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The Monocle Daily
Xi casts China as the world’s stable power: what does this mean for the international order?
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You're listening to the Monocle Daily, first broadcast on the 20th of May, 2026 on Monocle Radio.
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How far is the Russia, China axis from being a partnership of equals? Is the US really abandoning Europe? And can art keep you young? I'm Andrew Muller. The Monocle Daily starts now. Hello and welcome to the Monocle D coming to you from our studios here at Midori House in London. I'm Andrew Muller. My guests Erin o' Halloran and Mark Leonard will discuss the day's big stories. And our on this Day historical series admires Charles Lindbergh's earlier work. Stay tuned. All that and more coming up right here on the Monocle Daily. This is the Monocle Daily with me, Andrew Muller. We'll bring in our panelists Erin o' Halloran and Mark Leonard shortly. But first to Israel, where Prime Minister Ben Netanyahu may have to present himself to voters earlier than anticipated. A general election is due by October 27th at the absolute latest. But the Knesset has voted overwhelmingly to advance a bill which would, if eventually passed, trigger an election within 90 days. Though this process could in itself take long enough that it mightn't make that much difference, the effort is being driven in part by ultra orthodox parties vexed that Netanyahu has not shored up their exemption from military service. I'm joined with more on this by Yossi Meckelberg, senior consulting fellow at the Middle East North Africa Program at Chatham House. Yossi, first of all, will Benjamin Netanyahu have seen this coming?
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C
Good evening, Andrew. I think this government has seen its days for many, many months, if not years. But yes, he knew that this is he's just postponed and you know, when the Knesset decides today in a huge majority, 110 against, 120, it's just another stage. It's very performative. 90 days take in the middle of the summer, August, many Israelis expect not to be in the country. So it will take place somewhere between September and October anyway. So we are talking about few weeks here, a few weeks there. Symbolically, Netanyahu doesn't want election October because October right now is association with something which is not good for his re election.
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B
So might Netanyahu or at least part of Netanyahu actually welcome this if he knows he's going to have to face voters this year anyway?
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C
Well, in his ideal world, they will create a new emergency situation, Lebanon, Iran, somewhere, that he could postpone the election much further. He reads the public opinion polls. He knows that under any circumstances he can't form a coalition. But also the opposition can form a coalition because they chain themselves with, with, with a promise not to sit with parties that represent the Palestinian citizens of Israel who are Israelis. So it's going to a stalemate which to a degree will serve Netanyahu. So you can look for a prolonged, another prolonged political crisis in Israeli politics.
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B
I mean, we do know, or at least we think we understand what Netanyahu wants. He wants to stay in power and not unrelatedly wants to stay out of court, which is where he's likely to end up, lose his job. But we also know, Yossi, because we've talked about this many times before, that one rarely wins money writing off Benjamin Netanyahu. What is his actual plausible path back to power?
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C
I think only if he prolongs the current situation, keep creating and maintaining crisis, either internally, domestically or internationally. Yes, maybe one can say it's not clever to bet against Netanyahu. But you know, at the end of the day there are many also he lied to so many people. The reason that the ultra Orthodox don't trust him anymore, the rabbis on drafting, drafting, drafting youth, ultra Orthodox youth and so many others within Likud. We know that Netanyahu's time in office comes slowly to an end. It's just how long it would prolong all this, all this crisis, which is really costly for Israel, both in polarizing the Israeli society, but also, as we saw today from the videos of Benjvir, how much damage caused to Israel internationally.
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Just finally, Yossi, because I think this may be perplexing the passing listener. Is it clear why the ultra Orthodox are pushing this so hard? Because there is very little sympathy among the Israeli public for their line that they should be exempted from milit service. And they're unlikely to find, even if grudgingly, a Prime Minister more sympathetic to them than Benjamin Netanyahu.
