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- [00:02]
Alistair Campbell
What happens to the world when it stops believing American promises, American leadership and stops believing in Donald Trump's boasting of his own greatness? In recent days, we've had some answers. Nuclear Pakistan, oil rich Saudi and Turkey, one of the biggest conventional militaries in the world, coming together to form a new strategic alliance. And with Egypt next in line, it seems talk of an Islamic NATO the Iran war grinds on no end in sight. US munitions seemingly low and that being watched closely and exploited by Russia and by China from Ukraine to Taiwan. And as an explosive laden drone is found inside Leipzig airport as the German government warns of being subject to daily hybrid warfare. U.S. and European intelligence agencies both warning Russia may be about to test NATO's solidarity either with some kind of attack on a Baltic state or or even Poland. August used to be called this silly season because nothing much happened during the summer. Right now, not least with wildfires burning all over Europe, lots is happening, lots of it serious. And all of it is really related to this question. How do we make sense of this ever changing world order?
- [01:22]
Rory Stewart
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Alistair Campbell
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Rory Stewart
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Alistair Campbell
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Rory Stewart
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- [02:36]
Alistair Campbell
And I don't know about you, Rick, I find it exhausting because you spend so much time worrying about spam calls, data tracking you don't quite know to trust.
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Rory Stewart
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- [03:11]
Rory Stewart
That's quite a tribute Alice from you, who we often see as a bit of a tribute act to the analog world.
- [03:17]
Alistair Campbell
To get the best discount off your NORDVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com restispolitics the link is in the episode Description for
- [03:26]
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- [04:34]
Rory Stewart
Welcome to the Restless Politics with me,
- [04:36]
Alistair Campbell
Rory Stewart and me, Alistair Campbell.
- [04:38]
Rory Stewart
And today we will be talking about the development of a new, almost NATO type alliance which has emerged between Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan. We'll be asking what does for the new world which the Trump administration had hoped to bring into being. And then in the second half we'll move on to these hybrid attacks by Russia, particularly a recent drone attack in Leipzig which are testing Germany and indeed the security of Europe and linking that to the broader question of the war between Russia and Ukraine. So a lot to get into, but all of it fundamentally comes down to the question of global peace and global order. Alistair, over to you.
- [05:16]
Alistair Campbell
Well, I found this Saudi, Turkey Pakistan agreement absolutely fascinating. These are countries that don't always get on terribly well. They've had their own spats in in recent years, but they've signed something called the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement. Mohammed bin Salman Saudi, Lieber Erdogan from Turkey and Shahbaz SHARIF PRIME MINISTER OF PAKISTAN GETTING together We can't know that much because weirdly, for something that's been billed as a great new agreement, there's not really a big text of this. What we're going on, essentially, is one line where they basically say that any attack against any of the three states shall be regarded as an attack against them all, because that's what has made people make the link with NATO. NATO Article 5, and attack on one is an attack on all. So I think this is much more of a strategic pitch. And I do think, to go back to the point you just made, this is about them working out how do they adapt to a sense of, for them, America not as reliable as it historically might have been. Iran on the one hand, Israel on the other, being very, very, very powerful within their area. And so these are coming together, and they're essentially saying, look, you know, we are now partners. I mentioned Egypt in the introduction. I think Egypt may be lining up. And again, that's a country that's had some difficulties with some of these new partners. But this, I think, is all a response to, not directly, but the tipping point for this, I think, was America's attack on Iran and the consequences for all of the countries in the region to that.
- [06:50]
Rory Stewart
The interesting thing about what's happened over the last few months is that having US bases and having a US presence in the Middle east for 60, 70 years has been seen as an almost guarantee of protection, almost immunity. Not 100%, but pretty much, that was the idea. You had a US Base, and in return, the US Would protect you. And that began to crack apart with some Houthi attacks from Yemen against some of the Gulf states, which the US didn't initially respond to. That's going back a few years now. Then the Israeli attacks against Qatar. And now, of course, most dramatically, once Iran found itself under attack, it began lashing out at the Gulf states, and the US has really struggled to protect them. That's one big body blow. America is no longer providing protection and immunity. The second thing is that these states have quite a long history, particularly Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, of already cooperating covertly for many, many years now without really discussing it. There have been Pakistani pilots training in Saudi Arabia, actually flying Saudi planes. There have been Pakistani munitions on the ground. Pakistan is basically a military government. So although it's Shahbaz Sharif who signed it, as we often say on the podcast, it's really the chief of the arm staff who has the great whip hand in Pakistan. He's the guy that Goes for intimate lunches with Trump in the Oval Office.
- [08:13]
Alistair Campbell
Just on that, Rory. Asim Munir, the Field Marshal, he was with MBS the day before this all happened. They went off to some religious event together. So, yeah, he is incredibly important in this equation.
- [08:25]
Rory Stewart
The other thing I think is that this is unlike what would have happened if this had happened 20 years ago. The Saudi economy and the Turkish economies are very, very considerable things. Turkey is now one of the real military powers of the world. It's got extraordinary industrial capacity. Its drones programs are impressive. It was very much associated with this Azerbaijani victory in Nagorno Karabakh, and, of course, the victory in Syria, where it was the Turks that backed the new Syrian president as he ruled down against Bashar al Assad. Another wrinkle. Turkey's, of course, a NATO member. So one question in the back of everyone's head is, is there something that could have been done to prevent this happening? This is not ideal. There are some people, I notice in Washington beginning to try to spin it and say, this is exactly what we always wanted, which is people looking after their own affairs and burden sharing. This is not burden sharing, because what happens when you set up something like this is that you lose all the US command and control. Previously, all these countries would have had a very strong relationship with the head of U.S. central Command. People like General Petraeus, these great sort of big, almost, I don't know, Roman potentates who would be sitting down with heads of state and would be running a very, very complex coordinated thing with huge amounts of American assets on the ground working with these countries. This is setting up something which has no U.S. imprint coordination or strategy at all. And that's something that I think should really worry Washington over to you.
