490. Trump’s Greenland Ultimatum: What Next?

Summary

The Rest Is Politics – Episode 490

Title: Trump’s Greenland Ultimatum: What Next?
Date: January 21, 2026
Hosts: Alastair Campbell & Rory Stewart

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Episode Overview

This episode dives headfirst into the extraordinary geopolitical crisis triggered by former president Donald Trump's dramatic ultimatum over Greenland. Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, recording from the World Economic Forum at Davos, dedicate the entire discussion to analyzing Trump’s demand for “complete and total control of 98% of Danish territory,” the fallout for NATO, the EU, and world order, and the wider implications for political leadership and sovereignty on both sides of the Atlantic. The hosts also debate the roles of Britain, Europe, and the global community, exposing the deeper threads of performance, power dynamics, and the new rules of global politics under Trump’s unprecedented style.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Greenland Ultimatum: Trump’s Move and Its Meaning

[02:59–05:11]

• Trump has escalated from publicly musing about “buying Greenland” to outright demanding control over it and threatening aggressive tariffs on European economies until Denmark concedes.
• The US is leveraging military, economic, and political power to pressure Denmark and its NATO allies, with NATO deployments near Greenland heightening tensions.
• The hosts highlight that Trump’s actions play into Vladimir Putin’s ideal strategy, destabilizing NATO through division and aggression.

  “It is absolutely terrifying. And it is a sort of Putin wet dream that's unfolding.” — Alastair Campbell [00:37]

2. Dividing Europe: The Trade and Security Fronts

[03:44–04:50]

• Trump’s tariff threats target not only Denmark but also key NATO and EU members—UK, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Netherlands—likely as a divide-and-rule tactic.
• The inclusion of Sweden and Finland is debated, possibly as retribution for their recent NATO accession, possibly at Putin’s behest.
• Rory Stewart underscores the magnitude:

  “If the Russian external intelligence service tried to plan out their dream scenario for how to destroy the Western alliance ... they could not have come up with a better plan than this.” — Rory Stewart [04:22]

3. Reality TV Presidency: Escalation and Power Performance

[07:36–09:20]

• The “logic of reality TV” requires Trump to create ever-bigger global dramas for attention—Greenland is his latest, with performance and humiliation center stage.
• Trump's second term is marked by a more ideologically aligned and loyal inner circle, making him more unpredictable and dangerous.
• Campbell puts it bluntly:

  “He’s the most powerful person right now. He’s more powerful than anybody’s ever been in the history of the world.” — Alastair Campbell [00:20 & 07:01]

4. The Board of Peace: A New “UN” for Trump’s Friends

[10:32–13:43]

• Trump’s “Board of Peace,” ostensibly for the Israel-Gaza crisis, is now a pay-to-play club for handpicked countries (including Russia and Belarus), used to bypass international law and punish dissenters like France with new tariffs.
• Tony Blair is discussed as a potential figure lending legitimacy to this dystopian project, but both hosts express skepticism.
• Macron’s resistance results in direct economic retaliation, underlining Trump’s contempt for multilateral norms.

5. Sovereignty, History, and Hypocrisy: The Greenland Context

[15:01–18:33]

• Stewart recounts the long-standing and widely respected status of Greenland as Danish territory, with echoes of the UK’s support and historical treaties (e.g., Congress of Vienna).
• What sets this apart from past US interventions such as Venezuela is that Denmark is a close NATO ally, making the invasion an existential threat to the alliance itself.
• The hosts point to Trump’s selective reading of history and manipulation of sovereignty for expediency.

6. European Responses: Between Appeasement and Retaliation

[25:03–27:35]

• Macron considers invoking the EU’s anti-coercion “trade bazooka”—potentially banning US corporations—though the economic fallout could harm Europe more than America.
• Keir Starmer (UK PM) initially condemns Trump but appears to be hedging toward appeasement, especially concerning UK sovereignty over the Chagos Islands, prompting concern from both hosts.
• Rory Stewart frames Starmer’s posture as “appeasement,” drawing parallels to dangerous historical precedents.

7. The Dilemma of Dependency: Technology, Security, and Trident

[29:16–32:26]

• Europe’s and the UK’s defense systems (including Trident) and digital infrastructure are deeply dependent on the US—making resistance risky and limiting independent action.
• JD Vance’s alarming recent statements cast both UK and France as potential nuclear risks due to supposed “Islamist adjacent” leadership, hinting the US could withhold critical support.

8. Appeasement vs. Resistance: Weighing the Strategies

[33:51–35:30]

• The theoretical logic of appeasement breaks down if the aggressor’s demands (here, Trump’s) are performative, unbounded, and ever-escalating.
• “Every concession you make weakens your hand for the future and encourages him to do more.” — Rory Stewart [35:09]
• Campbell and Stewart debate whether Europe can or should credibly threaten hard power retaliation—or switch to soft power moves, such as blocking the US from hosting the FIFA World Cup.

9. The Options: Waiting, Gold Statues, and Holding the Line

[47:17–51:29]

• Stewart outlines three possible Western strategies:
  1. Wait it out – Hope Congress, courts, or US allies rein in Trump.
  2. The “Gulf Strategy” – Appease Trump with personal flattery and economic deals (statues, naming rights, investment pledges).
  3. Firm resistance – Public rejection of the ultimatum, unified by Canada, the EU, and UK, even if it means enduring sanctions and economic pain.
• Stewart argues for the third course, warning that handovers (like Greenland) only embolden further demands.

  “Once Trump begins to feel, ‘Oh, I'd like a few hundred billion dollars of minerals, thank you very much,’...there is literally no limit.” — Rory Stewart [42:09]

10. Psychological Warfare and the Power of Media

[46:29–55:18]

• Trump’s performance relies on exploiting the speed and reach of modern media, dominating the global narrative and keeping himself the perpetual subject.
• Campbell notes, “Trump's genius is that he has better than anybody understood the way that technological change and media change has completely changed the rules of politics and diplomacy.” [54:19]

11. Consequences for Europe and the Rules-Based Order

[57:23–60:59]

• Trump’s aggression has exposed fundamental weaknesses in Europe’s autonomy and the fragility of the liberal order, making plain the danger of over-dependence on an unpredictable US.
• The targets of Trump’s agenda—sovereignty, international law, and multilateralism—are under existential threat.
• Stewart:

  “His entrepreneurial genius is to discover that you can torment and abuse your allies far more effectively than you can your enemies.” [58:37]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Fear Factor:
  “It is absolutely terrifying. And it is a sort of Putin wet dream that's unfolding.”
  — Alastair Campbell [00:37]

• On the New World Order:
  “The Board of Peace is saying, there's a new world order creating it and I am going to run it.”
  — Alastair Campbell [12:35]

• On Appeasement:
  “Every concession you make weakens your hand for the future and encourages him to do more.”
  — Rory Stewart [35:09]

• On Europe's Choices:
  “Europe has got to be strengthened, and Europe has been fundamentally weakened by our departure, and we've got to be part of its restraint.”
  — Alastair Campbell [62:21]

• On Trump’s Style:
  “His objective is to make a huge performance of cruelty, humiliation and bullying.”
  — Rory Stewart [25:02]

• On Media Manipulation:
  “Trump's genius is that he has better than anybody understood the way that technological change and media change has completely changed the rules of politics and diplomacy.”
  — Alastair Campbell [54:19]

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Key Segment Timestamps

• Greenland ultimatum and global context: [02:59–05:11]
• The Board of Peace and international retaliation: [10:32–13:43]
• Historical background of Greenland and Denmark: [17:01–18:33]
• UK, Europe and responses—Macron and Starmer: [25:03–27:35]
• Dependency Dilemma—tech and Trident: [29:16–32:26]
• Debate on appeasement, resistance, and Western strategy: [33:51–35:30], [47:17–51:29], [58:37–62:21]

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Conclusion – Where Next?

Trump’s Greenland ultimatum is a watershed, testing NATO to its core and showing how performative power politics, media manipulation, and disruption can destabilize the very foundations of the Western order. Campbell and Stewart’s analysis warns that traditional “rules-based” responses are insufficient against such tactics, and calls for renewed Western unity, resilience, and adaptation to a transformed global landscape—while recognizing the gravity of Europe’s vulnerability and America’s internal contradictions. The episode ends with a frank acknowledgment that events are moving so fast, and are so unprecedented, that the old rulebooks may be useless.

