Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer on trading the Situation Room for a podcasting booth

Jake Sullivan: AOC was asked a question about whether the US would come to the defense of Taiwan. This is the hardest question that there is, I think, and we’ve dealt with this up close and personal with the president who we advise, maintain strategic ambiguity. He went out and was just like, “I’m going to answer a hypothetical question with a straight yes or no.” And he said, “Yes.”

Max Tani: Welcome to another episode of the Mixed Signals Podcast from us here at Semafor, where we are talking to all of the most important and interesting people shaping our new media age. I’m Max Tani, I’m the media editor here at Semafor, and with me as always is our editor in chief Ben Smith. This week on the show we are talking to Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer. These days, they are lonely podcast hosts just like us. They host a show called The Long Game, which is a podcast about foreign policy for Vox Media, but before that they had slightly more important jobs. Jake was the National Security Advisor for Joe Biden, also worked under Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and Jon Finer was the Deputy National Security advisor for Joe Biden and also was formerly a journalist for the Washington Post. Had a previous life in media.
Ben, you know both Jake and Jon pretty well through your times covering Washington, what are you interested in asking them about on the show today?

Ben Smith: Yeah, I think they, and Jake was really running American foreign policy at this moment of just such dramatic change in media and communications, and whether it was the run-up to the Ukraine War or the Israel-Palestine conflict, a lot of what he wound up thinking about I think was media, and then got to watch Donald Trump who has a rather different communication style. But I am very curious what he’s learned and of course why he’s making a podcast. What are we doing here?

Max Tani: Yeah, it is pretty interesting going from being one of the people shaping global events and outcomes across the world to doing host-read ads and doing collaborations with shows such as ours. I think that that’s an interesting career trajectory.

Ben Smith: Are you saying it’s a downward career trajectory?

Max Tani: No, I said it’s interesting. I didn’t say it was downward at all. I think that what we do is very important and very much on par with making global decisions that impact the outcomes of countries all over the globe. That’s why we do this show.

Ben Smith: Naturally.

Max Tani: So it’s worth mentioning also that because this is a media-focused show, we really wanted to ask Jake and Jon mostly questions about the media. There’s a lot of questions that could be asked about various foreign policy decisions that look good, maybe that don’t look so good, depending on your perspective, and they’ve given interviews and talked about that on other shows. Just for the purposes of this show, we wanted to keep it really focused on media.
Well, we have a lot that we want to get to with Jon and Jake, but we have to take a short break and we’ll be right back with the hosts of The Long Game right after this.

Ben Smith: Jake, Jon, thank you so much for joining us.

Jake Sullivan: Really excited to be here. Thanks for having us.

Jon Finer: Yep, great to be here.

Ben Smith: Welcome to the podcast trade. It occurs to me that it used to be that kind of officials like you, senior government officials, would leave office and would have some prestigious chair at a think tank or would write a thick biography of Winston Churchill or something. Two years ago this time you were basically running the world, Jake, now you’re hosting a podcast. Is that kind of a letdown?

Jake Sullivan: Well, I’ll tell you, it’s a big weight off the shoulders, that’s for sure because I can say just whatever I think without having to worry too much as to whether it conforms to the president’s policy or is going to move markets or anything else. So obviously it’s very different to be a podcaster than to be sitting in the seat as National Security Advisor, but there are some definite advantages. And the medium, as you guys know, gives you an opportunity to really go deeper on issues and also to talk like an actual human being as opposed to a talking points machine. That’s actually been a bit of an adjustment for me especially, but for Jon, I think he can speak for himself to a certain extent as well. And getting to grapple with these issues and talk about them in absolutely plain English actually gives you, I think, a little bit of a healthier perspective on them and maybe will make us better practitioners and policymakers one day in the future.

Max Tani: Has the process of being a podcaster, has that given you more respect for your friends in the media who when you’re in a position of power you think, “Gee, these guys are just saying whatever, and they have the freedom to do so.” But now you actually are kind of seeing how hard the technical nuts and bolts are. Those ad reads aren’t as easy as maybe they seemed when you heard them versus when you have to read them yourself?

Jon Finer: I’ll just say I actually started my career in the media. I came to government in large part from the experience of having covered what I considered to be either failed or bad policy decisions and got very curious as to how they were made. Mostly I was working overseas. So I think I came in with some inherent sympathy or empathy for what the media tries to do. I then, like every other government official, got massively frustrated when coverage seemed to be inconsistent with what I thought it should be and probably took it out on my reporter friends too often. But yeah, it’s nice to be back on the other side of the firewall here.

