SERIES FINALE: Trump Addresses Davos, Gaza Navigates Cease-Fire, 2025 Elections Loom, and More

MCMAHON:
Thank you. In the coming week, president Trump goes to Davos, virtually. Israel and Hamas prepare for the next round of hostage and prisoner swaps, and a new year of elections kicks off in the dictatorship of Belarus. It's January 21st, 2025 and time for The World Next Week Live. I'm Bob McMahon.

ROBBINS:
And I'm Carla Anne Robbins.

AMOS:
And I'm Deb Amos.

MCMAHON:
Well first of all, thank you, Deb, for joining us. Thank you all for coming out on this frigid night. Deb is the former international correspondent for NPR, and is currently the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. But most importantly, she is a friend of the pod. She was the guest host of our tenth anniversary podcast, this was when Jim Lindsay was my co-host, and she also did our summer reading episode not too long ago as well. We're delighted to have you with us, Deb.

AMOS:
Great. It's nice to be here.

ROBBINS:
It's wonderful to have you here.

AMOS:
Thank you.

ROBBINS:
So, tonight we have three journalists on this stage. So before we dive into the news to come, we wanted to take a few minutes to talk about our fabulous, struggling, and sometimes benighted profession. Bob, you have done it all and are continuing to do it all. You started out... This is sort of confusing, I feel like I'm in a tennis match. Okay. You started out as a print reporter, you moved to radio, then you went onto the web and some podcasting. Are they different. Do you tell stories in a different way?

MCMAHON:
Absolutely. I mean, thinking back to where I started in print and in newspapers, and you both well remember this, it's like a different planet from what we're capable of doing now, storytelling wise, and reach, and what we reach.
My first newspaper job, it was a suburban newspaper in the northern Westchester suburbs, maybe twenty thousand, forty thousand people or so in the community. You filed in that paper, you went to your deadline, and then you went home. And then people responded the next day depending on what kind of story it was, but that was it. That was that finite community. If it was a big enough story, maybe it got picked up on a wire service or something. I think about today, with something we file on the web, a podcast, it's going around the world. And we know that because we've had listeners around the world taking us to task sometimes for getting something wrong, from Australia to Kenya to Scandinavia, and that's just podcast, but it's also our other content. It is just incredible, the reach of media, first of all.
And then, but I would say the through line for me is that it's really, really important that some things have not changed, which are the real attention to facts, to sourcing, to conveying information really clearly. Even with today's main device for picking up information, the cell phone, you're going to flip through something and you're going to retain something that's been conveyed in a clear, credible way for the most part. Now, setting aside the whole storm of misinformation that's afflicting our world. The way you get information that you want to get, that you're looking for, that you're trying to follow what's going on, if it's presented clearly and concisely, no matter what the medium is, no matter what the platform is, you're going to pick it up.
So I start up my day, I get a number of newsletters, my drive in listening to the Economist's Intelligence podcast, which is a daily podcast. I'll come in and I'll check in on a few more sources, and it's a great way to get information. So I guess what I'm saying is, the platforms have changed incredibly. The storytelling can be just phenomenal, but we're also in this world of misinformation. And so it's just that much more important to continue to have the basics from going back to where I started, which is just sourcing clarity of conveying information and just being dedicated to the facts.

ROBBINS:
Well, we used to have this distinction between people who did words and people who did images. And you, certainly since you've been at CFR, you've done both and you've won Emmys for doing things like that. You've done interactives, I mean, I understand that journalists these days have to do everything, but how did you go from being a word person to being an image person?

MCMAHON:
Yeah, I think it is the conveying of information, I guess. We were lucky at CFR, we invested in immersive features early on in the old web 2.0 days, and we were among the first actual media organizations that were doing that. And it was clear that you were still trying to tell a story and you were still trying to convey information. So I think about some of the early pieces that we did, the worldly ones that I worked on were crisis guides on Pakistan and Iran, and so you're telling a story there. I guess, maybe because I'm a consumer of all these types of things, I know what;s comes across clunky and phony, and just sort of being able to be part of it and being working with talented journalists, scholars at CFR, it just seeps in. And so I guess I know what I like and I have the sniff test for sort of picking that stuff up.

ROBBINS:
The sniff test for images.

MCMAHON:
For images and for audio and... but-

ROBBINS:
I think they call that synesthesia.

MCMAHON:
Back to you. I mean, in podcasting. But I mean, in podcasting, you've been in real time. You'll be kind of riffing on something and then you'll realize, oh no, that was actually, that occurred at this time or that time. I mean, you're fact checking in real. Did you ever think you'd be sitting here podcasting and sort of broadcasting to the rest of the world on a weekly basis?

ROBBINS:
You guys tricked me into doing it, yeah.

MCMAHON:
We did. We did.

ROBBINS:
So...

MCMAHON:
I wanted to go over to Deb because we've been really fortunate to have her join us. And Deb, you spent a good deal of your career, a huge chunk of your career reporting overseas. You teach journalism now. How do you prepare your students who want to be foreign correspondents in this day and age, given some of the things we just talked about?

