B (1:56)

R. Decker Series premiere Tuesdays on ABC and stream on Hulu.

A (2:10)

Welcome to a Restless Politics special episode live on Iran with me, Alistair Campbell

B (2:17)

and with me, Rory Stewart.

A (2:19)

And Rory, It's a few days now since we did an episode together, and since then a huge amount has happened. I don' think even Donald Trump can really pretend that this war is where he expected it to be right now. There have been all sorts of unintended consequences, some of which we'll talk about. To my absolute gobsmacked shock, he said that he was. The big surprise was that the Iranians launched Attacks upon Gulf. Some of the countries in the Gulf, you and I think said from the first minute that is one of the things they were likely to do to try and drive the oil price up. Oil price now over a hundred doll a barrel predicted to go higher. And I guess the most, perhaps the most newsworthy thing that has happened in the last 24 hours is the appointment of the new Ayatollah Montjtaba. 56 apparently has a very large London property portfolio. I hope Oliver Bullough will dig into that at some point. But if anything says continuity, this certainly does. So I guess now remains to be seen whether Israel will carry out their threat to take him out, which they said they would if he was appointed.

B (3:32)

Just to underscore the continuity point, you didn't mention his surname. So he the son of the previous Supreme Leader. So this is Khamenei. And he is, you know, he's the son of a murdered father, he's the husband of a wife who's been killed, the father of a child who's been killed. So he's 56 years old. But in the last week he's lost his father, his wife and his child. So his willingness to engaged may be a little bit reduced by his personal circumstances.

A (4:04)

I suspect also that is, I mean, this is a process of 88 clerics who come together. And I suspect that the fact that Netanyahu had been saying we will take out the successor if it doesn't meet with our approval, the fact that Donald Trump has been saying we have to have approval of whoever they appoint, this is a very deliberate way of saying, no, you have absolutely nothing to do with this. And this is continuity, as you were saying.

B (4:30)

I mean, it would be almost anyone else they appointed. They would have to explain to the world why they're not giving in to us and Israeli demands. But to appoint the son of the previous Supreme Leader, I think communicates pretty clearly. And this is a man who's right at the heart. He's been, you know, he's not been right out in the open. He's been working very much, I think, partly sometimes as his sort of head of his father's private office, but very much as the link between his father, the kind of intelligence, security setup, the Revolutionary Guard, the Basich Militia and the clerical establishment on the other. So he's right in the very, very heart of the system. And as you say, symbolically, it couldn't be a clearer continuity candidate.

A (5:13)

Although interestingly, he's not the oldest son. So I don't know whether There's a sort of Shakespearean angle going on somewhere in the background. And I was talking to an Iranian this morning who said, I literally don't know what he sounds like. I've never heard his voice. So this is somebody who is kind of known because he is the second son of the former ayatollah, but he is not well known other than in the kind of the real power structures. And also it seems that he was a very big player in the recent crackdown, which is another sign that this is the Iranian regime saying this is not regime change.

B (5:51)

Yeah. Well, let's respond for a second to how the Iran war is turning into a global crisis. So I think when I was thinking about it just before I came on, it seems to me as though you could look at this Iranian crisis in terms of the fragile world order and assumptions that preceded it, the way in which, of course, this has been triggered by Trump and Israel, but they're triggering it in a context of a world which was very, very vulnerable. Very vulnerable in terms of a couple of things, particularly firstly, this choke point on the Straits of Hormuz. So that's the body of water we' talked about going past Iran, which is absolutely vital for about a fifth of the world's oil and a very substantial quantity of Qatars, almost all Qatars, liquefied natural gas and fertilizers and critical minerals required for a lot of different things, including semiconductor chips. So very dependent on that. And there's a bigger story about how we built a world that was very dependent on the idea of open sea lanes. And the second thing is what it's revealed about scarcity, the way in which we've discovered that we simply don't have the number of Patriot missiles to defend ourselves against these attacks. And we're in a slightly absurd world, which has been quite well documented by Foreign Policy magazine, of firing Patriot missiles worth millions of dollars at shahed drones which are worth a few tens of thousands of dollars, and Zelenskyy saying that they've now used more Patriot missiles in a couple of weeks than he's been provided for entire war with Ukraine. And the way in which that sort of forces us to confront the fact that essentially America, which had said we're not supporting Ukraine against Russia because we have to conserve our missiles for China, I mean, this was the Elbridge Colby line. Our real priority is dealing with China, not Russia, so we're going to keep all our missiles back for that. Turned out their priority was neither Russia nor China, but for some reason pursuing this particular policy in the Middle east now, but that's just the surface level. And I guess what we're going to get into, and I'm going to hand back to you here, is to be pretentious, the kind of second and third order results of this. So not just what's happening now on the ground in Iran today, but the way in which this is going to reshape very distant regions of the world, very different types of politics, economics and technology.

A (8:22)

Well, there's, there's a wonderful word I learned this morning, Rory, in a German headline, Der Spiegel. The word was Plan Lozigkeit. The headline was Trump's Plan Lozigeit ist eine Geffar, which means Trump's planlessness is a danger. So the Germans have this wonderful word, planlessness gives against.

B (8:45)

What's the whole sentence again?

A (8:47)

Trump's Plan Lozigkeit ist eine Gefar. Trump's planlessness is a danger. And if you think about it, the fact that he said, I mean, I mentioned at the top, I was honestly really stunned when he said the biggest surprise was that they went for the Gulf. Why was that a surprise to him? Answer. Probably because just as Putin's people told him, we'll take Ukraine in four days, Trump's people told him, we've got such superior air power, the Israelis are all over this. The place is going to collapse like a pack of cars. It now turns out, according to the New York Times this morning, that the last intelligence report submitted on Iran to the administration said that the regime would not fall no matter how many bombs they dropped upon it, that it was just too cemented and too strong. But if we just go through some of the, what you call the kind of unintended consequences. So now over $100 a barrel for oil. Okay, and this is you now. So you've got Saudi, Kuwait, Bahrain Emirates, Iraq, Qatar, Oman and Iran. Between them, about 30% of the world's oil oil prices. And bear in mind, this is Trump who said he would not send, he would not start any new wars and he would get prices down. Okay, he started a new war. And oil prices are now averaging $3.45 a gallon, up almost 15% on a week ago and still rising. The poly market reckons has it at 41% that the price of a gallon states will be over $5 by the end of the month. And the record high is $5.01. You've got a Japanese bank, one of the big Japanese banks has done a report today saying this is the biggest energy supply and logistics crisis that we have seen in modern history.