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(This summary skips all ad breaks and non-political content as requested.)

Transcript

[Alistair Campbell]

Thanks for listening to the rest is Politics. To support the podcast, listen without the adverts and get early access to episodes and live show tickets, go to therestispolitics.com.

[Rory Stewart]

That'S therestispolitics.com he's announced that he will have complete and total control of 98% of Danish territory by May, and he will ramp up tariffs until they hand it over.

[Alistair Campbell]

He's the most powerful person right now. He's more powerful than anybody's ever been in the history of the world.

[Rory Stewart]

His objective is to make a huge performance of cruelty, humiliation and bullying. There is literally, if we actually say we're not sovereign, America can do whatever it wants whenever it wants and we.

[Alistair Campbell]

Have no options to respond, it is absolutely terrifying. And it is a sort of Putin wet dream that's unfolding.

[Rory Stewart]

The logic of reality TV requires Trump every week to create a bigger and bigger story.

[Alistair Campbell]

And I've been saying that the ultimate reality TV show is nuclear war.

[Rory Stewart]

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[Alistair Campbell]

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[Rory Stewart]

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[Alistair Campbell]

Rory Stewart, and me, Alistair Campbell. And we are in Davos.

[Rory Stewart]

Yeah. As it says behind you, the World Economic Forum.

[Alistair Campbell]

We are globalists who a few years ago thought that we ran the world. And now every single person here is thinking, oh, maybe we don't.

[Rory Stewart]

We are going to do something very unusual, which is we're going to dedicate this whole podcast to talking about Greenland. There is nobody in the world who hasn't followed this in outline, but in essence, what's happened is that Donald Trump, who since 201617 has been saying that Greenland should be part of the United States and he wants to buy it, has now moved to a completely new stage in which over the weekend he has not only said that he will have Greenland, but. But when NATO deployed, when Norway, the uk, Denmark deployed troops to try to signal their support for Denmark's sovereign control of Greenland. It's part of Denmark. He's announced tariffs and he's announced that he will have complete and total control of 98% of Danish territory by May and he will ramp up tariffs until they hand it over.

[Alistair Campbell]

It's really interesting if you look at the list of the countries on which he said these tariffs are going to come. Uk, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands. Now, if you're really going to do tariffs against seven of those eight countries, you talk about the European Union, he's trying to kind of divide and rule. And I even wonder, you know, whether the reason that Sweden and Finland are in there is not necessarily because they're so close to Greenland, it's because actually they joined NATO. And I wonder whether I'm going to say something very controversial here. I even wonder whether that was a Putin ask. Putin will be absolutely dancing his little tappy toes away at this because this is 100% fits with his long term strategy.

[Rory Stewart]

And I think if the sdr, if the Russian external intelligence service tried to plan out over 10 years their dream scenario for how to destroy the Western alliance, undermine the United States and wreck NATO, they could not have come up with a better plan than this. This is literally the sort of thing that's sitting in your bath if you're the head of the sdr, is like your craziest idea ever. What if the United States decided to invade another NATO country and steal their.

[Alistair Campbell]

Territory and meanwhile withdraw their defence support from Europe because Europe's on the wrong side in reason? Greenland, leaving Europe alone to stand up for Ukraine and then having to fight these two ridiculous wars, which, and this is Europe's fault, which they're not fit to fight in the way that The Americans would and could. So it is absolutely terrifying and it is a sort of Putin wet dream.

[Rory Stewart]

That'S unfolding just before we get onto that. We're actually speaking just the day before Trump arrives here in Davos to give a speech to the World Economic Forum. Give a little bit of a sense of the place. I mean, essentially it is what began as a small conference of ski resort has now become absolutely enormous. Essentially it's difficult for the infrastructure of the place to cope. People are staying right out in outlying villages, coming in on trains, sitting on the ground, walking for 15 minutes through the snow. Outside our window status is defined by people walking very, very quickly with lots of people behind them trying to ask questions. There is an enormous amount of people looking over your shoulder trying to find more important people to talk to. And the key British symbol of this, I guess for me is probably George Osborne, who's become sort of quintessential Davos man.

[Alistair Campbell]

Oh, is he?

[Rory Stewart]

He loves it. Absolutely, he loves it.

[Alistair Campbell]

I haven't seen anybody following him around. He certainly hasn't got entourage. No, it is. Well, I'll tell you, the first thing I notice getting is how little snow there is. And of course that's largely down to climate change. And we'll talk about climate again in relation to Greenland. But I'll tell you what I found astonishing about. I've been to a few Davos and I can't pretend I love them, Rory, partly because of what you say. It's like the. It's like it's got the same atmosphere as a party conference, but only for really rich self important people. That is the sort of. That's the vibe that I get. But I think what's been incredible here, I have not had a single, literally not one conversation in which Donald Trump wasn't mentioned within at least the second sentence.

[Rory Stewart]

Last night we were doing an event actually, largely for charities in the environment in Gold's House. And you asked the audience, have any of you made it through the day without mentioning the word Donald Trump? And nobody mentioned it.

[Alistair Campbell]

Correct. The only person who claimed it was because he refuses to use the word Trump. He calls him the Orange man, baby. And I think it's important just to reflect on that because he's in. You know, there's this football song, Rory, that people sing. He's in your head.

[Rory Stewart]

He's in your head.

[Alistair Campbell]

Yeah, well, Trump is in everybody's head and of course he loves that. And I made the point last night at this thing, Gore's house, that I think you can make the case when we talk about power. And of course, he loves power. Stephen Miller, his right hand man, has said this is all about power and being honest about that. You get, if you have power, you want more power. But I think you can make the case. He's the most powerful person right now. He's more powerful than anybody who's ever been in the history of the world. I think you just look at what's going on. Term one, his first term was kind of chaotic, disorganized, and he was surrounded by people that sort of kept him in check.

[Rory Stewart]

And just a small one on that, I think really understanding how important that bit of it is that so many of the people that he had were part of the old American establishment. So his Secretary of Defense was General Mattis, his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, even John Bolton, who was a bit more on the neocon right, was very much part of the American National Association. And it now appears that Milley, as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the next Defense Secretary, basically conspired to keep Trump in NATO, stop him breaking his agreements, essentially managed him. And so by the end of 2020, when Biden came in, there were two things people said. One is that people like you and I who were complaining a lot about Trump, were suffering from Trump derangement syndrome. It hadn't been that bad. The tariffs hadn't been as mad as people thought. He hadn't tried to do anything too crazy. And secondly, people assumed he'd never be elected again because of January 6 and conviction of finance. Now he's back again.

[Alistair Campbell]

So that's term one. Term two is. And as you know, I'm obsessed about the Project 2025 thing that is ultimately the base of a lot of what they're doing.

[Rory Stewart]

And just remind people a little bit about that, because before the election, when we were in the Chicago conference, a lot of people from the Trump camp were saying this was all fake news.

[Alistair Campbell]

Yes, exactly. He hadn't. He barely read it, et cetera, et cetera. But this was setting out what we're now seeing, America first. And America first means whatever they deem to be in America's interest at the time, they are going to do it. And they're better organized than they were. And he's surrounded now not by people trying to curb him, but by people who are essentially egging him on, including people like Marco Rubio is sold his soul and just does whatever Trump tells him to. And including someone like J.D. vance, who thinks his only chance of succeeding him is basically even to preempt the sort of madness and to be.

[Rory Stewart]

A little bit banal again. The three key bits of this coalition which we keep coming back to are maga, the Christian right and this odd sort of tech bro world. And In a sense, J.D. vance, who we did that miniseries on, is a kind of symbol of somebody trying to hold those three things together. And maybe when we get onto Greenland, we can see bits of all those three coalitions working.

[Alistair Campbell]

I tell you what I think this week has shown. So we've always had this thought that Trump wants to be the most powerful person in the world, the richest person in the world and the most famous person in the world. Okay, he's definitely the most famous person in the world right now. I think even with the latest news, David Beckham cannot make that claim. I think the Queen might have just about pushed it when she was alive. But right now Trump has got that. He's definitely the most powerful person in the world. And a lot of what we're seeing is about becoming the richest person in the world because the whole thing is replete with corruption. So we're going to talk about Greenland, but let's just briefly, it's just a few weeks ago now. How many weeks since Venezuela? Two, three, four weeks. Right. Feels like months ago. And nobody's talking about it. Maduro is somewhere in the jail. People sort of forgotten about it. So you'd think with Greenland going on, that is the only big thing. But the other massive thing happening right now is this Gaza border peace. Just think about this for a moment. This, I think is about trying to.