AMOS:
So you'll be surprised to know that there are waiting lists for all of the journalism courses at Princeton, so there's students who really want to do it. I teach something called migration reporting, and we take them twice to Canada, twice to Berlin. I'll do another Berlin trip in the fall. So we take them on international trips and plunk them down and put them in the deep end. They have to write a pitch before we go, falls apart first day, that's a lesson because it always does. You don't know what's there until you get there. And it's astonishing what they learn to do.
Two years ago, there was a student who wanted to do something on Afghanistan refugees. We bought him a train ticket, he went to Hamburg, where there's a place called Little Kabul, and he met a woman who had been tortured by the Taliban and that was an experience that he had never had. And he came back to Berlin and he said, "I have to put every word down." And I said, "That's not your job. You have to make a narrative." And so when you go on these trips, everything is a teachable moment.
And what we do I think is certainly in my class, I really focus on reporting, reporting, reporting, not opinion, opinion, opinion. And that's the first thing that you have to sort of scratch out of people. They always want to put their opinions in. I find the most I write in all of my critiques to them is, "According to whom?" Because they like to just say things. I said, the sky is blue, you can get away with that. Everything else you have to attribute.
And the other thing that we have done over the years is be very aware of exactly what you have figured out. Journalism is changing, so you want to teach them data journalism, or you want to teach them open source investigations, because those are the things that will make them stand out. Those are the ways that they will get jobs. I've been doing this for eight years, I have six working reporters out there doing successful work in brand name media, and that's what keeps students coming because you can get jobs. It's not easy, but was it for any of us? It wasn't. Journalism has always been a hard thing to do. And so you have to, I mean, six is pretty good, I feel. So, it's a teachable skill.

ROBBINS:
I think we have to admit, it was easier when we started than it is now.

AMOS:
I don't know about you, but I was an affirmative action hire. It wasn't easy at all.

ROBBINS:
Well, I was certainly an affirmative action hire, I had a PhD. They didn't want that one.

AMOS:
Yeah. So I think if you keep them up to date with skills, what you're talking about, if you... well, they're going to have to do Instagram stand ups, they're going to have to do all kinds of things, but I think we can prepare them.
But look, we are coming into a new era. This is the Trump Administration, and we know what they said about us in the last administration, we were the enemy of the people. And you can already see that some journalists have been tapped for trouble. So, journalism is adversarial, it always has been. That's the point. We are juvenile delinquents poking our fingers at power. That is the point of what we do. How do we do it? What do we... Do we have to change the way we do this in this administration? How much risk can we bear? I always like the Marty Baron sentence, which is, "We're not at war, we are at work." Can we stay at work? What do you think?

ROBBINS:
Well, I think there are several things going on here right now. It's certainly going to be harder for the next four years. It wasn't easy in the Obama Administration, I'll say that. I mean, certainly there were a lot of leak investigations then, and it's always by definition an adversarial process.
And for those of us who were reporters in Washington, you cover diplomacy, you go to parties, you do those sort of things, but they're not your friends. And because I never felt like I was an alternative Secretary of State, that wasn't my job. Certainly you want people to talk to you, but they're not your friends and you can't let people think that somehow they can seduce you into telling their story. You always have to maintain that distance. That's really different from people who describe the media as the enemy of the people, I think it's significantly different. It was certainly enormously different in the first Trump Administration. And they are certainly gearing up with that now. You listen to Kash Patel, he's got an enemies list with reporters directly on it. They're going to do leak investigations, they're going to subpoena people. Something that Merrick Garland said he wasn't going to do.
So, we have several things we have to think about. One is just physical safety for reporters, which is not necessarily the Trump Administration, but we've seen it with people on the campaign trail. We do this local journalist initiative here. We have these webinars with local journalists here at the Council, and we had this event a few weeks ago in which we had a webinar, we had local journalist things about covering extremism.
And an extraordinary phenomenon developed in which there was a conversation and a chat among these local journalists, and they were talking about what it was like to cover the campaign and how harassed they were being when they were out there. And they were giving each other advice, which Deb, you would know and you, Bob, would know, all of us would know having been working overseas. Things like, don't go in the middle of a crowd, always cover it from the outside. Don't wear your ID around your neck because someone's going to pull it, pull potentially to strangle you with it. I mean, the idea that you can have this conversation about people who are working in Pennsylvania or people who are working in Arizona, rather than people who are working in the Sudan, is a pretty sort of scary notion of something that's going on.
I think another thing is, papers are already, they're upping their libel insurance. They're talking about doing things like making sure their visas are in line, that all their... so they don't get caught in a technical. I mean, they have to worry about things like that. But I also think, and this is what you were talking about and what Bob was talking about, I think we have to think about why the general public is losing trust in us and has been consistently losing trust in us. And I actually looked this up today, which is sort of the drop in trust of the press. And Gallup has been doing this since the 1970s. I have to get my numbers here, which is, in 1976, seventy-two percent of the public said they had a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the press. By 2000, those numbers had fallen to fifty-one percent, and by late last year, that percentage had dropped to thirty-one percent.
I mean, there's an incredible warning in that for us, which is a different thing from... I mean, you can't blame Trump for that. You can't blame people saying it's Viktor Orbán or whoever else. There's been a consistent drop in confidence in the press, and there's a lot of reasons for that. I mean, part of it's a wider loss of faith in institutions. I mean, let's be frank, people like Congress less than they like the press. So I mean, you can take cold comfort in that, but there is a general loss of institutions. Part of it's the economic unraveling of the business. Some newspapers are just not very good these days and other television and all of that. Social media puts a premium on snarkiness and I think we have to be really careful in this.
But I think there are things we can really do as journalists to push back. I think there can be a lot more transparent about how we get our information and how we produce it. There's just the basics that you were talking about there, we got to absolutely keep clear links to the community. We're not an Olympus. I think all those things are really, really important. So, these are really adversarial times, but there's been a general, this has been a decrease in trust in us, and I think we have to think about our responsibility for that too.