Jake Sullivan: Can I just say on that point, one of the things that I have a better appreciation for now is that a big part of the job of being a journalist or a commentator and observer is trying to make sense of events, not just the what, but the why and then the what then? Okay, so why should people care about it? And actually that’s kind of seemingly obvious when you’re making policy, but when you’re on the outside trying to interpret policy decisions, it’s more challenging and actually is a really interesting intellectual exercise that is something that we’ve come to over the course of the weeks we’ve been doing the pod.

Max Tani: You mentioned a second ago that it’s kind of changed your thinking on some of these issues. Obviously these are things that you’ve thought very, very deeply about, but can you think of any specific examples where you’ve changed your mind now having to be an interpreter rather than a player in some of these decisions? Are there any specific examples that come to mind here?

Jake Sullivan: I guess for me it’s a little bit less, have I flipped on a policy issue, like gone from believing X to believing Y, and more that the discipline of having to explain to people why something matters to a broad general audience makes you have to sharpen your thinking about what are American interests? What are the stakes? How do I make this real and not just something that’s kind of received wisdom or natural muscle memory? And we’ve done pods on everything from the use of US military force and how do we sharpen our thinking about what are the criteria for when we should and should not do that? To, US China relations, and how do you explain to people why do these semiconductor export controls actually matter. We just kind of were going with that in a way when we were in government, not just riding a wave or whatever, but you didn’t have to stop and say, “How do I explain this? How do I contextualize this? And in so doing, am I really pressure testing the ideas and the priorities that we’re putting on things?”

Jon Finer: I think it’s actually an exercise that makes for better policy or will help us make for better policy, or at least policy communications going forward. Because one thing that people like us, I think have not done as effectively as we should have, not just over recent years, but over recent decades, is stop taking for granted that people in the United States see things the way we do, or understand the importance of things the way we do, especially things going on in the world.
And one of the things that I think the Trump phenomenon has taken advantage of is a disconnect between people making policy and people who are digesting policy just out in the world who aren’t marinating in this stuff all day every day. And so he’s been able to come in and say, “Well, why are things working this way? Why does the United States do these sorts of things in the world? Why does the United States care about things like these abstract terms like the international system or alliances? And can drive a truck through the gap that we and others have left between what we consider to be just fundamentally important and the appreciation of that by many of the American people?” So it does kind of force us to be disciplined about explaining why these things matter.

Max Tani: Yeah. Is that the reason why you guys decided to do this? And also, just to take a step back, how did you decide to do this podcast together? Did Vox approach you guys, had you guys thought during your time in office, man, I can’t wait to get out of here so I can do a podcast explaining foreign policy from the outside to people? How did this actually come about?

Jake Sullivan: Well, Max, when I was a young man growing up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, I thought one day I will be a podcaster. I saw it coming long before.

Max Tani: Everybody does.

Jake Sullivan: Actually. I don’t know if Jon has the exact same recollection I do, but after we left, like a week, 10 days after we left, we went skiing out west with some friends and then we went hiking in Bryce Canyon, in winter hiking, late January, early February, and it was on that hike that we were like, “Hey, maybe we should do a podcast.” We kind of talked through A; that we thought there was room for a foreign policy podcast that wasn’t about hot takes and wasn’t super partisan, but that was actually just trying to explain the why. It put things in context. And the title of the podcast is The Long Game, talk about a longer-term view, a longer-term perspective.
So we both thought there’s a place for this and we thought this will be fun and we’ll learn a lot and stay fresh on these issues along the way. So normally when you cook things up on hiking trips, you don’t actually do them, but somehow we ended up doing it. Do I have that about right, Jon, or is my memory playing tricks on me?

Jon Finer: I think you do. I think the only thing I’d add is somewhat serendipitously, we got outreach from someone saying that Vox was actually looking for content in this space and had initial conversation, and I think they agreed with the theory of the case that we were cooking up on this hike, and the rest is at least recent history.

Max Tani: Who is listening to the show so far? Are you hearing from foreign officials? Are you hearing from diplomats, people you used to work with directly? Who are you guys hearing from? What’s the reception been?

Jon Finer: So I think both of us have had the experience of bumping into people as we move around the world or around the country doing other things that we do and having them walk up to us and say, “Hey, I’ve been listening to your podcast.” And either, “Here’s some constructive feedback,” or, “I like this or I don’t like this.” All of which is great and totally welcome. Now, I think it’s also the kind of thing people say when they see you and they know that you have a podcast, whether they’re actually listening to every episode, I don’t try to verify.

