Bonus episode. Today we're speaking to Aaron Lund. He's a Middle East analyst with the Swedish Defence Research Agency and he's going to be speaking about what the Biden victory in the US might mean for the war in Syria.

So obviously Biden, despite all the dramatic happenings in America, Biden is obviously he's going to be sworn in as the president, the new president of America, the president of USA.

That is obviously going to have quite a change on the policy in Syria. We know that Joe Biden was you know best pals with Obama when he was in my opinion

fucking up Syria what what do you what do you expect

might happen firstly like kind of immediately and secondly kind of in the long term.

Well good questions both of them I guess but I I think you know the president sets policy

right in the United States for foreign policy and what we know about Biden is that he's been in US politics forever

He's really a part of the Washington establishment he

But during the Obama years when he was vice president he was also seen as kind of a voice of caution. He was holding back and he didn't want to go into Libya he didn't want to

get involved too much with the war against Bashar al-Assad he wanted to keep US

deployments in so far as that was possible, narrowly focused on US interests,

counter-terrorism, rather than counter-insurgency or nation-building and things of that sort.

So that's Biden, and he is obviously the most

important person in the Biden administration. But then he has staffed his

administration so far with a few names that like the Secretary of State,

Blincken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, who as far as we know were on the other side of those debates for a lot of the time during the Obama years and they wanted to do more against Assad and get more involved with these Middle Eastern issues.

But then on the other hand you, one step down from that, you find, now for example he appointed Brett McGirk who was well you know of him he was he

OD'd on bidgey-bidgey juice apparently so yeah and maybe he did maybe he did Gee-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-Gee-G-Gee.

He's not popular with Turkey.

He's certainly very popular with the SDF, the Syrian Democratic forces in Syria, and generally he has been the sort of the point man in the anti-Islamic

state mission for a long time and that's probably going to continue to be a

priority of his I suppose. So you be a priority of his, I suppose.

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