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The Monocle Daily
US Senate votes on Iran war powers resolution as European opposition remains divided
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You're listening to the Monocle Daily, first
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broadcast on the 4th of March, 2026 on Monacle Radio.
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US insists war with Iran is going to plan. But is there a plan? Hungary's Prime Minister seizes another opportunity to be difficult. And is the backlash against social media platforms proportionate overdue or why not both? I'm Andrew Muller. The Monocle Daily starts. Hello and welcome to the Monocle Daily. Coming to you from our studios here at Midori House in London. I'm Andrew Muller. My guests Rachel Conliff and Phil Tinline will discuss today's big stories. And we'll hear from Croatia as conscription resumes. Stay tuned. All that and more coming up right here on the Monocle Daily. This is the Monocle Daily with me, Andrew Muller. We will have Rachel Cunliffe and Phil Tinline with us shortly. But first of all to Washington D.C. where U.S. secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Kaine have been promising strikes further into Iran as joint U.S. israeli air operations continue. In other headlines, an Iranian Navy frigate Iris Dana has been sunk off Sri Lanka by a US Navy submarine. Sri Lankan authorities say they have rescued 32 sailors and recovered 86 bodies. More crew remain unaccounted for. Well, joining us first of all is the Washington based reporter H.J. mai. H.J. first of all, the sinking of this Iranian ship, a very, very long way from theatre of operations. Have we heard anything by way of justification for that?
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No. I mean, you just mentioned, you know, that Pete Hexseth, the War Secretary, Defense Secretary and Joint Chiefs of Staff, you know, Dan Kane addressed the media this, you know, they confirmed that a ship was sunk. Hexa did not name that it was the Dana. But you know, subsequently it has been confirmed. But no, there's been no justification. It's just, you know, Hexa has basically said, you know, we will keep, I think, quote, throttling up, there will be more attacks. You know, they want to make sure, you know, that Iranian ships are not interfering with, with any shipping lanes around the world, not just in the Strait of Hormuz. But there's been no justification for sinking this frigate and killing dozens of people.
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With all due acknowledgement, this may be one of those self answering questions. Have we heard anything definitive on a potential timescale for continued operations against Iran or what the end point of all of this is supposed to be?
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Also not much. I mean, we had this interview that President Trump gave, I think it was the Daily Mail over the weekend where he talked about four weeks. Then Hexeth, you know, was asked about the timeline and he basically said, you know, we, we're gonna do it as long as the President wants us to keep up the pressure. I think this morning he mentioned four weeks, six weeks, whatever it takes. So, no, we have no real indication on the timeline. I think a lot of this depends on, you know, on, on really the firepower that Iran has, you know, obviously currently with, with all the strikes and the retell. Retaliatory strikes. The question is, you know, you know, how many, how many missiles, how many, you know, other weapons does Iran have to, to keep up, you know, always retaliating for, for, for those strikes. And we will have to see and wait. But at the moment, notice there's no, no real timeline. And also, we don't know yet what the, what the end goal is here. I mean, we have heard so many different, different explanations for this war that I think, you know, people here in Washington, around the world are still trying to figure out what exactly the US Plans to do with, with Iran.
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Well, one thing that is supposed to be happening today is this vote in the Senate on a resolution on war powers. The idea being that the President, as he should in theory be accountable to Congress for such decisions. Is this likely to go anywhere?
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Unlikely. I mean, you know, as you know, Republicans are in control of the Senate. They have a 53 seat majority. While it's a slim majority, it is a majority. And so far there's only one Republican who has publicly stated that he will vote for this war powers resolution to curb the President's powers. That's Kentucky Senator Rand Paul. But there's also a Democrat, John Fetterman, who said that he will not vote for it. So we're basically, you know, at status quo here. And so it's expected that this vote in the afternoon will fail. It's not the first time there have been war power resolutions introduced in the House and Senate also over the boat strikes that began last year in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, and also to keep Trump from attacking Venezuela, which obviously then occurred. So there have been a lot of times that people have introduced those resolutions, but they have failed. And that's also what's expected today. Nevertheless, there's definitely a different tone around situation in Iran than there was around those boat strikes in the Caribbean and Venezuela.