Max Tani: Everybody who comes up to me and who compliments me on the podcast is a full-time listener and they’ve listened to all of the episodes.

Jon Finer: By the way, Max, we love your podcast.

Max Tani: Thank you. Yes. You guys are huge longterm fans.

Jake Sullivan: We’re faithful listeners every week.

Max Tani: Yes, exactly.

Jake Sullivan: Huge fans.

Jon Finer: But I think it actually is, you’ve hit on something that we’re very curious about. We don’t spend every day scrutinizing the data and the numbers, we’re trying to get the content and do as well as we can at this. And I am kind of curious beyond the people who walk up to us or email us or text us, who out there is actually paying attention? I don’t have a particularly granular understanding. Other than I think our goal is to reach beyond the people who we see interact with, used to work with every day, to others maybe who have not been as much plugged into this content. And if we can do that, then I would consider it a success.

Jake Sullivan: Yeah, we definitely hear from current and former government officials around the world. We also just get a mailbag. We hear from people across the US, parts of Europe, other places, people writing in, responding to things, asking questions, suggesting topics and the like. We keep thinking about doing a mailbag segment where we take some of the listener questions and kind of go through them. We haven’t done that yet, but at some point here we will. But that’s kind of an unscientific way of getting some sense. And I think there’s a lot of listeners who follow foreign policy digest the major newspapers, the international sections of the major newspapers, but aren’t like living it day to day who are just looking for decent content on the topic. And that’s the audience we’re going to continue to try to grow.

Ben Smith: Your sort of description of why you’re doing this, you’re delivering that with a certain amount of discipline. But it occurs to me that during the Biden years, Jake, I think you in particular had this idea and talked about rooting foreign policy and the issues of the middle class, rooting foreign policy and domestic issues in some sense, and I think, I don’t know if you would accept this, but I think that fundamentally kind of didn’t land. It sounds like that’s some of what you’re reworking now and thinking about, is that right?

Jake Sullivan: Well, look, I do think that kind of across the board as the communications and information environment changes, finding a way to make real, the kinds of issues we work on for everyday people, for working people in this country is not an easy thing, and I’m not going to claim that our podcast is going to solve that. But giving us the opportunity to test out how to think about, talk about frame issues, I think is an important part of being someone operating in this space. It’s not good enough just to think about the ideas. You’ve got to try on a constant basis to speak about them, to communicate about them, in a way that can reach a broader audience. Because ultimately trying to get greater buy-in or greater understanding for what the United States is doing in the world is really important.
I do agree with you that on some issues it was hard to break through or communicate. On other issues, I disagree a little. I think Ukraine is a fascinating example of a case where for people from across all walks of life, all corners of the country, folks instinctively, intuitively got it. And actually, the media pretty consistently underestimated the American people on this. They kept saying, “Oh, the American people are going to abandon Ukraine. They’re no longer going to want to support it. They don’t want to fund it,” et cetera. But even in the Trump administration support for Ukraine and support for the United States providing aid to Ukraine has stood up pretty well on a bipartisan basis. So I agree with you to a certain extent it didn’t land, but I think that was more differentiated across issue areas.

Jon Finer: I personally am pretty surprised by the degree to which the Ukraine issue has landed with the American people and stayed consistent and front of mind. I started my career covering a war that the United States was fighting in as a journalist, the Iraq war, and I found during that time when I came home, trying to get people to talk about what was happening over there was often pulling teeth. People just did not want to engage on it, in part because I think it was a highly unpleasant issue, in part because I think there were real doubts about whether the purpose, the morality of the actual decision to go in was the right one.
On Russia, Ukraine. I think part of what I underestimated is how people are drawn to a narrative where there is a clear perpetrator and a clear victim as is the case in this conflict, and it made it much more digestible to the average person as opposed to the complexities of weapons of mass destruction or energy markets or some of these issues that have led to conflicts in the past, even though we were not a direct combatant, they stayed on it.

Max Tani: Because this is a media show, I want to ask a specific media question here. There was one thing that happened early in the war that you guys did that I think was seen by a lot of folks here as savvy, which is that you declassified a lot of these Russian disinformation efforts. You put them out there before they were able to kind fester and take hold as kind of conspiracy theories. It showed a kind of interesting savviness about the ways in which disinformation and new media worked. But I’m kind of curious how much time you spent thinking about media and the ways that foreign media was shaping some of the things that were happening abroad. How often was the interpretations of US actions in foreign media being factored into you guys’ decision-making processes?