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C
That might be the case. But they always rely that they will be needed one way or another if, especially if the opposition parties won't actually join forces with the Arab parties. So the only thing they can actually be the kingmakers and they will be needed and then they will create this dependency in them. But yes, there is very little sympathy, especially considering that Some people sell 550 and above days in reserve while they don't do any of this.
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Yossi Melburg at Chatham House, thanks as always for joining us. You're listening to the Daily back shortly. You're back with the Monocle Daily with me Andrew Muller. And we'll bring in our panel now. Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on foreign relations and author of Surviving Chaos Geopolitics when the Rules Fail. And Erin o', Halloran, historian at Cambridge University and the author of east of Empire. Hello to you both. Hello, Mark. First of all, welcome back. It has been ages and ages and ages, so reintroduce yourself, if you would, to our listeners, tell us a bit about what you're up to. Feel free to plug your book as clangingly as you like.
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D
Thank you so much. So I run the European Council on Foreign Relations, which is a pan European think tank. So we got offices in eight different countries around Europe, a tiny little office in Washington, D.C. and basically our mission is to try and understand all the crazy stuff that's going on in the world. So we have 150 people looking into all of the different continents, but also looking at some of the big new issues which are reshaping geopolitics like energy, technology, geoeconomics and the politics behind a lot of these issues. So we do a lot of polling as well. And as you say, I've just written a new book, it's just come out and it's called Surviving Chaos Geopolitics when the Rules Fail. And it tries to help people make sense of some of the big forces which are behind the headlines, but creating this wave of crises which have upended a lot of our different economies and political systems. And it tries to both draw on lots of conversations with people around the world to try and make sense of what's going on and to offer people a framework for understanding it. And then it ends in, I think, a kind of semi optimistic way with ideas about how Europeans can survive.
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B
Okay. Well, we will see in the rest of this program if we can thrash the optimism out of you because quite a lot of that will be recurring throughout our topics tonight. Erin, I did introduce you as the author of east of Empire, which is no word of a lie because you are that. But you are currently working on a follow up.
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That's right. Well, follow up, it's on a totally different subject, but it's still on the history of the early 20th century. So my first book is about the Middle east and India in the 20 years leading up to the partition of India, Pakistan and Israel, Palestine. The new book is called the Guernica, A History of Aerial Bombing and its Artistic legacies from the Middle east to Europe and Back again. So this is taking advantage of the last three years where I've been a postdoc at the Heritage Research center within the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge so I've been looking at how to integrate more visual and material culture into mainstream diplomatic history, basically, and history of empire. And this is the result.
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B
Well, also topical, probably fairly depressingly. But we go firstly to Beijing, where for the second time in as many weeks, Chinese President Xi Jinping is enduring the company of one of his fellow leaders of a superpower, if that indeed is what we are still calling Russia. Several agreements with President Vladimir Putin were concluded and a joint declaration was issued heralding the coming of a multipolar world for which read a belief that the United States should pull its head in somewhat in one of those occasional intimations that perhaps Xi does have sense of humour. Entertainment at the formal banquet included a dance from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, as traditionally broadcast on Soviet television as a holding pattern in the fraught interregnums following the deaths of General Secretaries. Mark, could this summit have been an email?
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D
Well, you know, we're in a world where there's an attention economy and people are desperately trying to claim as much of it as possible. And it was quite an extraordinary week, actually, to see the spectacle of Donald Trump making his way to Beijing looking like a supplicant rather than a dominant figure. And there's a lot of pageantry and the red carpet laid out for him, and then for Vladimir Putin to go down exactly the same route and to have a lot of the same pageantry. Though Donald Trump did say that his one was slightly better after the Putin visit ended. But, you know, it does show that China is really at the heart of the global system, that it's reached a level of power and authority in. On the global stage, which, you know, was definitely beyond its grasp for most of the last few decades. It shows that they've got global primetime. And that was the core message, I think, that Xi Jinping was trying to show to his own people. And from that perspective, I think it was a pretty good week for him. He didn't make any major concessions to Trump. He stood his ground. Trump went out of his way to say what a great guy he was and how well they were getting on. And then actually inviting Putin immediately afterwards, I think shows that Xi Jinping is sticking to the line that he's been plowing and sticking close to Putin in spite of the war in Ukraine and everything else that was going on.
