Loading summary
Transcript23 lines
- [00:00]
A
As that sort of trump card that they've got in the Strait of Hormuz becomes less of a trump card, I think Iran is going to go for a nuclear weapon.
- [00:12]
B
Welcome to the Mona Charon Show. So glad you could join us today. Before I introduce my guest today, I'd like to just give a heads up about our book club for July, which we are going to be recording actually at the very end of June, June 30th. Our guest is going to be historian Lindsay Chervinsky, whose book Making the John Adams and the Precedents that Forged a Republic. This is to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our founding. I have always had a soft spot for John Adams. Look, I know he was vain, he was prickly, he wasn't the handsomest of our founders, but I love his lifelong love affair with his wife. Wife. I love his principles, I love his integrity. Yes, he made some big mistakes and we get into that with some of the, with the Sedition act and so forth. But fascinating life, incredible contribution to the world that we now take for granted. So I hope you can read the book and then send in your questions. This one will not be live because of the holiday schedule, but I will try to get to as many, many of your pre written questions in the interview as I can. So we're looking forward to that. That'll be June 30th. And now it is my great pleasure to introduce Ed Luce, who is the US Editor and columnist for the Financial Times. And Ed, I'm proud to say, has been a guest before. So thank you so much for coming back.
- [02:05]
A
Always a delight to be with you, Mona.
- [02:08]
B
We have any number of catastrophes to discuss, but I want to start with something that I found really interesting precisely because it was the sort of thing you would have thought would have happened all the time, but never used to. So I'm referring to, to the little imbroglio that happened at the G7 meeting between Giorgia Maloney and Trump. So Trump did one of his classic classless moves. Trump gave an interview to an Italian outlet in which he let fly against Meloni, saying, she begged me for a photo and I didn't want to, he said, but I felt sorry for her. Okay, why don't you pick up the story from there? Ed Maloney didn't react the way people have in the past, did she?
- [03:03]
A
She didn't. I mean, there were some interesting visual moments before then at this G7 summit in Evian where she is standing there with folded arms looking like a very disapproving Italian housewife, a sort of classic Italian housewife at tramp. Not a fawning posture at all. And Trump sort of comes over to her and they get various photos together. But her response to Trump's claim that she begged for a picture with him was given to an Italian outlet, which made it even more of a sort of direct slight to the Italian leader. And she posted a video, a very sort of slapped down tone, saying this isn't true, this is completely false. And instead of worrying about my numbers because he mentioned in that interview and in a truth social post that she had her own political problems, Trump should worry about his. It was a very sort of simple slapdown. Shouldn't surprise us. You're right. It's not what we see from Friedrich Merz of Germany, certainly not what we've seen from Keir Starmer of Britain or Emmanuel Macron of France. But she's a nationalist. She's an Italian nationalist. You know, the pride and heart in the Italian flag and the sort of sense of being denigrated as Italy's leader means her response was not at all surprising. But she schooled him. And just one other thing, Mona, she was the only Western leader to attend Trump's inauguration. That inauguration with, you know, more cent billionaires in the room with more money in the room than all previous inaugurations combined, including John Adams's.
- [05:02]
B
Makes us so proud.
- [05:04]
A
Makes you so proud. And she was there. She set herself up as his maga, you know, counterpart in Europe. That's very much over. You know, she, she's, she's actually become far more aligned with France and Germany. She's been very sort of pro Ukraine. She's sticking up for Italian national interests rather than the populist international, you know, which others have fantasized about.
- [05:33]
B
Yeah, yeah, that's so interesting. And it's a good reminder that sometimes when we see. Because I, you know, I recall that when she was elected, I sort of had a sinking feeling that this was yet another victory for this, what you very rightly call the populist Internationale, and that she would be hostile to Ukraine, hostile to democracy, perhaps, you know, and to the rule of law and all those things that we worry about. And so she's been a very pleasant surprise. You know, she certainly right away was very, very strongly for Ukraine and not aligned with Putin. And so we have to remember that sometimes people can surprise you in a good way, not just in a bad way.
- [06:21]
A
Yeah, I mean, I would say she's probably the most secure. I mean, of course she has her own electoral problems. She did suffer a defeat in a referendum in a plebiscite earlier this year, which was quite a MAGA issue. She wanted to hold judges more accountable and fire unelected judges. I mean, I'm simplifying what she was putting to the Italian people and it was defeated. Defeated. So she's not, you know, she's certainly not invincible, but she's probably the most secure leader in Europe. And that's not something in my lifetime or before I can ever remember saying about an Italian Prime Minister.
