instead, these structures are still in place there. And everybody focuses on this is Croat, this is Bosniak Muslim, this is Serb, and instead of having an integrated society, they have a completely ethnically divided society and institutionally divided society. And they have not gone past really that original moment. I think there's a really interesting lesson here, and I'm not exactly sure what it is, but I think structures matter. I think that these structures were not sunsetted, and they're still living it. And they're living in it in Kosovo. Kosovo has not gotten past it either. And so while we can celebrate the diplomacy of Dayton, they haven't grown past it. And you can blame Serbia next door. You can talk about whether Europe hasn't done more to reintegrate it. You can talk about Russian meddling. There's lots of reasons why it's happened, but these divisions, sadly, and divisions that really didn't exist before the breakup of Yugoslavia, all of which are...There's a lot of tragedy in here.

MCMAHON:
Yeah. Yeah.

ROBBINS:
So let's back to the gas pipeline. Let's be clear, the gas is only about 5 percent of Bosnia's energy sources. It gets most of its power from hydro and unfortunately from burning coal. But gas does heat the capital of Sarajevo in winter, and Russia is its sole gas supplier. And we've seen what Moscow does when it's the sole supplier of gas. It uses energy as a political bribe and it uses it as a political weapon, which is why the U.S. and the Europeans have been pushing Bosnia to wean itself from the Russians and offering this pipeline, which through Croatia, and Croatia, let's remember is a NATO and an EU member. 

It's a comparatively small project, it's about a hundred-mile-long, cost a little bit over a hundred million dollars, but the project hasn't gone anywhere because these three ethnic groups can't agree on who's going to run it, where it's going to be, all the typical things that you would see in a country that's so ethnically divided. The Serb president who heads the Republika Srpska, Bosnia is divided fundamentally between the Republika Srpska and then the shared Bosnia and Croat section, he's a big friend of Putin's. He's in and out of Russia all the time. He was there at this week as well. He's completely opposed to the project. He wants more Russian pipelines. He's championing a particular additional pipeline from Russia. The ethnic Croat leader supports the pipeline from Croatia, not surprisingly, but he wants it to be run a company run by ethnic Croats. And the Bosniak Muslim leader wants the project to remain surprise, surprise under the current pipeline operator, which is based in Sarajevo and run by the Bosniak Muslims. 

So does this matter transcendently in geopolitical terms? No. What I think the thing that fascinated me about this story is that it's just a reminder of how profoundly divided this country is. The U.S. thinks it matters because they certainly don't want Russia peeling off more countries into its web. They certainly would like to anchor all of the Balkans in the West. And the Assistant Secretary of State for Europe Jim O'Brien, who was hugely involved in ending the Bosnia War at the time, went to Sarajevo this month as a part of this effort to break the stalemate. I don't know how much progress he made. Tony Blinken has been sending letters to people trying to break the stalemate, but so far the stalemate continues.

MCMAHON:
It had been thought that there's been so much carrot and stick involved in Bosnia since its independence seemingly. And I recall covering a lot of these issues at the United Nations because there's this UN stewardship of overseeing the international agreement that was allowing the country to function, including by the way that there was a time, I'm not sure how it is now, but in the early 2000s, the UN ambassador from Bosnia was a Muslim and his deputy was always a Serb. And Mo Sacirbey was the ambassador at the time.

ROBBINS:
Mo Sacirbey. Absolutely, yes.

MCMAHON:
Yeah. Who was a real larger-than-life character. And his deputy was a Serb and a proud Serb, but they both had made common cause to represent Bosnia. It was an interesting experiment and there was a little bit of hopefulness at the time. But I say that just to say that part of that was also part of the bigger experiment of can this fragmented country survive? And there were carrots that were offered too. And I'm wondering, it just seems like the enormous carrot of growing EU ties just does not seem to be enough anymore. That's the ethnic or the civilizational pull that seems to be winning the day there. But are you seeing any incentives to help them overcome this impasse?

ROBBINS:
Well, the EU accepted Bosnia as a candidate country in '22, but they haven't begun formal negotiations. And the country has a lot of corruption, hasn't done a lot of the reforms. And this has been the process itself for a lot of these countries. Serbia didn't want to give up its war criminals until it was pushed really hard by the EU, which is how they finally got the war criminals from Srpska. It took them forever, fifteen, seventeen, I don't know how many years it took.

MCMAHON:
And many, by the way, still don't acknowledge Srebrenica as a massacre too, many people don't.