- [09:54]
Alistair Campbell
Well, it was fascinating when this thing came out to see the way that the three countries involved, the way that they were framing it and projecting it, because they were all slightly different. And then also the way that other countries were reacting just to give the framing first. So Turkey, as you say, I mean, Turkey's got the second biggest military, second biggest army in NATO after the United States. It's a major military power, part of the Turkish government. Erdogan in particular, when he was signing it, quite keen to say, this does not, as it were, in any way threaten our commitments within NATO. But other voices within Turkey saying, well, actually, this is much more a kind of something that's closer to our coordinated with some of our political and religious beliefs then the Saudis. I got a message from somebody I know in Saudi who said, if you're, if you're confused about what this is all about, check out a guy called Ali Shihabi. I don't know if you know Ali Shihabi. Ali Shihabi is a Saudi commentator who is thought to be very, very close to the Royal Court. It's a bit how some people used to see me when I was a journalist writing about what the Labour Party might be thinking of doing back in the day where we were in opposition. So I checked out Ali Shihabi and he said this. This military alliance reflects a recognition that American deterrence has been significantly weakened and that the Iranian threat will increasingly need to be managed by regional powers. So that goes to the heart of what we, we've been talking about. How are people responding to Trump responding to this very, very different sense of an American foreign policy? And then, of course, Pakistan is fascinating because, you know, Pakistan very much defines its foreign policy in relation to India, and it's India, by the way, it was Indian newspapers that started talking about an Islamic NATO, a Muslim NATO, a Sunni NATO. But the Pakistanis, they, I don't think, want necessarily to be seen as nuclear protectors of Saudi Arabia or of, or of Turkey. So you're then having to work through, what would this mean in practice if, let's say there was another fight between India and Pakistan, Are the Saudis meant to get involved? Are the Turks meant to get involved? Are the Turks and the Pakistanis, why are they not already getting involved in the flare up that started again with the Houthis in Yemen? So I think it's sowing a lot of doubt. And that, I think, is when you say there's no American imprimatur on this, I think they're struggling to work out exactly what this means and why it's come around at this time.
- [12:32]
Rory Stewart
So what it doesn't yet have is what made NATO more than just an alliance of countries, makes NATO an integrated fighting force. And I won't get into all the jargon of the different NATO systems and structures that do this, one of the most famous is a headquarters system called shape. But essentially what this is about is making sure that you really work together under a supreme allied commander to coordinate where your priorities are and make sure this country is providing the trains that country is providing the troops that you're working out, how many munitions you've got, making sure that the caliber of rounds that your rifle's running on are consistent right across all the NATO countries. That's the really complicated, almost software of the system that operates in These headquarter systems that makes NATO so formidable. So far, we're not seeing any of that, really, out of the Saudi, Pakistan, Turkey thing. And then, as you've just said, the big trigger points where the conflicts are likely to come from are conflicts where it's not quite clear that everybody's absolutely aligned. So Turkey and Pakistan have been much more, let's say, soft on Iran than Saudi. Obviously, Pakistan's been doing the negotiations with Iran, so they're not likely to be leaning up to protect Saudi against Iran. Saudi is unlikely to want to be drawn into a war with India. And of course, this Indian point suggests another strange pattern that's emerging because Israel has developed its own alternative network of allies, which are India, Greece, Cyprus, and potentially increasing the uae, as well as some of the states such as Somaliland, that are emerging in the Horn of Africa. There again, it's not burden sharing, it's splintering into these funny regional groups and raises questions. Here's a couple of questions that I got from talking to people in the region. One of them is, why did Egypt not, in the end. Come on. So there's an R4 arrangement which would have included Egypt and Egypt didn't, in the end, join us. Why was there not an attempt to include other countries? It doesn't look, at least from the distance, as though countries like Kuwait or Qatar were at. Were actually invited to join, or Azerbaijan, which might have been pulled into this agreement. Why has Saudi checked out so much recently of the Iran negotiations? MBS and the Saudi team have barely been seen in the negotiations which have been being done by Qatar and Pakistan recently.
