Loading summary
Transcript96 lines
- [00:00]
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 that's therestispolitics.com on Iran. I mean, it may be that Trump basically has to say, I've got myself into a bit of a mess. Do you think you could have a word with your friends in Iran?
- [00:23]
Rory Stewart
Then they'll be looking for a concession. On Taiwan, the US Continues to have a formal position saying we do not support Taiwanese independence and they want him
- [00:32]
Alistair Campbell
to change to we oppose Taiwan. Japan and South Korea will be watching this with incredible nervousness. You can brief him and he'll listen and he'll read and he can it looks like he's taking it in, but he does tend to gravitate towards what the strong valida wants. This episode is brought to you by Fuse Energy.
- [00:50]
Rory Stewart
Fuse has introduced the tracker tariff, designed to give customers what matters most from their energy supplier savings, clarity and a bit more control.
- [01:00]
Alistair Campbell
And it guarantees that your rates stay below the offgem price gap, which saves you up to £200. And the tariff updates automatically every quarter.
- [01:11]
Rory Stewart
Energy prices don't move in straight lines. Global events and market pressures you can't predict and certainly can't control still find their way onto your bill.
- [01:19]
Alistair Campbell
And if you're on the wrong tariff, you can be stuck with higher rates after the pressure has ended with Fuse
- [01:25]
Rory Stewart
Energy's tracker tariff that changes if prices fall, Your rate adjusts at the next
- [01:30]
Alistair Campbell
quarterly update and it's automatic. No switching, no trying to second guess the market. You're protected while prices are high and ready to benefit when they fall.
- [01:39]
Rory Stewart
Switch to Fuse Energy's tracker tariff@fuseenergy.com politics and use code politics to get a free trip plus subscription.
- [01:48]
Alistair Campbell
Visit fuseenergy.com for full terms and conditions.
- [01:54]
Red Bull Summer All Day Play Announcer
Ready to soundtrack your summer with Red Bull Summer All Day Play? You choose a playlist that fits your summer vibe the best. Are you a festival fanatic, a deep end dj, a road dog, or a trail mixer? Just add a song to your chosen playlist and put your summer on track. Red Bull Summer All Day Play Red Bull gives you wings. Visit red bull.com brightsummer ahead to learn more. See you this summer.
- [02:27]
Rory Stewart
Welcome to the Restless Politics Question Time
- [02:29]
Alistair Campbell
with me, Rory Stewart and me, Alistair Campbell.
- [02:32]
Rory Stewart
So huge news this week. President Trump is on his way to China, first US Presidential visit in almost a decade. The two great superpowers getting together at a time when the world is crumbling Are they going to be able to reshape a new world order? And in Russia, Ukraine, signs that Russia may be more on the back foot. Are strains appearing in the Russian economy with Russian recruitment? Or is this just part of an ongoing saga where we change our minds every few months about who's on the losing side? And then I think we'll get into some lighter questions, but interesting ones too, on the spirit of trees and some sorts about books. Let's start with China. So the question, and then I'll do a little explainer. Will Trump's meeting with Xi in China bring any kind of positive developments, including in terms of Iran? Basically, this is the biggest story in geopolitics. The American and Chinese economies together are now about half of the whole global economy. We're in a world which feels like a bipolar age. Those are the two big giants. And you've got the US spending about a trillion dollars a year on defense. You've got China spending probably in purchasing power, parity terms, about half of that, maybe $500 billion in PPP terms, bit less in real dollars. And then you've got countries like Germany, UK, India, who are more like 100 billion, or in the UK case, about 85 billion. So that's the first big fact, really big power politics. Secondly, as we've often said on the podcast, America, China policy has been weird for a very, very, very long time. It started back in the 1940s when the Communists took over, and where America got incredible foreign policy shock and tried to hold on to the idea that the real government was the government, the nationalist government in Taipei and Taiwan, for nearly 30 years, until older listeners will remember ping pong diplomacy and Nixon Goes to China and this breakthrough where suddenly, by the end of the 1970s, the United States finally recognized the government in Beijing, the Communist government in Beijing as the legitimate government. And as China took off through the 80s under Deng Xiaoping and finally joined the World trade organization in 2001, China became a more and more important part of the global economy and a more and more important part of the American economy. But it never became what America dreamt, which was a democracy. And from the massacre in Tiananmen Square in 1989 onwards, problems about the Chinese dictatorial system, human rights abuses, increasingly the treatment of minority populations like the Tibetans or the Uyghurs, a sense that China was unfairly helping Chinese business through manipulating currency, subsidizing business, and just the forces of globalization that led in a 10 year period to the loss of nearly 2 million American jobs. As the China shock finally led to the situation about 10 years ago, where increasingly China was defined as the big adversary and a bi partisan consensus. Very unusual when the Republicans and Democrats disagree about almost everything. They began to agree on one thing, which was China was the big adversary. You saw that the end of Obama, where there was a pivot to Asia. More and more resources going into trying to make sure that China was contained in Asia. That was partly about China building artificial islands in the South China Sea and trying to balance the Chinese navy. Then Trump won. Where very much in Trump one, there was a big step up in tariffs against China. Mike Pompeo basically saying that Xi Jinping was a true believer in a bankrupt totalitarian ideology. Trump getting very angry that Chinese Covid, as he saw it, had completely torpedoed his economy and his election chances. And then when Biden came in, it was pretty much continuity, very cold relationship. Biden, I think one of the first presidents not to visit China. We covered in the podcast their meetings in Bali. We covered Jake Sullivan going out and doing meetings with the Chinese foreign minister. But there was still 100% tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles. And then Trump comes in and I'm going to speed up here because I'm talking too much, but Trump comes in. Trump too. And tariffs went up at one point, up to 145%. China knocked back by explaining effectively to Trump that they could cripple all America's access to critical minerals and rare earths. The tariffs came down. They've been knocked down further by the Supreme Court. And the national security strategy under Trump seems to have changed a great deal from defining China as a great peer adversary to talking in much gentler terms against it, leaving us very unsure what Trump's China policy is and what he's going to get out of his visit. Over to you.