ROBBINS:
This was the huge debate in the nineties about this whole question of whether it was inevitably bred in the bone, these ethnic conflicts. I do not believe that as a person, and this is why Clinton hesitated so long to get involved, because he had all these people saying, "These people are inevitably condemned to fight each other forever," for the other people who said, "No. And there was a long time when Sarajevo was this glorious multiethnic city." Serbs married Croats, Croats married Bosniaks, who are we to say this? And you see this debate now over creating a two-state solution, the ability of Palestinians and Israelis to live side by side versus other people saying, "They're condemned to kill each other forever." I am a person who believes people can live together. Maybe they're not going to be holding hands and singing kumbaya, but people can live together

MCMAHON:
Well, and we look cautiously at Northern Ireland as a possible example of that. But there are other examples. So you're right,

ROBBINS:
That has been the incentive, certainly of the EU. And certainly it was also the incentive when NATO was enlarging itself. It was saying to countries, "Resolve your border differences if you want to join NATO." This was the project at the end of the Cold War, to try to stabilize Europe. And to a certain extent it succeeded, but it's a project that's incomplete, and we still have the remnants of the Dayton Accords in Bosnia. It's very much unresolved, and the Russians are certainly seeking to take advantage of it right now, and Ukraine has only made it more fraught. 

So Bob, time to discuss our audience figure of the week, and this is the figure listeners vote on every Tuesday and Wednesday at cfr_org's Instagram story. And this week our audience selected, "Sweden becomes the thirty-second NATO member." So Putin wanted less NATO when he started the war in Ukraine, and now he has a lot more. So how much does Sweden add to the strength of the alliance?

MCMAHON:
Well, let me first start out by referencing the Putin comments that you cited earlier today, because they're very much an important part of this. He used this opportunity of this regularly scheduled speech to weigh in and to try to seize the narrative because the NATO growth is a big loss and it's a big strike against Putin's whole calculus for invading Ukraine. But there was some ill-timed, ill-advised comments perhaps by Emmanuel Macron earlier this week about boots on the ground coming in to help in Ukrainian cause. And Putin responded by taking on directly and resurfacing these ominous nuclear threats that he had made earlier after the 2022 invasion. He said, "They need to understand that we too have weapons," and added, "that can strike targets on their territory and everything that they're thinking of now, everything that they use to threaten us, all this is a real threat of nuclear weapons being used, which spell destruction of civilization."

So he's laying it all out there and it has created this chilling effect. There were, by the way, we should note, other NATO members, other countries in the alliance, tried to walk back any sense of NATO forces joining on the ground in Ukraine. We should also mention there are plenty of mercenaries from NATO countries and other places who are fighting alongside Ukrainians as there are in the Russian side too. But this is a formal NATO versus Russia thing that is very ominous. 

Back to your original question, Sweden as a thirty-second member brings tremendous capabilities. First of all, if you look at the map, when you couple Sweden and Finland together, you've basically had this unbroken line against Russia now from the Baltic Sea down through Central Europe. Swedes have for years maintained a strong military even while maintaining neutrality. It does not mean they have pulled the plug on their defense capabilities. And they've also, by the way, trained with NATO countries, they have interoperability. They are going to be close to be meeting that 2 percent of GDP defense spending. That has been a NATO commitment. They're already there, reportedly. They have strong air defenses and other capabilities that I think NATO is happy to see. 

We should note, apparently the final step that helped Hungary step over the line and support their ascension was a deal for fighter jets, for Swedish fighter jets, that was sealed earlier this week. And so they had previously faced problems and blocking from Turkey. Turkey also was able to get some concessions, including a vow to introduce new anti-terror laws and directed at Kurdish groups and so forth. So Sweden brings capability and they also bring a newfound resolve that Russia hadn't faced before from Scandinavia. And I think that's going to be very important. It's also going to be important now. Any messaging coming at a NATO is going to be super important as they try to dial down the temperature at the moment.

ROBBINS:
It is an extraordinary thing that who would've thought Sweden, seen as this partisan of neutrality, throwing its thoughts so completely in, in response to this invasion of Ukraine, and in particular at a time when the US is going all wobbly or threatening to go all wobbly under Donald Trump. It's a very much a shifting world out there, and thirty-two members of NATO and certainly NATO a lot stronger and we'll see whether NATO can hold. We'll see what happens in the election.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, and again, this is a country that its neutrality was part of its identity in some ways, and you had many, well-known international envoys and arms experts and others, tended to be Swedish because they carried this credibility of being a neutral actor. But even Sweden has just reached a point, given what they've seen playing out in Ukraine, where it's time to join the alliance, as you say. Very interesting times as we walk into a year in which NATO is marking seventy-five years as an alliance. 

And that's our look at the World Next Week, Carla. Here's some other stories to keep an eye on. China's Communist Party lays out its 2024 policies at the annual "two sessions" conference. Italy's prime minister, Georgia Maloney, visits Canada. And, Art Dubai, one of the Mideast's leading international art fairs, kicks off.

ROBBINS:
Please subscribe to The World Next Week on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a review while you're at it, we appreciate the feedback. If you'd like to reach us, please email us [email protected]. The publications mentioned in this episode, as well as the transcript of our conversation are listed on the podcast page for The World Next Week on CFR.org. Please note that opinions expressed on The World Next Week are solely those of the hosts, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. 

Today's program was produced by Ester Fang and Sinet Adous with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Markus Zakaria recorded and edited the episode. Special thanks to our intern Olivia Green for her research assistance. Our theme music is provided by Markus Zakaria. He's everywhere. This is Carla Robbins saying, so long,

MCMAHON:
And this is Bob McMahon saying goodbye and be careful out there.