Jake Sullivan: Well, particularly when it came to Russia, it was very front of mind because for Putin owning the information space, being able to define what was happening, was critical to his strategy. And what he wanted to be able to do in the Ukraine context was say Ukraine was the aggressor, Russia was under attack. Ukraine was starting the war and Russia had no choice. They got dragged in. And so to defeat that strategy, it became essential for us to essentially narrate the war, basically to say, Putin is planning to invade. He’s planning to do it in a couple months time. He’s going to throw up all this chaff about how it’s the Ukrainians provoking him. That’s all going to be BS. And we needed to lay all that down in advance so that Putin could not successfully own the narrative of that war.
And then equally in other contexts, we learned a lot from that. In dealing with the US-China relationship. China actually puts a lot of energy and effort into trying to shape the global narrative. One example of that in this whole question of semiconductor export controls, they really want to sell the story, this can’t work. They keep seeding in the western press that China’s had another big breakthrough, which just once again proves that the export controls don’t work at all. Meanwhile, their diplomats are demanding that we lift the controls, which suggests they are working, and there’s a lot of evidence to suggest they are. That’s another area where I think the centrality of being able to be engaged publicly in a back and forth in the global media has an impact on the actual policymaking and the actual shape of the strategy that great powers are undertaking. I think that that is going to be a feature of the landscape going forward, and anyone sitting in the National Security Council is going to have to think a lot about that.

Jon Finer: Normally in a crisis, something happens in the world and then you are responding to the thing that happens, some bad act somewhere. This time Jake and I walked in one morning and the first page of the President’s Daily Brief, which sits on our desk every day when we arrive, basically that the intelligence community believed that Russia was very likely to invade Ukraine. And we were like, “Huh, that’s pretty big deal. And it would’ve been nice if somebody maybe given us a call to say this was coming, but it looks like we’ve got a few months and we’ve got to figure out what to do.” And so that was the advantage. The disadvantage was when we went around and started talking to our friends out in the world, by the way, including our friends in Ukraine-

Jake Sullivan: The Ukrainians, yeah.

Jon Finer: ... nobody really believed that we were right. And there’s a checkered history of US intelligence predictions not always playing out the way we say. And so we were up against a pretty steep hill to convince our partners, our allies, the Ukrainians themselves and the public, that this was likely to happen. And it led to us pushing the envelope a bit with the intelligence community, but we did it in a way that was hand in glove with them, rigorous in the sense of protecting the sources of that material and the methods by which we obtained it, because obviously you don’t want to just undo your ability to collect intelligence by revealing this stuff. And it allowed us to be ready.
And the Ukrainians ultimately, once they were persuaded to be ready when the war began, because we surged a bunch of weapons in that they could use to defend themselves right off the bat. And we got our European partners ready to impose sanctions on Russia, not months after the first day of the invasion, but days after. And had we not been able to kind of present them with this pretty ironclad information, Russia would’ve been able to do this with impunity in the early days, which couldn’t.

Ben Smith: One of the aspects of the Israel-Palestine conflict is the media war. How much do you think the public should accept Israeli government claims about the conflict? And on the other side, how much should they accept Palestinian claims? I saw there was recently a report that the Israelis now accept the Palestinian death count.

Jon Finer: I guess my general view is when a country is a combatant in a war, it’s incentivized to present facts that are advantageous to its position. That’s true of any country, including by the way the United States in the wars that we’ve fought.
So I think a good general proposition is not to take any presentation at face value to sort of seek independent corroboration, whether from media, from other governments, from international organizations. And so, I think that is true of government of Israel. It’s frankly true of the United States government in the current moment, given some of the presentations that are being made about world affairs, whether in the Munich Security Conference recently or going forward. So I think that’s just a good general rule as a consumer of media to follow.

Jake Sullivan: And just to follow up on that, Jon started his career, he mentioned he was in media as a war correspondent, actually riding in with the US military into Iraq in 2003. And the US embeds journalists when we send forces into combat, whether it’s in Iraq or Afghanistan or elsewhere, and those journalists are able to get firsthand accounts of things, see them and report on them.
As things stand today, I still believe it’s the case that Israel’s not allowing foreign journalists into Gaza. And that is a significant problem because it means that you’re not getting independent eyes and ears on the ground there. And to Jon’s point, that’s true of any combat in a war, whether it’s Israel or Hamas. And the lack of access for international journalists to Gaza I think is setting back the cause of transparency and we should be able to get the full picture by having independent media in there, being able to report on it.