- [07:27]
Alistair Campbell
Well, yeah, I don't think. We're definitely not seeing sort of Nixon goes to China in terms of the, the sort of history making potential of this. But it is incredibly important. As you say, these are the two superpowers. China, which is continuing to develop both strategically, militarily at an incredible pace. And you're right that Biden didn't go there. And this is. So this is the first US Presidential visit for almost a decade. And it could be one of four times that they meet this year. You've got a G20 in Miami, you've got APEC, the Asia Pacific Economic Corporation meeting in Shenzhen. And there's an expectation that one of the announcements out of this visit is going to be that Xi will visit Washington sometime this year as well. So the answer to the question, Ben's question, is it could be incredibly consequential. And, yes, lots of positive could come out of it. Whether it does, we'll have to see. But I think what we're seeing, and I don't expect Donald Trump even to go through the motions of talking about Uyghurs and human rights, because it's just not his thing. I was talking to somebody in the States a couple of days ago who said, it's really interesting how he said, I keep a log of all the people, the world leaders that Trump praises or criticizes, and I bark the number of times they do each. And he said the people who have got the most praise are Putin, Kim Jong Un, Lukashenko, Viktor Orban and Xi Jinping. Oh, and Netanyahu. And the ones that he's attacked the most include Starmer, Sanchez, Macron, Maloney, the Pope, and NATO. So I don't think he's going to go there to the sort of, you know, you're a dictatorship, you should be more democratic like us. I think that in terms of what might come out of it, what would be very interesting will be to see how they frame the discussions on Iran. This is a meeting that was postponed because of the war in Iran. It's a meeting that is probably a little bit shorter than it otherwise would have been because of Iran. I think without Iran, the big issues would have been trade, tariffs and probably AI. I think these are the leaders of the two countries that probably have most influence and potential significance in terms of the debate about AI. And then from the Chinese perspective, they are going to really, really work to try to get Trump to change his language about Taiwan. I think Taiwan, Japan and South Korea will be watching this with incredible nervousness because they know that Trump can say things that have consequences beyond what he maybe realizes at the time. So I think it is going to be fascinating. And just in terms of the framing of it, Trump, in the advance of this, he's approved sales of advanced computer chips. He's delayed certain arms sales to Taiwan, and he shelved some sanctions for some of the cyber attacks that have been traced to China. So that says to me, he is going into this with a view to hoping to come out of it with lots of warm words and potentially, from his perspective, lots of deals. And Xi Jinping's perspective, he'll want change of approach.
- [10:43]
Rory Stewart
The big story, I guess, is, as you say, first visit for almost a decade. And of course, being Trump, what's so strange about it is that normally these meetings between the US And China are preceded by weeks or even months of negotiations between officials trying to work out what a good package of deals would be. And both because Trump, just in personality terms, doesn't do this, but also because he's distracted by Iran. We're in a situation in which he's turning up with very little staff work. The slogan, I think, is beef, beans and Boeing. Those being the three big concessions that Trump wants to get. So he wants to be able to sell planes, wants to be able to sell soybeans into China.
- [11:25]
Alistair Campbell
And then. And then they're also, Rory, he's wanting a Board of Trade. He's got his Board of Peace. Now he wants a Board of Trade. And the Chinese, they're more interested in having a Board of investment.
- [11:34]
Rory Stewart
So you've made five Bs for me,
- [11:35]
Alistair Campbell
not three five Bs. And you got three Ts, trade tariffs, technology. And you could throw in a fourth T, which is Tehran, because Iran, I think we're talking five B's and four T's.
- [11:45]
Rory Stewart
How about three P's? We still.
- [11:47]
Alistair Campbell
Excellent.
- [11:47]
Rory Stewart
Three A's.
- [11:48]
Alistair Campbell
Three A's.
- [11:49]
Rory Stewart
Yeah. And then China will be asking, well, what do we get in return? And one of the things they've asked for is a trillion dollars worth of investment into the U.S. now, that's really interesting because normally if he was dealing with Saudi Arabia or Japan, Trump would be saying, I've got a trillion dollars worth of investment to the us and sometimes he signaled he's quite open to that with China. He said, I don't mind if the Chinese build cars in the U.S. as long as they're employing U.S. workers and U.S. factories, that's fine. That was pretty much the view that Mrs. Thatcher took about Japanese car factories in Britain. Doesn't matter whether you're working for Nissan, you're still in Sunderland and you're still building things there. But for the Republican right, that is an absolute no, no, they are not interested in China incre investment in the us and they really do feel. I mean, I read an extraordinary long piece in the New York Times about this, somebody saying something which really would have been shocking to a liberal economist even five years ago, which is, we can't allow the Chinese to make cars in the US because they would just make them much better and much cheaper than our own cars in the us so that probably won't happen. So then they'll be looking for a concession on Taiwan and that maybe, as you say, where people are Nervous. The US Formal position on Taiwan. Just to remind people, Taiwan and China very much were a one country. And to add to the historical complications, Taiwan was occupied by Japan in the lead up to the Second World War. So Japan making comments about Taiwan does not go down well in China. But when in 1949, Chairman Mao did a communist revolution in China, the previous government of Chiang Kai Shek, the Nationalist government, kept its headquarters in Taiwan, meaning that one country had effectively been split. I don't know. On the British analogy, it would be, I don't know, as though the previous government was sitting in the Isle of Wight. As a result, the US has always held to a one China policy. It's always held that Taiwan is part of China, even when it believed that China should really be ruled, not by the Communists, by the Nationalists. And it continues to have a formal position saying, we do not support Taiwanese independence. We do not support Taiwanese independence. It's a difficult thing to get your head around, given that the whole question is what happens if China invades Taiwan?
- [14:10]
Alistair Campbell
And they want him to change to we oppose.
- [14:12]
Rory Stewart
Absolutely answer. Yeah, exactly. So over to you on this. They want him to get changed to we oppose Taiwanese independence. And Trump may well think. Well, and American voters may well think that doesn't make much difference. Of course, if you're Taiwanese and you're in the region, you see that as a terrifying change in position. Over to you.