B (10:41)

Follow that through for a second. Let's just talk this through. Because of course it means that economies like China, which import 90% of their oil, face a short term issue which is in manufacturing. But of course, China's been expecting this. So it has impacts on different countries. China's been expecting it. China has about 150 days worth of storage. It's done a lot of electrification and in fact, as Trump failed to understand in Davos, it's invested a lot in wind energy, hydro and different renewables. But it will have a big impact, yes, on the U.S. yes, it will have an impact, a huge impact, unfortunately on Europe and the UK and economies like Germany. And the reason why it has a huge impact is that we went through a journey of saying we were too dependent on Russian gas. So we began to diversify into what seemed like the more reliable suppliers in the Gulf. And to put it in context, Qatar, I think has never stopped supplying, ever until last week. Qatar has now cut off all LNG supply. And I've just got a few quick, quick figures for people who are interested. UAE oil exports down from 5 to 1 million barrels. Qatar out entirely. Saudi down from 7 to about 3.5 because they're reliant on a pipeline. And this we talk about second and third order. This is not just prices, this is also fertilizer production, sulfuric acid. And this is where things get very interesting and where you really think the problem with going to war is that you don't think about what's that going to mean for people trying to grow soybeans in Brazil? What's that going to mean for Bangladesh? What's that going to mean for sub Saharan Africa? Because in three months time fertilizer prices will spike and some of the poorest countries will be affected. Back over to you.

A (12:39)

Well, just on that. So a third of the most common nitrogen fertilizer, a third of all supplies go through the strait rates of Hormuz. So if you suddenly cut out a third from that, you are putting up, you're going to see a rise in prices, you're going to see a huge demand spiking and that's then going to translate into poorer food production and higher prices. So that's just another sort of unintended consequence. I'll tell you one thing, Roy, I would really like to see and we're obviously going to focus mainly on the kind of the big geopolitical stuff. I would like to see Ed Miliband The Secretary of State for Energy in the government. I would like him to make a speech right now explaining how this would be different if actually our world was powered by renewables. We have allowed ourselves, even though we've seen this coming war after war after war, including the Ukraine war, where there was a sudden sort of spike in prices. So just imagine if we didn't have 20% of the world's oil going through the Strait of Hormuz. Just imagine if the mere threat of military action in this region can lead to a SP spike in prices if that was not the case, because actually we were properly bound into renewables of wind and solar. And so I think there's a kind of geostrategic environmental opportunity here, and I'd really like people to start to make that case, because this is an argument against drill, baby, drill.

B (14:06)

Absolutely. And I think it's probably one of the most powerful, because given cost of living, given climate skepticism, given what the far right's up to, the strongest argument probably that you can land at the moment is resilience. That the reason why we need more renewables is that we have more control over our wind and our solar and our sun and our water than we do overall. Let's. Just before we move on from the Straits, there was an extraordinary article in the Telegraph today, written by a British naval officer, trying to explain what they could do to escort ships through the Straits of Hormuz. And he was trying to be reassuring. I found it, frankly, terrifying because, well, because it was just so complicated. There were going to have to be ships in front which were going to be taking out the ballistic missiles. There were going to be ships alongside which were going to be dealing with the drone swarms. There were going to be minesweepers, if, unfortunately, as he pointed out, we hadn't retired all our minesweepers that were going to be trying to deal with the mines underneath. A friend of mine called Ian Conn just got in touch and pointed out that if you look at the depths of the Straits of Hormuz, it's very shallow in many places. You don't actually need mines, you just sink a couple of boats. You can block the whole channel. But even weirder, what we don't take on board is they haven't actually started targeting vessels and Straits Hormuz yet. This is all happening just with threats.

A (15:26)

Yeah, exactly.

B (15:27)

So the insurance price has gone through the roof. And we saw this play out with the Red Sea. And the Red Sea probably four times simpler than the Straits for moves. That was the Houthis from Yemen chucking stuff into the Red Sea. The mere threat of that drove insurance prices up and they haven't come down. And a lot of shipping is now going all the way, the long way around. The same thing is going to begin happening in the straits almost regardless. Because one of the things, again, that we don't understand, I think, is that even if the war stopped tomorrow, which isn't going to, insurance companies are still going to be wondering in three months time, six months time, nine months time, is Israel going to do it again? Are they going to wake up in the morning and say, well, these guys have still got this, and suddenly everybody now realizes what the consequences are. And it's on that. I wanted to come back to you because the other thing you said, that Trump clearly somehow thought this would be easy, like Venezuela and he'd get away with it. If you're in the Iranian regime, you will say one of the reasons he thought it would be easy is that they were too restrained previously. They were too restrained when Israel attacked Hezbollah. They were too restrained when Israel did the first two strikes. And this time Iran is going to inflict a lot of damage across the whole region. And they will be doing it partly in order to say there is a real price to attacking us and that we should have signalled that much earlier. We made it too easy for you to attack us.