- [14:51]
Alistair Campbell
They're the factors that have led to the thinking that has led to this particular alliance forming at this time. And just think about how big a deal this has been for some of them. So if you go back to the Arab Spring, Erdogan, president of Turkey, was. He was backing the protests against the Saudis and they were very, very angry because they saw that as a threat to their whole kind of monarchical system. You mentioned the UAE there. The Saudis and the UAE were fighting Turkey in Libya. They supported Sisi of Egypt, former general, absolute, you know, military figure, who Erdogan in the past has denounced. What's brought those two together? I think it's Gaza and I think we shouldn't underestimate Gaza's role in this. Both Erdogan and Sisi are really worried, not just about what Israel is doing in Gaza, where Erdogan in particular has been very, very, very critical, to the point where lots of Israelis have painted him. I think one of the leadership contenders for the upcoming Israeli election has basically said that Erdogan is an anti Semitic dictator. But both Sisi and Erdogan are on the kind of genocide side of the debate. They're also worried about the attacks that have been on Lebanon and Syria. And so I think that's what's brought them together. But it is, as you say, it is interesting that Egypt's not there, as it were, at stage one. The talk is that they will be joining this at stage two, and that's when it does start to look like a. A much more formed thing. And just on the point about Rory, about shape, and, you know, I have quite a lot of experience of shape because I was working there during the Kosovo war. And it feels like a kind of mini United Nations. I mean, you've got all these countries, all the sort of fighting over who gets the deputy job this and the deputy job that, and how do you balance America's power against the powers of the other countries that are involved? And. But there's this very interesting guy. The reason why I think there's a bit of division going on in Turkey. Erdogan projected this very much not in the NATO Article 5. He talked about Article 51 of the UN Charter, which is the inherent right of everybody to be able to defend themselves. It was the foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, who I think would be great person to talk to on the podcast because he's a fascinating figure. He said, quote, it's technically the same as Article 5 of the NATO treaty. He went on to say there would be a permanent secretariat based in Saudi Arabia, regular committee meetings between the defense ministers, the foreign ministers, and the heads of the military, and said Egypt would join at a later stage because it was a, quote, natural partner. So I don't know whether he is, as it were, pushing the envelope while Erdogan carries on doing the more subtle diplomacy. But I think that was a very, very interesting seeming divide in the Turkish interpretation of this, let me just come
- [17:50]
Rory Stewart
to the thing that I think is the thing that was keeping me awake at night, which is what this means for the world and the big US picture. So you've just pointed to the NATO shape thing. And I think what you saw when you were in Kosovo, and what I think is we're not putting a proper price on, is that what the United States was able to do from the end of the Second World war until about 2016 and in some ways until 2024, was have something which it's almost impossible to put a price on. The US as the global superpower was able to write the strategy for the world, almost every component ally played into an American system and it was only the Americans who had the full global picture. The British tried to do this before the First World War, but it has been many, many decades since France or Britain or Germany has pretended to be able to do what the United States was able to do, which is sit there thinking, okay, we need air defenses in South Korea, we need Patriot missiles for China. We're balancing that with the need for counterinsurgency warfare troops that may have to be deployed in the Middle East. We're having to think about tanks in Russia. This is where our airlift is, this is where our seven fleets are. And they were doing it with European countries which were increasingly large in terms of their expenditure. Trump often boasts that he's increased NATO expenditure and what that's meant is that the US was able to leverage Europeans who were spending about 500 billion a year on defence, with the US pushing towards about 900 billion. If we meet our targets, heading towards 2035, the amount that Europe and Canada, the non US NATO members will be spending will be staggering. Right. We'll be pushing up to probably something approaching 2/3 of US expenditure. All of that relied on the fact that the US could use that it could almost double the size of its own troops. Not quite, but certainly significantly increase its reach. And not just its reach, not just that it was able to use its Western allies for boots on the ground. It could use our bases, which was very important. And we've just seen this with Iran, with the fights over whether or not Spain would allow the US to use bases, whether Britain would allow the US to use bases, could use our bases, could use our intelligence, could use our diplomatic pressure, could use our networks. Now what's happened is that all of that has been destroyed because the US has gone penny wise, pound foolish. Hegseth and Trump appear to see the world in this crazy black and white way where they think, well, what we're going to do is we're going to save some money by removing a US brigade or we will insult the Europeans over Greenland or we won't follow through on our NATO guarantees. And it doesn't matter because we're spending a trillion dollars, we're going to save money in Europe, we'll save money in the Middle east, we'll bring it all home and we'll be stronger. But they're not stronger, they're much weaker because what they can't put a price on is everything that they're losing in terms of their alliances, their influence, their bases, their intelligence, things which would cost much more to rebuild. Now they've lost them.
- [20:56]
Alistair Campbell
Well, I guess. Is that a useful place to talk about what has been the big debate within the US in recent days, which relates to the cost of munitions used and the cost of munitions which they may seek to replace? Because there's something very, very strange going on here. On the one hand, Donald Trump is saying, we're going to hunt down the people who are leaking out this fake news about us not having munitions. And on the other hand, Pete Hexseth is going back to Congress to ask for even more money, because this war is costing so much more than they thought it would when they said they'd be able to sort out the Iranians in days. The other really interesting thing to me that speaks to what you've just said is that Iran, which we say right at the start, has got a greater tolerance threshold for this kind of conflict. I used in the introduction the word. You know, they feel emboldened. And so they've issued a warning, and this was issued by the National Security Council, which is, you know, right at the top of the Islamic Republic regime, said the United States must never again threaten the Islamic Republic. Call for the United States to lift its naval blockade, lift sanctions, withdraw the US Military from around Iran, pay war reparations, release frozen assets, end all attacks on Iran, allies in the region and threats against the country. Now, I think when this whole thing started, if that had been their. I mean, they did all the sort of belligerent war talk stuff, but for them to do that and for it not to land with people like you and me and everybody else saying, well, this is just utterly absurd, I think suggests that Trump is in a much, much worse position in relation to what's happening in Iran than we're being led to believe. And the cost on the munitions, so the wars cost up to sort of 40 billion, the Patriot interceptors. And I mentioned again, there's a link to Ukraine here because, you know, Zelensky's constantly saying, if there's one thing I need, it's the Patriot interceptors. And America's used so many of them in tackling the attacks from Iran that they're kind of running out.