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Well, on that subject of the tone around Iran, do you get a sense yet of how this is panning out domestically, politically? Because for all that, there may well be some sort of rally round the flag bump now that battle is joined. Before battle was joined, the idea of a war with Iran was monstrously unpopular among American voters, even among Republicans.
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Yeah, I mean, once again, I think it depends who you ask, but I think, you know, you know, Trump supporters to, to some degree are okay with, with, you know, if the justification is, well, Iran was about to, you know, hit our ally Israel, or was threatening us. You know, they, they're somewhat okay. But, but I think the most interesting part here is that Trump's, you know, maga, you know, base is basically really, I don't want to use the term, you know, to, to completely, you know, disruptive, but, but they're really annoyed with how the administration has handling that. I mean, he came into office promising no wars, no, you know, engagements. Now we have seen, you know, US Service members who have died. And so, you know, his, his MAGA base is certainly not on board with, with the current situation. And I think that could be a challenge going forward. And as you mentioned, you, this strike beginning. Yeah, this was hugely unpopular. I mean, you know, there's, there's, there's the fear that the US Might once again get dragged into an endless war in the Middle East. And, you know, the, the memories of Iraq and Afghanistan are still there. And so I think, you know, there is the challenge of, of balancing, of, you know, trying to sell the story that this was an imminent threat that Tehran posed, but also, you know, trying to keep or make sure that American soldiers are not putting once again in harm's way, which is something that the President actually acknowledged there might be more casualties coming up. And so that's something that Americans in general are very wary about.
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H.J. mai in Washington, D.C. thank you both for joining. Thank you rather for joining us. There is just the one of you. You're listening to the Daily on Monocle Rad. You are listening to the Daily on Monocle Radio with me, Andrew Muller. I am now joined by our panel, Rachel Cunliffe and Phil Tinline. Hello to you both.
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Hello.
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Hello.
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Well, to listeners of a certain vintage, this week's events may be disquietingly reminiscent of March 2003, when the United States and its allies invaded Iraq with what would prove to be distinctly mixed results. U.S. secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth obliquely addressed these concerns earlier today. Thus far, Operation Epic Fury has delivered twice the air power of shock and awe of Iraq in 2003, minus Paul Bremer and the nation building, which translates approximately as 23 years ago, we at least pretended to have some idea what we were doing. Well, not on my watch, by golly. Phil, do you get a sense that Iraq does hang over this? We're thinking in terms especially of how, especially in terms rather of how Europeans have responded to it, many of whom rather feel they got their fingers burnt 23 years ago.
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Yes, I mean, I think clearly it does. And I think thinking back to 2002, 2003, the sense, partly because there was in some quarters a sense that there was a cause here, that Saddam Hussein was a horrific dictator. This is following on from Kosovo, following on from Blair Chicago speech, that it was part of something that felt in some quarters quite righteous almost, albeit dovetailing with a very hard faced neoconservatism from the US the tenor of some of the debates, not least in this country, was quite sort of ideological and quite claimed to be sort of coming from principle. Now it feels like absolute sort of bleak pragmatism that we're just trying to find a way through this. And there's been quite a lot of comment over the course of the last couple of days that actually Keir Starmer is probably reflecting quite a wide sort of position in the British public, widely held position in the public, that this is something where we obviously have to manage Trump and we have to kind not get involved, but maybe we have to let our bases be used and so on. Then that kind of weary pragmatism is actually quite close to the public view, much as some of the more tub thumping views in the press don't want it to be.
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I do want to come back to that balancing act that confronts the British Prime Minister shortly. But Rachel, do you see it like that as well? Because Phil and I, I am going to go ahead and speculate, remember 2003, perhaps better than you might have, but there was a certain, I mean it was framed on both sides for and against as of a moral question. The Prime Minister here at the time, Tony Blair, was very much of the mind that Saddam should be removed because he was just a bad man. And as Phil said, after things like Bosnia and Kosovo, removing bad people from power is just what we're going to do. Now it did turn out obviously that some of the rationales for it were somewhat spurious and or misguided. But there were also those countries against it, France most notably, that did also frame it as a moral thing, as in we're not just going to blunder around the world doing stuff like this.