[Rory Stewart]

Destroy the United nations and explain again, Gaza border peace.

[Alistair Campbell]

So the Gaza border peace, we've had phase one of the so called peace plan. Since when, by the way, two and a half thousand buildings have been destroyed and four hundred and sixty three Palestinians have been killed inside Gaza. And we're now moving on to phase two, which involves this board of peace which we thought was going to be a sort of technical thing with people like Tony Blair on it and a few sort of, you know, of Trump's allies. But it's now expanded where for a billion dollars a country, and by the way, amongst those invited Russia, Lukashenko of.

[Rory Stewart]

Belarus, the head of Belarus for the border peace is completely extraordinary. I mean, is that the sort of, just to remind people, Lukashenko, who runs Belarus, Belarus is essentially a Russian satellite and Belarus is a very, very brutal Soviet style authoritarian leader of a very extreme sort. I mean, inviting him onto the border peace, it's almost like putting North Korea on The border peace.

[Alistair Campbell]

Well, I wouldn't put that past him for a billion dollars. Putin is an indicted war criminal. Okay. And we're talking about the Board of Peace. I mean, as you know, we talked about this last night, and I said, look, I'm glad that Tony Blair is involved in this, because I think he'll. At least he'll keep Gaza, which wasn't even mentioned in the Board of Peace articles, keep it in the debate. And also he's got his experience, but I'm wondering whether actually it doesn't make sense for him to say, I'm sorry, if this is what it's really about, I cannot possibly be involved in it.

[Rory Stewart]

Two quick things there. So, just to remind people, the border peace originally was set up for Gaza, and in fact, there was even a UN resolution.

[Alistair Campbell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Rory Stewart]

But what you're saying, which seems to be quite clear, is that Trump's actually imagining the border peace, not just for Gaza, but it's a sort of new kind of un. He's trying to set up a new form of international organization, but only the 60 countries he wants and pay to play. So I agree with you. I don't think Tony Blair should be involved. Macron has announced that he won't be involved with the result that Trump has now announced this morning that there will be sanctions on 200 categories of French goods because he won't join his Board of Peace, a voluntary international organization. You don't join and then you get punished financially.

[Alistair Campbell]

So the Board of Peace is saying, there's a new world order creating it and I am going to run it. And it will not be about rule of law and it will not be about anti corruption, and it will not be about human rights and all the things that the United nations is meant to be about and has been pretty effective a lot of the time. It will be about the sort of sycophantic obeisance that we see from Vance and Rubio. We're going to take that wider. And the other thing he's done with Macron, Macron, today is publish the private text message that Macron sent yesterday where he said, I supported you on Syria. I think you've done great work on Iran. I don't understand what you're doing in Greenland. Let's have a meeting. We're in Davos. But he's also. Trump published the latest text message from your friend Daddy Mark Rutte, where Rutte, Secretary General of NATO, has not learned his lesson from the first time he had all his messages published because he's done it again of yet another sycophantic. I'll be in Davos. I'm going to talk up your amazing success you've had in Syria. Does Trump even know that the Syrian thing happened this week? Dunno. This is Trump treating every other leader with complete contempt, including today also Keir Starmer.

[Rory Stewart]

Let's transition to Greenland. I think the first thing is just to get a sense of the enormity of what's going on here, because we get so used to Trump's mad behavior that we're beginning to lose a sense of what this means to slightly tease the rest of politics. Us, our sister series. You and I have been saying now for probably 13 months that the logic of reality TV requires Trump every week to create a bigger and bigger story. And I've been saying for some time that's why I think Greenland is increasingly likely.

[Alistair Campbell]

And I've been saying that the ultimate reality TV show is nuclear war.

[Rory Stewart]

You have indeed. Absolutely. Okay, well, thank goodness we're not there yet. Okay. But we have got to this. And you know, even two weeks ago, I was. You were teasing me because I was being attacked by Boris Johnson, the Daily Mail, because I'd said that even though China is in many ways a much nastier, worse, authoritarian, human rights abusing state, I mean, incomparably worse than the United States in terms of its treatment of its citizens, but in terms of our dependency, we are much more dependent on the US Than we are on China. And actually, in the short term, the US Therefore can pose more of a threat to Europe than China can. Now, Boris Johnson wrote a whole article saying, this is complete nonsense. This guy's completely deranged. What on earth?

[Alistair Campbell]

He's a lefty bedwetter.

[Rory Stewart]

Lefty bedwetter? Yeah. There's a lovely moment in it where Boris, who was actually the Foreign Secretary when I was the African minister, says, what I can't believe is this guy was apparently briefly a junior minister in the Foreign Office. I can't imagine how he even got the job. Right. So he goes on like, and now we are seeing what this means. And what does it mean? Well, firstly, the US has now had with Trump an explicit statement that he wants, in his words, complete and total control of Greenland by May. Greenland is part of Denmark. It's 98% of the entire territory of Denmark. It is actually something that's been much more settled than many other countries in the world. I mean, Trump starts playing games about where boats landed a few hundred years ago. The fact is the British were backing Danish ownership of Greenland and the Congress of Vienna in the early 19th century. Right. If you're talking about international borders, Greenland is pretty established, but much more dramatic than that. And you move from Venezuela, and maybe this is where I'll finish and come back to you. Venezuela was a sign that Trump was flouting the United nations, flouting Congress, kidnapping the leader of another state on the most dubious legal grooms, and then leaving a brutal regime in place. He wasn't doing it to bring democracy, but Venezuela was not a NATO ally. What makes this completely different is that he's not just redrawing international borders. In other words, doing exactly what Putin did in Ukraine, which is to go into someone else's country and take their territory. He's doing it to one of his closest allies. He's doing it to Denmark. That was a huge troop contributor after 911 came with NATO behind the US lost more troops per capita than any other country supporting the US after the attacks on 9 11. And he's doing it right in the heart of NATO. He's saying, I'm doing it because Russia and China are a threat to NATO. But actually the first country to seize a NATO territory is the hegemon itself, the big linchpin of NATO.

[Alistair Campbell]

The point about Russia is you made this point last week that if he really saw Russia as the threat, why is he being so helpful towards Putin in relation to Ukraine? And we can also add that now, if he sees Russia as a great threat, why is he inviting Vladimir Putin to join his fabled Board of Peace? So there's utter hypocrisy involved. And just on the history of this. So what he said was that just because they landed in a boat there 500 years ago doesn't mean they own it. Just to get brief, the story 1721, that a Danish Norwegian missionary landed on Greenland, and of course, this is how the world worked then. You land and you take land. This is now ours. Since when there's been this sort of evolving relationship, so that Greenland now does have a lot of its own powers, but it's very reliant on Denmark for money and also for its foreign policy. That's why Denmark is so involved in this debate. But I saw one of the most moving things I saw this week was an interview on Vice News with Per Stigmuller, who was the Danish foreign minister in 2004, which was the last time they reviewed the treaty between the United States and Denmark about Greenland, in which the United States have the right to put any amount of military that they want on Greenland, provided that they consult that they say to the Danes or to the Greenlanders, we think actually there's a real threat coming, therefore we want to do this. And he made the point that at its height, there were almost 18,000American troops on Greenland and there were 18American military bases. They, the Americans have reduced it from 18 to 1 and from 18,000 to 150. And as this guy said, I never asked them to leave. So Trump is creating this whole narrative that Denmark has relinquished any sort of serious security approach. It's the Americans who've done that. And he's now using that as an excuse basically, as you say, to blow up NATO, to rip up potentially to rip up this sort of traditional alliance between the United States and the whole of Europe. And you know what I think you mentioned there about the kind of rules base, I wonder if we haven't kidded ourselves that this world order, liberal rules based world order, that we've, because we felt that it's working for us. We haven't, maybe we've underestimated the extent that actually it's worked best for the Americans. Okay? But that's not enough for Trump. That is not enough for Trump. So what he's doing now, I think this is going to backfire spectacularly because I actually think ultimately we're seeing it already. This is going to push people towards the one superpower that he identifies as America's genuine enemy. He's behaving like Europe is the enemy. Okay, Europe is struggling. We'll talk about how Macron responded, about Starman's responding. They're struggling to know how to respond to this. But meanwhile, the Chinese are just sitting there watching it. And just one final point on that, the one thing that really brought that home to me this week, watching Mark Carney in Canada. So there's Mark Carney. Mark Carney was elected. He's a very, very clever guy and he's emerging as a very effective politician. But let's be frank. He knows he was elected because of Donald Trump, because Pierre Polievre was way ahead in the polls. Trump comes along with all his MAGA, 51st state madness, and that absolutely destroyed Polyevre because he was too close to Trump. Carney becomes the Prime Minister. Really clever guy, understands the way the world economy works, unlike Trump, who thinks it's just a sort of real estate deal. And Carney, without saying Trump's lost the plot, without saying that America is becoming a kind of a hostile force, rather he just goes to China and has this amazing meeting with Xi Jinping, at the end of which they do all sorts of deals that are going to benefit the Canadian economy.