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B
Well, on that thought, Aaron, I mean, China is now, and this is a depressing, I think, statement about the world in which we are living, pitching itself as the stable power. The trouble is they're not, well, Certainly relative to the United States and Russia. They're not actually wrong about that, are they?
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No, indeed. Although there are of course, some. You know, let's complicate that statement slightly. I think for me, one of the more jarring kind of ironies of the past couple of days was the headline that Xi Jinping had said to Putin that, you know, he was concerned about the law of the jungle taking back over international affairs. I mean, making that case to Putin, who's, of course, one of the principal architects of the more jungle, like international.
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B
I return to my thesis about Xi's sense of humor. I mean, it's subtle.
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A
Yes. No, for sure. And I do think he's become a bit of a master of the optics and of the stagecraft involved in political theater. The optics of having Trump come and supplicate, followed by leaving just as Putin's limo was pulling up, essentially is fairly impressive. And I don't think that that. I mean, if I was him, I'd be filing my nails with a smirk on my face. I'd be feeling really good about myself. It's an impress of feet to have pulled off. He seems to be moving the center of gravity increasingly toward Beijing, away from European capitals, away from D.C. and this is a humbling moment for a lot of great powers, but it's also thinking about how this is playing in the global south, thinking about how it's playing for middle powers. I think it's a really interesting moment. And as much as it is, as you said, it's a theatrical. It's optics rather than substance. It potentially could have been an email in terms of substance, but the theater of it is important. So I do think that being the case, we now have to ask lots of more interesting questions about what this means for European policy, for example. Yeah. And what it means for the alignment of states in Africa, in Latin America, et cetera.
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B
Mark, the statement or the joint communique did make reference to this idea of a multipolar world, which obviously they both seem to suggest is preferable to the unipolar world as they saw it dominated by the United States. But does China, and specifically does President Xi, really want a multipolar world, or do they just want a different unipolar one, that is, with China at the middle of it?
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D
Well, he's committed himself to the rejuvenation of the great Chinese nation, and he does see his role as being a historic mission of returning China to a position of being a huge power on the global stage stage, something which was true for most of human history. But we had this century of humiliation where China had to make do with a much lesser role on the global stage. But I don't think that, you know, I think we often project our ideas of order on the Chinese. So people look at some of these pictures, the pictures of the last couple of days. Even more dramatic was, was it last year or the year before when in Tianjin and in Beijing you had these events which were even more dramatic. One was the meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization where you had Xi Jinping alongside Putin and Modi. And then the next day he had the parades to commemorate the end of World War II. It was 2025 in Beijing and he posed the game with Kim Jong Un from North Korea. And there was a sense in many people's minds that this was a sort of world without the West. It was the beginning of a Sino centric order and that China was trying to take America's place as American power declines and America becomes a normal power, putting America first, that China is going to create a Sino centric order. But I don't really think that's what they're doing. I think they are definitely trying to push back on the West. They're trying to create a dominant role for themselves within Asia and they want to be authors of their own destiny. But Xi Jinping's favorite phrase to talk about what's going on on the world stage is to talk about great changes unseen in a century. And what that means is that the next few decades are going to be characterized by chaos and crises. And the challenge for China is not so much building an order like the American led order, it's more about how to be strong and to survive that cha. And to put itself in a place where it benefits from it and comes out as the strongest country from the, from the rubble of the old order.