AMOS:
I was thinking about the media and how it is so fractured now in the United States. Everybody's losing audience because the audience is going wherever they please, and there's so many choices.
One hopeful sign this week is I have been on a WhatsApp channel with two hundred journalists who come in and out of Beirut. And when the regime fell in Syria, everybody jumped in on that WhatsApp group. There's now a thousand reporters on that WhatsApp group. And so I was very happy to see that because... And they're from everywhere, and the fact that a thousand people showed up for the end of the Syrian regime I thought was still impressive. There's still interest in international news, and I thought that was good.

ROBBINS:
A lot of storytellers.

AMOS:
Yeah.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, and I'll just harken back to where I began, which is newspapers. And another recent example was the LA fires where you've seen this surge in interest and in traffic to the LA Times website as people are like, where do I find out what's going on in LA? And lo and behold, the local papers is the big show. It's probably the first place you should go still and just follow up, and that's really important. It's still sad to see all of the misinformation and really kind of nasty things flying around around the cause of those fires and who's doing what. However, there is some solace in that there is a sense that a locally-based organization is where you can get credible information, so.

AMOS:
But here's one thing that is worrisome, I think, and as I say, I focus on teaching, reporting, reporting, reporting. Everybody's getting rid of their fact-checkers. Zuckerberg just did it. And I don't know of a podcast, we have no fact-checkers. Most podcasts do not have any fact-checkers. And so everybody is out there without-

MCMAHON:
We do.

ROBBINS:
We do.

AMOS:
You do? Good.

ROBBINS:
Including us.

AMOS:
Ah, but most don't. And so a lot of people are getting their news from places that don't do fact checking and that, I find disturbing.

MCMAHON:
Well, we've talked our way into the regular part of our podcast, and I think we started out, Carla, with Trump attending Davos as our tantalizing line, but it is virtual. He's going to be beamed into various meetings. He's expected to join this year's meeting at the fifty-fifth annual, just a few days after inauguration, which everybody's still buzzing about.

ROBBINS:
And we still were not invited, Bob.

MCMAHON:
And we still, I'm still waiting for it.

ROBBINS:
Yeah, one more year.

MCMAHON:
Holding out hope. Trump knows the Davos scene. You can't call him Davos man, which is sort of the term of art-

ROBBINS:
Of art.

MCMAHON:
... for the globalized figure, striding the world stage. However, he is well known there. I think he likes to be considered someone who can stride into Davos. How is Davos getting ready for Trump 2.0, Carla? What message do you think he's going to bring the elite global audience?

ROBBINS:
So, I went and looked at his past performances at Davos. In 2016, he campaigned against Davos man, against the global elite. He didn't go in 2017. He arrived in 2018, and I looked up the Times headline and it was pretty clever. He arrived as a "party wrecker and left praised as a pragmatist." His 2020 visit didn't go as well. This was, if you recall, during the first impeachment saga. His speech was fine, but he just couldn't help himself. On his way out the door, he had a press conference and he let loose on Democrats. He called Jerry Nadler a sleazebag and he called Adam Schiff a con job. And this was very un-Davos-like behavior and people were pretty shocked by this.
And this was also the meeting when he privately told European commission President Ursula von der Leyen, that the U.S. would not come to the EU's aid if it was attacked militarily. And by the way, NATO was dead and you owe us $400 billion. And so later, of course he started saying this on the campaign trail all the time, but when this leaked out at the time, everybody was just completely shocked. This was the first intimations we got that he might be pulling out of NATO and not coming to the aid of Europe. So people were pretty traumatized by that visit. So, no one's really sure which, are we going to get party wrecker or are we going to get pragmatist? No one really knows which Trump is going to show up virtually.
Everyone was absolutely glued to their TVs, according to the reporting during the inauguration. Interestingly enough, the Ukrainians actually had a watch party. I mean, they're very clever in the way they do these things, they're actually brilliant in the way they do this. And of course, Zelensky was already there. Considerable relief that in this blizzard of executive orders, there were no tariffs that were imposed, none of this twenty-five percent on Canada and Mexico, although he did later say that February 1st, potentially, but huge relief so far in Davos that the tariffs haven't been imposed.
They're going to be listening very carefully, I was looking at the things people were talking about. They're going to be listening very carefully to see if he talks about AI regulation. They're very aware of the fact that all the tech bros were seated right behind the president's family. And so they know that the Zuckerbergs of the world are pushing against regulation, but they're talking EU regulation there. So, they're going to pay a lot of attention to that.
Going to be listening very closely to what he says about Ukraine. The president did not mention Ukraine in his inaugural address. The only reference was this, "We're spending more on borders overseas than we are at home," but they want to know if he's going to raise Ukraine himself. They're quite aware of the fact that the President originally said he was going to solve it in twenty-four hours, but they pushed it back to six months or a hundred days, depending on who you're listening to.
Going to be listening to what he says about Russia. The President said last week that he's going to have a meeting with Putin, but we haven't heard anything else about that. But they're going to certainly going to be listening for that. President Biden on his last days, put on these new set of sanctions, much tougher sanctions on Russian oil and Gazprom and those shadow fleet, that would have a big impact on the European economy as much as the Russian economy. So they're going to be listening to see, because while President Biden imposed those, it's up to President Trump to decide whether to follow through. So they're going to be listening to that.
And so today there were speeches. Von der Leyen gave a speech, she didn't mention Trump by name, but she defended the Paris Climate Accord, and that was a pretty clear message there. She kicked the Chinese a lot more in protectionism. She didn't mention Trump on that, but she did warn against a race to the bottom, and I think there was a certain message in that. The Chinese Vice Premier was there, and he said very clearly, "Nobody wins a trade war." Once again, he did mention President Trump in that.
And I think the most interesting one was the speech today by Zelensky. Zelensky, who has really been going out of his way to praise Trump on every possible opportunity, today he said to the Europeans, basically, "You guys better pull your socks up because basically, does Trump even care about you?" And so I think he's going to use the Trump to basically jujitsu the Europeans. So we'll see, and I think they're listening very closely.