- [06:59]
B
So. Interesting. Meanwhile. Well, I don't want to leave the topic of Meloni just yet, but I'll just point out that, you know, it's funny that this Italian Prime Minister is so secure, or seemingly very secure at a moment when British Prime Ministers are turning over like dominoes. But before we leave this topic entirely, I just want to note that one of the things that I have found so maddening about our era is that Trump engages in so much bullying and so much diminishment of other people's dignity or all the time, and people just swallow it, whether it's senators or tech titans or, you know, even foreign leaders. And so I liked the fact that she went right at that. She said, italy and I do not beg. And you know, that's just, that's all you need to do, just assert your own dignity, your own self respect. And you know, I don't know, maybe the fact that she's a woman had something to do with it, I am not sure. But it's amazing to me how many people, especially in the MAGA coalition, you know, you have this, you have this movement that has made such a big deal about manliness and about the importance of the manly virtues and returning to some sort of idea of masculinity that is, that is passe. Well, yet these very so called masculine men are happy to be emasculated by Trump on a regular basis. You know, Very true.
- [08:51]
A
This is very true. I mean, there are a lot of women who have stood up to him. You know, I do think of Marjorie Taylor Greene, of whom I am not a fan.
- [09:00]
B
Right.
- [09:01]
A
And even Lauren Boebert, you know, who was taken into the situation, woman to try to arm twist to vote against the Epstein Transparency Act. She stood up to him. So maybe women have, you know, really do have more balls than men because, you know, you talk about, talk about Keir Starmer, then, you know, I wouldn't put him in Maloney's category.
- [09:28]
B
No. So let's turn to that because Though you cover the U.S. i'm sure you keep a close eye on your nation of origin. And so the UK has had six prime ministers in 10 years. It's been crazy for people who are accustomed to a lot more stability from our great ally. And so I as this week we saw Andy Burnham win this by election, which means he can now he's returned to Parliament, which means he can be the leader. And, and Keir Starmer saw the writing on the wall finally and, and agreed to step aside. But tell us your perception of why Britain is now so volatile. By the way, I should add just a couple of things. The British economy has been doing terribly since Brexit. The, the rate of growth I think I saw was like 1.4, 1.5%, which is abysmal. And it's a huge problem when a country isn't growing, then you have to divide the pie, a smaller pie among more people because the population keeps growing. So what is your perception of Britain's state at this moment?
- [10:57]
A
It's a question that absorbs me a lot because as you say, Britain's stagnating and it has been now for a decade. And it's, I think, no coincidence. We've just commemorated the 10th anniversary of Brexit. Britain prior to Brexit, along with the United States, was at the sort of top of the OECD and G7 growth rates following the 08 financial crisis. So it had a pretty good textbook response in those first few years after that. Then it got, I think premature austerity, a sort of German style Sado Manitarism as they call it.
- [11:41]
B
I haven't heard that expression, wow, more
- [11:46]
A
a moral thing than an economic thing. I mean, really bad, bad timing, you know, for very simple reason that when, as economists say, when the, the private sector is saving, the public sector should dissave and the other way around, you pick up the slack. And for both to be saving at the same time guarantees you're not going to get good growth. And by the way, that switch in 2010 from the labor government of Gordon Brown, which was the end of the Blair era, to the Conservative government of David Cameron, that was mirrored by the switch in the United States from an Obama controlled Congress and a very countercyclical, correct economic response to the financial crisis by the Tea Party midterm election and a move into premature austerity and six years later you get Brexit and Trump. And I want to stress the sort of affinities between these two dates, but also the six years that precede them. You put people in a bad mood, you squeeze them, you create stagnation in their incomes, you remove hope from their consumer sentiment, if you like. And then you ask them, would you like more of the same? Which was essentially what the British electorate heard when they heard the Brexit question and what they heard when Hillary Clinton said stronger together. So sorry for that sort of long backdrop, but I see it as zero coincidence that the decade since then, we're now going to have the seventh prime Minister and that there is no decade I can think of, or there is no decade full stop preceding that, where you get more than three prime ministers. And so I don't see this as a coincidence. The Brexit impact, not just on the economy and feeding into stagnation, but on this sense of restlessness. Well, we got Brexit and all these things were promised that we would be back to being a ship on the worldwide seas, striking deals with people and becoming wealthy again. That just hasn't panned out. And so you're getting more and more polarization, more and more restlessness, complete breakdown of political loyalties, by the way. And this is where it's different to the United States, which has a sort of more rigid polarization, complete sort of shifting restlessness. It's like, well, we might vote Green, we might vote Reform. Nigel Farage is far right by we might vote Restore Britain even more far
- [14:35]
B
right, which is even more far right.
