Rex Tillerson's departure looks imminent as the North Korea crisis heats up

Worldly

Vox Media Podcast Network

News Commentary, Politics, News

4.4 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 30 November 2017

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Yochi, Jenn, and special guest Alex Ward talk about President Trump’s apparent decision to fire Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who will go down as arguably the worst secretary of state in American history. Tillerson will leave the department after cutting large numbers of senior diplomats, ignoring many of those who remained, and being part of an administration that has alienated close allies while cozying up to dictators. The question is whether Tillerson’s likely replacement, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, will be any better — particularly since he is a partisan Republican who defends Trump at every turn, routinely lies about US intelligence, and wants to tear up the Iran nuclear deal. They also talk about North Korea’s test of a new ballistic missile capable of reaching the entire mainland US and the grim reality that the US military would almost certainly be unable to shoot down all the missiles North Korea might launch if war broke out. Yochi compares a powerful Republican senator to a robotic giraffe, Jenn expresses her undying love for and knowledge of what she calls “sportsball,” and Alex busts out the term “killer vehicle” — which, it turns out, does not refer to a really sweet sports car. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to Worldly, Vox's weekly guide to the most important stories in the world, part of the
0:12.1	Vox Media Podcast Network.
0:14.0	It's Yolke. We've got Jen Back. We have our newly married colleague, Vox Defense
0:17.3	reporter, Alex Ward, welcome back.
0:18.8	Thank you, thank you.
0:19.8	So the Driesen family Thanksgiving managed to avoid any discussion of politics, thank God.
0:25.2	But we instead discussed something that was far, far less cheerful, which was war with North Korea.
0:30.0	And that's because we keep hearing comments like this from UN Ambassador
0:33.3	Nicki Haley yesterday.
0:35.0	If war does come, it will be because of continued acts of aggression
0:40.1	like we witnessed yesterday.
0:42.2	And if war comes, make no mistake, the North Korean regime will be utterly destroyed.
0:49.5	That again was the UN Ambassador Nicki Haley, that was on Wednesday which was a day after
0:54.7	North Korea fired the longest-range missile in its history or as Defense Secretary Jim Mattis
0:59.6	referred to it. It went higher frankly than any previous shots they've taken it's a research
1:05.6	and development effort on their part to continue building ballistic missiles that
1:09.8	could threaten everywhere in the world basically.
1:14.0	So that leads to the two questions we'll be talking about today.
1:17.0	One, how scared should we be?
1:18.5	And two, how does a country that has millions of people very literally starving pull this off and
1:23.2	Alex let's start with you because you've been writing about it a lot this week
1:26.1	what can this new missile actually do and why is this so much different and so much scarier
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Vox Media Podcast Network, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Vox Media Podcast Network and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.