AMOS:
And I read today that people expect two messages. One is, America first. And the second is, we are now open for business. We have changed regulations, we have lightened the load for all you bankers, all you international business people. Come on down. And that may be the pragmatic side of him, if that is the message that he delivers.

ROBBINS:
They'll be very happy with that, but I think it wasn't lost on them that the people who were invited to the inauguration were some very, to their mind among the Europeans who were invited, were some pretty scary Europeans as well. I mean, there were people from the AFD there.

MCMAHON:
Correct.

ROBBINS:
The ultra-right of Belgium, the ultra-right of Spain. So yes, I think a lot of the business moguls will be very happy, but I think there was a certain amount of anxiety as well. So, we'll see. Party wrecker, pragmatist, we'll see. So, where are we in our script?

MCMAHON:
You were going to tee up Deb.

ROBBINS:
I know, it's so much easier when we're just taping this.

MCMAHON:
I know, I know.

ROBBINS:
So much.

AMOS:
It's this live stuff that's so hard.

ROBBINS:
I know, this live stuff is so hard.

MCMAHON:
Good thing the mics can't pick up the paper shuffling.

ROBBINS:
I know. Deb.

AMOS:
Yes.

ROBBINS:
Onto you. The Israel-Hamas ceasefire went into effect on Sunday, January 19th, and as part of phase one, three Israeli hostages came home and exchange for ninety Palestinian prisoners. So, the Gaza War has threatened to destabilize the entire region. We saw what it did in Lebanon, we saw some pretty extraordinary things have happened in Syria, we see what the Houthis are doing. How are the other actors, the countries, the groups viewing this deal? This, could it lead to a wider peace? Is everybody watching it as closely as we are, or is it just sort of a pause?

AMOS:
I've been reporting on the Middle East too long to say that it could be a wider peace, but it was welcomed in the region. As you noted, I mean, Hezbollah could not mount much, but the Houthis didn't. They said, "If you have a ceasefire, then we're done."
I think that both communities, the Israelis and the Palestinians, there were celebrations but it was bittersweet. For the Palestinians, they saw because they were moving north now, how utterly destroyed the Gaza Strip is. Hospitals gone, schools gone, universities gone, heritage sites, all gone. And the notion of what it's going to take, ten years, twenty years, it's extraordinary how much has to be rebuilt. For the Israelis, they were very happy to get the hostages back, but in the exchange, they saw how much Hamas is still in the Gaza Strip. And Hamas wanted to show that. As they were moving the hostages into a van, they all had their green headbands on and they staged those shots. There weren't that many people out, but they bunched them so if you had a close-up shot, it looked like there was a lot of them.
I think also, that the West Bank is now where the action is. There's no ceasefire there. And settlers have, in recent days stepped up attacks in villages and reportedly, under the eyes of the Israeli military. And it seems that this has been going on for a while, and you can expect more of it.
And here is another sort of detail in this story, and that is, one of the things that Trump signed in the executive orders, is to take off sanctions that President Biden put on the most radical of the settlers who are doing these kinds of things in the West Bank. And it was certainly a signal that, we won't say too much about what you're doing. We're happy with the ceasefire, this is good for the region. This may even get us somewhere to a understanding between the Saudis and the Israelis, which was on the table before October 7th when Hamas carried out one of the most horrific attacks on Israeli citizens since the Holocaust. But there are a lot of people who want that deal to come through, Trump is one of them. So let us see if they can get there. But what's happening in the West Bank will be an impediment.

ROBBINS:
Can I just follow up with a question about the Saudis in that? I mean, if the United States is not going to, and President Biden clearly didn't have much leverage with the Israelis in the first place, but if the U.S. is not going to exercise any leverage with the Israelis, is there anybody else in the region who can exercise? I mean, how much does Netanyahu want to deal with the Saudis? Is there any leverage that they can exercise at this point, by dangling the potential of reviving that deal?

