The World Next Week: Final Episode Live Podcast Taping

Please join us for a live taping of The World Next Week podcast. Hosted by Robert McMahon, Carla Anne Robbins, and their guest co-host, Deborah Amos, this special taping and livestream will serve as the show’s series finale after over seventeen years on air. 

The World Next Week brings journalists’ perspectives to the critical and intriguing stories developing around the globe—from Kyiv, to Pyongyang, to Capitol Hill, to Cannes. TWNW’s hosts have years of experience covering international and Washington news. Before joining CFR, Robert McMahon, managing editor of digital content, reported for the Associated Press and was news director for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague. Carla Anne Robbins, a senior fellow and faculty director of the MIA Program at Baruch College’s Marxe School, was deputy editorial page editor at the New York Times and chief diplomatic correspondent at the Wall Street Journal.

SIERRA: Hello everyone. Wow, I sounded like an emcee there. Welcome to our live taping of The World Next Week. I am Gabrielle Sierra. I’m the director of podcasting here. And I host another one of our podcasts called Why it Matters. Check it out.

This is a really special moment. We’re here to have a great time, and for you all to see your favorite hosts live and in person. But we’re also saying goodbye to CFR’s first and longest-running podcast. For anyone tuning in for the first time, for the past seventeen years The World Next Week has been highlighting and discussing critical and intriguing stories developing around the globe. On a weekly basis, The World Next Week’s hosts, Carla Anne Robbins and Robert McMahon, bring a journalist’s perspective to international news. And today they are joined by another fabulous seasoned journalist, Deb Amos, who will serve as a very special co-host.

So I’m going to repeat some of the stuff Stacey just said, but we are currently live streaming to fans all over the world. So let me tell you what you’re in for this evening. In a minute, our hosts will join us on stage for the series finale episode, which will also feature our first-ever live audience figure of the week poll. So those here in the room and folks at home will get the opportunity to vote via a QR code. So it’ll display on your screen. We’ll have it up here and it is in your booklets. So many different ways. And you’ll have ample time to vote on the audience figure of the week. The taping will run for forty-five minutes, and then the livestream will end. As Stacey said, at that point we will be hosting a fifteen-minute Q&A just for folks in the room. However, we do invite those watching at home to send us an email at [email protected], and Bob and Carla swear that they will get back to you and answer your questions. The video of this event will be available on CFR.org and YouTube, and the audio will be released on all of The World Next Week’s usual channels on Thursday.

So without further delay, let’s get this show started. Carla and Bob and Deb. (Applause.)

(Music plays.)

MCMAHON: 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 21, 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, is currently the Ferris professor of journalism at Princeton University. But most importantly, she is—she’s a friend of the pod. She was the guest host of our 10^th anniversary podcast, 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. OK. (Laughter.) 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, you know, thinking back to where I started, in print, you know, 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 20,000-40,000 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, 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, you know, 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 throughline for me is that it’s really, really important that some things have not changed, which are, you know, the real attention to facts, to sourcing, to conveying information really clearly. You know, even, you know, with today’s main device for picking up information, you know, the cellphone, you’re going to flip through something. And you’re going to—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 know, you’re going to pick it up. So I start up my day. I get a number of newsletters. I might drive in listening to The Economist Intelligence, you know, 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, you know, of misinformation. And so it’s just that much more important to continue to have the basics from the—and going back to where I started, which is just sourcing, clarity of conveying information, and just being—you know, being dedicated to the facts.

ROBBINS: But 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, how do you think—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—it is the conveying of information, I guess. It’s the—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 know, you were still—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 early 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 kind of a—I’m a consumer of all these types of things, I know what kind of comes across, you know, clunky and phony. And just sort of being able to be part of it, and working with talented journalists, scholars at CFR, you know, it just—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 out.

ROBBINS: The sniff test for images. (Laughs.)

MCMAHON: For images, for audio. You know.

ROBBINS: (Laughs.) They call that synesthesia.

MCMAHON: But back to you, I mean, in podcasting—but I mean in podcasting, you know, it’s—you know, 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, you know, this time or that time. I mean, you’re fact checking in real time. You know, did that—did you ever think you’d be sitting there podcasting and sort of, you know, broadcasting to the rest of the world on a weekly basis?