- [14:28]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah. And also you've seen some really interesting things happening on that front because the, the opposition leader recently made a visit to, to China, and there has been some polling which I was reading about the other day. Younger people in Taiwan appear less concerned about China than older people. I, you know, I can see that from Xi Jinping's perspective. That would be a huge, huge win for him and Trump because Trump is so sort of, you know, words just kind of spew out in all sorts of different ways. And as you say, he will get briefed. But I remember when we talked to Fiona Hill, who was his first term National Security foreign policy advisor, and she would say that you can brief him and he'll listen and he'll read and he can. It looks like he's taking it in, but the minute he gets in the room with the strongman leader, he does tend to gravitate towards what the strongman leader wants, providing he can get something out of it. So I think that's where the Taiwanese will be incredibly worried. And the other point about your point about Japan, Rory, maybe this is something we should discuss in a future episode. There's a really interesting debate going on in Japan at the moment where the new prime minister, Sanae Takeichi, seems to be signaling that. Well, not just signaling, she's absolutely stating that Japan has to build its own defense industry and that the pacifism that they've deployed in the past has got to change. And part of that, I suspect, is because they are worried, just as Europe is worried, that you can't necessarily guarantee on, you rely on Trump security guarantees for the future. And Japan, as we said in a recent episode when we talked about American troops coming out of Germany, Japan has more American troops than anywhere in the world apart from the U.S. so, yeah, Taiwan is going to be fascinating. And on Iran, I mean, it may be that Trump basically has to say, please don't brief this out, Xi, but do you think you could help me here? Because I've got myself into, I've got myself into a bit of a mess. Do you think you could have a word with your friends in Iran? Because there's no doubt China has been tacitly helping Iran in this recent. But it's been damaging to both their economies. That's the truth.
- [16:46]
Rory Stewart
Kurt Campbell, who was Biden's China lead, wrote an article in Foreign affairs, which, which you may have seen, which was all about the ambiguity of Trump's position. And I thought it was fascinating because it was the sort of insight into the problem that everybody now faces in trying to talk about Trump, which is you might as well say we have literally no idea what this guy's going to do when he turns up. I mean, you can call it ambiguity, and that might sound like it's strategic ambiguity, which was the famous old American phrase on Taiwan, that you never quite state what your position is. You could talk about ambiguity in terms of splits in the Republican Party between people who see China as the big enemy and other people who are broadly kind of isolationist. Let's worry about our own hemisphere and Taiwan doesn't really matter. Or you could just be talking about ambiguity in the sense that Trump barely knows when he gets out of bed in the morning what he thinks. But I sense a shift. And one of the signs of a shift is that it seems as though the person leading on the China negotiation isn't Marco Rubio, who's a bit of a China hawk, the secretary of state. Instead, it's Commerce and Finance and Scott Besant and people like that. And it's very much we're bringing over Elon Musk, we're bringing over the head of Apple, Tim Cook, and We're going to make this more of a business trip. And that makes me feel that, again, one of the ways in which Trump has surprised people is that the difference between Trump 1 and Trump 2 is he was more of a China hawk in Trump 1. And that may have just been that in Trump 1, he listened more to the American foreign policy establishment, which is quite China hawkish. And now he's defaulting to his own position, which may simply be. I don't really get why we're so obsessed with Taiwan. And actually, it's an interesting question because as a foreigner looking at it, you do sort of think, well, look, if America's saying Russia taking Ukraine doesn't really matter, why do they care so much about Taiwan? It's a very, very long way from the U.S. it's very, very close to China. If it weren't for the historical accident of all this stuff I've been talking about back to the 1940s relationship with Taiwan, looking from 30,000ft and being Trump, you might think, well, why do we care that much about Taiwan?
- [19:00]
Alistair Campbell
Isn't it about the fact it's one of your favorite stats, that they have such a near monopoly in the terms of these advanced chips? And that's where part of the discussion about AI is going to take place. But you see, I think another guy I was talking to about this, and you're absolutely right, by the way, I think the State Department has done its usual thing of preparing, endlessly preparing big folders and big briefing papers. But as one of them, one of them said to me, the chances of this stuff getting read by anybody who's actually going to have an influence on Trump in the room, very, very small, but they have to sort of churn it out. But they were essentially making the point that the traditional visiting, particularly from a democracy, the visitor who has to sort of speak out about human rights, has to talk about the Uyghurs, etc. The Chinese, in their planning, they're basically making clear from a position of what they consider to be their strength that, you know, you have to show a bit of deference to them and even Trump has to show a bit of deference to them. So you can have your grievances and you can have your criticisms, but you better make those privately, because if you make them publicly, that is what they see as a damaging to them. You can regularly, if you hear the hawks, this guy said to me, by the way, he says Trump is the biggest China dove in the, in the Trump administration right now. So if you're the China Hawk, you basically say, well, these guys, it's not just. Let's. Let's say Trump doesn't really mind that much about repression and, you know, media control and Uyghur concentration camps. What he does mind about is the military, intimidation, espionage, massive disinformation campaigns that they spread all around the democratic world, technology theft. And this guy was saying to me that the Chinese, even if you raise those in private, it's best not to say that they're criticisms. They basically say that we need to address some of these misunderstandings, these misconceptions. And if you think about. We talked about this when Mark Carney went to China, that, you know, Carney loosened quite a lot of import restrictions, particularly on electric vehicles. And it, you know, quid pro quo. Beijing did something similar in relation to some of the Canadian food products. But what that said to China was, and I'm not criticizing Mark Carney for this because it's kind of an obvious thing to do because he is basically trying to develop better relations with China, in part, again, because he's hedging in relation to the United States. Keir Starmer did something very similar. You know, we had this great debate, one, whether he should go in the first place, and we both agreed he should. Secondly, we had this huge furore about the Chinese Embassy in London, and he raised the case of Jimmy Lai, this elderly guy who's, you know, locked up in jail. He got a cut in tariffs, but not long after he left, Jimmy Lai's case went into a far worse place. So I think that they're all just accepting China is very, very powerful and they're dealing with it differently as a result.