AMOS:
It's hard to say if the war starts again, and this was something else that President Trump said when he was asked about the ceasefire because he was one of the authors of it. And he said he didn't think that it was going to last. That's not a good sign that he said that at the White House on his first day in office. Not a good sign at all. So yes, there are things that the Saudis want. They want nuclear cover because they worry about Iran and that's the big issue for them. But will they do it if they don't get a commitment for a two-state solution from the Israelis? I don't know. I think not, but there are many things that are possible these days. And those negotiations, we'll have to see what happens.
But the other thing that Trump did is he lifted any restrictions on the biggest bombs that the U.S. had given to the Israelis, these two-thousand pound bunker busters. So, if the Israelis want them again, it makes you think they are preparing. And I had read today in Haaretz that there is a double thing going on with the IDF. One is that the ceasefire lasts and one is that it doesn't and they have to go back to war. So, it seems very, very tenuous at the moment. Let's see, as we go forward, if it lasts.

MCMAHON:
One more piece in the region, you mentioned that Syria before and people covering the Syrian story. Those events surprised everybody who were focused elsewhere. Does Syria still have the ability to surprise, in terms of, does this new group of revolutionaries, can they actually put together this country and it somehow emerges as maybe a point of stability? And now you have a little bit of new leadership in Lebanon nearby. Is that some area where you could take some sense of solace perhaps, in developments in the Middle East?

AMOS:
Correct, and I do think you can. This new government in Syria is a surprise a day. Ahmed al-Sharaa, who was the head of the militia that took down Bashar al-Assad, sent a note to President Trump congratulating him on his presidency, and saying that he wanted better relations. Everybody today on social media said, "That was not on my bingo card." That had never, ever happened before. So-

ROBBINS:
He looks really fine in that suit.

AMOS:
Well, I keep saying, how many jihadis you know, know how to tie a tie? And so he's such an interesting character. His father wrote a book about democracy. His father was an oil executive. He grew up in Mezzeh in Damascus, which is a middle-class neighborhood. He's not your typical jihadi. He was in Camp Bucca in Iraq for four years. The Americans saved his life by arresting him, so he didn't have to fight at all. And when he got back, he went back to Syria and kind of watched TV and went, geez, these people are cutting people's heads off. I'm done with this. And that's when he begins to make his transition. I found him a very interesting character to watch.
Can he pull this off? It's really hard to say. He doesn't have enough people to do it. Sanctions are, people haven't been paid since December. Goods are flooding in the Syria, Turkish goods. Saudi soups have arrived on the shelves, but people can't buy them because they have not been paid. So there's lots of stumbles, there's lots of challenges for him to put a government together. But so far, the steps have been mostly positive.

MCMAHON:
Okay, we're going to talk about our third topic for this World Next Week.

ROBBINS:
Is my moment coming?

MCMAHON:
It's coming soon.

ROBBINS:
Oh, good.

MCMAHON:
But first, I'm going to let our audience know that we're doing the live special as promised, audience figure of the week poll. And we're going to ask you, those of you here right now to vote on which audience figure of the week you'd like to hear us talk about today. So, it's going to be a little bit of a sight-reading, but the audience figures, as chosen are two, which is the number of ports in Panama operated by Hong Kong based, Hutchison ports. And you'll know what that refers to. One hundred and seventy million, which is the number of U.S. TikTok users who are getting a reprieve as President Trump puts off the ban. Twenty, the number of days of imprisonment extended for South Korea's President, who's involved in a tense impeachment process. Or twelve and a half, which is the number of years since Austin Tice was kidnapped while reporting in Syria.
For those of you in person with us, please scan the QR code featured on the screen behind us. Those who are joining us virtually, please scan the pop-up QR code on your screen and select the topic you'd like us to discuss. And we'll announce a audience figure in just a few minutes. So, but first, we will continue to talk amongst ourselves.

ROBBINS:
And for those of you who thought that Bob and I put our thumb on the scale week after week to get the audience figure we want, we almost never do that.

MCMAHON:
Almost never.

AMOS:
So, are they voting now?

ROBBINS:
They are voting now, but-

MCMAHON:
They are voting now.

AMOS:
So we can talk about-

MCMAHON:
We can continue to talk.

AMOS:
... global elections?

MCMAHON:
Yes.

AMOS:
In 2024, half of the world's populations headed to the polls in more than sixty countries. 2025 will provide fewer, but nonetheless important elections, which could have far-reaching effects for the global community. First up is an election in Belarus. Presidential election is happening this Sunday, January 26th. Bob, what can we expect from that election?