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It's interesting, I went back and looked at what the polling of the Iraq war was like at the time. And in retrospect, it's very easy to go. Everyone always knew it was a disaster and that Tony Blair was just cozying up to George Bush and that obviously there were no weapons of mass destruction. And actually, the polls are more nuanced than that. There was, I think, very narrow support. So I would say maybe slight cynicism, caution, more caution among the public than the government, but there, there was support. And there was also, I think, a sense that removing dictators could then lead to something better and to the building of a nascent democracy. And it is the experience of what happened in Iraq after, and the complete disintegration of any of those hopes and aspirations that has played very strongly in the minds of British politicians and the British public. On Keir Starmer, it's interesting that he, obviously, he's got a background in international law and human rights law. Law is his thing. When he appointed Richard Hermer to be Attorney General and made him a lord specifically so that he could fulfill that role rather than choosing a politician, his rationale for doing so, according to a report we've had in the New Statesman, was the memory of the Iraq war and lack of focus on the legal advice at the time, or Tony Blair's lack of lack of focus on that. And I think it's really interesting that that conflict has clearly, really shaped Starmer's own approach to politics and to what it means to be a Prime minister. Certainly he talked about learning the lessons of Iraq several times in the House of Commons chamber on Monday when he. When he gave a statement. So the scars are very deep and they are affecting how politicians react. Even if we've now got somebody in the White House who is so volatile and unpredictable that countries, governments also have to hedge their bets a bit and not antagonize too much.
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Phil, Rachel makes an excellent point there about how people have forgotten what public sentiment actually was in this country, at least in 2003, because everybody remembers the visuals of those enormous demonstrations. And of course, you don't get enormous demonstrations of people going, yeah, sure, fine, whatever the government reckons, we're broadly on board with that. But again, this does feel different, doesn't it? Because the mood among European countries does now seem to be one of more or less complete incomprehension as to what it is we're actually trying to do here.
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Well, there's that. There's also contextual factors like the long, sad end, or rather sudden in the end, sad end of the legacy. We're talking about where the Withdrawal from Afghanistan does rather give the light of the idea that anything good is likely to come, even if they're sort of more ambit occupation. But no, there's also obviously the huge, huge factor which is weighing on European leaders minds constantly of Ukraine. I mean, the reason to keep Trump on side fundamentally is to try and keep as much support as we can shore up from America behind Ukraine. And so, no, I mean, it does feel very, very different to how it felt in 2003, I think, partly for those reasons.
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Rachel, what have you, though, made of how Starmer is having to manage this so far? Because on the one hand, it's, as you were pointing out, he does want to keep Donald Trump broadly on board. He wants to keep the United States in the transatlantic alliance more broadly. And yes, he does want to keep Trump focused at least partly on Ukraine, if that proves possible. But for an unpopular prime minister, as Starmer presently is, he would be not a politician at all if he didn't think, at least in part, wow, this war's really unpopular. If I take a few swings at the President of the United States, it might not do me any harm in that respect.
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So I don't think you've seen Starmer directly take swings at the US President, but he has received swings, as it were.
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He absolutely has.
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And I take a different view to some on the right in British politics who would argue that that is a humiliation for Britain to have Trump say that Starmer is no Winston Churchill. I actually think the majority of the British public look at the comments coming out of the White House and it's probably in Starmer's interest not to be associated with that administration at the moment. Obviously, it makes things challenging. Trump has threatened to cut off all trade with Spain, for example. How feasible that is is another matter. But the fact remains that the US has the potential, if they want to be vindictive, to really damage the UK economy and other European economies. And that won't be very popular because anything that does anything to increase the cost of living or inflation is absolutely toxic in British politics. But I do think, to reiterate what's been said before, Starmer is broadly in the same position as the British public are on this. His rationale for initially saying no to allowing the US to use UK bases and then saying yes only for defensive purposes once the situation changed. I think that makes a broad degree of sense and if you look at the polling on it, huge amount of ambivalence for allowing the US to use our bases regardless of the situation. So this idea that the British public are kind of gung ho. Let's go in. We want Donald Trump to be saying that we're the greatest ally ever. That is just not borne out in reality.