ROBBINS: You guys tricked me into doing it.

MCMAHON: We did. We did.

ROBBINS: There’s no question about it. So.

MCMAHON: I wanted to—I want 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. (Laughter.) 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, you know, 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 know, 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. (Laughter.)

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

AMOS: Yeah. So, you know, I think if you keep them up to date with skills, what you’re talking about, if you—you know, they have to—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, you know, tapped for trouble. So journalism is adversarial. It always has been. That’s the point. You know, 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? Do we—you know, I always like the Trump—or, I mean, the Marty Baron sentence, which is: We’re not at war. We’re 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 will say that. I mean, they were 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 know, you always—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. I mean, certainly you want people to talk to you. But they’re not your friends. And you can’t—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’ve listened to Kash Patel, he’s got an enemies list with reporters directly on it. They are 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 that we have to think about.

One is just physical safety for reporters, which is not necessarily with the Trump administration, but we’ve seen it with people on the campaign trail. We do this local journalist initiative here with 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 a local journalist who was about covering extremism. And an extraordinary phenomenon developed in which there was a conversation in the 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 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—you know, potentially strangle you with it. I mean, the idea that you can have this conversation with 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, I mean, 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—you know, 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, 72 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 51 percent. And by late last year, that percentage had dropped to 31 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. (Laughs.) So, I mean, you can take cold comfort in that, but there is a general loss in institutions. Part of its 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 we can be a lot more transparent about how we get our information and how we produce it. There’s just, you know, the basics that you were talking about there. We’ve got to absolutely keep clear links to the community. We’re not on 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: You know, 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 200 journalists who come in and out of Beirut. And when Syria—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—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 L.A. fires, where you’ve seen this surge in interest in—and in traffic to the L.A. Times website, as people are, like, where do I find out what’s going on in L.A.? And, lo and behold, the local paper 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, you know, 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 factcheckers. Zuckerberg just did it. And I don’t know of a podcast—we have no factcheckers. Most podcasts do not have any factcheckers. And so everybody is out there—

MCMAHON: We do.

ROBBINS: We do.

AMOS: You do? Good.

ROBBINS: Including us.

AMOS: Ah. So but most don’t. And so a lot of people are getting their news from places that don’t do factchecking. 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, 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. Holding out hope.

ROBBINS: (Laughs.) One more year.

MCMAHON: Trump knows the Davos scene. He’s not—you can’t call him Davos man, which is the—(laughter)—sort of the term of art for the globalized figure astride 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 to the elite global audience?

ROBBINS: So I went and looked at his past performances at Davos. In 2016, you know, 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, quote, “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 is dead. And you owe us $400 billion. And so, you know, 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. Those are the first intimations we got that 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—you know, 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—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 25 percent on Canada and Mexico, although he did later say that February 1, 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, you know, 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’ve 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 the shadow fleet. That would have a big impact on the Russian—on the European economy, as much as the Russian economy. So they’re going to be listening to see, because while the president—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 in this—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 on in protectionism. She didn’t mention Trump on that, but she did warn against the 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 didn’t 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 Trump to basically jiujitsu the Europeans. So we’ll see. 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 businesspeople. 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, 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 square?

MCMAHON: You’re going to tee-up—

ROBBINS: I know. It’s so much easier when we’re just taping this. (Laughter.)

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.

ROBBINS: I know that. (Laughs.) Deb.

AMOS: Yes.

ROBBINS: On to you. The Israel-Hamas ceasefire went into effect on Sunday, January 19. And as part of phase one three Israeli hostages came home in exchange for ninety Palestinian prisoners. 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? 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. You know, 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. But 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. You know, as they were moving the hostages into a van they all had their, you know, green headbands on. And they staged those shots. There weren’t that many people out, but they bunched them so if you had a closeup shot it looked—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(n) understanding between the Saudis and the Israelis, which was on the table before October 7 when Hamas, you know, 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—let us see if they can get there. But what’s happening in the West Bank will be an impediment.