Max Tani: On the one hand, we’ve seen a lot of investment in Israeli propaganda, particularly on social media. We know that there’s been paid influencers in the United States who’ve carried some of this. And then on the flip side, we’re curious how important Al Jazeera remains as far as supporting the Palestinian side. How did you guys think about both of those kind of entities here?

Jake Sullivan: I think there’s a larger issue here that even goes beyond this particular very tragic conflict where you’re seeing a lot of different governments around the world think about how they invest in sources of, for lack of a better term, propaganda. And I think we have seen the Israeli government take steps to try to press its narrative through a whole bunch of different channels. And we have seen supporters of the Palestinian cause, and Al Jazeera is, I think, an example of an outlet that makes no bones about its perspective in this war, what it thinks of Israel, what it thinks of the Palestinian cause, and I think has had a huge impact on the narrative because of its ability both to generate images and have access that a lot of other people don’t get. And that goes way beyond just this conflict for Al Jazeera.
I think Al Jazeera remains an incredibly potent platform to drive a variety of narratives across the region, some of which upset other countries in the region because of course it’s based in Qatar, and Qatar has had its challenges with some of its neighbors. But this is something in the US government we had to watch, but we had to watch it not just with respect to these countries and these players, but with many others as well. And going back to previous administrations, there have been efforts to engage the Qatari government on Al Jazeera as it relates to various US policy actions. We didn’t really, in our administration, have that kind of engagement. We weren’t trying to shape or change Al Jazeera’s coverage in any way, but we were certainly cognizant of it as we watched the information environment unfold around the set of overlapping conflicts across the Middle East.

Max Tani: You guys were some of the most visible faces and important people in the room for some of these discussions. I guess, for better or for worse, do you feel like some of the policy decisions that you guys made have closed some doors to you guys in terms of your future within the Democratic Party?

Jon Finer: Well, look. I guess what I’d say is, this issue is unique in some ways. In that, you know, close watchers of it, close observers of it, often take an extremely zero-sum kind of binary, almost, approach. It’s either this or it’s that, and there’s no Venn diagram of the two views.

There aren’t many issues we work on that are like that. So finding common ground among people who believe, for example, our administration was — and there are people like this, even though it’s maybe a bit less in some of the media discourse — too harsh in criticizing the Israelis, withholding certain capabilities from them. And then the people who I think are at least the majority of the people who I hear from who believe the opposite, essentially. That we gave the Israelis too much of a free hand and a free pass during that conflict. There is not going to be any common ground among those people, and that issue is still, I think, playing out in the discourse, both broadly across the country and as you kind of hinted, inside the Democratic Party.

I think Jake and I each have views, sort of decision by decision and moment by moment. Did we get this right? Did we get that right? But this is going to be a big issue that I think the party is going to be wrestling with. Maybe less in terms of the midterms, because the midterms tend to be about a bunch of different micro races playing out across the country. But certainly, as we go into choosing a candidate in 2028, this is going to be one of the issues that’s on the agenda.

How did that candidate view what happened on October 7, and in the aftermath of that, is going to be one of the issues that a Democratic electorate will assess, and frankly, should assess.

How that impacts me personally, I suspect Jake would feel the same way, is not nearly as high a priority for me now as helping figure out what the party should be for going into, ideally, the next time that we’re in power, which I hope is soon, whether that includes us or not.

Jake Sullivan: I couldn’t say it any better, and, just to put a fine point on it, I think the key question is what lessons to take away from the last three years when it comes to policy towards Israel and Gaza. The opportunity to go back through a set of decisions and look hard at them with the benefit of hindsight, and then make judgments about where the party, where the country should go from here on these issues.

I think Jon and I will both participate in the conversation, and many, many other people will as well. And what kind of impact that has on me, or him, or anyone else, that’s not a top priority.

Max Tani: Well, we have a lot that we want to get to with Jon and Jake, but we have to take a short break and we’ll be right back right after this.
A lot of the things that we’ve been talking about here are a little bit backward looking. I want to kind of look forward. One thing people saw during the 2016 election and afterwards was the power of digital misinformation as kind of a political and a state tool. The new force in information, the major player is obviously AI and LLMs that are increasingly a part of people’s daily lives and how they get their information. How do you see LLMs shaping the information people get and how is the US government going to try and reckon with the fact that most people across the world are probably going to be getting their information from AI within the next 10 or 15 years?