A (16:54)

That's really interesting because if you remember, at the time of the last attack, we said that their general posture was to take the hit and then signal what the response would be and make the response, but not make that big a deal of it. So maybe that is why Trump did think they won't go for the Gulf. I think that the nature and the scale of the attack that Israel and the United States launched last week is such that it was utterly impossible for them to react other than how they have. And I honestly wonder, Ori, whether the Iranian regime has done more scenario planning as a result, prior to this attack than the Americans. Did you get the feeling from the Americans and the way, and we can talk a little bit about the way that Trump communicates, the way that Hex communicates, the way that the White House press secretary communicates. It's very, very what we say is the truth. If we say something is happening, it's true. If we say something is going to happen, that's what's going to happen. And I just think I get the sense that the Iranians have had a plan. I think the plan is included, probably. I mean, who knows whether they took out the natural successor when they were bomb the former Ayatollah Khamenei and whether the sun has emerged. But I suspect they definitely had planned to have a continuity candidate. They definitely had planned to hit the Gulf as a way of driving up the oil price and trying to put pressure on the Gulf states to put pressure on Trump. And likewise, I think they've been planning up to and including, by the way, I mean, you did your terrific series on AI. One of the things I've been following is their use of AI in their propaganda. They're pumping out all sorts of stuff to, to their own people suggesting this is a huge success. Now, the Americans do that in a different sort of way. But my point is that you get the feeling that they are operating according to some kind of plan. But we shouldn't overstate it because we don't know. We can't tell what's going on inside Iran.

B (19:01)

One bit of it we haven't covered much is that there are signs. I don't want to overdo this because I think what's happening for people in the Gulf and for people in Iran and for people in Israel and for people in Turkey and for people in the region is terrifying, completely terrifying. If you're an ordinary civilian who is not one of the kind of people invasion, she's terrifying. But there's a part of the story that I don't think is being told very clearly and that for some reason the media, maybe, I don't know, doesn't feel comfortable communicating and probably are getting trouble communicating it. But some of these Iranian strikes in some of the Gulf states have been more calibrated and limited than people are acknowledging. In other words, they've done a lot of damage, but they could have done much more. They could have announced, for example, with relation to uae, that we're going to strike the Burj Khalifa, the biggest hotel in the central city. They wouldn't even need to strike it. The mere statement would have a catastrophic impact on Dubai. I mean, already Dubai, which has a lot of tourism income, is going to really struggle to get tourists in this year. And if Israel and the US Continue doing this, is going to struggle getting tourists in for a long time to come. But at the moment, most of the Iranian strikes are Iran trying to do this very difficult balance, which is they're trying to say privately to the Gulf states, this isn't anything personal. We're doing this because you're hosting US Military bases. We're doing this so long as the US And Israel Continue to use you to strike. Strike us. A lot of the strikes have been against American embassies, Israeli representation, CIA bases, hotels with American citizens in them. And they're trying to say to the Gulf, don't get dragged into this. And the Gulf then is in an equally difficult situation, which is they're trying to say, look, our sovereignty is being attacked. This is terrifying. We're going to have to stand up and say something. But at the same time, we don't want to become dragged into this war and become an unwitting ally of Israel and the US and of fight with Iran. So this calibration point, how do you stay below the threshold?

A (21:14)

Yeah, but also, if you think about it, the Gulf states, in a way, have welcomed in Americans and American bases as a way of protecting them from attack. They have now been attacked. That changes their own assessment of that relationship, too, once they've decided. And I think you're right, by the way, I think the Iranians could have done a lot more and could have gone in a lot harder. I also think it was interesting that the national security guy came out yesterday and said, you know, it was basically Trump was taking it as a kind of, you know, they're almost apologizing for what they did. I don't think he was. I think he was making the point that you're making. We can keep going. We have actually got a hell of a lot more of these drones than you realize. We've actually been stockpiling for an awful long time. We know that we can take out their air defenses far quicker than we could have done before we had this mass drone production. So I think there's something going on there that the. They are. I suspect they're feeling a lot stronger, a lot more resilient than the propaganda that is put out against them suggests. Now, it's very hard for us to know that because they are masters of their own propaganda. You can't get media inside there. It's very, very hard to know what's going on. But I would not, if I was the Americans, I would not be happy with the way this thing is going right now.

B (22:30)

And just on your US Point, you're completely right. One way of putting it is that those US Bases were welcomed in. So Qatar has the largest US Air Force base in the world, and there are bases in all these countries were welcomed in because the Gulf states thought that provided a US Security umbrella to protect them. But what they discovered in 2019 when their oil fields were hit is that the US didn't protect them. When Qatar was struck by Israel, the US Again, didn't really protect them. Now the US Is now trying to provide some protection. But you've got to be asking yourself, I'm afraid, if you sit in the Gul, are these bases now making you safer or are they putting you at more risk? Are they putting you at more danger? Are you being targeted because of these bases? And you're going to begin to think, wait a sec. We gave an enormous amount of money to Trump. We promised all these investments. We thought he was getting us on side, and he has now dragged us into chaos. I mean, there's rumors about whether particular Gulf states were secretly supporting this. If they were, they must be regretting it now because this is an unmitigated catastrophe for those economies.

A (23:38)

I also wonder, when you say, whether they would admit it, their stated position. I mentioned how, in relation to Ukraine, Putin was being told what he wanted to hear, and that's what he then believed. And we see the same with Trump. So those world leaders. So, for example, when Chancellor Merz was alongside Trump in the White House, you could see on Merz's face that he was not agreeing with an awful lot that Trump was saying, but he wasn't saying. I suspect that these Gulf leaders, when they're phoning up Trump at the moment, they may be pointing out that the oil price going through the roof is not a great thing, that they're having to cut back on oil production, that that's going to have the potential for a global recession, all the other sort of consequences there might be. But has anybody actually said to him, Mr. President, you are making a catastrophic error here? Because I think it's hard to escape that view that he is making a catastrophic error. And of course, because if you just look at what he is trying to achieve from. And they weren't clear about the objectives, but so far as we could work out from him, one of them was regime change. Now, they've topped the head of the regime, but they've now got the same. They've got the same regime. Another one, Rubio had one different set of arguments, Vance had a different set of arguments. But what we haven't seen is a clear set of objectives. That is, we are able to say, well, that's what he's doing and that's what's being met. And I'll tell you the other thing that I find incredible about this. I mean, really, just gobsmacking. Until recently, Russia was selling its oil at a loss, okay, because of what's gone on now, we've seen the Americans lift sanctions on Russian oil. They're now able to sell more of their oil. And what's more, they are feeding the Iranians intelligence about where American troop movements are. And both Hexus and Leavitt and others in the administration have said they don't care. I cannot for the life of me get my head around.