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B
Well, returning to the unipolar world, we do find the beneficiaries of the Pax Americana continuing to struggle and indeed scramble to assess the incumbent U.S. administration's level of interest in upholding it. In recent weeks, the US has announced the withdrawal of 5,000 of the circa 50,000American soldiers stationed in Germany and the cancellation of the deployment of 4,000American soldiers to Poland, or has it? NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe, the US Air Force General Alexis Grinkowicz has reassured that he does not expect any further such drawdowns in the near term and that at any rate, the gap may be filled by increased European capacity. Erin, first of all, we have to ponder the possibility that actually none of this is even happening. Germany was saying today they have had no reliable confirmation of the withdrawal. Is it possibly possible, especially because Trump's declaration came so quickly, after Chancellor Friedrich Merz had talked of America being humiliated in the Persian Gulf, that this is yet another example of Donald Trump just saying stuff?
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A
I think that's kind of the point, right? The point is that we do not actually know what the key partner in NATO's plans and intentions are for the European continent. We do not know whether to take these reports seriously. We do not know what the intentions of America are vis a vis Europe. We have readouts of, you know, the. What was it, the signal chat from last year, where we have the Secretary of Defense. Sorry, the Secretary of War, Excuse me. And the Vice President talking about how much they loathe European dependence on America. We have the whole Greenland debacle, which feels like it was a million years ago, even though it was a few months. So what we have essentially is an unreliable, erratic partner that Europe cannot rely on. And that's the point, really. Whether or not this troop withdrawal actually happens, whether or not it's 4000 or 6000 or 2000 is kind of beside the point. The point is the instability and the uncertainty means that Europe has to make some very different and dramatic decisions, I would say, relatively quickly, to disentangle themselves from a partner that they literally don't know whether it has their back or not.
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B
Because on that thought, Mark, if this can happen, if indeed it is happening to Poland, which even this US Administration has called a model ally, how worried should everybody else be?
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D
I think they should be quite worried. I mean, you know, this is not something which is. It's not a bolt from the blue. This is something that Donald Trump has been saying, you know, since the old days in 1980s when he used to take adverts out in Playboy magazine. He wanted to pull back the American presence from NATO. And I think he does mean it. And as Aries.
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B
And the thing is, he's not the first US President to have suggested that the Europeans might want to buck their ideas up on the spot.
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D
That's definitely true. But he is the first one who looks like he means it, and I think that's why Europeans are now finally waking. But I happened to be in Poland last week when this story came out, and I saw people involved in the government and people in the media and in other places, and there was a kind of widespread sense of panic there. And I think that's the wrong reaction. As Erin's saying, I think we know that it's quite difficult for, for 450 million Europeans to explain to 300 or 350 million Americans why they should be paying for most of our security. It's not something that was sustainable. I think Trump does really mean it. I don't think that we need American help in the long term dealing with the threat from Russia. Russia is a mid sized country, has a lot of nuclear weapons, but the European Union's economy is many times the size of Russia's economy and we should be able to deter that. The question is, how do we get from where we are now to a position where you can do that? And that's a very tricky situation. And it would be a lot better having started this journey with a less erratic and difficult to predict president. But people thought they could sit it out and carry on free riding when Barack Obama and Joe Biden were in the White House. Well, now we're having to move much more quickly. But I think some countries really have done that. Germany by 2029 is going to spend as much as Britain and France combined, which is pretty extraordinary situation.
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B
But Erin, until the Europeans do get there and can plug those gaps themselves, as has been suggested, it's not just about the personnel and the kit, is it? The fact that there is an American presence is part of the, I guess, the cosmetic aspect of the deterrent.