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And the other thing, of course, that's shadowing all of this is Greenland. Right. You have had a moment and I think this is underpriced sometimes. The sense in European capitals that the US really crossed a line by threatening to invade a NATO ally, which logically would have meant it would have invaded itself under Article 5, attack itself, but the sense that we really now need to divest in terms of energy, in terms of tech, in terms of defence procurement, and this just feels like it fits into that story.
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And don't forget Trump's comments as well, that UK and other NATO allies were far away from the front lines when they assisted with Afghanistan and Iraq amid missing our dad. Yeah, I don't think in America it was understood quite how insulting that would be and the rift that that would cause.
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Having spoken myself to a couple of British MPs who were also veterans of Afghanistan, I can report that it went over about as well as you'd imagine. On the subject of energy related issues, though any disturbance of such equilibrium as the Middle east ever demonstrates has an effect on energy prices. And this week's events have been no exception. Oil prices are up. Brent crude, for example, has spiked about 15% this week. And gas prices are up a lot. In the UK this week, they have nearly doubled. This will have political consequences everywhere. But in Hungary, for one, where an election looms next month, floundering incumbent Prime Minister Viktor Orban is trying to wring mileage from his decision to carry on buying energy from Russia, which is to say continuing to fund Russian pillaging of Hungary's neighbour, Ukraine. Rachel, is Russian energy about to become fashionable again? Or has everybody else in Europe, apart from Hungary and Slovakia, just decided, no, we're not going back there?
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Well, it's a case of there are no decent choices, isn't it? Or the good choice would have been to build sufficient energy capacity, whether renewables or something else, 20 years ago. But because we didn't do that, we're now, as we're on the radio, I'll say we're stuffed. I think the Hungary situation is really interesting because you are seeing there very, very clearly how a foreign policy sort of geopolitical issue can get right to the heart of domestic politics, which is if Orban arguing that if Hungary is no longer able to access Russian gas, this is going to impact Hungarian Consumers and industry and accusing his. His opponent of what was it being, being deliberately sabotaging or being on the side of the. The eu. And you're actually seeing that not to
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that being on the side of the eu, of which, of course, Hungary is
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a member, although it has taken a reluctant number and has taken a very different path to other EU members. But you're seeing that in the UK too. You're seeing the Conservatives in reform arguing that because of what we've seen in Russia and now in the Middle east, the UK government should tear up its Net Zero plans. And that sense that once the foreign policy crises start to hit the pockets of domestic consumers in these countries, the politics changes. And it's a perfect narrative for the right that's been looking for any excuse to undo the Net Zero trend anyway. But I think something we should be
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very worried about, Phil, the key point here, literally the pinch point of the Strait of Hormuz. This is a scenario which has haunted the nightmares of the west forever. This idea that somebody who closes this narrow waterway cuts off around a fifth of the world's oil and gas. Iran is. Well, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in particular are claiming they have complete control of the Strait of Hormuz. But in that's not likely to last on current pace, is it? Because they are going to rapidly run out of assets which they can control it with. Aside from that frigate that got sunk off Sri Lanka that we mentioned earlier, CENTCOM, the US Central Command is claiming they have sunk more than 20 other Iranian vessels.
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Yes, I mean, I think we shouldn't sort of scoot straight to the nightmare scenario. The difference, though, between gas and oil is it's easier to move oil because you have more options. The liquefied natural gas from Qatar has to come through, indeed, the Strait of Hormuz. We are less dependent on it ourselves than we were three or four years ago. We're much, much more dependent on the US for LNG than we are now on Qatar.
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But obviously it all plays. No problem there.
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Well, right, exactly. But it all plays into the same market. And it also, of course, plays into what Rachel was saying about the debate over energy security. It strikes me that the intelligent way, which I think is where things are going both in Europe and probably here, you know better than me is to start making this argument on the basis of energy security, with Net zero as a help, or, you know, tackling climate as a helpful side effect, but making the case for renewables, which if we had more of nuclear power stations following the Finkelton review, if we had more of, we wouldn't be as exposed. Feels like a more strategic political way to make the same argument.