Jon Finer: I think one thing probably everybody has experienced is just the deluge of AI generated content in their various feeds wherever they consume information. And that creates a couple of problems. One obviously is a disinformation problem. Some of this is just false or information generated to push a particular viewpoint, even if it’s not grounded in fact. But it also exacerbates another problem, which is people already come to this AI phenomenon with a deep skepticism about facts that they’re presented by media. And now you often see even content that’s generated by established news organizations, if you look at the comments underneath it, you have people saying, “Oh, this is clearly AI, or this is clearly fake news,” or whatever.
And so I think we have a societal problem that is we no longer have a common factual basis on which we develop our opinions and analyze the issues we face. We used to always have wildly divergent views about policy or things that were happening in the country, but at least we started from a common set of basic facts. We don’t even have that factual foundation anymore. And so on the one hand, while AI enables people to obtain all manner of information that was not available to them previously, I worry that it is going to deeply make even more difficult, this challenge of being able to function as a cohesive society because people disagree even about the basic building blocks of information that they are presented. I think that’s going to make things harder, not easier.

Jake Sullivan: And Max, one of the things in the Biden administration that we pursued with the major AI companies, US companies, was a set of voluntary commitments that they would make, one of which had to do with watermarking, which is essentially to take any piece of digital content and say, this is human-generated versus this is AI-generated. There’s been pretty uneven implementation of that, but I think we are going to have to come up with technical tools to help consumers distinguish between that which is real and that which is AI-generated, especially since the AI-generated stuff is so damn good, both video and audio as well as the more traditional kind of text-based digital content.
So technical solutions are going to have to be a part of this, and figuring out how to play defense against what will be a deluge of this stuff coming forward. And by the way, not just foreign state directed, I mean this is going to be bubbling up in terms of trying to shape the political discourse in the United States. And there’s a real question as to whether democracies, which do have to be rooted in a common base of information and facts, as Jon just said, are going to be able to withstand this flood. I think we can, but it’s going to require some pretty creative work, both on the technical side and just in terms of public education and resilience to be able to deal with what is, I think a really severe systemic challenge.

Max Tani: I want to shift to some stuff in the news today, which we’re really curious about. I’m sure you guys were paying close attention to the panels and some of the speaking that was happening over the weekend at the Munich Security Conference. AOC’s comments were pretty highly scrutinized. I’m really curious what you made of in particular Newsom and AOC speaking at Munich, and of course also separately what you thought about Secretary of State, Marco Rubio taking a slightly different tone than JD Vance when he appeared at Munich last year. I realize that those are two to three very specific questions. You guys are pretty good at this, your podcast pros, I’d be curious to hear you on both of those.

Jake Sullivan: Well, I’ll make one observation. AOC was asked a question about whether the US would come to the defense of Taiwan. This is the hardest question that there is, I think... And we’ve dealt with this up close and personal with the president who we advise maintain strategic ambiguity. He went out and was just like, “I’m going to answer a hypothetical question with a straight yes or no.” And he said, “Yes.”
So as far as I’m concerned that Taiwan question is almost necessarily going to generate an answer that people can pick at because the right answer is some mashup of ambiguous statements that kind of leave you nowhere. So that stood out to me. It was a flashback to many, many times sitting in rooms where that question was posed to the President of the United States, and he would continually say, “Yes, we’re going to fight them,” and then want to go out and say, “Our policy hasn’t changed,” and so forth.
I thought on Rubio’s speech that there was a big disconnect, interestingly between in the room him getting a standing ovation, and I think people actually appreciated a civil tone, if nothing more, especially after what JD Vance did last year. And then immediately the way in which I think the European press covered the speech, which was essentially this is a velvet glove over the same policy that is still a policy that fundamentally disrespects and undermines the transatlantic relationship and is very aggressive towards Europe.
And I think that that’s fair. And to double down on that message, Rubio went on to stand next to Viktor Orban and basically endorse his candidacy in Hungary to be reelected as Prime Minister. So it was unmistakable that Rubio was saying things in a pleasant way, but fundamentally was reasserting a quite hostile policy from the Trump administration to Europe. And the Europeans are saying basically, “We have to take what you’re saying at face value and de-risk from the United States, hedge against the United States.” And I think that that is really problematic because I think that that relationship, that transatlantic relationship has been a huge asset to the United States.

Jon Finer: The way I think about the Rubio speech, which was received exactly as Jake described it, is he’s almost the designated driver of the Trump administration. He’s not smashing the guardrails or sort of swerving down the lane, but he’s going to the same destination as JD Vance and Donald Trump. And so, there was nothing other than the tone, the respectful presentation. He didn’t just walk in and track mud on the floor of their house. He was polite, but nothing in the substance of the presentation that should give Europeans much reassurance. And if anything, it ratifies what they were already, I think completely convinced about, which is they just cannot depend on the United States for the foreseeable future.
And I think AOC deserves a lot of credit, frankly. I mean, for presenting a coherent worldview in terms of foreign policy and a set of objectives that she will stand for on the world stage or as a candidate for some higher office if she chooses to do that. Most people come and try to just memorize a few safe answers to these questions and get out looking like they’ve at least learned the catechism of foreign affairs, and she tried to do more than that. And whether people like that worldview or dislike that worldview, we may find out going forward, but she took a bigger swing than most people do for their first time in these settings.