[Rory Stewart]

So he's dropped, for example, tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, which were set at 100%, because that's what Biden requested. Biden wanted to make sure that Chinese electric vehicles didn't swap the world. And he got all his allies to agree to put up tariffs, dropped it to 5%. So 44,000 Chinese electric vehicles will be arriving in Canada, well under the price of any of Tesla or any compromise.

[Alistair Campbell]

And meanwhile, the canola oil thing, that's very important to Chinese food, they're going to lift the levies on that. So that's the sort of core of the deal. Then there's been trade deals, there's been deals on.

[Rory Stewart]

So it's very, very quickly double trade between Canada and China. Okay. So I wanted to develop one thing which I think is very important, which is the issue of performance. We were saying yesterday that in a sense, Trump, sometimes his people talk the old language of national security. They pretend that what they're doing makes logical sense. So you'll get Ulbricht, Colby, for example, in the Department of Defense, trying to say all of this, and you'll hear this from American military officers is about the fact that Europe didn't spend enough on defense and the United States needs to focus on China, and we can't fight two theaters at once. And so this is a completely rational move where we're going to start refocusing on China and Europe is going to get it defence against Russia. But the gap between that story and what Trump is actually doing is so extreme and growing, we're beginning to see that his objective is not actually to strengthen European defence against Russia. His objective is not to strengthen US Security. His objective is not to control the Arctic. His objective, in some sense, is not even directly to find the easiest way of getting hold of Greenland. His objective is to make a huge performance of cruelty, humiliation and bullying. What do I mean by that? Let's just take that idea of getting hold of Greenland. If what he had actually wanted to do was get hold of Greenland as easily and smoothly as possible, and he was actually thinking tactically, you could design a strategy for it. Right. So let's say the US Wanted to do that, they would use the option that they had to put troops in there. So they would have been slowly increasing the number of US Troops in Greenland.

[Alistair Campbell]

Showing their reforms were good.

[Rory Stewart]

Yeah. Until they ended up with 25,000. They would be putting in US mining companies and then those US mining companies would be paying huge amounts of community grants to the 50,000 local Greenlanders. Tidyu ended up essentially every local Greenlander is getting $100,000 a year from a US mining company. And then the next thing you do traditionally is you start a separatist movement. You start financing separatist leaders. Maybe there's some strange Russian submarine appears as a bomb, and then the United States steps in as the peacekeeper who really needs to respect indigenous rights, protect the security. And now you've got tens of billions of investment in the ground. You've got 25,000 soldiers on the ground. De facto you've done it. Now it's not gonna be comfortable. There'll still be some protests, but my God, that's a smoother, slicker way of doing it. But he doesn't want to do that. He's not somebody who wants to go into the ring and defeat the other wrestler. He's somebody who wants to get up in a costume, stand on the edge, beat his chest and trash talk him.

[Alistair Campbell]

No, because what you've outlined there is not just a couple of episodes of the reality TV shows, like 10 series. And he doesn't have the patience for that. And he genuinely please and look, his whole life and his survival having failed as a first term president is about showing that he can do things that nobody else has done. And he thinks that this, he thinks right now he is going to get Greenland okay? He absolutely thinks that. And what's more, I don't want to sort of upset people, but I was talking to somebody last night who's okay. I know Sweden and Denmark have a bit of a kind of issue between themselves. I was talking to a Swede yesterday who said my big worry right now is Denmark will ultimately cave because the pressure will become absolutely unbearable. Now we would hope that won't happen, but he thinks right now he is applying pressure in all the right places and getting the right responses. So maybe this is the time to talk about the way that Europe and other leaders around the world are responding to this. So Macron comes straight out and says, starts talking about bringing this so called coercion act at the trade bazooka.

[Rory Stewart]

Tell us a bit about that.

[Alistair Campbell]

Well, that's basically, I think this was designed in the first instance, if there was ever a problem with China and the way that it operates.

[Rory Stewart]

And it was designed by the European.

[Alistair Campbell]

Union, by the Commission and then supported.

[Rory Stewart]

By the union and it's called anti coercion. The idea is somebody else is using economic levers to Force you against your sovereignty.

[Alistair Campbell]

Exactly, exactly. And if that was so, Macron raised that on Sunday as a possibility. If you actually look into it, and you know, I know you will come on to you, you thought Keir Starmer's response was terrible and we can, we can discuss that. But Macron, if you actually did what Macron suggested, or this economic question thing, the trade bazooka, you'd essentially be saying to massive companies who are huge in Europe. JP Morgan, Microsoft, Microsoft, Facebook, whatever, Google, bye, bye. You can't operate here. Okay. That's putting it. It's very simplest.

[Rory Stewart]

And the impact of that is you're really running the risk of cutting your nose off despite your price.

[Alistair Campbell]

Absolutely. And you're also going to hit your own consumer prices. The Germans, for example, that's one of the reasons they're so cautious about, about this. So that basically that is Macron doing what Trump wanted him to do, in a way, which is why he's come back today with these 200% tariffs. Because you don't want me on my. You don't want to be on my board of peace, the one that's even more kind of alarming, particularly from a British perspective. So Keir Starmer, he comes out with a pretty strong statement. Day one. This is completely wrong and this is not the way to resolve it. He does a press conference yesterday with a speech where he's still operating. I think through the old paradigm, I can work with Trump, I can get Trump into a better place and we'll.

[Rory Stewart]

Come on to this. It's a paradigm which I would suggest is called appeasement. That's a good word for it.

[Alistair Campbell]

Okay, that's your view. But what's happened today, he's come out and basically said that Britain is utterly stupid is the word. He used to have done this deal with Mauritius on the Chagos Islands. And that is in direct contradiction just to what he. Yeah, to what he said when the deal was done.

[Rory Stewart]

Just to explain that again for the audience, because it's one of the great, great ironies of all time. So Keir Starmer comes in and he and Jonathan Powell and many people in the Foreign Office concluded that because Britain was deeply respectful of international law and principles of the UN and self determination, it was necessary for Britain to give up the Chagos Islands, which it had acquired during its complicated colonial history, to Mauritius. Not only give it up, but actually sign up to pay every year money to keep retaining a base.

[Alistair Campbell]

Exactly. In part to keep an American airbase.

[Rory Stewart]

At the time, I remember speaking to A very, very senior figure in Whitehall who at the National Security Council had said, why don't we just sell it to the United States? If America wants this thing so much, why don't we sell it? They'll give us 100, $200 billion for the Chagos Islands, we'll get that for the NHS. They can have the check of islands. And the response from the British establishment was, no, no, no, possibly consider doing that. What we'll actually do is we'll give it away for free and we'll pay for the privilege of continuing to use it in order to be nice to the United States. And it now looks as though that guy who said, if the Americans want it so much, why are we paying for the Americans to be there? Why don't we just flog it to them? May have been onto something. Anyway, that aside, and I can see why we resisted that, because it sounds pretty brutal, we're now in the situation in which Trump needs to be responded to. And this is where I come to this word appeasement. Appeasement is not an irrational view. I was talking to the great guru of all time, my mother, yesterday on the phone and she said to me, it's all very well, this story about standing up to bullies that assumes the bully's a coward and they back down and you're going to be able to beat them. That's usually what happens in the children's story. What happens if the Bully actually provides 70% of your defense, has all the.