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I would agree with that except I was talking to some experts in the energy industry recently and I made this point that if we had better wind and solar power here, then we wouldn't be as reliant or as exposed to external foreign policy shocks. And they said, but what you have to understand is that right now all of the renewable technology, where does it come from? It comes from China. And if you, if you need parts repaired or if you systems updated or whatever, that's, that's where it's coming from. So they warned perhaps that we also need, as well as investing in renewables, we also have to invest in homegrown British renewable industry. So we're not facing that further structure shock further down the line. But I'm sure that wouldn't happen. I'm sure China wouldn't shut off the UK's renewable energy at any point.
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No, no, very hard to imagine that China would use its leverage to coerce the United States in that respect in any regard whatsoever. Just finally on this though Rachel, because I'm interested in this because some of the most interesting conversations I have had around this stuff in recent times have been with actual currently serving or former extremely senior military people who are absolute lions for renewable energy, it turns out not because they say yeah, it is a matter of national security. The cleaner and more self sufficient a country's energy is, the safer that country is, the better defended that country is. Is that a case that you can imagine anybody being able to make to the British electorate?
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Is it a case that I can imagine anybody being able to make to the British electorate? Yes, and I think it's a compelling case. And I would look at say casinos in Nevada that all have their own super woke solar farms because that's what makes sense for them. So actually energy security doesn't have to be a left political issue in renewables fit into that. But who is the current Energy Secretary? It's Ed Miliband who I think has been actually a really strong champion for the clean energy revolution. Can I imagine Ed Miliband making that case to the British public that we need wind farms and solar power in order to stand up and defend British security on the world stage and stick it to the Middle East? I can't see him as the messenger for that, that.
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Well, let us now pivot as gracefully as any figure skater at the recently concluded Winter Olympics to the subject of a national conversation the British government wishes to launch. And by national conversation, we can of course, can of course infer just months and months of bad faith, partisan screeching and inane culture war. Bum throwing at hand is the subject of social media and the wisdom of allowing children unfettered access to the approximate informational equivalent of a crack pipe. Late last year, Australia began, became rather the first country to punt under 16s off social media, and others are moving in that direction. Though arguably more good could be done by banning the over 50s. Phil, where are you on this? Not merely banning the over 50s from social media, because unfortunately no one's ever going to try that, but the under 16s.
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Well, I think the idea of challenging the power of the social media companies is where this needs to kind of be directed. Now, in one sense, banning under 16 does that, but I would rather the focus was on what's actually causing the problem in the first place rather than the people who are receiving it. Clearly that's very important, but as Rachel's pointed out, you know, the under 16s haven't actually been consulted about this because we don't generally ask them questions in polling because they still don't have the vote despite David Runciman's recommendations. But no, I think you have to start from the principle of how the design of social media functions and the way that algorithms work and all of the things that we know have been introduced quite deliberately to keep people engaged, Infinite scroll, autoplay and all these things. And it's very striking, looking at the questions in the consultation document that it is asking, would people like to see restrictions on access to Infinite scroll, to autoplay to some of these design elements for people at particular ages. Now, I'm not personally across how straightforward it would be technically to ban infinite scroll for under 16s and then allow it for people over 16. But if that can be done, then that is a useful indicator, beyond the debate about the under 16s per se, of how you can, you know, use the power of the state to intervene on behalf of the public to rein back some of the damage that these design systems have created.
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Rachel, a fun game I like to play sometimes is to think about what are things we do now that just seem like everyday life and just completely normal, that 30 or 40 years from now will seem as. As unfathomable and bizarre as the fact that, for example, people once smoked on the tube. Is the current attitude to social media one of those? Will we look back on this moment and think, dear God, what were we doing?