Ben Smith: Who do you think are heavyweights on foreign policy in the 2028 field, and ultimately, does that even matter anymore?

Jon Finer: I would just start off by saying, I think Jake and I have worked for two presidents, one of whom I think he would acknowledge came to the job without a ton of foreign policy experience, Barack Obama. The other, Joe Biden, who probably came to the office with more foreign policy experience maybe than any other president, at least in recent history. You could make the case about George H.W. Bush having been pretty steeped in foreign policy when he became president too. So totally different experiences in that way.
And I will say for Barack Obama, quite quickly, he became one of the most fluent, if not the most fluent person in all of the issues the country faced in the discussions that took place with his national security team. He was an incredibly quick study and developed a very coherent theory of the world and tried to take on big challenges in a significant way that was not necessarily what you might expect for somebody who was new to all this. I’m sort of dodging, I guess, who’s best in these, not.

Max Tani: I was going to say that’s a very diplomatic answer. Yeah, exactly. You don’t have to do this anymore.

Jake Sullivan: I’ll take any of them over what we got, so that’s that.

Jon Finer: Hear, hear.

Max Tani: All right, fair enough. Yes, very artful dodges. One of the things that I think really works in the format that you guys are doing, this works both for political and policy podcasts and also for sports podcasts, is hosts who have done the job before interviewing people, but then kind of using that as an opportunity to get into really interesting stories or things that have happened, using the kind of personal experience to reveal interesting kind of information. I was thinking about that when I was listening to you guys’ episode that you did with Evan Osnos on China.
Do you worry that there’s a potential that you guys might reveal information that you’re not supposed to reveal? Are there still things that you kind can’t talk about that maybe you want to talk about because you’re doing a podcast about the things that are happening in the world?

Ben Smith: Are you at risk now on a podcast of revealing something that maybe you shouldn’t?

Jake Sullivan: Definitely. I mean, because we know a lot of stuff that is still considered classified information. Of course, we wouldn’t reveal any of that. So we have to be careful about policing that line between what’s classified and what’s not classified. But of course, we had a lot of practice with that in our time in government, knowing what we’re allowed to say publicly and what we’re not allowed to say publicly. But that remains something that we have to think about.
Also, Max, it’s interesting, it does take, we’ve now done I think a dozen episodes or close to a dozen episodes, and I would say we’re not at 100% of being purely human yet of being like, hey, we’re just going to tell you how it is. Because beyond the classified filter, there’s still the kind of public official filter of how to say things the right way. And we are just trying to tear that. We’ll keep the classified filter up like absolutely four square, but this other filter I think we need to tear down, and we’re getting better every episode, by, I don’t know, the end of this year, I think we’re just going to be really letting it rip. But that has been an interesting adjustment for sure. That is something new. That is uncharted territory, talking like a pure, unadulterated human being.

Max Tani: Important part of podcast success is letting it rip. But Jake, speaking of someone was telling us in the prep for this interview that you are a rumored Senate candidate in Minnesota. Is this going to be a short-lived podcast stint? Are you running there? Is that a real thing? This was in our show notes, so it’s important that we ask.

Jake Sullivan: I really wonder where that came from in your show notes, because the answer to that question is definitely no. And that’s not a... I’m just happy doing what I’m doing podcasting right now while I explore it. No, I’m not running for Senate in Minnesota.

Jon Finer: And now that Jake’s not running, I’m going to have to look hard at it.

Max Tani: Are you going to have to take a hard look at it? Yes, exactly. I think that’s a good place for us to wrap it. So now that you guys feel comfortable encroaching on our territory as podcast hosts, maybe I should put myself up for National Security Director or Deputy National Security Chief.

Jon Finer: Let us know if you need a reference. Happy to provide.

Max Tani: Exactly. Thanks again.
Ben, what did you think about the overall thrust that they had of this idea that Americans need foreign policy demystified for them and that the media space at the moment isn’t doing a particularly good job at explaining these key pillars of foreign policy? I mean, they basically mentioned during the episode that American’s inability to understand fully what was going on in the world was one of the reasons why Donald Trump was able to, as they put it, drive a truck through the way that the world was operating, and American’s understanding of foreign affairs and why things operate the way that they do in this kind of global system. What did you think about that argument? Did that ring true to you?