- [23:18]
Rory Stewart
It's really startling. We've covered in the podcast before that the Patriot systems are these exquisite, very expensive systems, a lot of them designed with a lot of Raytheon components which do something very unique that almost nobody else in the world is able to do. And one of them is to intercept these extraordinary ballistic missiles, missiles coming down at hypersonic speeds. And this is really what we were very worried that Ukraine was being deprived of as the US withdrew its support. Because although Ukraine is able to do really good stuff with drones, it doesn't have systems that can hit these very fast moving ballistic missiles. The Patriots have incredible optical equipment and extraordinary designs and nobody in the world has ever been able to replicate how extraordinary these Patriot missile systems are. But America was very worried it was running out of them. Very worried that it was running out of them. Partly because the story had always been that it needed to keep them in the Pacific in case there was a threat from China.
- [24:18]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah.
- [24:18]
Rory Stewart
And the story was it couldn't afford to give these things to Ukraine, couldn't even afford to supply them if Europe wanted to buy them. This was one of the big arguments for the US getting out of Ukraine is because it didn't have enough patriots for China. And then there's been this extraordinary reporting. CSIS has suggested that they have used something like half their Patriot missiles. CNN suggests they may have used 80% of their patriot missiles in Iran. Again, CSIS suggesting of these air defense systems which were in South Korea, they may have used up as much as a third. CNN suggests from reporting inside the Pentagon, it could be 50, 50% of their entire stock. And these are things with a three year lead time and they cost.
- [24:59]
Alistair Campbell
Every time they whack one off, it costs $4 million. And of course, what the Iranians, and this is very relevant to when we get on to talk about Russia, Ukraine, what the Iranians have worked out is they can put a drone up there costing 20 grand, 30 grand, 40 grand, whatever it might be, but it's taking a Patriot interceptor to bring it down. One of the. I go back to my point about exit they love and also about Trump's constant desire to boast about American power. The whole thing has been projected. We are so powerful, we have such military power. This is like, you know, Darlington against Paris St. Germain, but it's not. And the Iranians have worked out just as the Ukrainians as the underdog have worked out against Russia. They've worked out that the way that warfare has changed gives them an advantage when it comes to this kind of big against small warfare. Maybe it's a time era just to give the current episode of leading with Johnny Mercer, the former veterans minister, where I thought he was fascinating about his own life, fascinating about his mental health, but I thought one of the most interesting parts of the interview was when he was talking about his sadness and his kind of bit of anger as well that Al Khan's is not in the government. Al Khan's the former military guy who was defense minister under Keir Starmer. And because he was saying he absolutely gets this, the way that technology is changing warfare and making it harder for the bigger powers sometimes to tackle the so called smaller powers. And I think that's what we're seeing in the battle in Iran right now.
- [26:37]
Rory Stewart
I was just trying again to play devil's advocate with myself and try to make the Republican case, make the Hegseth case.
- [26:45]
Alistair Campbell
Is this happening? You got tired of being infantino spin doctor. You're now going to be spin.
- [26:50]
Rory Stewart
So if, if I were Hexas spin doctor, what they're trying to run at the moment is a story that the United States couldn't afford to pay for the whole world. Other people needed to burden share. Middle east needed to pay for its own defense. Europe needed to pay for its own defense. And this is the story they would spin at you. They would say, well look, turned out that when we withdrew our support from Ukraine and saved ourselves $100 billion, Ukraine didn't collapse. Instead Europe stepped up, footed the bill and Ukraine is still surviving. They would say we had great success in Venezuela. Amazing special forces operation, no soldiers killed. Cuba is now about to collapse and that will be a U.S. foreign policy objective they've had for decades. That they have hit Iran with incredible precision weapons and that they have massively degraded their economy and their strike capacity. They will say that their ally Israel has never been stronger, it's now a regional hegemon, that Syria is now an American ally, that Hamas and Hezbollah are a shadow of their former selves and that the US is about to spend a trillion dollars a year on its defence and it's going to become more and more war ready warrior culture promoting tough guys like Hegseth more and more kill ready to operate. And that Russia didn't manage to defend its allies in Venezuela and in Iran and Syria in the way that people expected. That China has found itself in an awkward position because it's been unable to get its fuel supplies through and also wasn't reliable to support Venezuela or Iran. So paradox is this. Given all of that, what they seem to have done is two things that they went wrong in ways they didn't anticipate. The first is that by saving money they actually weakened themselves for the reasons we were talking about earlier. Because they ended up. Instead of having reliable allies, they changed it from them being a deterrent of last resort, able to use helpful allies, into a world in which they became an exploitative force, weaponizing dependency and just driving their allies away. But the second odd thing is with their enemies, because the actual truth is that they haven't created a more peaceful world. Iran, which they've hit hard, is more dangerous than it was before. Russia feels more dangerous than it was before. China paradoxically feels more dangerous than it was before because the world's been so distracted by this other chaos that actually China can just sit back while America consumes its Patriot missile programs, destroys its allies. So paradoxically, by hitting hard and doing these things, they've actually made their adversaries more desperate, more violent, and hitting them harder than if they'd left them alone in the first place. Over to you.