MCMAHON:
So, 2024 was the year the incumbents were trounced in many places, and we know that well. And I chose Belarus to kick off with for a number of reasons. This is not an incumbent being trounced. This is a dictator getting his seventh term, but why is he even running? And this is all part of the weird pathology of some of these repressive states. They still hold elections because they need to have some sense of, that they can claim that they are being supported publicly.
Lukashenko in 2020, some of you may recall, opened the door a little bit and allowed opposition candidates to run. And they did really well. So well that they, Lukashenko forces came in and rigged it. Extraordinary protests, I think the most extraordinary protests in post-Soviet history in Belarus, and a vicious crackdown. And the crackdown by many accounts only succeeded because Russia's basically said, "Well, we got your back on this." And Russian security forces were there to help. And Lukashenko owed Putin a big one after that, and served as a staging. Belarus served as a staging area for the invasion of Ukraine from Belarusian soil. Although Belarusian soldiers have not fought on the field there, they have not done the North Korean thing.
But I say that to say, that this is still important, Lukashenko is now going into this campaign season, so to speak. There was something like fifteen hundred political prisoners, he's pardoned two hundred of them, which means there's still a lot of people in prison. Including a number of people who were reporters for my old shop, Radio Free Europe, the Belarus service, under really harsh conditions there. And they basically just can't abide by any sort of independent information coming out. There's a Belarusian movement in exile in the Baltic countries, but it's going to be a Lukashenko return. The question is whether or not things move further on that front, in terms of the tightness of that alliance.
Putin, it was overlooked a little bit in all the sort of election hoopla coverage here. Putin moved nuclear tactical nukes into Belarus late last year. Lukashenko wants the next round of weapons to come in and Putin's kind of holding off for now, at last report. But this is a disturbing development. We've seen disturbing developments in Georgia, where they also had the most extraordinary protests taking place there recently, based on their elections last year. But if you have the consolidation of the Belarus-Russian relationship and Georgia turning more and more into the Russian fold, that's just a very troubling development.
And even while it's not a tense election, right around the corner are some tense elections. I'll even mention another one from the old RFE territory, which is Kosovo, which is unrecognized by a number of countries, by the U.S. and by a number of Western countries. They're having Parliamentary elections, the so-called Balkan powder keg could be on edge there again, because there are some Serbian districts in Kosovo in which there are candidates that last report were being allowed to run. But there's all sorts of back-and-forth between the Serbs and the Kosovo Albanians, keep your eye on that one.

ROBBINS:
And the government there, of course, is being accused of vast corruption and increasing repression by its own, by the-

MCMAHON:
The Serbian government, right?

ROBBINS:
The Serbian government.

MCMAHON:
That's right. And then the big enchilada, Germany.

AMOS:
Precisely.

MCMAHON:
And this extraordinary development, where the second-highest polling party is, referenced earlier, the far-AfD, alternative for Deutschland. Great deal of concern that they're going to somehow come into some sort of power-sharing or some sort of buy-in into the German government, even though the main parties have said they want nothing to do with them. The situation is still troubling in Germany, like the backlash around Europe. There's a great deal of concern about migrants, about irregular migration, and about the war in Ukraine in some cases, they're tapping into that concern. And so Germany is the big one to watch, February 23rd.

AMOS:
You bet, and boy, are they not happy about Elon Musk.

MCMAHON:
And you were in there recently too. Yeah.

AMOS:
I spent seven months there in the spring, and the Elon Musk support of the AfD is driving people mad in Germany. And the fact that one of the newspapers published his backing and they were invited to the inauguration. What side is Trump on? And I think Germans are asking that, in particular about the AfD. When I first arrived there, there were millions of Germans on the street protesting against the AfD. But you're right, it's the issue of immigration. People are up to here, I'm always surprised at Germans when they say, "No more, we would like to close our borders. We don't like these people, that's too many of them." And that I saw over time, and that's a major issue.

MCMAHON:
And we should say the German conservatives, they're polling at about thirty percent or so. And Friedrich Merz is the headliner there. He's widely expected to be someone who's going to be called on to try to forge some sort of a coalition government. Olaf Scholz, the social democratic candidate is seen as sort of-

AMOS:
They're done.

MCMAHON:
... done for. So, look for Germany to turn right, but maybe not sharply right. It's going to be very, as I say, very tense moment. And that's by the way, going to be happening after what's called the security Davos, the Munich Security Conference, where you're going to hear a lot of stuff about Ukraine and the Trump Administration's stance on that.

ROBBINS:
Well, in France, when the first round, of course, which they won't have in Germany, they scared the you know what out of people in France when it looked like the right was going to win overwhelmingly. And in Germany, we've seen this before. They came up very close to the election, it looked like the AfD was going to do overwhelmingly, and then people said, "Can we remember our history a little bit too much?" And then they sort of woke up. Do you think that at this point, the AfD's becoming so regularized in people's mind that they're just not going to, that they really are going to make it this time, that they're going to do reasonably well?

AMOS:
I mean, there's two kinds of people who will vote for the AfD. One is the protest vote. They are annoyed with their government, this is why Scholz has to go to elections. And I don't think we know. I try to read the German press as much as I can, and they don't know. But who will be in a coalition with the AfD? That's a real question. That could be a mark of political shame. If the CDU does it, it's tempting if they do well in the elections, it's very tempting. But there were millions of people on the street last winter against the AfD, so that must be in their minds too.

MCMAHON:
Carla, it's time to ring the bell.

ROBBINS:
Oh my God. Has my moment come?

MCMAHON:
It's your moment, it's your moment.

ROBBINS:
Do we know?

MCMAHON:
Yes, we do.