[Alistair Campbell]

Cloud computing of the world in the playground. There are higher forces. There is a teacher, there is a head teacher, there are parents outside, there are other kids who may or may not be stronger. With Trump, he is now creating this new world order where the bodies that you thought might have been above him domestically, the Supreme Court, Congress gone, authority shattered, spineless politicians who just caved in, spineless judges who are caving in, and then beyond that, the United nations, for which he has complete and total contempt. So your mum's got a point.

[Rory Stewart]

She's absolutely got a point. And of course, in a sense, what Trump has inherited is this wonderful long con, an 80 year con whereby the United States, posing as the champion of the rules based international order, liberal democracy, NATO and the rest, succeeded in making Western Europe entirely dependent on the United States for every aspect of their lives. So that when China 20 years ago started really focusing on how to deleverage de risk and make absolutely certain that the United States couldn't extort people, rejected the Chinese model. When de Gaulle said After Suez, we cannot become so dependent on the United States. We got closer and closer to them and now it's all coming home to roots. Now, appeasement can make sense, but only this is my international relations theory here. Only if what's being demanded is limited, bounded, reflects genuine grievance, and you can give it to them in a rules based system and they stop. So the question with Greenland is, is what is happening is that. And this is where I disagree with Starmer. Right. So I think what Starmer's tempted to think, and part of the problem is that our entire establishment in Britain cannot.

[Alistair Campbell]

Contemplate that they might be an enemy.

[Rory Stewart]

Yeah. Because it would be so expensive, so damaging, so inconceivable. And the same is actually true in the whole of NATO and Europe. I was asking NATO officials nine months ago, have you done any contingency planning for the United States seizing Greenland? They look at me like completely mad. What the hell are we supposed to do? We don't teach that in staff college. I mean, if you look at gchq, which is the British signals intelligence, it's all backhauled off the nsa. There are Americans all over it. We don't really have independent systems. All our military rely on American satellite, American intelligence, American heavy lift, et cetera. Certainly Ukraine, our Trident nuclear missile, which we're about to buy hundreds of billions. Yeah, it's an independent nuclear deterrent, but it wouldn't last very long without American support and supply. Right. Remind us what JD Vance has just been saying about nuclear deterrence and why that might be relevant to how much we can rely on this being an independent nuclear deterrent.

[Alistair Campbell]

So what JD Vance said last week, I'm amazed he didn't get huge coverage. He essentially said that one of the worries they had, and one of the reasons, one of the many reasons they've suddenly found why they need Greenland, is that both the UK and France are at risk essentially of falling into the hands of what they called Islam adjacent leadership.

[Rory Stewart]

And Islamist adjacent.

[Alistair Campbell]

Yeah.

[Rory Stewart]

A general sense of terrorist state who.

[Alistair Campbell]

Look a bit like Sadiq Khan, I think, was kind of what he had in mind. So he basically gave him the sense that it's not impossible that governments hostile to the United States take power in the UK with nuclear weapons, with nuclear weapons which could be turned against them.

[Rory Stewart]

Which has an implication then if J.D. vance and President Trump are selling us Trident and they think that we could become a hostile Islamist, what real genuine guarantees do we have that we're going to be able to easily operate an independent nuclear deterrent if the person who's selling it to us thinks that we're a threat.

[Alistair Campbell]

And as you know, because we talked about this lawyer yesterday, I can't pretend that I was 100% happy with the way that Keir Starmer presented. But what I do want to say is because in essentially this goes to the Hugh Grant Love actually moment where Hugh Grant in love actually stands, a British Prime Minister stands alongside the American President and says, basically, you know, we're fed up with you. Get stuffed. Okay?

[Dominic Sambrook]

And since bullies only respond to strength now onward, I will be prepared to be much stronger.

[Rory Stewart]

And the President should be prepared for that.

[Alistair Campbell]

And he gets a massive boost in the polls and the public loving for it, etc. Etc. Now, what you don't see because it's the movie, is what happens then. And what we've seen today, even on the basis of what you call appeasement, and I would say was maybe a bit more real politics, even that has provoked Donald Trump into doing this complete U turn for him on the chago silence. You imagine what Trump could do if he were determined to inflict the kind of damage that he might do if he felt that we weren't actually cooperating with him. Now, I'm not pretending, I'm not saying, by the way, that that means we should just do whatever he says. Au contraire. I'm saying why it's so difficult for Keir Starmer to stand there, represent the national interest and if you like get the balance between what the public want him to say, which is, you know, fuck off, you're a bully, and what he thinks we need to do to try to prevent the worst happening.

[Rory Stewart]

Maybe let's develop that a little bit after break. And I just wanted to finish though my slightly long pompous point on appeasement because I think the big question when you're appeasing somebody, when you're appeasing the US or you're appeasing Mussolini or appeasing Hitler or appeasing anyone really is, is what they're demanding limited grievance based with a technocratic solution, which is what Starmer hopes. So Starmer hopes that what Trump really is interested in is maritime security. Right? And therefore if we come up with a good deal, whether it's going to be American bases and a little bit more British French thing and maybe some mining concessions, Trump will go away. Where appeasement does not work though, is if the person making the demands actually is making demands which are open ended. It's just the beginning Precedent setting, unbounded. And it's a ridiculous adjectives, performative. Right? Because if that's the case, there's all of those. And if it's that, then making concessions to him is a disastrous thing to do because every concession you make weakens your hand for the future and encourages him to do more. In other words, if this guy is going to continue giving him Greenland, just gives him 98% of Danish territory even more control, even more resources. So that when he asks for the next thing, you're in an even weaker position than you were before. Which is why I'm afraid, there is no way that you can appease this guy. The logic of appeasement doesn't work.

[Alistair Campbell]

Right. So then you have to work out what inactive terms in action you are going to do to get him to the right place. And we can talk about that after the break. But it's bloody hard.

[Rory Stewart]

Very good.

[Alistair Campbell]

This episode is brought to you by whoop.

[Rory Stewart]

So I'm wearing a whoop. I've been wearing it through Christmas and over New Year and it's pretty amazing. So this thing connects to an app on your phone and it gives you a resilience score every morning and it sets basically a target for how much exercise you should be doing today. And it pushes you quite hard.

[Alistair Campbell]

Based on what? Based on data it already knows data.

[Rory Stewart]

It picks up from your heart. So it picks, picks up what your heart rate is. It can pick up other stuff, actually. There's other settings where you can get into blood pressure, you can get into heart rate variability. It's very good at picking up what activity you're doing. So I was doing cross country skiing. It could pick up from that, from the movement, I think, for my hands. And I think it's the beginning of this amazing revolution in wearables which would allow you, if you were interested, to know how far to push yourself. But if you really are interested in sports activity data, I've just bought one for Shoshana for Christmas, because for somebody who's obsessed with fitness, I think you'd find it pretty useful.

[Alistair Campbell]

So if you want to join Rory and Shoshana in building healthier habits that actually last over time, go to join.whoop.com trip.

[Rory Stewart]

You can sign up for a free 30 day trial, try Whoop Risk Free and start your year with a bit of momentum.

[Alistair Campbell]

This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

[Rory Stewart]

January is when we reset everything. Routines, inboxes, intentions. We're back online, doing serious things in the least secure places from trains and cafes, wherever the WI fi happens to be.

[Alistair Campbell]

NORDVPN encrypts your connection, so whether you're commuting, traveling or working in public, your data isn't just drifting through the room hoping for the best.

[Rory Stewart]

It also includes Threat Protection Pro, which helps block malicious links and scan downloads. Particularly useful in January when people are clicking through job applications, Travel plans and inboxes full of messages marked urgent prices.

[Alistair Campbell]

And content can quietly change depending on where you're browsing from. NordVPN NordVPN lets you change your virtual location so you can check what you're actually being shown.

[Rory Stewart]

One account covers up to 10 devices or install it on your router. Cover the whole house.

[Alistair Campbell]

To get the best discount on your NORDVPN plan, head to nordvpn.com restispolitics. You'll also get four extra months free on the two year plan, plus a 30 day money back guarantee. The link is in the episode Description.