B (25:38)

Well, this partly goes to the weird sense that by going into this war, the Trump administration shows what a nonsense their national security strategy was and what a complete nonsense it was. The whole thing was meant to be about rethinking America first. The Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which basically said, we're going to stay in the Americas. There's another story which has been coming out of the Department of Defense, which they've been selling us for years, which is we can't afford to fight on two fronts. We need to concentrate on China. So, of course we agree Russia is an enemy. Of course we do. But you and Europe are going to have to cover more of the cost of that. Then there were all the people I had friends last week saying to me, well, well, gotta say this for Trump. His great thing is that he put sanctions on Russia and the oil price has come down, so the Russian economy is hurting and that's done more to help Ukraine than anything you can imagine. And now he shows where his priorities are by doing this. Oil price going up through the roof. Russia's going to get richer. Sanctions have been dropped. All the Patriot missiles which might potentially have been put into supporting Ukraine are now being blown up the wall, fighting Shahid missiles out of the way. Ukraine is. I mean, you're very worried. If Sjodson's and fundamentally. Just step back for a moment. What is Trump doing again? Weakening his allies, strengthening his adversaries. He's going to make Ukraine weaker, he's going to make the European economies weaker, and he's going to strengthen China, Russia and everybody who is going to benefit from a world in which America is now seen as an unpredictable, savage, unreliable ally. And that's before we get onto what I'd love to get onto at some point, which is the new alliances that will emerge and the fact that people are going to start investing in nuclear weapons to protect themselves against the increasingly erratic Israel and United States.

A (27:38)

Well, before we do that, as you know, I was in Dublin and Belfast Thursday, Friday with Anthony Scaramucci. And that question that you and I have done with audiences before, which is the greater threat to global stability, USA or China? In both Belfast and Dublin, it was 92% to 8. America, 80% thought that the war was a deliberate distraction from Epstein. And I remember how very well you got on with Gerry Adams when we interviewed him in Belfast. Rory, you'll be pleased to hear that the question who deserves a Nobel Peace Prize more, Trump or Jerry Adams? Gerry Adams won by 83% to 17. So the general view of America was unbelievably negative. And even when I put, as I did, all the reasons why, actually you might argue China, there were people saying, no, no, no, no, America is the real problem. And I'll tell you something else which I found fascinating. There's a piece in the New York Times this morning analyzing the language that Trump and Hexoth have been using and comparing it with the language that Putin used four years ago in relation to Ukraine. Hexoth, we didn't start this war, but under President Trump, we're finishing it. Putin, we didn't start this so called war. We're trying to finish the leadership. Speaker Johnson, I think you'd call this an operation. The Russian speaker. This is a special military operation. Putin, July 2022. We haven't started anything in earnest yet. Trump, last Monday, we haven't even started hitting them hard. Both said we have no choice but to attack. Both said to the Ukrainians in Putin's case and to the Iranians in Trump's case, lay down your arms. Arms and go home or face certain death. So you even get the feeling that they're sort of, you know, that he's kind of cribbing from Putin's playbook in how he communicates this. And as for Hexith, I saw some of your tweets about Hexith. It strikes me that you were a little bit shocked by his conduct.

B (29:39)

Well, I don't know whether, I mean, I know how many people enough on social media to follow this, but Hegseth speeches and the White House channel has been putting out these horrendous videos which are cutting scenes from Hollywood action movies. So weirdly, one of them turns out to be Braveheart. So Scott's fighting against English, but also

A (30:03)

with Saltar on his face.

B (30:04)

Tropic Thunder, which is a comedy about Vienna. Yeah, yeah. And all of it. And then cut with video games and Iron man and, you know, Marvel book comic superheroes and all of them essentially turning the whole thing into a game. Yeah, yeah. A sort of sadistic game.

A (30:21)

Yeah, no, that's exactly how he's projecting it. But no, because I get the feeling with Hegseth that Trump is deliberately putting him out there. I mean, Trump can decide. The White House can decide who's out there. We've barely seen J.D. vance. We've barely seen Rubio. Hegseth has been the main guy and that guy Kane, the head of the defense staff. I mean, he looks kind of suitably embarrassed, but he just has to stand there and listen to this kind of macho, macho bullshit.

B (30:48)

Okay, well, next things just to maybe we'll take take, as it were, a virtual break. Quick break. Back for more. Now just a quick pause in the podcast to mention our sponsor NordVPN.

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B (33:49)

So as we come back, I think the one question I really wanted to look at was that we are assuming that the only real actors here are the US And Israel and everybody else is passive. But actually Iran, of course, is a huge actor here and a lot depends on whether the Iranian regime holds together or fragments into civil war, whether they decide to mount cyberattacks, terrorist attacks or not. The Gulf countries they're all to play for at the moment. They're trying to stay out of this war. What happens if they're dragged further into the war? What happens if ultimately the Iranian attacks cross the threshold and they feel that they need to respond and then Iran feels they need to respond to them? China runs Russia, so you've talked about Russia. Russia is clearly providing COVID support to Iran. China has now parked a massive electronic warfare vessel providing information on targeting so the Iranians are able to target precise bases. They just blown up a $1.2 billion US radar station which will take five to seven years to replace, almost certainly with Chinese intel. Over to you.