- [29:27]
Alistair Campbell
Well, I think what you did there though was you highlighted the difference between a political communications case which can be made, and you made that in a way that Hexith probably would make it. But the longer term strategic questions are not operating in America's favor. I do think there's an element to which Trump became so emboldened by the speed of the operation in Venezuela, the relative success of it, the fact that Delsey Rodriguez then came in and is sort of more or less doing the Americans bidding. We said right at the start, Iran is a completely different level of opponent. I also think that maybe the other thing I you talk about what keeps you awake at night. We've talked a little bit in recent weeks about nuclear proliferation. I just wonder on this Saudi, Pakistan, Turkey deal, the extent to which the Pakistan is the only Muslim nation with nukes is a factor or isn't a factor. I can remember back in the day, there's this guy, you will know who I'm talking about, that everybody called a Q. A Q Khan was the Pakistani nuclear physicist and engineer who was broadly known as the father of the Pakistan nuclear weapon. And when he died, I think he died about five, six years ago, he was celebrated, his nickname was the savior of the nation, etc. Etc. Etc. And I can remember post 9 11, for example, I remember all the meetings that we had with intelligence. Tony Blair would always at some point say, what's AQ up to? What do we know about aq? What's he up to? He was this sort of giant figure within the nuclear debate. When we think about Pakistan's nuclear weapons, I think we tend to think of them in terms of Pakistan, India, Kashmir and that very, very Tense, difficult relationship. Does this bring Saudi and Turkey under a nuclear umbrella? Now, I don't know the answer to that. My sense is that they're trying to play that down. But I think it's another reason why this became such a big thing when these three countries came together and announced this, for all the different framing that they put on it.
- [31:41]
Rory Stewart
And it connects to the story that we were covering two weeks ago, which was this story that the US Was suddenly going to allow Saudi Arabia to enrich uranium, which is part of the precursor to its own nuclear weapons program, potentially, although they framed it as civilian. And again, you heard voices from Washington saying this looks like America's got reckless and is giving Saudi a nuclear weapon. But the reason we have to do it is that if we don't, other people will. And the implication was that China now is in a position to provide a civilian nuclear program or maybe, as you say, Pakistan. And this, again, is balance of power. I mean, I was thinking about the fact that there are you and Tony Blair sitting around a table talking about this stuff. One of the big changes is the relationship between countries like Britain and countries like Turkey and Saudi Arabia since 1989. So since 1989, the British economy has broadly grown three or four times larger. The economies of Saudi Arabia and Turkey are 15 times larger. They were in 1989. So one of the reasons why the US is now having to make concessions that it never would have considered doing when you were in office is that Saudi is so much wealthier, has so many more options. And China, of course, has much more capacity to build civilian nuclear programs. So the ability of everybody to shop around and not be dependent on the US Is much greater, which is why it's even more reckless and mad that the US Rather than leaning into these relationships, treasuring them, bringing people ever closer to themselves, decided to weaponize them at a time when there are alternatives out there.
- [33:13]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah. And I also. I was surprised. So we had some pretty interesting reactions to this new alliance from India. The Indian government, as opposed to the Indian media, was playing it down a bit. They were being very restrained. And I think that was their way of saying, we don't see this as Riyadh. The Saudis having left us, okay, Because. So they didn't inflame it. They didn't, in a way, give Pakistan what they probably wanted. The Iranians likewise was they weren't that angry. There were some politicians of lower orders who came out and said, you know, this is pathetic. The foreign minister used it to talk about the importance of Muslim unity. When Muslims stand together, we can face every challenge by malicious outsiders head on. Israel we've talked about, but there wasn't much from Europe. And I feel that, you know, remember when we talked to Alexander Stubbs, the president of Finland, and we were talking about what a new Europe might look like and what, and what a developing European defense architecture might look like, he talked about Ukraine and Turkey. So I was a bit alarmed that there was almost like a, this was, this was seen as a policy of interest to the United States and the countries involved in their regions as opposed to Europe.
- [34:20]
Rory Stewart
That's exactly right. So if we were completely right and you're right, we should have got there earlier if we are really caring about shaping a middle power future. Europe, Canada, UK et cetera. It should have been Europe working out how to bring Turkey on side, potentially Saudi Arabia, Qatar, into a middle power alliance rather than allowing it to chip off into yet another kind of micro alliance that the dream has to be us, China and a bigger European Western led alliance that hopefully brings in places like Turkey and Saudi rather than sending them out into yet another spinning bloc.
- [34:57]
Alistair Campbell
Well, listen, should we take a break and then come back, talk about all sorts of interesting things going on in Europe related to Russia and also Ukraine and the Johnny Mercer interview that I mentioned, which I really do recommend to people. Just search rest is politics leading wherever you get your podcast? There's all sorts of reasons why it's worth listening to, but some of them relate to what we've just been talking about. And when we come back we'll talk about Russia, Ukraine and some very interesting things going on in relation to drone warfare, drone politics and even drone organized crime.
- [35:31]
Rory Stewart
This episode is brought to you by Lloyds. Now we live in a world which is completely saturated with information, social media, podcasts, data.
- [35:40]
Alistair Campbell
I think in politics now in public life, I think one of the worst things is that politicians just dealing with such a volume of messages of information. So I guess information overload is a real issue and it's whether you can analyze that and manage that in a way that works for you.
- [35:58]
Rory Stewart
Yeah, and I suppose it's the same true with your personal finances. And Lloyds provides a bit of assistance on this. So they've got something called Explore your spending in the Lloyds app. It's AI powered and it helps you make sense of your spending by answering some pretty straightforward questions around your personal finances. You can ask questions, get answers in plain English, receive personalized insights to help you make more informed choices. Based on the data that Lloyds has and of course it's discreet. And you're getting that confidential advice from Lloyds.