[Dominic Sambrook]

Hi everybody, it is Dominic Sambrook here from the Rest Is History. Now you have probably been watching the scenes on the streets of Iran. You may be wondering where all this comes from. So on the Rest Is History. We have just recorded a four part series on recent Iranian history. So it kicks off with the Iranian revolution that brought down the Shah Muhammad reza Pahlavi in 1978 1979, and it's actually his son who is now leading opposition to the Ayatollahs from exile in the United States. So in this series we explore the history behind the Islamic revolution in Iran at the end of the 70s. Where did people like Ayatollah Khomeini come from? Where did their ideas come from? Why did they have so much support? Why was the Shah driven out of Iran in the first place? And what did it have to do with American intervention and indeed British intervention in the 1950s? And we look at the unfolding story of the revolution and then the amazing story of the SEIZURE of the US embassy in Tehran, the taking of initially 66 hostages by the Iranians. This is probably the story that I most enjoyed researching and writing. So please, if you're interested in Iranian history and what's going on, check it out. And if you want a taster, we have a clip for you at the end of this episode.

[Rory Stewart]

Welcome back to the Restless Politics with.

[Alistair Campbell]

Me, Rory Stewart and me, Alistair Campbell.

[Rory Stewart]

And I'm going to start then and you can attack me while I try to talk through what options you might have. So you were completely right to point out that America has an unbelievably strong hand. One very strong hand, of course, is, as you've pointed out, our economic dependence on the United States is actually much greater than the United States economic dependence on Europe. And it's not just trade. We saw this with the fact that the United States can basically disable our access to Google and Microsoft whenever they want. They just did it, in fact, to the head of the International Criminal Court, a judge who took a case against Israel, and Trump has instructed US Tech companies to disable his access to his Internet. All our cloud computing depends on these US Companies. And Trump has shown that he can just tell these US Companies, switch this stuff off. I've talked a lot about the fact that all our AI in the future is going to depend on the U.S. the dollar is the center of the world's financial system. 70% of the world's stock market is American. 60% of all the defense equipment we buy, we buy from the United States. But the second thing isn't just their economic dominance. It's that the person attacking us, challenging our sovereignty, is our security umbrella. Our entire Britain and Europe's entire defense strategy against Russia and ultimately China depends on the United States. NATO is completely underpinned by the United States. So our ability to turn round and have a fight with the United States risks not just our economic life, the complete operations of our technology, but also our entire security umbrella, protects us, gets frustrated.

[Alistair Campbell]

You said you were going to tell me what we could and should be doing. And what you're saying is, militarily, there's not much we can do at all. All I've explained that in relation to trade and economic retaliation, I think there is as much a risk to Europe in terms of the backlash on that. So in a totally abnormal diplomatic world, I think what you're seeing is the politicians behaving in normal, rational ways that they think can persuade Trump to get to a different position. I think they should by now be being disabused of that.

[Rory Stewart]

So I'm going to argue in a very weird way. So all that's true, but for the reasons before the break, appeasement cannot be the strategy.

[Alistair Campbell]

Okay?

[Rory Stewart]

Because appeasement, just, let's say appeasement. We hand him Greenland, which is what people will eventually be tempted to do. Oh, fuck. There's nothing we can do about it. He's got his throat in our juggler. Let's give him Greenland and he'll go away. What then happens to Iceland? What's happened? I mean, once Trump has begun to get the appetite for this Thing once he begins to feel, oh, I'd like a few hundred billion dollars of minerals, thank you very much, I'm going to put the tariffs up, I'm going to put the tariffs down.

[Alistair Campbell]

He starts to say, my mum was born in Scotland. Problem.

[Rory Stewart]

There is literally no limit. If we actually say we're not sovereign, we can't defend our sovereign territory, we are so much a vassal of the United States that America can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, and we have no options to respond.

[Alistair Campbell]

Rory, you keep giving me the problem. Let me throw in one possible. I think what this points to is that it's going to be very, very hard for Europe to do hard power things. That's essentially what you're saying. So maybe we have to start looking at soft power things. I'm going to throw this one out. I'm going to an event later on at which the ghastly Infantino is going to be present. The boss of FIFA.

[Rory Stewart]

Yeah. Who I know a little bit.

[Alistair Campbell]

Donald Trump's NBF new best friend. We can't be that far off a situation. If this does come to Europe saying, no, no, no, no. America saying, yes, yes, yes, yes. And if it means sending in the troops into there, we're going to do it, then I'm sorry, I think the European countries have got to instruct their football associations. No, sorry, you can't do the World cup in these circumstances.

[Rory Stewart]

100%. Is Keir Starmer going to go along with that, or are we going to end up with a normal sort of shabby impression that I'm getting at the moment, which is that if you look at Keir Starmer speech, this was one of the things I wanted to get to, the absolute necessary, before you get into anything else, is that the alliance of the uk, Europe, Norway, Canada needs to stick together, needs to be completely in lockstep. The only hope in the end, in the end, Europe has 450 million people. It is an enormous economy. It has huge support, actually, with many American voters, with the American Congress. The American military is very reluctant to do this. They fought alongside the Danes. They are totally horrified about the idea that they're going to launch troops to try to seize part of a NATO country. Right.

[Alistair Campbell]

Well, they're right that only America and Britain lost more troops per capita in Iraq than Denmark. That is why the Danes. I was with this event last night, the one that we did. There's a Danish guy there. I don't think you spoke to him. And he said, when Trump's here tomorrow, he says, he will not be able to go in the room because he will not be able to stop himself doing something really, really crazy.

[Rory Stewart]

Okay, so the lock set thing, right? Canada, as you said, Carney, who's again here, has just done this huge thing with China. You've got Macron starting to talk about responses. You've got actually some quite brave statements from van der Leyen, from the commission. They've actually stepped up more than other people. But in Starmer's speech, what you're not hearing is, is absolute solidarity with Europe, absolute solidarity with Denmark, absolute assertion. What you're hearing is this isn't a way to behave. These tariffs are outrageous. What you're not seeing is we are democracies. This is about staying together. This fundamental. My anxiety is that he will think, Starmer's thinking, well, maybe if I'm nice to Trump, maybe he won't put the tariffs on Britain and he'll just put the tariffs on the rest of these guys.

[Alistair Campbell]

Well, okay, I get who you say. You see, I think he, I think that message that you just said was in that speech. Okay, but it was not strong and clear enough. So that, that is the message that was heard. My worry about the Americans watching Keir Starmer yesterday, which they will have done, not necessarily Trump, but some of you will have. My worry is that the message they took out of that is Starmer's not a problem.

[Rory Stewart]

Absolutely.

[Alistair Campbell]

Yeah. And where I agree with you, I think that's not necessarily the right place.

[Rory Stewart]

To be in the mafia boss mind. You're thinking, okay, here's the problem here. Dharma's just caved. It's fine. I'd worry about the rest.

[Alistair Campbell]

Whereas Kier, who is operating in the rules based international corporation, which is the right thing to do in principle. But what I would have liked to have heard more of is a defense of those principles in absolutely clear, unequivocal.

[Rory Stewart]

Standard and of an alliance. And I'd like to much more reference to Europe, much more reference to Canada and joint statements by all these people together saying the same thing.

[Alistair Campbell]

Well, by the way, can I say where I think this may head for all that we're talking about increased defence spending. And as you said last night, a lot of that's going to go in the nukes anyway. We are going to have to revisit that again. The defence expenditure argument is going to have to be met again. And that is going to require some very, very painful political decisions to be.

[Rory Stewart]

Made on welfare, unfortunately.

[Alistair Campbell]

On lots of things. On lots of things. Because we are not remotely if you go back to when we were in poverty, Poland with Sikorsky, when we were with Moldova with Maya Sandu, the president, their mindset is already in a place that says we are entering an era in which war is more likely than not, and a war in which Europe is going to get involved in all sorts of different ways. We are not remotely ready for that psychologically or militarily. Part of what Trump is doing is actually is a form of psychological warfare. And he is basically saying that militarily now it genuinely is America first. I think the concept of consequences for America are terrible, but he doesn't think that. So we're going to have to shape up to a completely new mindset and standpoint, including the spending, including the policies that we're going to pursue. And the quicker we get there, the better.