A (35:01)

I think the other country that is worth keeping an eye on is Turkey. I think they're going to play, I think they do play and will continue to play quite a significant role. I think they're always the slightly understated power in some of this. But look, I think that when you're looking at the I know you've got this thing that the sort of middle powers, when Mark Carney made his Davos speech about the middle powers coming together and projecting something very, very different. The that maybe because of the missteps in the very, very first hours of this, that didn't happen. I think it's beginning to happen. I sent you yesterday, I don't know if you had time to look at it, an absolutely extraordinary communique co authored by Carney and Modi about the visit that Mark Carney made to India. It read to me like the shaping of a new trade partnership, economic order without even mentioning the United States of America. It was really, really, really interesting. And I thought that was a fascinating. I've just read this extraordinary German book called Das er wachtener Land, the Grown up country. And it's a guy from Die Zeit who was basically speculating that Germany decoupling from the United States is now a huge opportunity on a par with the second, like another Berlin Wall falling. And he gives a very, very, very compelling argument. I'm not sure many German politicians are in that place, but. So I think we are going to be seeing that kind of thing. Thing. I think these are because, let's be honest, Trump will say he has won whatever happens and however it transpires. Okay. But I think most people are looking at this and thinking Trump is not handling this well. This is not going according to whatever plan he had in his mind. And therefore these other countries will, I think, start to get together. I think you're right that Iran will be closer to some of these Gulf allies than anybody likes to think in that they know they're going to have to have some kind of relationship going forward. I think. I think Israel is going to be even more unpopular in many, many parts of the world than it already started out. And meanwhile, America is not projecting itself as a reliable ally. Therefore, other allies of America will start to kind of, you know, play around with each other.

B (37:18)

Well, Germany's really interesting. Is it because Germany traditionally has been a very, very strong ally of the US and because of the Holocaust, a very strong ally of Israel and has tended to support them pretty uncritically and therefore the instinct, I guess, for Germany and a lot of European countries would have been strongly to come in on the US Side on this. And it's quite an achievement for Trump to have done this with so little consultation, so little preparation, that he's actually managed to alienate these people who might have been potential allies for him.

A (37:52)

Yeah, yeah. And I think the other thing I mentioned, the speech that I'd like Ed Miliband to make. I don't know who the. I guess Nick Thomas Simmons is the closest that the labor government has to a historian. I'd like to see a speech about Churchill and Trump based on Trump had this insult of Keir Starmer. Well, we're not dealing with Winston Churchill. I went back and read Churchill's Fulton, Missouri speech, the famous speech, the Iron Curtain Special Relationship. So it's become known in a way as the Iron Curtain speech. And the special Relationship special Relationship speech. The actual title that Churchill gave that speech was the Sinews of Peace. And it was a lot more subtle than Trump or the headline writers of the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph might think. For one, he was calling for more power, not less, for the United Nations. Well, Trump's not saying that. He had a very interesting passage on the importance of always trying to understand your enemies. Again, not something that Trump specializes. And his strongest message of all was that the best way for the world to stay peaceful was the Western allies to stay, stay strong together. And you even had on the radio this morning a friend and ally of Trump's on the Today program saying that, you know, that the Americans didn't take Britain into consideration before they sort of went down this route. So I think there's something in the idea that Churchill actually would not have been as gung ho as Trump might think in terms of supporting this particular adventure.

B (39:24)

Well, there's a sense, isn't it, that Israel sees this as their last opportunity, paradoxically, because American political opinion is turning against Israel in quite a significant way. And they probably think that after a Trump administration, they wouldn't be supported in doing this. So I think what they probably want to do is do the maximum damage they can. And that will probably mean not just hitting Iran once. They will try to make Iran, Netanyahu, I think, will try to approach Iran in the way that he approaches Lebanon or Syria or the West Bank. In other words, he will set up a new normal where Iran becomes the target almost whenever Israel decides it's a threat. And they will just go in and they will bomb it again and again and again. And they will try to get it into a situation where Israel will no longer have to depend on the US because they'll think they can't. And what are the signs that Israel may not be able to depend on the US in the future? Future? Well, one of them is that actually in the Democratic Party, it's now becoming very difficult for some of them to even take AIPAC funding. So the pro Israeli group, which provide a lot of supporting for U.S. senators, congresspeople, cross party, is now becoming something that's becoming more toxic in Democratic Party. You can see Tucker Carlson and bits of the Republican movement beginning to say, wait a second, second. This is not anything to do with the US national interests. This may or may not be in the Israeli national interest. But the Israeli national interest is not identical with the US or the Western national interest. And the assumption that Israel somehow knows what it's doing. Well, what Is it that Israel's trying to do here? I don't think they're probably trying to do regime change. In fact, one question is, do all the planners in the IDF really even want regime change? I mean, let's imagine you had a more, more American friendly nationalist regime in Iran that began to rebuild its military arsenal, but with more American support and more American backing for rebuilding its arsenal. Would that be in Israel's interest? Or would Israel actually in some ways rather continue to have a very weak, marginalized regime which is perceived by the US and others as an evil terrorist threat so that Israel can continue to weaken it in, in support of its own national security?

A (41:46)

Yeah, because I mean, the sense you get at the moment is that Israel is seeing itself as having the right and the impunity, if you like, to kind of go into the whole region wherever it wants. I mean, what's happening in Lebanon right now on a normal kind of week would be like massive news around the world. It's a kind of fifth order situation. The continuing sort of moves into the west bank that are going, going on. When was the last time that we actually heard anybody across the sort of, you know, the main media in the world talking about what's going on inside Gaza. It's almost like, well, they've done that and now they're onto the next thing. And I do think that that creates a problem for the United States because I think opinion, I think opinion there is shifting. But I'll tell you the other thing that I think maybe just if you've could move on to something else, I'm really interested in this whole, you mentioned it briefly earlier, but, but the nature of warfare and how it's changing and how this is going to impact upon Ukraine and the importance of drones and the work that drones are doing. What's happened here, it seems to me is that the Iranians. There was a very interesting tweet put out by centcom, the Central Command of the United States. And they're basically saying centcom's task force Scorpion Strike for the first time in history is using one way attack drones, including combat during Operation Epic Fury. These low cost drones, modeled after Iran's shahed drones, are now delivering American made retribution. So the Iranians develop these drones, they start to use these drones, the Americans get hold of them, they work out how to develop them, and now they're using them against them. Meanwhile, Ukraine has become, become expert at defending against drones. And despite all the abuse that's been poured upon his head by Vance and by Trump, and by the American administration. Zelensky is now helping the Gulf states in. You have the Ukrainian expertise in how to, to deal with this stuff. But I just wondered this, this relates to your series on, on AI. If you've now got these drones that are costing roughly 30, 30, $35,000, the cost of taking them down is way above that. And they can. Now, I was reading that the ones that they're using, they can fly more than a thousand miles at 150 miles an hour. They can circle for up to six hours. They've got a 50 horsepower little engine that just sounds like a little kind of moped going on. And they can be phenomenally accurate. I read to the end of this piece and it said this, as yet, the US lacks the technology, public appetite and legal framework to introduce this on an AI powered basis. But it may be here before long. I mean, how quickly is the nature of warfare changing and how worried should we be that that's the next step?