Ben Smith: Yeah, I mean, I think that they are doing these podcasts in a way like the way we are, sort of learning as they go, using this podcast to try to figure out a media space that I think at a very high geopolitical level, Jake and Jon played extremely effectively against the Russians in particular, but in an American tactical political level, really didn’t work. They had this idea we’re going to explain foreign policy in a way that makes sense to middle class. Maybe Joe Biden couldn’t really explain much at that point, but that didn’t work.
And Trump came in and did actually explain foreign policy in a way that made sense to people, totally personalizes it. It’s about his relationships with other leaders and then has meetings in public that typically would’ve taken place in private. Like the Ukraine breakdown with Zelenskyy wasn’t something that happened behind the scenes and we learned about. That happened on camera. And there’s this way in which Trump is operating totally in public that I think has allowed him to explain what he’s doing abroad. I’m not sure that’s made it popular, but it’s made it clearer and it’s drawn attention in a way that I think the Biden administration didn’t really succeed in doing.

Max Tani: One of the things that we wanted to ask about was this kind of battle over information related to the war in Gaza. Whether on one side you had the Israeli state essentially propaganda, and on the other side you had kind of this interest-based media. Particularly, we asked about Al Jazeera as an example of that. But what did you think about the ways that the Biden administration and those guys were thinking about handling information and how that was shaping public perceptions of the war of what was going on over there?

Ben Smith: My own perception is that they were very focused on communicating to the Israeli public and to Benjamin Netanyahu and really kind of lost the information war at home there. And then meanwhile, the Israeli and Palestinian sides via Al Jazeera, via the Israeli government, via a network of people on Twitter, took the whole narrative away from them. I did think the thing I want to the, that Jake said is true. The fact that the Israelis don’t allow independent journalists to Gaza means that we don’t have independent voices telling us what’s going on, and that’s just a real issue.

Max Tani: It really strikes me that both Jon and Jake understand foreign policy quite well, but one of the things that they are actively puzzling through with this podcast and puzzling through in the aftermath of their departure from the White House is how to communicate about foreign policy in a new information landscape and how to use communication as kind of a state tool. And that I think part of the reason why they’re not writing books or necessarily becoming contributors on television is that they are trying to feel like what it is on the other side, being the communicators being part of this kind of new media ecosystem. And I think in some ways that’s teaching them how to kind of shape US foreign policy going forward, should either of them be involved in any administrations in the future.

Ben Smith: I think that’s a great point. And to that point, I mean, you asked, I thought, a kind of impolite question about the way in which Gaza I think will hang over everybody from the Biden administration. You covered the White House, you covered these guys. How do you think the Biden approach to that war is going to play in 2028? Are there going to be people who are disqualified from running for president because they were too pro-Israel?

Max Tani: I think that Jon said it pretty well. This is going to be an issue that is going to hang over the 2028 Democratic primary, and where various candidates stood on this issue is going to be something that matters to a slice of the Democratic electorate. And so that was the reason why we wanted to kind of ask them. Both of those guys are some of the most senior foreign policy officials in democratic politics, and it is an open question about whether they’ll be involved in future administrations given the controversy around this and the sensitivity around this particular topic.

Ben Smith: Yeah, no, I think it was a good question. I guess my own experience is that once folks get into that little circle of people who’ve had that level of experience, they come back, partly just by definition, there’s so few people who have the experience. So I suspect those guys won’t be podcasters for life. Look forward to their roles in the AOC administration.

Max Tani: And that is it for us this week. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Mixed Signals from us here at Semafor. Our show is produced by Manny Fidel and Josh Billinson, who both had to put in some extra reps this week because of our technical difficulties. We really appreciate that. With special thanks to Anna Pezzino, Jules Zern, Chad Lewis, Rachel Oppenheim, Tori Core, Garrett Wiley, and Daniel Hoeft. Our engineer is Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Steve Bohn. Our public editors this week are former guests of the show, former foreign policy experts, US Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy, Sarah Rogers, and of course Jamie Rubin. Guys, what did you guys think of what Jon and Jake had to say? Let us know. Send us an email.

Ben Smith: If you like the show. Please follow us wherever you get your podcasts, and please subscribe on YouTube.

Max Tani: And if you want more, you can always sign up for Semafor’s Media Newsletter, which is out every Sunday night, and please send us questions for our Trust in Media Summit, which is happening next week in Washington.