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I think giving smartphones to children is certainly going to be one of those things. I think the image of a small child, a toddler holding a smartphone, is going to be as absolutely unbelievable as you say, as somebody smoking on the tube in however many years. What's interesting about this consultation and this question about how we fix the Internet is Phil and I both wrote pieces for the New Statesman on this subject within a couple of weeks of each other. Phil wrote a really in depth, detailed kind of history of what the Internet was meant to be and how it changed and the dot com crash and the early principles of it. And I wrote about what it was like to be under 16 on the Internet back when the Internet was fun. And we both came, I think, think to kind of similar conclusions, which was not the Internet that has broken society. It's social media specifically. And it is some of the design choices made with social media and what it's done to us as a society in terms of discourse, in terms of our relationships and who we count as a contact and the blurring the distinction between real life and Internet life in the amplification of anything that sparks outrage or, or anger. You know, we, we know about sort of clickbait and rage baiting and the algorithms all geared to that and what that's done to our politics. And actually, when you break it down in those terms, I don't think it was. It's giving access to the Internet to under 16s that's the problem. I think it's giving access to social media to everyone. That's the problem. And if we can fix social media in some way, whether, you know, regulation or just encouraging people not to use X or whatever, then it won't just be under 16s who benefit. It will be all of us as a society.
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Well, just finally then, I will briefly appoint you both information commissars or whatever the phrase is going to be, and allow you to make one recommendation, one reform you would implement for social media. At which point, I will repeat the one which is, is it almost certainly unworkable? It may be, but I don't care if it is. My suggestion is that social media platforms are treated entirely as publishers and therefore held accountable for literally every single thing that appears on their mask.
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D
Well, that is certainly one thing people have talked about. And the reason we don't have that goes back to the Clinton attitude to business in the states in the 1990s. What I would suggest, doing as I do in the paper I wrote for Demos about this and in the States and Peace that Rachel mentions, is suggest that we do something quite radical, which is to try to copy China without the totalitarianism and actually in Europe, build some new social media networks. And I think if you do that on the basis, it fits very much with what I was talking about before divesting from America in terms of energy, in terms of defense procurement, which is much harder. One of the things that's really encouraging and helpful about this is that the tech, the compute power, has moved on massively in the last 20 years. Facebook and Twitter are built on quite old compute power and you can have more sophisticated algorithms now which are more responsive to how people actually are and less doing the sort of stuff Rachel's been talking about, of constantly pushing people into these sort of simple, narrow, ever more extreme channels. And I think if we started to do that, quite a radical step, but as I say, easier than with defence, we could just completely reinvent the whole ecosystem.
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A
Rachel, you're in charge. What are you doing?
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B
I mean, I love the idea of a new utopian social media site and if that was possible, I think we should definitely look into it. I'm looking for something much more mundane. I think we need social media and Internet literacy taught in schools. I think we need to explain, explain to children at a probably pretty young age, I'd say like 10 or 12, how what they get served up in the algorithmic feed is served up to them. What are the motivations behind it, and almost inoculate them against the disease of social media that they will inevitably encounter. Now, I think a lot of adults, particularly adults who came of age before the Internet, could also do with that inoculation. But media literacy for, you know, mandatory for the over 50s is also not a vote winner.
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Rachel Cunliffe and Phil Tinline, thank you both for joining us. Finally, on today's show, next week, young men in Croatia will renew a tradition that has been on pause for the best part of two decades. The first batch of new recruits will be reporting for compulsory military service. It'll be the first time that will have happened since Croatia joined NATO in 2009. And it coincides with nervous times throughout the region, with both the war in Ukraine and more local tensions playing their part. Monocle's man in the Balkans, Guy Delaunay, can tell us about more.
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In the days of Yugoslavia, conscription was a rite of passage. Young men had to commit to a year of military service, but the independent countries that emerged from Yugoslavia did away with the requirement. Now, Croatia is the first to bring back a form of conscription to give their Young men, some basic, basic military grounding.
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Croatia had one problem after the 2000 we decided to remove the army quite significantly and to disarm.
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Gordan Akrap is the vice rector of Croatia's Franio Tudman Defense and Security University.
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We came to a situation that we were not able to fulfill our tasks and demands by our international partners and allies within the international military operations. And that was a significant challenge for us. And it's not rearmament, it's investing in security, because only safe and secure societies can adapt to modern security challenges that we are facing with and that we will face with in the future.
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Polls suggest that seven out of 10 Croatians are in favor of mandatory military service. And when the required legislation went through the country's national assembly last year, it passed with 84 votes in favor and just 11 against.