- [14:37]
A
Yeah, but what we're not going to do with any regularity is what our parents and grandparents and great grandparents did. We're really not going to be loyal to labor or the Conservatives. So that two party system is broken.
- [14:52]
B
But people do think, and I've read this a few places, that Andy Burnham, assuming he's the next prime minister, and that's the overwhelming likelihood this is Britain's last chance to escape from a Nigel Farage prime ministership. What do you think about that?
- [15:12]
A
It is pretty remarkable that it is less than two years since Keir Starmer achieved in a general election Labour's largest majority ever, bigger than the majority Tony Blair got in 1997. And within less than two years, he's gone. They've pressed the eject button on him. And there's one reason for that. I don't think it would have happened in a normal political cycle where the Conservatives would be a beneficiary, the main beneficiary of a failing Labour government. The reason why Labour MPs, Members of Parliament were so impatient is because they see Nigel Farage coming and this is a whole different level of threat. No time to be polite and decent to their leader and sort of give him more time. That's it, you failed, you're out. And so the sort of Nigel Farage sense of him breathing down their necks and what a potent threat that is to their idea of Britain. And you know, I think most people's idea of Britain as being forward looking, cosmopolitan, having got over Empire and being a modern country in the modern world. Farage is knocking at the door and, and that explains Starmer's ejection. But I, you know, I don't yet have enough on Andy Burnham. Nobody does to have any confidence in saying whether he's going to be a big improvement on Starmer's policies. I think he's a much better politician. Starmer really very wooden, not got any retail touch, doesn't read rooms. Burnham has got all those things. He was mayor of a city, Manchester, for more than a decade. So he's got a lot of retail. You know, mayors talk to people the whole time. They're sort of more, more relatable. But he doesn't have, he does share one thing in common with Starmer. He doesn't have an obvious theory of the case. How are you going to make Britain grow again? You can't redistribute which labor like to do if you don't grow.
- [17:21]
B
Yeah, exactly. Okay, well, we will continue to watch that. Thank you. That's, that's useful. All right, let us now turn to the US and you wrote a piece about this Iran debacle with a catchy headline, how to Lose a War in Three Easy Steps. It strikes me that this is so often in Trump's life and in his public career, he has managed to warp reality around him. He's created a reality distortion zone so that even when he makes horrible mistakes, even when he botches the response, for example, to Covid so desperately that it was chaos and many more people died than were, than had to die just because of the mismanagement. He is able to spin a different reality. And of course, most famously, he denies that he lost the 2020 election. And he's been able to bring along half the country or, or at least 45% of the country to his view that this actually happened when it's a lie. And I feel like this war is where that ability to warp perceptions is really hitting a wall. What do you think?
- [18:48]
A
I certainly hope you're right. It might be though, that having embarked on a foolish war with no exit plan and things going just as you would expect them to go when a war starts. On that basis, having run through sort of all the bad options, he's now reached the least bad, which is like, well, you've got to find. You've got to find an off ramp, that it was either land invasion or off ramp, and a land invasion, not a good idea. And I think a land invasion would have involved, apart from melting down the global economy, it would have involved body bags, and it would have involved what you saw in Vietnam and to some degree in Iraq, and that would have really fed through into popular American disaffection. Trump's theory is, okay, the stick doesn't work, so now we're moving to the carrot. And quite a part. Whether you think that'll work, I don't think it'll work. I think he's massively strengthening Iran here, and I think that's really not a good idea. But we are where we are. That he doesn't want to be Herbert Hoover, as he said at the G7 last week. He doesn't want to preside over depression. He wants to get that waterway open again and the oil price is down again and pretty soon it'll all be fine, I think.