- [22:12]
Rory Stewart
It's amazing, isn't it? I mean, I guess it would be odd for Trump, I mean, almost impossible for Trump to return to what the US Used to do, which has accused the Chinese of committing genocide against the Uyghurs. Because the word genocide has basically now gone out the window because the dispute around Gaza, so genocide, which used to be applied in Kosovo and in the case of the Uyghurs, to persecuting another ethnic group, there's now a push to make it essentially mean only the Holocaust, that you have to be killing millions upon millions of people. So he probably won't focus on that. And as you say, he doesn't care much about human rights anyway. Even on the espionage side, it's a pretty mixed picture. There was quite a. I was reminded that we're talking about selling Boeing airplanes, that the Americans built an airplane for jiang Zemin in 2000, as his private plane, it arrived in China and The Chinese found 27 listening devices had been inserted in this plane that the Americans had sold the Chinese, including in the back of the bed which Jiang Zemin was supposed to sleep on. So I do think some of this espionage stuff's a bit weird too, because I think the Americans are doing all they can to spy on China and the Chinese are doing all they can to spy on America. I also wonder whether it's true that America wouldn't engage in industrial espionage if they felt that China was ahead of them in nuclear secrets, AI or anything. I imagine they would. Right. There was again another interesting article in Foreign affairs with a very senior American professor and a very senior Chinese professor saying, we're getting into a very dangerous Cold War stage where if there was an accident, a Chinese plane flew into an American plane, or a bomb was dropped in the wrong place, we'd be much closer to war than we would have been 25 years ago. Because both sides are becoming so paranoid. And there's a sort of weird echo, which is on the American side, you've got the China is doing all those things that you mentioned, espionage, stealing industrial secrets, threatening Taiwan, and on the Chinese side, a very, very strong sense which is completely confirmed. It's not even really paranoia. The Chinese accurately read the Americans as saying, we are trying to slow the rise of China, we're trying to stop them getting technological dominance, we're trying to stop them dominating their region, we're trying to make sure America is the dominant country and can't rise. So that's not even paranoia. But put those two things together, you've got a really difficult situation. And yet Trump, by returning to just worrying about trade, seems to have sidelined the China hawks, sidelined figures who we've talked about, like Elbridge Colby, who has been running policy in the Department of Defence. Elbridge Colby, who's the grandson of the CIA director who wrote this book called Strategy of Denial, who was the big driver of America shouldn't be doing stuff in Europe or the Middle East. All its resources should be about denying China's opportunity to take Taiwan. We've barely heard from him for the last few weeks or months, and certainly what Trump is doing in Iran isn't an Elbridge Colby. Let's just focus on China policy.
- [25:15]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah. And I mean, it is hard to look. We read and hear so much more about Trump than we do about Xi Jinping, but it's hard to look at this without thinking that Xi Jinping will be, I think, be feeling a lot stronger and a lot more confident about this encounter than he would have done, certainly in Trump one, and possibly even when he met Biden in the margins of a previous apec. And one of the reasons for that is that there has been this wave of visits. The Chinese talk about this wave in recent, not that distant past. You've had prime ministers or presidents of Australia, Canada, France, the uk, as I mentioned, Germany, Spain, Finland, Ireland, Uruguay, South Korea, Georgia, New Zealand, Slovakia, the European Union. Our friend Mr. Vucic, he's been there several times and actually talked. People should listen to what he was saying about because he was very much coming from the perspective of people do not fully understand just how good these people are at what they're trying to do. And of course, they both also give a sense. I mean, look, Xi Jinping is not as voluble as Trump, because in a dictatorship you don't really need to be, but my God, does he emanate strength everywhere he goes. And I think that what's so fascinating about this, Trump even talks about the G2. You've got a G20 and a G7 and a G8. This is the G2. It's almost as if Xi Jinping's the only one that he thinks even gets close to him in terms of power. And I think wheeling round that very discreet looking mind that doesn't say much. I think Xi Jinping will be looking at this. He wants, at the end of this, he wants people to say, he's more scared of me than I'm scared of him.
- [27:11]
Rory Stewart
Final thing, before we go to the break, in the photographs that you see, Xi Jinping seems to always face the camera and barely smile and stick his hand out to the side, making everybody from Biden to Vucic to Starmer to Trump look slightly weird, because they've always got a big grin on their face and they're sort of shaking hands and he looks like he's sort of slightly casually and slightly sarcastically handing his hand over to the other leader. Is that right? Or am I being unfair?
- [27:38]
Alistair Campbell
No, no, you're not being unfair. It's very clever. It's very clever. It relates exactly to what I've just said. He's always got the same facial expression in those photos. You'll never see him looking different. And I don't know if I think we've mentioned this before. If you go on to any of the on the Internet in China and you put in the phrase Winnie the Pooh, you'll find that it doesn't exist because he really, really, really hates this sort of cartoon image of him as Winnie the Pooh. Another interesting thing somebody was telling me, Roy, about the trade and AI stuff is that you're a big fan of Deep Seek, aren't you? Yeah, because this guy was saying to me that Deep Seek is very much part of the is. It's, for example, if you go and try to find out about the history of the Ukraine war on Deep Sea, you're getting a very, very different version to the truth. So it's very much a kind of. It is part of their propaganda outfit.
- [28:33]
Rory Stewart
It's amazing. One of the things that Deep Seq does, which is really weird unless you can screenshot it is, you can see it thinking through the answer and then suddenly it refuses to, is to give you the answer. So it'll say, the listener is asking me to compare Winnie the Pooh to Xi Jinping and I must do some searches and find this out. Reuters does it. And then suddenly it'd be like, I cannot answer this question.
- [28:55]
Alistair Campbell
Exactly, exactly.
- [28:57]
Rory Stewart
But the reason it's relevant though is that China is increasingly going open source on AI. So again, as a plug for the interview with Will MacGaskill on leading, which I think people will enjoy when they listen to it, a lot of which is about AI and AI safety. If you want to listen of Wolmer Gaskell, just, just go ahead and search for the rest. Is Politics Leading wherever you get your podcast. And you'll find so many other great interviews. I'm still trying to plug Naz Shah, who's a mesmerizing Labour mp, who I think you'd enjoy listening to. But the big difference between what China is doing is they are gambling on providing cheap access to open source models. So you can basically, if you're a European company building an AI platform, you can essentially take over this whole Chinese model and build your system on it, rather than having to endlessly license access to a server in the United States. So they're a few months behind. I mean, these models are not as good as the Frontier US models, but probably only five, six months behind. But they're gambling that by going open source and cheaper, they'll be able to dominate European markets in a way that the Americans can't.