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Alistair Campbell
It's app features like this that make 14 million people bank on Lloyds. For more, head over to Spending Insights in your app to try it out.
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- [37:10]
Rory Stewart
Buyer's remorse. Buy a new car. I'll be moving in. Let's get started.
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Sorry, I think there's been a mistake. I bought it from Carvana.
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Rory Stewart
You what?
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Alistair Campbell
Yeah, great price.
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Rory Stewart
I guess I'll let myself out. Congratulations.
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Alistair Campbell
I mean it.
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- [37:43]
Alistair Campbell
Welcome back to the rest of Politics
- [37:45]
Rory Stewart
with me, Aleister Campbell and me, Rory Stewart.
- [37:46]
Alistair Campbell
So Rory, we talked a lot about this Pakistan, Saudi, Turkey deal and we mentioned that, you know, there is a relation here to Russia, Ukraine. I'll just put that into context. In the words of President Zelenskyy, he said this week that the number of air defense missiles being provided to Ukraine by Western allies has dropped threefold this year, 2026, compared with the same period of 2026 on Wednesday. Just take one day last week there were 28 missiles fired by Russia that the Ukrainians failed to intercept. 17 deaths. And Zelenskyy unsurprisingly said they could have saved the lives of those killed today. Now bound to say that, etc. But it's just, you know, real life consequences for America, which under Biden in particular was giving a lot of this kind of military support when the Americans are now having to use it elsewhere. It means less for Ukraine.
- [38:36]
Rory Stewart
Yeah, sorry, just a technical point on that. Just again to bring it home because we talked about this a lot where Ukraine is very powerful and I think you're going to get onto this is on countering drones, things like the Shahed system which is this Iranian drone. These are quite slow moving systems and the Ukrainians are the world's pioneers in quite cheap solutions to taking out those cheap drones. But they have a much more, much bigger problem with these ballistic missiles that Russia produce in much smaller numbers, maybe 70amonth, which come hurtling out of space at many times the speed of sound. And there it's only these Patriot missile systems that are able to do three different things. They're able to have the radar to identify them. They're able to have the compute to do these incredible calculations on exactly how they're turning and moving, and then the precision motors to allow them to actually intercept. They often strike them straight on in order to detonate them in the air, and that's what Ukraine has not been able to do. Trump was talking about giving Ukraine the technology to manufacture these stuff themselves. And as usual with Trump, he's now backtracked and said he's not sure that's a very good idea.
- [39:43]
Alistair Campbell
The other interesting development on the kind of Ukrainian strategic front is they are now going much deeper into Russia in all sorts of different ways. And I've been fascinated by these attacks on wild berries, which wildberries is. This is sometimes called the Russian Amazon. So this is like an online platform where you can buy all sorts of stuff. And Ukraine is claiming it's a military target because lots of the stuff that wild bearers is responsible for is ending up at the front line. But that's them taking this whole thing into the economic sphere as well as the military sphere. And then the other thing we. We should maybe talk about in relation to drones, Rory, Lots of stuff going on. So for. First of all, a Leipzig airport bus driver is wandering around Leipzig Airport, and he looks out his window and he thinks, that's very odd. I've never seen one of those before. It turns out to be a drone. It's absolutely laden with explosives, and it's not far from a place where a lot of Western stuff is being delivered to Ukraine.
- [40:39]
Rory Stewart
And did you get these. Am I right that he sort of somehow stopped it with his hand or he.
- [40:44]
Alistair Campbell
He certainly went off and realized that something. This was not right, and he'd never see what it should be here. So he certainly fiddled around with it, which terrifies me, the thought of it.
- [40:53]
Rory Stewart
We haven't got the exact details, I think, released by the German government yet, but it seems to have been a quadcopter, which is not a large thing, depending on whether it's the sort of thing that you buy for your kids or a more commercial thing. You're still probably talking about something that you can hold in your hands but seems to have had explosives in it. Over to you.
- [41:11]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah. And I think we should both agree, Roy, do not buy one of these for your kids. That would be a very, very, very bad thing to do. So there's that going on. There's the German Interior Minister saying in all sorts of ways we're facing hybrid attacks most days left, right and centre. We've then had the Lithuanians warning, they say that, and presumably based on intelligence, but basically saying that Russia is considering putting together a false flag attack against critical infrastructure in the Baltics using Ukrainian drones. This is why this was. There was another event this week where a drone landed and went off very near to the border between Romania and Bulgaria, very close to a very important gas pipeline, as yet not entirely established the provenance thereof. It seems the one in Leipzig, people are pretty certain that the Russians somehow got that there. You're assuming an airport, pretty tight security, what have you. But they got one in there and then the other thing which I think is.
- [42:11]
Rory Stewart
Sorry, sorry, but you were just saying that. And I think this is the connection, isn't it, that the one that was found in Bulgaria seems to have been Ukrainian. And then again the question is, is this a Ukrainian drone that's gone off track? And we've seen a bit of that actually as far away as the Baltic. Occasionally reports of Ukrainian drones going off track or whether it's, as you say, the Russians beginning to use Ukrainian drones themselves.
- [42:31]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah, as I say, I don't think there's 100% clear yet, but the initial indications of the Bulgarian government is that this is likely Ukrainian which either went astray or was being used for the wrong purposes. But what it does show is that this relates to the discussion we had in the first half is that drone warfare now is transforming the nature of real life battles, including between major powers.