B (44:47)

Well, very worried. I mean, one way of putting it is that the frozen front lines in Russia, Ukraine, this famous story that Russia's only been advancing by a few hundred meters a day is effectively because for the last couple of years, if you've popped out of your bunker for a moment, you get hit by a drone. And most of the innovation, most of what defines that landscape is all about these unmanned vehicles. So instead of a plane that could cost tens of millions of dollars or $100 million and which has a human in it, and where American pilots can be killed and bled up, this is the thing which, as you say, costs a few tens of thousands of dollars, about the size of a car. And it doesn't involve any human getting killed if it gets struck. Now, the problem that they faced in Ukraine is that electronic warfare means that the signal station that connects your drone operator to the drone, these things are like you may have played with radio controlled drones, They're a fancy version of radio controlled drone, began to get knocked out by jamming the signal. So they then started flying them with fiber optic cables trailing behind them. Which is why if you go to Ukraine at the front line anyway, there are all these pictures of glass cables all over trees. The next stage, obviously is to release these things and have them controlled autonomously by the machine itself. So it's no longer relying on a base station. This is where artificial intelligence comes in. And this is what Anthropic is refusing to do. Anthropic is saying, an extension, I suppose, of saying, listen, if I can't even trust ChatGPT to get the sugar quantity right in my brownie baking. The idea that I'm going to release these things to fly around making their own decision on what target to engage with and who to kill is for the birds. But the pressure will be moving this direction, and this is a war, and this is what I suppose we're waking up to, which isn't actually. And it's terrifying for conventional militaries. It's not really, really a war about soldiers on the ground. It's not really, increasingly, a war about pilots, because you don't want to risk American pilots and planes in the air. It's not a war about navies. They've sunk the whole Iranian navy. And if you look at Britain, it's extraordinary. We have these incredibly expensive vessels, and the reason they're so expensive is they're all about electronic warfare equipment and shooting missiles out of the sky. And almost none of them are operating. I mean, it is like five out of six of them are currently in one type of repair, are aircraft carriers sustaining another repair. And nobody can contemplate sending our aircraft carrier off because they're worried that someone's just going to fly a $50,000 drone off until this $2 billion aircraft carrier because we don't have enough destroyers and frigates trying to protect it. So we've entered a universe now, thanks to Ukraine and now thanks to Iran, where that everything that we assumed about the military is essentially being replaced by swarms of cheap drones and more and more pressure on those things becoming autonomous, independent, making their own decisions. And now you've entered science fiction. Now you've entered a world where you're wandering around, hopefully only on the front line of a battlefield. But actually, if you're in Tehran, you're seeing this in real time, or if you're in Dubai, you're seeing this in real time. And certainly you're seeing it in Ukraine. Ukraine, where suddenly the sky is full of these weird devices flying around, somehow making their own decisions on whether or not they want to kill you.

A (48:18)

75% of casualties in Ukraine, we were told when I was there last week, week before last, were from drones. So it's totally changing the nature of warfare. You probably are going to get to a place where governments start to say, well, we don't need all these sort of huge great ships and planes and the rest of it. We just sort of fight drone to drone. But I'll tell you the thing that I thought was really interesting. Rory, you mentioned fertilizer earlier, and there's going to be this sort of fertilizer crisis, because the Straits of Hormuz. The other thing that happened was a drone hit a desalination plant. So this is, this is the other thing. I mean, I've often thought that water would be the next sort of, you know, source of war. And There are now 400 desalination plants across the the Gulf region, which, because

B (49:08)

there's no fresh water, they have to

A (49:09)

turn seawater, so they turn seawater into drinking water. And eight of the top eight of the 10 biggest in the world are in the Arabian Peninsula and the other two are in Israel. You know, and sometimes when you see how on earth do they manage to build golf courses and ski slopes and all those football stadiums for the World Cup? The answer is desalination. And it's very easy to imagine that hitting these desalination plants would almost certainly be a war crime. But are we not in that era now where people worry less about whether there's any kind of, you know, there is a sense of impunity. You take that out and it wouldn't be the first time. Because if we go back to the first Gulf War, I don't know if you remember this, but Saddam Hussein released a lot of oil and the thinking was that he was actually trying to destroy one of the desalination plants then. So trying to destroy these things would actually have a massive impact upon human life. And that again, again, was any of that discussed in the planning of this?

B (50:11)

And of course, the Iranian explanation for why they hit the Bahraini desalination plant is that they claim that Israel and the US hit one of their desalination plants first.

A (50:20)

Exactly, exactly.