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A
Yeah, I would agree with that. And I think that the only way that you'd go from the cosmetic deterrent to something that is credible, minus America has to be through an enormous amount of very hard work, big spending and a lot of rethinks that again, need to get more creative and more imaginative, frankly. So one of the things that's happened, we've seen the immediate reaction to Trump's tariff war, for example, which we can see as the first economic shots off the prow on this retreat entrenchment or American isolationism or whatever you want to call it. And that that affected a lot of countries, not just Europe, but it resulted in, for example, a big trade agreement between Canada and Europe and also one with Brazil quite recently and more on the docket in terms of Latin American countries, et cetera. So I do think that there are ways for these allies or economic partners, let's say, to expand those conversations. But whatever the deterrent is, it's going to have to move from something that, look, we've got America behind us, so don't touch us to something that feel much more credible and is not necessarily as cosmetically, not necessarily as seamless in terms of the image. But it actually has to come down to brass tacks. It actually has to come down to a material defense agreement that is more significant, that is heavier, that is weightier.
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B
Just finally and briefly on this one, Mark, is there possibly any sort of opportunity here for any European country? I'm particularly curious about Poland, which has been spending immensely on defence in the last couple of years. And there is that thing where the closer a country is to Russia, the more seriously it tends to take this stuff, for obvious reasons. But Poland could position itself in a Europe that was looking after itself as an extremely significant power, like way beyond what it would have been regarded as 20 or 30 years ago.
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D
Yeah, look, I think Poland is an important part of the picture. I think the UK and its relationship with Europe comes back into question as a result of. Of this. But look at Ukraine. It's a country with a much smaller population than Russia, with much less resources than Russia had at the beginning of the war. And they've shown incredible bravery and have defended themselves extraordinarily well. If Ukraine can do it, I don't understand why the combined might of Britain, France, Germany, Poland and the rest of the European Union shouldn't be able to deter all.
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B
Well, moving along, the secret to eternal youth has been revealed. So there is that. Boffins at UCL publishing in the rollicking journal Innovation in Aging, would have us believe that engaging in the arts and general cultural activities actually slows the aging process to a degree comparable to exercising regularly. These findings may startle those of certain generations who tend to find that contemplating certain areas of the arts just makes them feel ancient. Like, for example, when they realize that we are now as far from. From the release of Nevermind by Nirvana as it was from the sewers crisis. I think that's right. My arithmetic isn't perhaps what it once was, but there we all are. Erin, as a general principle, are you buying this? Does engaging with art actually literally keep us young?
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A
I don't even know why this is controversial or news. It's so intuitively obvious. I mean, we have been as a race, as a human race, we have been producing music, we have been singing, dancing, creating art, telling stories since before we cultivated land, since before we had permanent settlements. It's like the most essential part of our nature. They actually say that our capacity for speech didn't initially evolve as speech. It initially evolved as our capacity to sing. And out of singing came speech and came language. So I think that this is just so inherently what human beings are built to do. They're built to be artistic beings, to create, to share with one another. And it's also the glue of society. It's how we interact with one another. It's how we share and build bonds with others. And we're deeply social creatures. So this is so obviously real to me that it's sort of like, yeah, of course. Of course it keeps us young because it keeps us healthy, because it keeps us well. And I was definitely. I mean, having said that, obviously, I was raised in the arts, right. I went to theater school. I was trained as an opera singer, actually, when I was young. And I recently had an opportunity to sing an aria in public for the first time since I was 15, I think. And it was. Yeah, I think I got younger just rehearsing.
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B
Mark, my question to you, though, is how do we adapt this knowledge to the fact that all popular culture created after the age we turn 35 is baffling and terrible?
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D
Well, you just gotta go and try some of it out. I mean, it's definitely true that a lot of the popular culture that was created before I was born is probably better than anything that's happened in my lifetime. It is. You know, one of the great things about having kids is that it does force you to engage with the world that we're living in, rather than the world of our imagination.
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B
You say that like it's a good thing, Mark.
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D
I think it is. Yeah. No, it definitely. It both makes me feel much younger, keeps me alive, and I discover through my kids, but also through younger colleagues and other things and people on my travels, all sorts of amazing things which made me think about the world in a different way, which give me kind of energy. And I think I agreed so much with what Erin was saying, because I think the essence of culture is about connecting with people, and it's connections which keep us alive and young and stop us from getting Alzheimer's disease and dying alone and miserable. It is, you know, it's the essence of good art is about making an emotional connection with somebody else.