- [30:00]
Alistair Campbell
My final point, Roy, just to scare our listeners and viewers even more, the nuclear issue is going to be quite important because they are developing advanced arsenal of roughly 1500 warhead nuclear warheads by 2035. Huge build up. And at a time, you know, historically when we thought of nuclear, the nuclear powers, we've thought mainly of the Americans and the Russians, and that's why we had the START treaty, which that's and one of the reasons why Trump has refused to recommit to that is because it only really affects America and Russia as opposed to any arms control on China. So whether we'll see anything on that front as well. So I think this is one of those summits where we really, really have to watch it closely and analyze every, analyse it from every which angle. Because you've got two, these two superpowers, very different characters, but both all about power and all about winning. And they're coming together at a time when they probably could sort Iran between them, they probably could sort AI between them, they probably could sort some of the big economic and security issues that we face. They probably could start to think about a new world global architecture. And it'll be fascinating to see just how far they go in any of those things or not.
- [31:18]
Rory Stewart
Well, Alistair, thank you. Well, let's take a quick break and when we come back, I know you wanted to talk a little bit about Russia, Ukraine, and maybe that's partly out of your crane visit and your conversation with Zelenskyy.
- [31:28]
Alistair Campbell
This episode is brought to you by Lloyds Business and Commercial Banking. We hear a lot of talk in politics about stability, as Gordon Brown used to call it, but I think that word means different things to different people. To me, it does mean New Labour for me.
- [31:41]
Rory Stewart
I might be tempted to say Theresa May, but it doesn't matter whether you're a business, small business owner or a government. Stability is never about avoiding change. It's about being prepared for change and embracing it with confidence. The latest change, of course, that affects a lot of people listening is making tax, which is reshaping how income tax is reported.
- [31:59]
Alistair Campbell
Lloyds is there to support making tax digital for income tax with a free HMRC recognized accounting tool built into your online banking, giving you an easier way to manage your income expenses and stay compliant without all the stress.
- [32:14]
Rory Stewart
Change is perpetual, but Lloyds has helped navigate change for over 250 years. So when the rules shift, you can bank on Lloyds to help keep your business on the front foot. Search Lloyd's business accounts to find out more. Welcome back to the Restless Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart and me, Alistair Campbell. Question from Harry. Is Putin making noises about the Ukraine war coming to an end? Just him buying time for Iran to stuff his coffers again?
- [32:48]
Alistair Campbell
Alastair Well, I said to you on the main episode that I'm in Germany at the moment and the papers, you know, the main newspaper I got developed today, which is a huge broadsheet with these sort of 5,000 word articles about all sorts of things. There was nothing about the uk, Literally not a word about Keir Starmer's travails. It was a little piece yesterday.
- [33:08]
Rory Stewart
Well, that's, that's extraordinary. Wait, can I just pause on that? That is absolutely extraordinary. I mean, if you go back five years, certainly 10 years, the idea that the Prime Minister of the UK is about to be toppled would have been absolutely front and center. I was so struck by this because, you know, we'll get onto Ukraine just in a second. But I was in the States at another one of these meetings and I offered to talk about British politics and people just didn't want to hear. Literally didn't want to hear, listen, there's
- [33:39]
Alistair Campbell
a lot going on here. Friedrich Merz has just had a bit of a defeat in the Parliament where he tried to get through this thing where employers would help out paying, reducing the energy bills of their employees, and that's been defeated. But the front page is absolutely covered with stuff about Ukraine and including Putin, suggesting that Gerhard Schroeder is the man to be the negotiator between Russia and Ukraine.
- [34:06]
Rory Stewart
Just remind people a little bit about the disgrace there and how controversial that is and why most people would raise their eyebrows at that.
- [34:13]
Alistair Campbell
Well, Kaya Kallas, the European diplomatic chief, she has raised her eyebrows as high as it is possible for them to go and said, this is completely unacceptable. So have the Ukrainians, basically, because Gerhard Schroeder, when he was Chancellor of Germany, and he's also now 82, which I think could be a factor. But he basically got very, very close to Putin, including after leaving office, to becoming, you know, how can we put this? A Russian lobbyist who made a lot of money doing so. So in answer to Harry's question, does it signal that he's just trying to buy a bit more time? The answer to that is probably because Ukraine do seem to be on the up at the moment. There was a piece in, I saw in one of the papers about how the Russians are actually losing territory at the moment, which is, you know, this is not exactly going according to plan. There has been huge debate about. Anybody you talk to in the military says what the Ukrainians have done in terms of their drone technology and their use of drones has been huge. They are losing somewhere between 25 and 30,000 troops pretty much every month. We're up to 1.2 million casualties on the Russian side, probably half a million on the Ukrainian side. Very interesting was to watch the parade, the annual military parade that they do for their victory over the Nazis, which is. Putin has turned in recent years into one of the most gigantic shows of military strength. And it was minuscule. Added to which he was filmed sort of being, you know, scuttled into a. By security out of the way. They were worried about Ukrainian drones hitting it. They had to get Trump to ask Zelensky to promise not to try and drop drones on it. So that suggests he's in a pretty weak position. But I think the Ukrainians will be saying, hold on a minute. He's just trying to buy time.