ROBBINS:
Okay. Well, Bob and Deb, it's time to discuss our audience figure of the week. For the last time, the bell has been rung. I hope all of you got your votes in live. And this week our audience selected once again, Bob.

MCMAHON:
You can see the bar, it's pretty overwhelming, and it's a hundred and seventy million.

ROBBINS:
The number of U.S. TikTok users-

AMOS:
Wow.

ROBBINS:
... getting a reprieve as Trump puts off the ban. So, I don't get this.

AMOS:
Fair enough.

ROBBINS:
Okay, it's not that I don't get... I mean, I somewhat don't get TikTok, but what I don't get is Trump is the first one who called for the ban in August of 2020. The Congress votes in a bipartisan way to ban it. And I'm ambivalent about it. I'm a journalist, I don't like bans, which seem to be banning free speech. Okay? So I will stipulate that I'm ambivalent about this. The Supreme Court rules that they have to go ahead with this, and somehow the President signs an executive order on his first day that says, you don't have to go ahead with this.
I mean, TikTok has been, first, I don't know if you guys immediately when they did it, I mean, the first they put on their screen, "Sorry, we're no longer here because bad people have banned you having a lot of fun." And then they said, "Sorry you're not here, but maybe President Trump will be able to save you." And then, "Sorry, we're not here, but we think President Trump is going to save you." And then, "We're back. President Trump has saved you." So they've been quite, they've been playing it fully. And also, the CEO of TikTok got invited to the inauguration. So, they've been playing it fine, but I legally don't get it either. If the Supreme Court has ruled, how does an executive order overcome that? And even Mike Johnson isn't happy about that. He says, "The law is the law," which last time I checked, I thought the law was the law. So, can someone explain this to me?

AMOS:
Yes. What Pam Bondi said in the hearing of when she-

ROBBINS:
You mean the attorney general nominee?

AMOS:
The nominee, that she would not enforce. And because there's huge fines for this uncertainty that you're talking about.

ROBBINS:
Huge fines for?

AMOS:
For what happens if it's-

ROBBINS:
For the Apple, for the stores, and all that, yes.

AMOS:
If you open it-

ROBBINS:
Not for you and your TikTok account. But yes, those are Bob's daughters there. Okay.

AMOS:
It's like $5,000 per person who gets, and she says, "I won't." So there's some notion that it will be able to... I agree with you, I don't get it either, but all the people who have to not enforce things have said they won't. So it can go on until somebody decides that they want to buy it or not.

ROBBINS:
And the President has also suggested that maybe because he's going to negotiate it, that the U.S. gets half of it, fifty percent.

AMOS:
Correct.

ROBBINS:
Finder's fee or something.

MCMAHON:
Well, and also our colleague, Kat Duffy wrote a piece for us for our website, pointing out that the bottom of this is supposed to be a national security concern. And Congress has kind of danced around what that concern is. It's not declassified anything or much of anything that sort of spells out what the threat is, just so you're saying it's too much of a threat, it's too perilous. So that's raising, and here's the trust that we were talking about before in institutions. People are kind of like, what's the deal here? They just don't like this medium that's popular among youth? So Kat's saying, declassify some of the information, sort of shore up your argument, and then take it from there, instead of getting into this gamesmanship going on right now, which is probably going to play out further.

AMOS:
But there's two things that are true. One is, the Israelis have been lobbying because TikTok has pretty much-

ROBBINS:
Lobbying in favor of the ban?

AMOS:
In favor of the ban, because of the Gaza coverage, it has been relentless. And I'm teaching undergraduates so I can feel it in my classroom. That's what they're watching. That's where they're forming their opinions, and the Israelis know it. And they are not happy about this wall-to-wall coverage of the terrible loss of life in Gaza. And it's affecting a generation of Americans. Two-

ROBBINS:
Can I do something radical here?

AMOS:
Yeah.

ROBBINS:
How many people here think we should ban TikTok? That's a minority. Okay. Sorry, two?

AMOS:
Part two. We had researchers come to our class and they had done a deep dive into TikTok and how they were portraying migrants, and the misinformation was striking. And the reason that they were doing it is because in Europe, you can demand that social media platforms allow you to scrape their data. Not here yet, maybe never.

ROBBINS:
Yes, now going the exact opposite direction.

AMOS:
Probably never. But in Europe, you have to allow that. So researchers can dig around and actually show, and the whole idea is, of this is, you can either go to the company and say, "You see what you're doing? You really should stop doing this." Go to European legislatures and say, "See what they're doing? You should do something about this." And so they could scrape data in Europe. And the misinformation about refugees was startling. They came to my class, they talked to the students about it, and they have numbers, they have facts, they have figures, they have data.
So, those are two problems that don't even touch the larger issue of, what are the Chinese doing with our data? President Trump made a reference to it where he said, "Ah, they're just taking the data from kids." Yes, that is correct. And he said, "It's okay. I don't mind that," but there's a lot of people who do.

ROBBINS:
I mean, are they taking more data than CVS is taking from us? But that's a conversation for-

AMOS:
Well, when we go to war with CVS, we'll talk about that. But until we do.

ROBBINS:
But I mean, seriously, there is no law in the United States against data brokers selling information to foreign countries. And until that is banned-

AMOS:
What's the difference?