- [42:56]
Rory Stewart
Can I just. On this. It's a really weird phenomenon, isn't it? Because you're completely right, it's very worrying, but it's not worrying in the way that you might first think if you were to say to people, russian drone warfare, hybrid warfare against Europe. They would probably, I guess, imagine something on an enormous scale. Huge coordinated cyber attacks, rail attacks, road attacks, airport attacks. And that's not what we're seeing. What we're seeing is every few months something happening. So Leipzig, Hull, I think this is the second time this airport, which is the key logistics hub for DHL and does quite a lot of supply into Ukraine has been targeted. We've seen these drones going into Scandinavia, we've seen the Poles responding, but these are things at pretty small scale. Happening, as I say, every few weeks or months. Then we've seen this. This phenomenon of sabotage attacks. So you talked about the firebombing attack on Keir Starmer's house. You've seen attacks on warehouses. There was an assassination attempt against the head of Rheinmetall. But again, these have tended to be, it seems, people recruited on telegram, paid a few thousand euro and pretty incompetently delivered. So what's going on? Well, what this isn't is a phase zero pre campaign for the invasion of Lithuania. This is not. Not the Russian intelligence services releasing SOE during the Second World War, setting Europe ablaze before an invasion. It seems to be something else. And what exactly is it? Well, one theory is that what they're doing is that they're testing European defences and response times. So they found out, for example, in Denmark that these drones are not spotted by the military, they're spotted by civilians walking their dogs. They found out that Friedrich Metz takes about two months before he's able to identify a Russian is behind something. They find out they can get there stuff into Leipzig, they can fly stuff from shadow fleets. But I'm not sure that that's the key because my sense is, if you were the Russian intelligence services, you probably would have guessed already that drones are pretty ambiguous and that European government's going to struggle to identify them and struggle to identify who sent them around. Here's my theory. One of the things I think possibly going on is that these are training exercises, that the GRU is keeping a capacity. A gru, the military intelligence, keeping a capacity going, thinking, well, why don't we try, we've got the shadow fleets out there, why don't we try flying some drones? Let's. Let's see whether this telegram mechanism works. What happens if we offer a few thousand euros to someone to do something? You are exercising a muscle and in the process you're also doing something else, which is that you're forcing European governments to spend an incredible amount of money trying to work out how to defend against these things. That's the version of your story around how Iran does cheat drones and then gets struck by millions of dollars. So there's a question. How does Europe get the reaction? Right, because it might suit the Kremlin if we ended up spending tens of billions of dollars putting together very, very complex defense mechanisms against the quadcopter that you can buy for $800 on Amazon.
- [45:58]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah, well, there was that. That debate was raging within the German politics and media on the back of this quadcopter being found inside the airport. You know, we all know that airports are. You have to go through security. It can be very bulls aching. It got increased after 9, 11, and you know, for the freight, it's even the security should be even tighter. Often isn't. So there was a debate, how did this happen? How did this thing get through? And you then have politicians all running off saying, we should be doing this, we should be doing that. It costs this, it costs that. And we're talking about a, you know, pretty, pretty big scale here. So just the ones that have been cited. In the two months after the one that shut down two airports in Scandinavia, it was almost 100 sightings across 15 NATO countries. Germany and Belgium, of the two that seemed to be most targeted. Germany probably because it's the biggest country in Europe, and Belgium, possibly because that's where NATO shape headquarters that we talked about earlier is based. And meanwhile, there was this phrase I read, which I think does explain partly why they keep doing this in the way that they do it. And the phrase was provoking a collective anxiety attack. It's not just about making the politicians feel they've got a problem with hands. It's making all of us feel worried, anxious, nervous, and that then gives the Russians the upper hand. If you think about the invasion of Ukraine itself, the buildup was huge. You know, we were talking about it for days and weeks beforehand. I even wonder sometimes people talk about that amazing American intelligence operation to get their plans. Part of me wonders whether the Russians were actually, you know, not that fussed about that because it was building the levels of, of anxiety. So I think this is something that we haven't got our heads around. Back to the point about what Johnny Mercer was saying in the leading interview about Al Khan's being on top of this. The nature of a war in 2026 is so different to war even 10, 20 years ago, let alone the Second World War. That still defines for much of our political debate, how we think about modern
- [48:00]
Rory Stewart
warfare, getting the right reaction and understanding what the Russian limits are and why they're doing so little as well as so much. I mean, I keep trying to sort of get my head around this because, as you say, it's a lot of sightings, but it's definitely not yet at a level where it's panicking European publics. I don't think it's puzzling generals, it's worrying policymakers, but it's not killing people. I mean, we're not. We haven't seen, I think in. I think I'm running. In four years, nobody in Europe's been killed by any of these. These Russian operations. Now, part of that must be that they're very aware that they don't want to actually provoke a more aggressive European response. So I think they're taking a certain amount of risk. One of the stupid things if they're flying these drones off the Shadow Fleet, is that might lead Europe to do what it should have done a long time ago, which is finally just shut down the Shadow fleet, These illegal vehicles smuggling Russian oil out, from which these drones seem to be being flown. Europe hasn't yet followed through on confiscating this $200 billion of Russian assets. It uses the interest from it but it's still held off taking the full Russian assets. NATO hasn't deployed a headquarters forward into Ukraine. So there's quite a lot of things, quite a lot of pain Russia would experience if you were able to point a smoking gun and say, oi. You've actually literally here is a Russian connection to doing something that's genuinely big and particular. I suppose they'll be worried about alienating Washington. I'm also interested in whether there isn't, and this is something we never quite know. What's the boundary between the Russians being very, very smart and controlled. Compared to the possibility that gru, Russian military intelligence is actually quite incompetent. Are there limits to its capacity? Has there been a real impact on its capacity from shutting down many of the formal intelligence diplomats that were in the Russian consulates and embassies across Europe? Does that make it more difficult for them to coordinate? I wouldn't over push that because my sense is Russia is a big place and if it wants to do more, it can do much. We're just getting a glimpse of a capacity that could be 100 times greater.