- [36:04]
Rory Stewart
It's so interesting, this. I was trying to remind myself about this narrative. So the honest truth is there's been a lot of crying wolf on both sides going back from February 22nd, which is when. So it's been. The war has now been going on for over four years. There's been a number of occasions where the commentators have convinced themselves either that Russia is on its last legs and is about to collapse, or Ukraine is on its last legs and about to collapse. And so far, for the last four years, neither's really proved true. So you'll remember probably the most desperate moment for Putin last time round, firstly, was his failure to take Kyiv. And then the year later was the year in which there was a real expectation there was going to be Ukrainian counteroffensive. And Prigozhin, who led the Wagner group and had done all the fighting around Bakhmut, effectively tried to march on Moscow and stage a coup. And people really thought, this is real trouble. But the Russian economy proved much more resilient than people predicted. They found workarounds. They sold oil to China. They had shadow fleets. They were doing funny stuff with Iran. Their economy grew surprisingly strongly. They massively increased expenditure on defense. They started pouring out munitions. And so the story, if we go back 12 months, was Russia really had the initiative. Trump was coming in. He seemed to be very much on the Russian side. Ukraine was struggling to recruit, whereas Russia was paying bigger and bigger bounties, getting lots of people in. Russia was slowly grinding forward. People pointing out it's pretty slow, but it was advancing. And if you fast forward to where we were even two months ago with the Iran war, again, basically what Trump did would seem to strengthen Russia because he's been firing a lot of the missiles which could have been sold to the Ukrainians at the Iranians, and he allowed the oil price to go up. So oil revenue's been going up for Putin, and Ukraine continues to struggle to recruit. They have a real problem replacing manpower up at the front line. A lot of those units are only 46 or to 60% full. Some of them are only 25% staffed.
- [38:21]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah, there's been quite a lot of desertion as well. I think there's quite a lot of desertion on both sides. And when I was in Ukraine fairly recently, one of the things I kept hearing was that the length of time which troops were being expected to serve without a break becoming a real problem for Zelensky. But it's very, you know, Putin's definitely, look, he's always up to something, and he's definitely up to something on this because he essentially of the many kind of several thousand word articles that have been written about analyzing this, him saying that, you know, we're nearing the end of the war, we're heading towards the end of the war. Somebody's written a column pointing out how he talked about the Ukrainians four years ago compared to how he's talking about them now. He never called Zelensky generally by name. He's never, ever referred to him as president and probably never will. But he called him Mr. Zelensky, whereas he used to be talk about, you know, the Nazi, the military operation for the denazification, the Kyiv regime. So he's definitely softening his talk. I think what the Schroeder thing does, I think it's a classic Putin divide and rule. It's like I saw one columnist today saying, well, what's wrong with Gerhard Schroeder? He's very serious, he's very experienced. You know, he knows Putin well in as long as he's not unkind to the Ukrainians. So it's a classic where most of the establishment come out and say, this is stupid idea, but then he gets a few going the other way. Roy, one other thing I wanted to raise in relation to Russia now, you know, you and I read an awful lot of different things. I've been reading the annual report of the estonian equivalent at MI6, which is about the extent to which Russia is deceiving people from Africa to go to Russia and then go and fight on the front line. And we're talking about hundreds and hundreds who are dead. And of course, you've now got quite a large number of African countries who are under pressure to bring people back, which are Kenya, we're talking around about a thousand.
- [40:22]
Rory Stewart
Just a little explainer on that. What seems to be happening is that Russians are signing up Kenyans, giving them the impression they're going to get a nice job in Russia. And they arrive in Russia, get their passports taken away, they get told that they're not going to have their travel back to Kenya paid for and they're sent within three or four days to the front line without their passports. And the overwhelming majority of them are being killed. So it's completely morally abhorrent.
- [40:53]
Alistair Campbell
The Kenyan intelligence service reckons of a thousand that have gone to Russia, 30 have come back alive. Are you talking Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Togo, Botswana, Mali, Guinea, Cameroon, Eritrea. And you can see, because we talk a lot about demographic change and Africa has got this extraordinary growth of young people with economies that aren't necessarily geared up for that. So people who are being offered jobs as cooks, as drivers, as builders, as whatever it might be, getting their flight paid to go to Moscow, then getting there and finding their. They're sent straight off to the front
- [41:35]
Rory Stewart
line because they've been made to sign a contract in Russian which they can't
- [41:38]
Alistair Campbell
read a lot of them. Yeah, yeah. They just sign it and think this is going to be great. And then talked a lot about how China and Russia have been investing a lot in diplomatic power within Russia. This cannot be sustainable. These countries must be trying to get something done to stop their own people getting sent off there to the front line.
- [41:57]
Rory Stewart
Yeah, it's horrifying. It's horrifying. And again, we don't know because both Russia and Ukraine are so weakened. I mean, both of them have taken such unbelievable economic damage, have suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties, are locked in this horrifying drone war at the front line. And if either of them were to collapse, we would be able to provide a very convincing reason why. Because there's so much economic and personal damage. Right. And yet more than four years on, they're both continuing. And I think you'd be brave person to guess which one is going to fold first. There's a whole industry, as you can imagine, of very smart people in ministries of defence and intelligence agencies around the world trying to come up with objective indicators on who's doing better. And in the end, the problem comes down to. Is it comes down to what you can count. And the thing that you can't count is morale, nationalism, political endurance. So there are 10 indicators that somebody sent me that they're monitoring at the moment. Net territorial change per month, Russian casualty to recruitment ratio, AWOL desertion rates, Russian sign on bonuses, drone missile production and launch rates on both Sides, Air defense interceptor stocks, Russian oil export volumes and revenues. Not just oil price, Russian inflation, labor shortages, regional budget stress. I'm about to finish Ukraine's domestic arms output, drones, missiles, artillery shells, and finally, Western aid reliability, air defence, ammunition, finance. So they try to take these 10 different questions, run them through all these models, but they have consistently been wrong over the last four years on predicting which one's going to fold first. Because in the end, it seems as though there are things you can't count in the question of whether Putin and Zelensky. Keep going.
- [43:52]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah. Right, Rory, a couple of lighter things to finish off on somebody. Jess wants to know, what is my obsession with trees all about? You're mildly obsessed with trees as well, aren't you?
- [44:01]
Rory Stewart
I am. I plant a lot of trees. I'm very good. I might even be better than you at the names of trees and trees species. I think you're more beat on trees.
- [44:11]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah, yeah, no, no, absolutely. Because I love trees, but I don't. I deliberately don't want to be an expert on trees, because I think if that happens, you can spend all your time thinking what they are rather than the effect that they're having on you.