ROBBINS:
What's the difference? And I don't think that's going to be banned in this administration. So I mean, I'm ambivalent about this. I mean, I truly am fundamentally ambivalent about this. There is the other question of what's being served up, because this has a great, I think, enormous psychological... I mean, one more thing. How many people have actually seen something on TikTok that actually refers to the Chinese government?

MCMAHON:
Couple.

ROBBINS:
A couple.

AMOS:
Three.

ROBBINS:
And so I mean, how many of you ever watched the Manchurian Candidate? Okay, that too is a conversation for another.

MCMAHON:
So, we're going to have to end on your note of ambivalence, Carla, because that's our look at the World Next Week. Given that this is our last episode, Carla and I want to say a few things about the show. Carla?

ROBBINS:
First of all, I want to thank you for teaching me. I had no idea when you asked me to step in for Jim Lindsay, first of all, when you said it was weekly, I had no idea that meant every week. I mean, it's not like I... I was a newspaper editor, I sort of knew what the word weekly meant, but somehow I didn't realize how relentless it was going to be. I had no idea how to do a podcast. I had no idea how to write a script. And it has just been a blast. It's been a blast working with you. It's been a blast talking to you every week. And I am just, can I call you every Thursday at 11:00?

MCMAHON:
Please, please do.

ROBBINS:
Because I'm really going to miss it. And it's just been an enormous amount of fun. It's been enormous amount of fun working with everybody.

MCMAHON:
At least before every film festival, we have to talk about it, so.

ROBBINS:
And that's been the other thing. I mean, I have an absolutely terrible voice and they let me sing Abba on the podcast. I mean, what more could a girl ask for? It really has been a blast, and it has, particularly for someone who has spent so many years in daily journalism, it's just given me just that total adrenaline rush, which I really missed. And it is just been an enormous amount of fun, and it's been fun hearing from people who listen to it. And it's just been a wonderful experience. And it's been a wonderful experience too, because it's the council, so you can't screw up. I mean, it's really rigorous and that too is a really wonderful thing.
I used to say at the Times, "It's the effing New York Times," when we did things. You just can't mess up. And I'm sure you said that at NPR, "It's effing NPR. You can't mess up." Well, it's the same thing here. It's the effing CFR, you can't mess up. And that too made it so incredibly special. So, thank you, Bob.

MCMAHON:
Right back at you, Carla. Thank you for partnering and stepping into this yes, weekly program. And I mean, you can tell from hearing Carla, she's meticulous and she's dogged, and whether it's going into the Academy Award category for best foreign film, or it's following through on Ukrainian arms sales or whatever, she is dogged and it's really, I think, brought this podcast to kind of a new dimension, which I really appreciate. So thank you, Carla.
I also want to say, thank all the people who've worked on the show through the years. A huge thank you to all the hosts and guest hosts. Can you say, Deb Amos.

ROBBINS:
A regular.

MCMAHON:
We've had on the show, our longtime former co-host, Jim Lindsay, did it for many years with Jim through thick and thin, through COVID, and many other things. Shout out to our founding producer, Jeremy Sherlick, who basically plucked this podcast out of an nearly partnership with The Economist and turned it into a CFR product, and he stuck it with it more than a dozen years. To Gabrielle Sierra, who has helped us in most recent years. Thank you so much, Gabrielle. And a shout-out to a recent producer who just departed who we hope to hear from soon again in more exotic ways, Ester Fang, who produced a show for the last two years.
I also want to thank Molly McAnany. I want to thank Justin Schuster for producing today's program. To Markus Zukaria for providing our theme music, and rewriting our theme music and tending to audio production skills all on the way. Special thanks to Helena Kopans-Johnson for her really, really dogged research assistance to this one especially, and on this episode and many others. Special thanks to Sam Platt and Nick Sander for engineering this live taping, and to our AV teams in New York and D.C. for engineering many, many episodes over the years. Thank you, Sam Dunderdale, who's also a phenomenal basketball player. He helped get this episode up and running for us. And I'm all out of thanks, but Carla, over to you.

ROBBINS:
As I said, this has been a blast and it's just been wonderful bringing this complicated world every week. We've also loved hearing from people in the last week, people going, "Why? Why are you going away?" We loved hearing from you last week. Don't stop and keep telling us about your favorite moments. I'm still waiting for someone to tell me that they loved hearing me sing Abba, but it's probably not going to happen.
Write to us about all your favorite TWNW moments, drop us an email at [email protected], or leave feedback on our iTunes page or tag CFR_org on X. A transcript of our conversation are listed on the podcast page for The World Next Week on CFR.org. I should have memorized this by now. Please note that opinions, and we've certainly had them, expressed on The World Next Week are solely those of the host, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.
This is Carla Robbins saying so long, and thank you Deb and everyone here for joining us. And thank you, Bob, for being a truly, truly wonderful partner in all of this.

AMOS:
I am Deb Amos and I'm very happy to be here. This is like watching a movie. You know that last scene, right?

ROBBINS:
It's Dark Victory with Bette Davis.

AMOS:
I know, I know. But I'm very happy to watch all of this, and thank you for letting me join you on your last night together.

MCMAHON:
Well, this is Bob McMahon saying goodbye and for last time on this channel, be careful out there.