[Rory Stewart]

Okay. I'm going to try to get to what I think the possible solutions are. And actually, I was listening to a great Australian analyst called Darren Lim, who people may want to listen to. He's got his own podcast on Australia and the world. But one strategy is what I call the wait it out strategy. And the second strategy is what I'd call the Gulf Saudi strategy. Right. The wait it out strategy essentially says, listen, Congress was horrified by the fact that he went into Venezuela without approval. Five Republican senators defected, all of whom are leaving. And then at the very last moment, J.D. vance talked a couple back, and they managed to get a Senate vote through by. Yeah, by one vote. So one possibility is. I mean, incidentally, it's horrifying that it isn't just Trump, but. But the vast majority of Republican senators seem to be okay with this green intervention.

[Alistair Campbell]

It's not that they're okay with this. They think if they don't go along with it, he's going to get them deselected before the election.

[Rory Stewart]

Right. So it's just possible that Congress might Senate on tariffs. The Supreme Court is about to have a hearing on whether Trump actually has the emergency powers to impose these tariffs. So there will be people in European capital saying, if we can play this out and buy some time, Congress could stop him going after Greenland. Supreme Court could stop him going after the tariffs against us. And then all our allies and supporters in the United States might stop saying that's the weighted out strategy. The second strategy is the Gulf strategy, and this is the planes investment. This strategy basically says what you need to understand about Trump is that he is like a mad medieval king. Actually, he's worse than medieval king.

[Alistair Campbell]

You're going to introduce the idea of economic appeasement.

[Rory Stewart]

Well, the idea here is that he basically is all about performance, status, swagger, family money. And so if you are Saudi or Qatar and you look at this man, you think, okay, my best option is I build a massive gold statue to Trump in Greenland. I rename all the bases in Greenland the Trump Arctic bases. I hand over mineral concessions and I announce to him that we're going to put some totally made up number that we're never going to deliver a trillion dollars of investment into the US Economy over the next five years and hope that you can limp through to the midterms and something will be all right in the next five years.

[Alistair Campbell]

So you're actually arguing for a combination of waited out and the gold strategy?

[Rory Stewart]

Well, no, I would actually. Those, I think are the two things that will draw Europe. I think actually we should instead take the pain and we should play chicken on this. So I would like to see us say no. We're holding together Canada, Europe, UK and hopefully Japan, South Korea. We do not accept this. This is sovereign territory. I'm so sorry, President Trump, we can say polite things, but this is not happening. And just sit there and endure the sanctions, endure the tariffs. I don't think he's going to ultimately conclude that he wants to cripple the European economies. I don't think that the United States will conclude that when push comes to shove that their decision on whether to dismantle all American security guarantees for Europe is going to depend on what we do or don't do on Greenland.

[Alistair Campbell]

So that is a strategy that says you're not doing this. And then he says, yes, I am. And then the next thing is, well, if you do do it, we are doing this. You're saying you're not doing it, but we're not going to do anything to stop you.

[Rory Stewart]

We're going to put more troops into green than now. Now, we're not going to be able to fight you on the beaches, but you are going to have all over international television the sight of American troops arresting and detaining Danish, British, Norwegian troops on Greenland territory. We are going to use the entire United nations, with the support of China and Russia and the entire Security Council to condemn.

[Alistair Campbell]

You can't let the entire Security Council because America's on it.

[Rory Stewart]

To condemn the American annexation of Greenland. We're going to have the General assembly on our side. And this will be at best an equivalent of the Turkish occupation or Cyprus or the Russian occupation of Donbass. We refuse to recognize we sit. But I don't think that by doing that, the fundamental calculations that Elbridge Colby or the Department Defence make on whether or not to continue to provide a nuclear American deterrent against Russia in the Baltic will change.

[Alistair Campbell]

At which point, the point about United nations, at which point he basically says, I've always thought the United nations was a joke. I think it's completely ridiculous that it has to be New York because we're the only country that knows this damn thing. If you want your own organization, take it somewhere else. You lot in New York, take it.

[Rory Stewart]

To Geneva, take it all to Geneva.

[Alistair Campbell]

The United States isn't part of it.

[Rory Stewart]

We step up now. We step up and we say that in the end. I mean, one of the reasons I was reluctant to say medieval king. I mean, of course, in a way what he's doing is not very different to what Edward I did when he invaded Scotland or what Henry V did when he invaded France. This is sort of medieval. Well, I have a bit that territory and. And every child maybe feels like that. Every child maybe thinks, wouldn't it be jolly to be the leader of a country and just help myself to a bit of chunk of neighboring territory? But the difference actually is so dramatic because it's this postmodern wrestling performance. Those medieval kings went to so much trouble to invent these legal arguments. Edward I sat there for 150 days with lawyers trying to concoct some reason why the English had a claim to the Scottish throne. Henry V, you remember the beginning of the Shakespeare play, it's all about these sort of Salic law. This is the first time since Genghis Khan that somebody has said, I have no legal claim to this. There are no indigenous people being persecuted.

[Alistair Campbell]

I'm making up a few reasons, but.

[Rory Stewart]

I'm just going to ask you, and I'm not even really going to bother to make up a few. I mean, I think even Hitler, when he went into Poland, staged a fake border incident to justify going. Trump doesn't even. Because he wants to humiliate so much. He likes the fact that he has no reason. He can't even be bothered to stage some indigenous uprising which he has.

[Alistair Campbell]

Can't even send him the little green men.

[Rory Stewart]

Can't he be bothered because it wouldn't make the humiliation so complete.

[Alistair Campbell]

The humiliation point is really interesting because remember when we talked to moises Naim, the 3Ps guy? Populism, polarization, post truth. They need 3C's crime to get elected. Play hard on crime, corruption, just run the whole thing like your own business. And there's Any third circumstances was cruelty. And there is a real element of cruelty to what's going on now. It's really interesting. I've met. I think I've met four Danes while I've been here, and they're in agony. They're in agony. You can see it talking to them. And you imagine being a Greenlander right now was 89% of them are indigenous, 85% have said they have no interest whatsoever in this happening. They're just going to want to be left alone and get on with their lives and embrace their culture and all the other stuff that they do. And they've suddenly become the Most talked about 55,000 people in the world and because of one man. And this goes back to the point I made at the end. I think we. You talked about Genghis Khan because of the way that the world has developed because of technology, because now the power of these American tech companies, he can spread it. Genghis Khan couldn't sort of put out a tweet and say, I'm going to do this and you lot are going to listen, and every broadcaster in the world is now going to be talking about me for the next 24 hours. And when you get bored with that, I'll give you something else to do. His genius, I'm afraid to say Trump's genius is that he has better than anybody understood the way that technological change and media change has completely changed the rules of politics and diplomacy. And too many of the others are absolutely still caught up in the old ways of doing things. They're now going to have to use the new ways of doing things to push back. Not by being a bully, not by being a liar, not by sort of saying corruption's the way to go. But they've got to understand this. And this is what pains me about watching Europe. I mean, Ursula von der Leyen is going to be speaking here today and Macron's coming a bit later and they'll make big speeches.

[Rory Stewart]

Where is Starmer?

[Alistair Campbell]

Well, he's not here. I don't know what he's doing.

[Rory Stewart]

Yeah, but why is he not coming? Macron's here, Trump's here. The guy's just fucking invading Greenland. Why is Starmanov here?

[Alistair Campbell]

Carney's here, I think. No, Macron and Carney were always going to be here. This is a big deal event where you can meet lots of people at the same time. You could make the case. It would be dancing to Trump's tune to do that. What happened if Kiya came? And actually Trump decided not to see him anyway.

[Rory Stewart]

I don't know, Trump might quite enjoy that money.

[Alistair Campbell]

He would enjoy that. Right? Because having done the Chagos, the Chagos island thing is humiliation. That's humiliation.