- [44:23]
Rory Stewart
So tell us about trees and your life. When did you start with your tree of the day? When is this a late, late development? Have you always been obsessed with trees?
- [44:29]
Alistair Campbell
I've never been obsessed. I've always loved trees. I think. I think there's something about trees I've always loved, but I started posting a tree of day quite a long time ago. Now, if you go through my pictures on my phone, it's mainly. It's mainly trees, to be honest. And I got an absolute beauty this morning, which may well be today's winner. But, Rory, I don't know where it comes from. I just. I just. I just love. And even sort of ugly trees, I quite like looking at them to think, you know, you're quite interesting.
- [44:55]
Rory Stewart
The Japanese particularly love what you might call an ugly tree. I mean, a lot of the Japanese wabi sabi aesthetic, a lot of what you'd put around a tea room in Japan if you were going in for your tea ceremony, are trees which are warped pine trees that, you know, are stunted or head off in odd directions, losing bits. And. And actually, I've been trying to do a bit of this planting myself because I've been trying to do a mini Japanese garden in Scotland. You can actually try to plant the tree at an angle. You can do a very careful bit of Japanese pruning where you Take off the leader in order to create this distorted look. The most extreme, obviously it's bonsai where you're doing this in a tiny pot. But Japanese will do this at huge scale. If you go to the great Japanese gardens you can see trees which are 3, 400 years old where every year there are teams of people out there carefully making it look as though it's a wind warped tree on a Scottish cliff, when in fact it's sitting in the middle of Kyoto.
- [45:54]
Alistair Campbell
You're right by the way. You definitely. I've been to your garden up in Scotland. I'd say you're more of a tree expert than I am. I'm a kind of very. I'm a tree amateur who just loves to look at them and sort of bathe in them. And I want to plug something called Treeline. If people go to treeline.org.uk this is, brings two of my passions together or trees and music. And this is, this is a composer called Graham Fitkin who's going to be cycling from Romania to, to the UK and on the way doing 20 concerts in and around trees and forests. And he's using and including playing inside trees by the way, and the sounds of trees, using music, recordings, concert performance. It's all about just sort of, you know, he obviously loved trees even more than you and I do. So. And I think it might be the sort of thing if people have been reading and enjoying the interview interviews in our newsletter. I think it might be one for Izzy, our newsletter interviewer. I think Graham would be a great interviewee.
- [46:59]
Rory Stewart
I can't resist sort of my two normal plugs. One is you and I, both great fans of the Woodland Trust which continue to do lovely stuff. Secondly, I'm continuing to push for the new Labour leaders as they emerge. She or he, please think about turning the Greenbelt into the largest forest in England. I'm obsessed with this idea to remind listeners you could put hundreds of millions of trees and it would transform a green belt which people don't want to develop but which really isn't a very beautiful place into. If you planted those trees, you would have something that would be there for hundreds of years. It would improve air quality in London, it would drop temperatures in London, be great for climate change. But most importantly of all, because it's close to our largest population centre, it would allow 10, 12 million people, including young people from inner city areas to get out into nature and bathe in those trees. So if you're really looking for an exciting big legacy project, planting the Green Belt and final thing, I had a. Because, you know, now that we've become like podcast bros, we need to become wellness influencers. That's our next stage, astronaut development. Right. So this is my new thought. Yesterday I went for a run.
- [48:09]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah.
- [48:10]
Rory Stewart
And my friend Felix has been trying to convince me I need to run at zone two, which means that you need to run at a kind of pace at which you can have a conversation. Keep your heart rate really low so you're slightly plodding. And the way in which I suddenly managed to achieve it, running through the park, is by looking at trees. If you're able to run at a pace where you can really absorb the canopy and the trees and look in detail at the leaves, I find you naturally adjust your pace down to zone two. There we go.
- [48:38]
Alistair Campbell
Okay. I used to, when I was. When I was running, doing marathons and, and stuff, I used to use trees as. Rather than thinking, I've got 10 miles to go, I think I've got to get to that next tree and then I've got to get the next tree. So they, you know, I use them in, in different ways. By the way, literally, while I've been speaking, somebody's pinged me a. A video which I actually did see last night from Talking of trees and Changing the World for the Better, which Sadiq Khan, after 10 years of mayor of London, put out a video, sort of all the sort of stuff he's been involved in. But there's one very, very good example. He set out early to tackle the idea of, you know, air quality in London and asthma and remember all the fuss about Ulez and he was going to lose labor, all these by elections, all that stuff, and he just stuck to his guns. Stick to your guns is always a good policy.
- [49:28]
Rory Stewart
Wonderful. Final question for you, Alistair, from Cameron. You're always recommending books on the show. How do you find time to read all of these books?
- [49:37]
Alistair Campbell
Good question. I think you look at more books than I do. I think.
- [49:42]
Rory Stewart
Well, partly because I've got a Kindle. So if I'm thinking yesterday, I'm about to do a show with Alastair on China, and I spend a lot of time talking about Elbridge Colby, and I've never read his book. I can literally, in the bath in 30 seconds, download Elbridge Colby's book and start reading it.
- [50:00]
Alistair Campbell
And how much of it would you read?
- [50:03]
Rory Stewart
I would probably read the first 40, 50 pages. Partly because those American geopolitics books are slightly set up like an article in Foreign affairs or the Atlantic, where They basically set out their argument in the introduction, in the first chapter. So you can be pretty confident that you've got a sense of where they're going. I wonder whether that isn't actually part of the problem with the loss of those kind of American policy books. We interviewed Ezra Klein, who was talking about his book Abundance. And again, I wonder how many people make it to the end of the book and how many, like me, just kind of get the framing at the beginning and then go around talking about Ezra Klein's buns.
- [50:36]
Alistair Campbell
But you.
- [50:37]
Rory Stewart
You like to finish books, right?