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B
Well, let's see if we can check out then, by helping our listeners not die alone and miserable, which I think would be a noble vocation on our part. I want to ask you, each of you, internal. I'll start with you, Erin. Can you recall the last piece of art that you read or heard or saw or just somehow engaged with, which just somehow made you feel better, dare I say, younger, than you previously had?
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A
Oh, my God. Yeah. So last week I went to the Garden Cinema and saw Kokuho, which is the big Japanese. It was their Oscar submission this year and it's like a three hour family drama about geisha's like male performers in the Japanese opera tradition.
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B
I'm sensing there wasn't a car chase.
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A
It was. There was no car chasing, but there was a lot of actually. But there were scenes about the gangs, the famous Japanese gangs.
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B
The Yakuza.
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A
The Yakuza. Because one of the main characters is the son of a yakuza. So there was yakuza violence which was quite exciting. And then there was, you know, you got an amazing introduction to traditional Japanese theater, art and culture. And also this beautiful human drama, like intergenerational story woven through it. It was stunning and totally worth the time and I would encourage everybody to go see it.
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B
Okay, that title again.
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A
Kokuho.
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B
Kokuho. Mark one from you.
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D
So not the last thing, but you were encouraging us to find some music that was done before, you know, less than 35 years ago. And there' this amazing youngish French performer that performed in London last year called Zao De Sagason, who is a real revelation to me. Anyway, I went to see her with my kids and she has taken French chanson into the 21st century. She's kind of merged the lyricism and the power and the kind of beauty of the greatest French singing like Jacques Braille and things like that with. She's got a kind of weird obsession for a young woman with like 80s German electronica kind of Kraut Rocky.
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B
Weird obsession at any age. To be honest, I think it's rather wonderful.
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D
She's created some extraordinary, an extraordinary sound. She's an amazing performer. Just watching her is slightly exhausting as she bounces around the stage and really like brings. Listening to it is very, is invigorating and makes me feel young. But watching her perform is sometimes maybe a bit too much for someone in the sixth decade. But, but she, she is really wonderful. And her, her latest album was called La Symphony des Eclair and it's a, it's something which I thoroughly recommend and you know, she's becoming, you know, a real global superstar. She, she played during the, the Olympics in Paris in the opening ceremony and she's also very sort of multi. You know, she, she does great covers of English songs as well as French songs. Even though with a very, very nice French accent.
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B
Well, I am informed by a voice in my earphones that she features on Monocle Radio's playlist because that's just how discerning a station we are. Mark Leonard and Erin o' Halloran. Thank you both very much for joining us. Finally on today's show, our on this day feature reflects on an extraordinary feat of aviation while offering a warning against getting over invested in the virtue of his heroes. Time magazine's man or Woman of the year award since 1999, its Person of the Year award often occasions controversy, though usually undeservedly. The title Person of the Year is intended to acknowledge impact, not virtue, which is why it has been conferred upon a few undeniably rum customers down the decades. Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, King Faisal, Ruhollah Khomeini, Vladimir Putin. This ambiguous tradition was inaugurated, if inadvertently by the very first bestowal of Times Person of the year. 99 years ago. It went to a 25 year old American aviator in recognition of the journey he began on May 20, 1927. In fairness to Times editors, the character flaws of Charles Lindbergh for it was he were not yet fully appreciated. When Lindbergh walked onto the Runway at Roosevelt Field Airport on Long island and climbed into the cockpit of the custom built single propeller, single seat, fabric covered Ryan monoplane he'd named the spirit of St. Louis fame was yet to bring out the worst in him or do its worst to him. The greatest stunt of all begins on the misty morning of May 20 as a young airmail pilot hastens to be the first to fly nonstop from New York to Paris. Charles Lindbergh wasn't from St. Louis. He'd been born in Detroit and raised between rural Minnesota and Washington D.C. his father, also Charles Lindbergh, was Swedish immigrant who'd become a long serving Republican congressman. But the younger Lindbergh's peripatetic life in aviation stunt pilot, air service reserve corps officer, airmail deliverer had gravitated towards Missouri. If he had a home, St. Louis it was. There was money as well as glory on offer. The New York hotelier Raymond Orteg had put up $25,000, nearly half a million in today's CO for the first non stop transatlantic flight from New York to Paris. There was also horrifying risk involved. Within the previous eight months at least three attempts to win Orteg's cash had ended in the deaths or disappearances of those involved. The legendary World War I French fighter ace Rene Fonck survived the crash of his Sikorsky S35 on takeoff from Roosevelt Field. His two crewmates, Jacob Islamoff and Charles Clavier did not. Two more try it, Noel Davis and S.H. worcester are next but dive to death in swamplands near Langley field. Virginia, and 12 days before Lindbergh took off another French fighter race. Charles Nungesser and his navigator Francois Colley had tried it in the other direction. Embarking from Le Bourget airfield in Paris in the bright white Levasseur biplane they called Loyseau Blanc, they were seen over Ireland a couple of hours later. Later, they haven't been seen since. Lindbergh had resolved to travel light. It'd just be him which would further accrue the cachet attached to being the first person to do the flight alone. The Atlantic had already been crossed in a single hop back in 1919 by Royal Air Force officers John Alcock and Arthur Brown, who'd flown a repurposed Vickers Vimy bomber from Newfoundland to County Galway in around 16 hours. Spirit of St. Louis was not designed for comfort. The cockpit was tiny and in the interests of streamlining the design, it had no forward facing windows. If Lindbergh wanted to see anything, he had to steer askew and look out the side. The little monoplane, with neither radio nor safety equipment is heavily loaded with fuel. Ahead 3,600 miles to Paris and all America vicariously shares every lonely mile. Lindbergh's own descriptions of his 33 and a half hour flight and his arrival in Paris in his rush released memoir, we tend toward the blandly matter of fact. He was a pilot, not a poet.
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D
After the plane stopped rolling, I turned it around and started to taxi back to the lights. The entire field ahead, however, was covered with thousands of people, all running towards my ship. When the first few arrived, I attempted to get them to hold the rest of the crowd back away from the plane, but apparently no one could understand or would have been able to conform to my request if they had. I cut the switch to keep the propeller from killing someone.
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B
Lindbergh had become instantly one of the best known names on earth. New York City welcomed him home with a ticker tape parade attended by an estimated 4 million people. What a flying fool was he, Lindbergh. In due course, less admiring songs would be written. Mr. Charlie Lindbergh. He flew to old Berlin, got him a big Arn Cross and he flew right back. Lindbergh was indeed decorated in Berlin in 1938 with the order of the German Eagle by his fellow pilot Hermann Goering. Back in the United States, Lindbergh became active in the America first movement, which sought to keep the US from getting involved in World War II. If not quite a Nazi sympathiser, he was indisputably an anti Semite. Sympathetic biographers have floated the line that Lindbergh had somehow been sent round the twist by the 1932 kidnap and murder of his 20 month old son, Charles Jr. A crime which transfixed America. Message that shocked the world comes in
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D
on the police teletype.
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B
A message that stunned the imagination, that made every parent shot shudder. But the best and the worst of Lindbergh's story remind us that heroes and villains are rarely as straightforward as we might prefer. That's all for this edition of the Monocle Daily. Thanks to our panelists today, Erin o' Halloran and Mark Leonard. Also to Yossi Mekelburg at the top of the show. Today's show was produced by Anita Riota and researched by Josefina Astradenegla Gomez. Our sound engineer was Elliot Greenfield. I'm Andrew Muller here in London. The Daily is back at the same time tomorrow. Thanks for listening.