Can we just—can I just follow up with a question about the Saudis and 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 a 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, you know, 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 2,000-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 Syria before, and people covering the Syrian story. Syria’s surprise—those events surprised everybody who were focused elsewhere. Does Syria still have the ability to surprise, and in terms of—there’s this new group of revolutionaries. Are they—can they actually put together this country, and it somehow emerges as some—maybe a point of stability? You know, and now you have a little bit of new leadership in Lebanon nearby. You know, is that—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. You know, everybody today on social media said, that was not on my bingo card. That had never, ever happened before. (Laughter.) So—

ROBBINS: He looks really fine in that suit.

AMOS: Well, I keep saying, how many jihadis do you know know how to tie a tie? (Laughter.) 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. You know, he’s not your typical jihadi. (Laughs.) 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, 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 floating in—flooding into Syria, Turkish goods, Saudi soups have arrived on the shelves. But people can’t buy them because they have—they have not been paid. So there’s lots of stumbles. There’s lots of challenges for him to put a government together. But, you know, so far the steps have been mostly positive.

MCMAHON: OK. We’re going to talk about our third topic for this World Next Week—

ROBBINS: Is my moment coming?

MCMAHON: It’s coming soon, but first I’m going to let our audience know that we’re doing the live special, as promised, audience figure the week poll. And we’re going to ask you—those of you here right now to vote on the 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. A 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, just to give you a little bit more housekeeping here, please scan the QR code featured on the screen behind us. Those who are joining us virtually, please scan the popup QR code on your screen and select the topic you’d like us to discuss. And we’ll follow—we will announce an 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 did that.

MCMAHON: Almost never. (Laughter.)

AMOS: So are they voting now?

ROBBINS: They are voting now.

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 to the global community. First up is an election in Belarus. Presidential election is happening this Sunday, January 26. 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 of getting his seventh term. But why is he even running, you know? And this—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 a claim 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 basically said, we got your back on this. And Russian security forces were, you know, there to help.

And Lukashenko owed Putin a big one after that and served as a staging—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 releasing—there’s something like—going into this campaign season, so to speak, there was something like 1,500 political prisoners. He’s pardoned 200 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, you know, information coming out.

There’s a Belarusian movement in exile in the Baltic countries, but there’s not—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 is kind of holding off for now at last report. But this is a disturbing development. We’ve seen disturbing developments in Georgia, where they’ve also had the most extraordinary protests taking place there recently, based on their elections last year. But if, you know, you have the consolidation of the Belarus-Russian relationship and Georgia turning more and more into the Russian fold, that’s a very, you know, troubling development.

And even while it’s not a tense development—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 but by the U.S. and by a number of Western countries. They’re having parliamentary elections. The so-called Balkan powder keg could be, you know, on edge there again because there are some Serbian districts in Kosovo in which there are candidates, that by 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 on that one.

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

MCMAHON: The Serbian government, correct.

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 poling party is, as you referenced earlier, the far right AfD, Alternative für Deutschland. Great deal of concern that they’re going to somehow come into some sort of power—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, and 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 23.

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

MCMAHON: 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 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 has—that’s a major issue.

MCMAHON: And we should say the German conservatives are—they’re polling at about 30 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. The Olaf Scholz, the Social Democratic candidate, is seen as, you know, 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—you know, 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, you know, in France when—in the first round, of course, they—which they won’t have in Germany. They’ve scared—you know, what happened with people in France when it—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, eh. We remember our history a little bit too much. And then they sort of woke up. Do you think that they’re—at this point, the AfD is 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. There’s nothing—I mean, I—you 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?

AMOS: Do we know?

MCMAHON: It’s your moment. Yes, we do.

AMOS: OK.

ROBBINS: Well, Bob and Deb, it’s time to discuss our audience figure of the week. And is it—is this my moment? (Rings bell) For the last time, the bell has been rung. (Laughs.) I hope you—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 170 million.

ROBBINS: The number of U.S. TikTok users getting a reprieve as Trump puts off the ban. So I don’t get this. (Laughter.)

AMOS: Fair enough.