- [50:38]
Alistair Campbell
Well, I don't mind throwing a book away if I. I don't mean literally throw it away, but putting it down if I'm not enjoying it. Fiona. The number of times she'll sort of sit up in bed saying, God, I really hate this book. This. This book is so boring. This book is so crap. This person can't rise or why are you reading? Is because I've started, I've got to go to the end. Whereas if I don't like a book early on, and it's partly because one of the best feelings in the world is when you pick up a book, usually a book you weren't even aware of, because you're in a bookshop or a library or something, and you pick up a book and you know within a few pages that you're really going to like that book. I love that feeling. So if you spend all your time reading books that you're actually not enjoying reading, you minimize the number of times you have that great feeling. I go through phases.
- [51:24]
Rory Stewart
Your serendipity points. Sorry, just quickly, because it'll be my last introduction. But your point about serendipity is important. The problem with Kindle. I'm not browsing. I'm downloading a book that I already know I want. I'm not looking at a bookshelf and finding things. I just, by serendipity, found a book by Henry Power, who's an academic at Exeter called Homer Haunted, which is about his own personal relationship with Homer and the Iliad and its rich and beautiful and strange and quite emotional. And again, it wouldn't be like Elbridge Colby. I wouldn't be downloading it from Kindle. I came across it because I met his sister in the street, then she handed it over.
- [52:04]
Alistair Campbell
Fiona And I've been listening on drives, if we're in the car, we have. We've been listening to Andrew Lowney's book about the Duke and Duchess of York and, my God, Roy, I don't know if you had anything to do with them. They are, they are awful people. I'm sorry if the guy's research is even 60% right. They are truly, truly, truly awful. But it's a. Fiona's loving it. I'm tolerating it because I just think, why are we spending so much time listening about these two clearly awful people? But it's a. Brilliantly. I mean, the research, the depth of research is extraordinary. Here's one you'll like, Rory. Gabrielle Rifkind. You may have come across Gabrielle Rifkind because she works in sort of conflict resolution. She's written a book. The subtitle is Turning Conflict into Connection. But you love the title, how to Agree to Disagree. So it's bang on message for the, for the podcast.
- [52:58]
Rory Stewart
I think Gabrielle spotted something because she keeps sending me little links to it. And I've also been looking at the book a bit. Yeah. So well done, Gabrielle, for picking up this. Yeah.
- [53:07]
Alistair Campbell
It's a book that I'll dip in and out of. I won't read the whole thing because it's actually not about conflict resolution that you and I are very interested in. It's about, it's about marriage and it's about sex and it's about, you know, getting on with your friends and school, bullying and all that. But it's interesting how she's taken her kind of adult, professional life and turned it into a book. And then the other one is by. I mentioned a few weeks ago, Florence Galp, who wrote who's German, wrote a book about where we're going in the future. And I said this book should be translated in English. As a result of which, she sent me her previous book which had been translated into English. It's called the Future A User's Guide. And again, it's sort of. It's kind of how to take what we know about now and, and the past and, and use it as a sort of active tool to navigate the future. So. But I, I've. I'll read both of those. I'll probably dip in and out of. Fiona will make me listen to the end of the Andrew book. God, they are awful already. Did you have anything to do with them?
- [54:06]
Rory Stewart
I'm not gonna get drawn into the.
- [54:09]
Alistair Campbell
Rory.
- [54:09]
Rory Stewart
I didn't. I didn't. I really didn't. I didn't, I didn't, I didn't. I think I've met Prince Andrew twice in my life for five minutes at a party. I mean, I know. Know very little about them, but I
- [54:20]
Alistair Campbell
love the way you deflate anything to do with the rules. Absolutely love it.
- [54:23]
Rory Stewart
Yeah, I did. Totally deflecting that. My. A serious recommendation for people who want a big book to get into, which is geopolitics, which I think I've talked about a little bit, but I think is amazing, is Edward Fishman's choke points, how economic warfare is changing the world. And that's basically about how Trump is now using all America's handle on choke points around the world. Of course, Straight of Hormuz is one big example, but how they developed a lot of that after 9 11, originally going after terrorists and then it began to be something that you could use to put pressure on Europe over Greenland. But anyway, Edward Fisherman choke points.
- [54:59]
Alistair Campbell
Very good. Well, there we are. We've talked about Trump and XI that will. We'll probably talk about that again next week, I imagine. We've talked about Russia, Ukraine and the luring of African men to the front line, which is pretty horrible. We talked about our love for trees. I'm looking at some beautiful trees out the window now, and our books. There we are. Lovely to talk to you, as always.
- [55:20]
Rory Stewart
Lovely talk to you. Have a great week and let's talk soon. Bye bye.
- [55:30]
Gordon Carrera
Why did we really go to war with Iraq?
- [55:33]
David McCloskey
And did Saddam Hussein really have weapons of mass destruction?
- [55:37]
Gordon Carrera
I'm Gordon Carrera, national security journalist.
- [55:40]
David McCloskey
And I'm David McCloskey, author and former CIA analyst. We are the hosts of the Rest Is Classified. And in our latest series, we are telling the true story of one of history's biggest, biggest intelligence failures. Iraq WMD.
- [55:53]
Gordon Carrera
In 2003, the US and UK told the world that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. But they were wrong.
- [56:02]
David McCloskey
This wasn't a simple lie. It was something far more complicated, far more interesting and far more dangerous.
- [56:09]
Gordon Carrera
Spies who believed their sources, politicians who wanted the public to believe in the threat, and a dictator who couldn't prove he'd already destroyed the weapons.
- [56:19]
David McCloskey
In this series, we go deep inside The CIA and MI6, go into the rooms where decisions were made, and look at the sources who fabricated the intelligence that took us to war.
- [56:31]
Gordon Carrera
The Iraq war reshaped the Middle east and permanently weakened public trust in governments and intelligence agencies. And its consequences are still playing out today.
- [56:40]
David McCloskey
Plus, in a Declassified Club exclusive, we are joined by three people who are at the heart of the decision to go to war. Former head of MI6, Richard Dearlove, Tony Blair's former communications director, Alistair Campbell, and former acting head of the CIA, Michael Morell.
- [56:56]
Gordon Carrera
So get the full story by listening to. The rest is classified and subscribing to the Declassified Club. Wherever you get your podcasts.