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I don't see any challenges to this conscription. Some populist groups from far left, they said we don't need army, those investments, we need to invest in kindergartens, etc. But the fact is that someone needs to protect the kindergarten and our way of European way of life and democracy as you can see it. And this can be done in the last final stages by the army.
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Here in Croatia's capital, Zagreb, people are all too aware of the war in Ukraine. A stray drone landed in the city center soon after Russia's invasion. And only Hungary separates Croatia from the site of the fighting. To add to that, you've got a military build up across multiple countries in this region, not all of whom are exactly on the best of terms. So these. The decision Croatia made almost two decades ago to scrap compulsory military service is looking like a relic of another, more peaceful time.
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Situation in Europe, situation in Croatia, situation all around our neighborhood was stable. Right now it's completely different situation.
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Ivan Anushic is Croatia's Defense minister.
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A rhetoric of the politics on the eastern border of Croatia is the same as the night. And that is worried us. And because of this and because of the situation of the Russian aggression on Ukraine, we decided to have the conscriptions. That reason that I said is the reason. We don't have problem with political decision and we don't have problem with politics. We don't have problem with the public. We don't have problem with the young men who, who must go in this military conscription.
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E
They're going to be trained, as I understand, for two months. That's the idea. What can be achieved in that sort of short period of training.
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After these two months, there'll be infantry men completely and they learn how to survive in this situation. They learn with the new technology operating with the drones and the two months, it's enough for the, the first step. After this first step, we give the opportunity to stay in our army forces, to sign the agreement and to be professional. But two months, we have experience with two months. That's enough.
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E
Croatia isn't the only country in the region considering the reintroduction of conscription. Neighboring Slovenia is holding elections this month and the party currently leading the poll poles is very much in favor of a return to compulsory military service.
- [35:25]
A
The world is now more dangerous than at any time since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
- [35:30]
E
Yanes Jancza is the leader of the right wing Slovenian Democratic Party and a three time former prime minister. He says all European countries should bring back the draft.
- [35:41]
A
So we must urgently and significantly enhance the defence capabilities of, of member states, reintroduce universal military conscription and effectively pull research, development and production capacities of modern weaponry.
- [36:01]
E
Croatia's other neighbor, Serbia, isn't a member of NATO or the eu, but it's also on the verge of reintroducing military service. That sort of talk, along with the increased military spending, is making Kosovo and Bosnia nervous. In turn. Serbia is alarmed by Croatia's new military alliance with Kosovo and Albania. It's all adding up to increased tensions in the western Balkans.
- [36:23]
H
Any sort of military development you see in the Balkans actually just makes the whole region far, far less secure because everyone's reading it as being aimed against them.
- [36:32]
E
Analyst James Ker Lindsay specializes in international conflict and the Balkans.
- [36:38]
H
Croatia saying, look, we're arming ourselves because we're part of NATO. We're expected to increase our defense spending because this is what NATO is, is doing these days. We're very nervous about what's happening and we want to play a full part in that. Instead, it gets read in Serbia as well. This is Croatia arming against us. And then Croatia signs a defense deal with Albania and Kosovo and that pretty much says to the Serbs, yeah, this is aimed against us.
- [37:00]
E
What was Croatia's motivation there?
- [37:02]
H
What do you think? This quite clearly is something that was designed to antagonize Belgrade. And so it was a really, really unhelpful move and people would say otherwise. And again, look, Kosovo does not need that agreement with Albania and Croatia. It's effectively a NATO protectorate. So it was a really, really unnecessary move.
- [37:28]
E
Croatia is of course pleading innocent, but the regional tensions may play on the minds of the first recruits for the country's new version of military service. Memories of conflict in this region are still fresh and painful. And that could give basic training a little extra meaning. For Monocle in Zagreb, I'm Guy Delaunay.
- [37:56]
A
Guy Delaunay. Thank you. That is all for this edition of the Monocle Daily. Thanks to our panelists today, Rachel Cunliffe and Phil Tinline. Today's show was produced by Hassan Anderson and Chris Chermak and researched by Anneliese Maynard. Our sound engineer was Steph Changu. I'm Andrew Muller here in London. The Daily is back at the same time tomorrow. Thanks for listening.