[Rory Stewart]

Just to reinforce your point about fighting this difficult, about performative cruelty and Trump finding new opportunities. What Trump spotted as an entrepreneur is a really radical idea. He said to himself, it's not that nobody's ever behaved like this before. Putin basically behaves like this, this. But his brilliant insight is, what if the President of the United States started behaving like President Putin? Imagine how much more latitude I would have because I underwrite the entire UN system, I control all of European security, I run all of NATO. So my capacity to do this stuff is far greater than what's available to Putin and actually at the moment, far greater than anything that's available to Xi Jinping, particularly when to it comes. It comes to stealing Greenland. Right. So I want to also say, as my kind of final point, that this should be the moment where the defenders of Trump and I don't want to raise all the people in the British right wing media that were laying into me over the last two weeks for attacking us need to accept that they've got him wrong, that all their temptations to support him and say, well, he said some of the right things about migration, or he says I'm right. Kamala Harris are no good. On the. Now is the moment to recognize that you cannot any longer believe in the US national security strategy. You can't believe the sort of stories the Department of Defense is sending us. National security strategy. I've just reread it this morning. Its whole paragraph on Europe is, the problem with Europe is that it's ceding political sovereignty.

[Alistair Campbell]

We're heading to civilizational erasure.

[Rory Stewart]

Absolutely. But the whole point is Europe needs to be sovereign. What is sovereignty? Sovereignty, in the end is control of your territory. What is he actually doing? He's not supporting European sovereignty. He is destroying European sovereignty by taking 98% of the landmass demo. Secondly, the Department of Defense story, which they've been selling very, very well. I was talking to a very senior British military officer and of course he was quite tempted by this American line, oh, Europe hasn't invested enough in defence. We need to focus on China. If that really had been that view, they wouldn't be doing this right. If what they really want to do was focus on China and make Europe able to stand on its own too feet and take on Russia, we would have seen continued American absolute assurance that they Were going to provide security guarantees for Europe, American loans, ability for the Europeans to spend their own money buying American equipment, supply Ukraine. Why wouldn't they do that? But they're not doing it. But above all, they would never, ever go into Greenland. Going into Greenland is the single most destructive thing you could possibly do to NATO, to Europe, to its ability to stand up against Russia. And what he's showing is his entrepreneurial genius is to discover that you can torment and abuse your allies far more effectively than you can your enemies.

[Alistair Campbell]

Which is a horrible thought, but I think it is what we're seeing. We've seen them right back, you said way back that maybe we have to just accept that he's on Putin's side. I've said way back. I think that the reason for this kind of obsession with Putin in is jealousy. Jealousy that you can do within your sphere of influence, whatever you want and nobody's going to take you on because basically you're going to drop them off balconies if they do. Now, Trump has not yet got to the dropping off balconies. But if you just think about another thing that's happened recently that we're no longer talking about because we're now all talking about this, the violence in Minnesota, the killing by those ICE thugs. Now, America's leadership of the rules based liberal order was essentially that they believed in the rule of law. Well, he's just pardoned somebody, by the way, for the second time. Somebody who he pardoned, then got involved in crime again, got convicted. He's pardoned them for the second time. So rule of law, less important than he was international law, he has no respect for it. Even the Maduro thing, okay, there were Republicans saying okay, might be the right thing to do, but is this legal? Not so sure. And then free trade, which he's decided because through his tariff strategy. So all the things that we gave them the leadership for, he is basically pulling the plug on.

[Rory Stewart]

And then the problem is that we are, unfortunately, Trump is playing to all the worst views of the United States that critics of the US particularly in developing world and in Eastern Europe had for 50, 60 years. Because it's a side of America which is terrifying. What you're seeing from Vance, from Stephen Miller, from Trump, is an America that seems to be saying we literally don't care about the rest of the world. We are totally exceptional. America is the only thing that matters. By the way, there is a deep element of racism. This is a white America. The problem with Europe is that it's becoming non European. And we will do whatever we want to whoever we want, and they're just going to suck it up. And one of the reasons why, in the end, Canada, Britain and Europe can't appease is we cannot allow ourselves in the end, to be in the position of America saying, europe's too weak, it's too pathetic, it's too dependent on us. We can do whatever we want to them and there's going to be no consequences whatsoever.

[Alistair Campbell]

My final point on the politics back home. So Kay Badenock, who actually has been, I think I saw in one of the polls this morning that she's overtaken Farage for the first time on some metric or other because of the way she handled the Robert Jenrick defection. And she was supportive of Keir Starmer stunts. And even Farage put out a sort of. Well, I'm not quite sure I agree with this. And then he pulled out of a BBC program, I think, claiming illness. But anyway, so he's been very, very quiet about this. But now, because of Trump and the Chagos Islands, Kemi Badenoch and Farage and Lawrence, lots of others have come out and said, this isn't just an act of stupidity, it's an act of sabotage, and Keir Starmer's got to unpick it. So Trump has already, whether deliberately or because he knew this was a sort of dividing line in our politics, he's already come out and separated. That sort of sense of the country coming together behind Greenland, behind Denmark, behind Europe's approach. So just reminds me that we are, we are much more on our own than we were. I wonder if this is also the point at which we actually say to the public, this is yet another reason why we have to revisit the whole European Union issue, because Europe has got to be strengthened, and Europe has been fundamentally weakened by our departure, and we've got to be part of its restraint.

[Rory Stewart]

And because Britain is in the worst possible situation, totally, you do not want to be in a world where you are outside Europe confronting the United States and facing China and Russia. Britain can't be in this position.

[Alistair Campbell]

Okay, well, there we are. We got question time tomorrow. We're going to talk about. Actually, we had a massive response to the poll that we put out about whether I should or shouldn't go to the World Cup. It's helped cement my decision, I would say.

[Rory Stewart]

And we're also going to talk about this seismic split in the UK Conservative Party, where Robert Jenrick, who was seen as the kind of heir apparent, the person who's going to take over the Conservative Party. Instead of waiting to take over, the Conservative Party has defected to Nigel Farage's Further Right Party Reform. And we're also going to talk about Syria. I've just returned from Aleppo and Damascus and there's been some extraordinary things happening in Syria.

[Alistair Campbell]

Excellent. See you then.

[Rory Stewart]

See you then. Bye.

[Alistair Campbell]

Bye.

[Dominic Sambrook]

Hi there, it's Dominic Sambrook again from the Rest Is History. Now, I mentioned during the break that we have a new series on recent Iranian history. So here is a short extract for you. If you want to hear the whole series, then search for revolution in Iran on the Rest Is History. Wherever you get your podcasts or search for us on YouTube, There are crowds in the streets every day. There are attacks on banks and restaurants every day. And already in some towns in Iran, power has been taken from the legitimate authorities and it's been taken over by Revolutionary Strike Committees. Now, if you're with the revolution, this is very exciting. If you're not with the revolution, it is terrifying. And in his memoirs, Ambassador William Sullivan describes standing at the US Embassy and looking out through an upstairs window. And he sees in the distance troops holding back demonstrators. He sees cars burning in the middle of the road. He sees smoke rising from burning buildings. And he thinks something has to change. You know, we have to do something. So on the 9th of November, he sends a secret cable to Washington with the title Thinking the Unthinkable. And he says the Shah is finished, it's over, and if we don't act now, Iran, which is so vital to us, will slip out of our hands forever. He says we should ditch the Shah right now and it may well be time to do a deal with the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. If you enjoyed that clip, then please search for the Rest Is History wherever you get your podcasts.

[Rory Stewart]

One of the darkest scandals of the modern era.

[Dominic Sambrook]

A billionaire financier, powerful friends, hidden networks.

[Alistair Campbell]

And questions that refuse to go away.

[Dominic Sambrook]

Was Jeffrey Epstein a spy? I'm Gordon Carrera.

[Rory Stewart]

And I'm David McCloskey, and we're the.

[Dominic Sambrook]

Hosts of the Rest Is Classified, the intelligence and national security podcast from Goal Hanger.

[Alistair Campbell]

And we've just released a gripping new series investigating whether Epstein was linked to.

[Dominic Sambrook]

Any spy agencies and asking what those agencies might have known about him.

[Rory Stewart]

Listen or watch now on Spotify, YouTube.

[Alistair Campbell]

Or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Rory Stewart]

Hello, it's Steph McGovern here from the Rest Is Money. If you want to know why, despite announcing major plans for the rail network.

[Dominic Sambrook]

The government keep derailing themselves.

[Rory Stewart]

Give our latest episode a listen. There's also been another scene screeching u turn from the government on digital IDs.

[Dominic Sambrook]

And we're talking about Trump, whose fight.

[Rory Stewart]

With Fed Chair Jerome Powell has gone up a level. Has he met his match?