ROBBINS: OK, it’s not that I don’t get—I mean, I somewhat don’t get TikTok. But what I don’t get is so 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, OK. 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, first they put on their screen, sorry, we’re no longer here because, you know, 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—you know, they’ve been playing it fully. And also, the CEO of TikTok got invited to the inauguration. So they’ve been—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 all—for this uncertainty that you’re talking about.

ROBBINS: Huge fines for the Apple, for the stores, and all that? Yes.

AMOS: For—what happens is, it’s, like—so if you—if you open it you get—

ROBBINS: Not for you and your TikTok account, but, yes. Those are Bob’s daughters there. OK. (Laughter.)

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, 50 percent finder’s fee or something.

AMOS: Correct.

MCMAHON: Well, and also our colleague Kat Duffy wrote a piece for us for our website pointing out that, you know, at the bottom of this is supposed to be a national security concern. And Congress has kind of danced around what that concern is. Has not declassified anything, or much of anything, that sort of spells out what the threat is. Just sort of saying it’s too much of a threat. It’s too perilous. So that’s raising—and here’s the—here’s the trust that we’re talking about before in institutions. People are kind of, like, what’s the deal here? They just don’t like this popular—this media that’s popular among youth? So Kat’s saying, declassify some of the information. You know, sort of shore up your argument and then take it from there, instead of getting into this sort of—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, you know, 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. 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 right. Not here yet, maybe never. Probably never.

ROBBINS: Now we’re going in the exact opposite direction.

AMOS: But in Europe, you have to—you have to allow that. So researchers can, you know, 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, you know, they have—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? (Laughs.) You know, 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 OK. 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. (Laughter.) But until we do—

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

AMOS: What’s the difference?

ROBBINS: What’s the difference? And so—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 is—has a great, you know, I think, enormous psychological—I mean, how many—one more thing. (Laughs.) How many people have actually seen something on TikTok that actually refers to the Chinese government?

MCMAHON: A couple.

ROBBINS: A couple. So, I mean, how many of you ever watched The Manchurian Candidate? OK, that’s too a conversation for another day. (Laughter.)

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—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. (Laughter.) I mean, it’s not like I—you know, 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’m just—can I call you every Thursday at 11:00?

MCMAHON: Please. Please do. (Laughter.)

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

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

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? (Laughter.) It’s just—it’s really—it’s 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 a total adrenaline rush, which I really missed. And it’s 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—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, you know, 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: Well, I want to—right back at you, Carla. Thank you for partnering and stepping into this, yes, weekly program. And, I mean, you could tell from hearing Carla she’s meticulous, and she’s dogged. And whether it’s, you know, going into the—you know, the Academy Award category for, you know, best foreign film, or it’s following through on Ukrainian arms sales, or whatever, she is—she’s 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 thank all the people who’ve worked on the show through the years. A huge thank you to all the hosts and guest hosts—I say, Deb Amos—we’ve had on the show. Our long-time former co-host Jim Lindsay. Did it for many years with Jim, through thick and thin, through COVID and many other things. Shoutout to our founding producer, Jeremy Sherlick, who—basically we plucked this podcast out of an early partnership 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 shoutout to a recent producer who had just departed, who we hope to hear from soon again in more exotic ways, Ester Fang, who produced the 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 Zakaria for providing our theme music and rewriting our theme music—

ROBBINS: (Rings bell, laughs.)

MCMAHON: —and tending his—tending to audio production skills all along the way. Special thanks to Helena Kopans-Johnson for her really, really dogged research assistance, to this one especially, 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 in the 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—(laughs)—but 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.

Did we mention any publications in this episode? So I don’t have to say that. 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. (Laughs.) Please note that opinions—and we’ve certainly had them expressed on The World Next Week, are solely those of the hosts, 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’m Deb Amos and I’m very happy to be here. This is like watching a movie. (Laughter.) You know that last scene?

ROBBINS: Right? It’s Dark Victory with Bette Davis. (Laughter.)

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 the last time on this channel, be careful out there. (Applause.)

So thank you. That was the end of the livestream portion. Don’t go anywhere. This is a Q&A portion now that’s going to be kicking in for the last fifteen minutes or so of this event. As per CFR rules, please—

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.