B (50:21)

And we'll get on tomorrow to talk about what's happening internally in Iran and in the region. Because I think one of the problems with talking big geopolitics is you're not talking about columns of noxious poisonous smoke rising up from oil refineries being struck, you're not talking about schools being struck, and you're not talking about people being killed in retaliation, but you're absolutely right, desalination. Now, just before we go to the comments, I guess my sort of stepping back for a moment to try to think about this. The final thing we haven't talked about, if I wanted to be really gloomy, is we don't talk enough about non linear effects. The problem about predicting these kind of things is we assume that everything goes in a relative, relatively straightforward, as it is today, so it will be tomorrow. One thing that often isn't like that is global financial crises, because a lot of them are about trust and confidence. And there are some worrying signals. We've talked about oil, we've talked about problems around the private credit markets before, which is this very strange, slightly murky, less transparent than the banking sector, and the way in which this could all transform, trigger global recessions. We don't know whether it will or won't, but certainly the chance of that happening is higher than it was two weeks ago. And it's one of the problems with going to war without bothering to work out why you're doing it. And one of the reasons you don't need to work out why you're doing it is you don't have to explain what you're doing to Congress. You don't have to tell your allies, you don't have to tell the UN So you don't even bother to go through the business of trying to work out what your priorities are. Is that all these consequences for from suddenly finding out you don't have any Patriot missiles to defend Taiwan against China or a global financial crisis, or the changing of global norms, suddenly China and Russia saying, okay, a new argument's been put up. You don't need legal stuff, you don't need the U.N. you don't need to consult your own parliament. Israel and the US have demonstrated whenever you want you can do this stuff or nuclear proliferation, St. States, Saudi getting a nuclear weapon, middle powers getting nuclear weapons to stop this happening to them. None of this is thought through because you don't need to justify yourself.

A (52:38)

Just one. We did a little polling question, Rory, while we were talking. Who was more prepared for the conflict, Iran or USA? And our listeners and viewers have gone 79% Iran, 21% USA. Whether that was influenced by our discussion on it, I don't know. But I think I do have that sense that they've been thinking about this for a very long time. Somebody just said in the comments they've been thinking about it since 1979. There may be maybe something in that. And there's a lot of comments coming through about this Russian oil point. The Lorna McKay, this war is a gift to Russia. Russia had sanctions of oil sales to India lifted on Friday during high prices. King Jeppy, can you discuss the stock market crisis around the world, particularly South Korea and Japan opened several points lower than they closed. And again, was there scenario planning? Did the Americans sit down and say, now what is. If you get the feeling that Trump's entire style and you even had, you know, his press secretary said that you Know, he had a feeling, he had a feeling that there was going to be this attack, the Israelis are going to attack, therefore they had to be part of it. So I think we are seeing the limits of this sort of personalized narcissistic approach to really serious policy.

B (53:56)

Isn't part of the point that he and Boris Johnson and his other cheerleaders and Farage, the others, and sometimes I'm afraid it looks as though Tony Blair seems to be supporting him, but we'll get onto that tomorrow. That's not today's conversation. But anyway, isn't part of the problem for Trump and the rest of them is that they feel that a bunch of lefty bedwetters like me were stroking our chins and saying, oh, it's all very difficult. There's a rules based order. You've got to follow the law, you've got to consult with the UN and said it was going to be dangerous to intervene in Iran and they feel they got away with it in Venezuela and they whacked Hezbollah and they've hit Iran twice and Iran apparently didn't do very much in return. And therefore all these people in which they would class European leaders, diplomats, et cetera, and American State Department officials like Rob Malley who would have been saying, be very careful what you're doing here in Iran, they would have concluded, well, these guys kept telling us it would be difficult. We've got away with it again and again. We'll get away with it again.

A (54:56)

That is certainly how they think. But then even I would say that you'd be ill adv based upon Iraq and Afghanistan. To say that another Middle east venture right now with the geostrategic position as it is was entirely sensible. And you're right, we should talk about tomorrow we'll talk about Keir Starmer and Trump and Tony Blair. This speech that Tony Blair made that got leaked out. But I sort of feel with this that we're seeing, I mean, the Americans really truly believe in this American exception. He thinks he is an exceptional person. He thinks he's the only leader in the world who understands the state of the world. He thinks he is bigger and better than everybody else. And I think what we're seeing is other people, other leaders sort of waking up to the fact that, you know what, there may not be that big a price to say, no, you're not. Now they're not doing it in a very rude way. Nobody's sort of, you know, saying to him the sort of things that he says to other people. I mean, it Would have been quite easy.

B (55:59)

Just sorry on that one. I mean, I still think the best way of doing that is with values and vision. I mean, just as you probably would say in a political campaign, you need to know what people stand for. So if you're going to put these middle powers together, going to put Europe, Canada, India, Middle east together, be great to have some sense of why you're doing it, what you stand for, what your values are. Now then there's a very difficult question of how you begin to spend the next five, ten years moving away from the US we talked about in this AI series how bloody difficult it would

A (56:35)

be to actually move US and the un. I mean, how do you move away from the UN as the sort of global body? Very difficult.

B (56:44)

Interesting here, people saying, why is it, given that the British public's against it and Foreign Policy magazine did a poll of international relations experts and almost universally they think it's a massive mistake. Why is it that the Boris Johnson and Farages and a lot of the right wing media, and indeed I'm afraid, the Conservative Party and others seem to be championing. Why are they so out of step with the public, with international relations experts? And why? Let me try to put it in the most brutal terms. Look, Iraq and Afghanistan were very risky and were misses. But Iran has a population four times larger than either Iraq or Afghanistan. Iran can throttle the Straits of Hormuz and stop 25 of global oil. That wasn't true of Iraq or Afghanistan. Iran has the Revolutionary Guard, it's got Hezbollah terrorist networks all over the world. I mean, why did they think this was going to be a good idea?

A (57:43)

I think the answer is because they are utterly trapped in very old fashioned lines which are right v Left and America v Europe. So Trump is a right wing America American. And if you're a Brexit supporting Faragist, you are a right wing Trump supporting Brit. I think Farage is making a terrible mistake, by the way, and I think Kemi Badenot made a terrible mistake in that interview she did where she said, you know, what the hell's going on? Our planes are just, our pilots are just hanging around like they should be up there in the air now bombing anything that Trump tells them to. Trump is, as we saw in Belfast and Dublin, right across Europe. I would argue Trump is very, very unpopular. He's not trusted, he's not respected and he's not liked. So when, and here's the other thing, I've written my column about this. When Obama came out during the Brexit Referendum. Do you remember? He came out and said no. On balance, I think it'd be a very bad thing if you left. And I think you've got a much better chance of getting a trade deal if you stay in the European Union. And the Farages and the Johnsons, they all went absolutely insane. How dare, how dare an American president tell us what to do and what to think. Those same people today are basically saying whatever Trump says is what we should do. And at least with Obama, you knew the guy had a brain, he had an intellect worth respecting and worth admiring and he wasn't kind of crazy. This guy is doing crazy stuff. And you know Keir Starmer, we'll talk about it tomorrow. He's in a very difficult position. I actually think he's a ended up handling it pretty well. But Trump basically wanted to, he wants a position where when he says to Keir Starmer, when I say jump, you say how high? And Keir Starmer's basically said, no, no, no, that's not going to happen. I'll work out our national interest, you work out yours. Sometimes they'll coincide and other times they won't. So I think with the Badnocks and the Farages and these people and the right wing papers, they're totally locked in this view of American good, Europe bad, right wing good. Anything to do with the Labour government bad.

B (59:56)

Well, we'll leave the discussion around Starmer's policy till tomorrow where as avid listeners will realize, we have a slight disagreement of view.

A (60:06)

Well, the Dubliners were on my side, Roy.

B (60:10)

I'm glad that Dublin's on your side. I'm glad about that. Well, we'll reopen that a little bit tomorrow. But just to finish up, I think the thing that strikes me most looking at this is the way in which this has wrecked confidence and trust for a very, very long time. The way I'm thinking about it is that Trump's reelection wrecked American confidence in liberal democracy. That was populism. And then maybe Vance's first Munich speech wrecked their connection with Western values. And then Trump, Greenland and Davos, which you and I sat through, was the moment where they basically broke the Western alliance. But I think this Iran engagement will prove to be more significant than any of it. I think this is the moment where the post war security architecture really comes crumbling down. This is the moment where where all the norms and all the rules are finally exposed. This is the moment where America's power in the world is revealed as being a danger not just to its traditional enemies, but also to its allies in Western Europe and the Gulf. It's the moment where I think people will start reorganizing the whole world. And China, if it's nimble, will be able to benefit from this a lot. The world will become more dangerous, more nuclear weapons will take place. But it's also this confidence point, which is that whatever happens with a new US Administration, whatever president comes in, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. You can no longer recreate a world where people will say, oh, that was just a small aberration with Trump, and now you can trust us again. You can buy our tech, you can rely on us for our defense and security, you can buy into our missiles, you can come into our coalition. Nobody will buy into that. And the second thing is that I'm very sorry to say, but the Middle east is now permanently trust has been wrecked. I mean, this is going to be the problem for UAE and Dubai, that once you've seen it, once you've seen what Iran can do to the Straits of Hormuz, you can't unsee it. And the insurance costs of moving oil through there are not going to come down for a very long time once you've seen what they might be able to do. Dubai, your tourism sector is shattered because it's about confidence and trust. Your financial sector is under real strain. What Trump has done is by blowing up all our confidence in open sea lanes, all our confidence in America being a predictable, careful power blown up. The idea that having American bases makes you safer and made them instead seems more dangerous. He's done so much in two weeks, which will take many, many years to, to unravel.

A (63:13)

Well, listen, we'll talk about this more tomorrow. We are going to revisit our little spatet about Keir Starmer's handling of this and Tony Blair's interesting intervention. I also think we should maybe dig a bit deeper into this whole thing about, you know, the way these other countries are forming different sorts of alliances now. But I, look, I, I, I sort of feel that this is in a really bad place and I think it's likely to get worse before it gets better. I think it's not impossible that this is going to be the spark of a global recession, and that would be pretty grim all round. And this is the other thing that I talked about, is kind of narcissistic leadership. If you literally only care about America first, and you only care about what you think and what you're trying to do and what you're trying to achieve without out the consequences of the rest of the world, then don't be surprised if the rest of the world starts to think, you know, we can't trust you in the way that we thought we would and we could. And that is when these different alliances are going to start to form a couple of plugs. Rory Alexander Stubb, president of Finland. He is the current leading. And also we seem to be getting a lot of feedback for our Sunday long reads in the newsletter. One this week on Iran, I got one next week on Ireland following the trip there with the Mooch. So people seem to be enjoying those. But anyway, thank you for the thousands of questions. I'm sorry we got through so few. There are literally thousands of them coming in. I think it's fair to say that most of them are expressing quite a lot of alarm about what's going on in the world and a lot of

B (64:52)

pushes to talk about what's actually happening on the ground in Iran. I mean, I feel one of the dangers is that, you know, we talk at 10,000ft about the world, but the Iranians are in this horrendous situation which we'll talk about tomorrow, which is they have this incredibly unpleasant unpopular regime that they would be desperate to see the back of. But at the same time, they're beginning to really feel that allying themselves with Israel and Trump in this bombing campaign is a completely different sort of horror. And it's impossible. I mean, in essence, what Trump's done here is put the Gulf in an impossible situation, Europe in an impossible situation. But above all, Iranian people who just want to get rid of this regime and live a peaceful life where they're not having people blowing up their oil refineries on the edge of Tehran and spewing noxious gas and hitting schools. So many things to talk about. What's happening there, refugees, civil war, war, potentially the regime itself. Will it hold or fall? And what on earth is happening with the man that we both met in Munich, Pahlavi, who seemed to say, but I'm sure I'll be told this wasn't quite what he said, but there was a slight implication. He said he'd quite like to be the Shah of Iran, but he couldn't do it full time because he had family commitments that he needed to worry about in the United States.

A (66:14)

He did. I'm sure he didn't say that. I'm sure he didn't say that. He said to me that he, he'd like to put himself forward as a transitional figure who could lead to a different sort of regime. I think for now that ship has sailed and we have. We have the son of. They don't even have to change the slogans and the T shirts and the flags. They just, you know. Khamenei. He's still there. All right, Roy, I'll see you tomorrow.

B (66:37)

See you soon. Thanks again. Speak to. Bye.

A (66:39)

Bye. Bye, bye.