- [49:59]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah. But I think if you, if you listen to the kind of the fairly neutral voices that try to cover the main battlefield. Ukraine is killing a lot of Russians with and not least through its better use of drones. We're talking in terms of Russian loss, losses something like 30,000 men a month. Ukraine and that. You've got to be careful with all the figures. But Ukraine just on that one.
- [50:21]
Rory Stewart
Sorry. I mean, you're completely right. That is one of the figures out there. What we do know is there are hundreds of thousands of casualties. Pinning down exactly how many are killed and how many wounded is quite tough.
- [50:30]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah. And that they're having to go back to some pretty brutal tactics to get Russian men to the front line and that is bound over time. I know we've been saying this for four years now. Surely that is bound over time to sort of hit morale both on the front line and at home, where everybody now knows somebody, knows somebody who's lost their life or certainly knows somebody who is close to somebody who's lost their life on the front line. Rory, I mentioned organized crime. There's this. I don't know if you saw this extraordinary story about Colombia, and I'm sure you noticed, by the way, that one of the few dignitaries who went to the swearing in of the new Colombian president was your Fregiardi Infantino. He was there with the, with the right wing leaders of Latin America. So this is the story. I think it was the Financial Times that had this. The Colombian drug dealers or drug business people have been sending people to Ukraine to fight, you know, because it's a war and people can go and fight. And they say they support the Ukrainian cause. But in part what they're doing is trying to learn from the way that the Colombia that the Ukrainians are using drones because they use drones in their armed conflict to protect their industry in, in Colombia. I mean, you talk about unintended conspiracy, consequences of warfare.
- [51:45]
Rory Stewart
I didn't understand this until I sat down with somebody who's a former British intelligence guy and then a former British Special Forces guy talking about something which I think is really shocking and maybe we should dig into more and expose more, which is the number of former British intelligence and Special forces people and Americans and Europeans in general, who are operating as mercenaries on the front lines in Yemen and across the Horn of Africa and in Sudan, coordinating exactly these kinds of drone attacks and are being drawn into some of the most horrendous human rights abuses in the world. I mean, we talk about UAE supporting the actions of Hameti in Sudan and this genocide that happened in an attack on a town last year. But there are foreign, including UK mercenaries right up there at the front line operating these drones, operating the killer systems, coordinating, controlling, not always on the ground with the guns. And some very interesting moral questions. I was trying to push this guy. You know, what do you think when the people you're allied with just go and massacre thousands of women and children in a town? And I was very, very troubled by the response, which is, I think there's a real moral blindness. I think some of these guys, and I'm not saying as, yeah, uniquely British, there are French there, there are Americans there, there are Colombians there. I mean, interestingly, Latin American mercenaries are very common they're relatively affordable. They can be deployed quite easily. Just shrug their shoulders and say, well, everybody does it. Both sides are just as bad as each other. I mean, this whole world of drones technology is spilling out of Ukraine so quickly. The front line in Sudan is much more high tech now than people understand. It's not just a rag bag of child soldiers with AK47s. There are people really there with fancy computers, bits of kit, and fancy drones, which are either Iranian drones or Turkish drones or Ukrainian drones or Russian drones. Learning from these systems, from drug wars right the way through to genocide in Africa.
- [53:52]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah, it underlines the point we're making throughout this episode that technology is changing the nature of warfare. Technology has changed the nature of organized crime over the last decade or 2. But in 24, 25, the government, Colombian government, estimates that these cartels launched 264 drone attacks quite cheap, usually dropping explosives on enemies. And the enemies might be other cartels or it might be the security forces. Colombia says it managed to neutralize most of them, 96%, either through jamming them or through destroying them. But the 4% that get through can do an awful lot of damage. But just think about that. There's you and I very, very supportive of Ukraine. Ukraine wants to have support from around the world, politically and militarily, and including volunteers who go there. And here they are, they're going there, some of them, to take back expertise that they then use to carry on killing people through drugs.
- [54:48]
Rory Stewart
And the line between domestic surveillance and war is becoming smaller and smaller. You talked about the killing of the Hamas leader, and many people will have actually seen the video caught by the Israeli drone. I mean, it literally hovers, goes into the building, and you can see him wounded in the building shortly before he's shot. So the experience on the ground in Gaza, and actually for many people on the west bank now, is these drones very, very close to you, following you around, monitoring you and making you feel that you could be killed at any moment. And, and let's add the final thing to this, which is AI because so much of what's happening at the front line between Russia and Ukraine is about shortening the kill chain, which is this slightly sinister phrase for how do you make a decision more quickly to pull the trigger? And how do you make these machines autonomous so that they can't be jammed? The jamming gets between the operator and the drone in the sky. And if you give these drones independence, they don't have to communicate with the operator and they can't be jammed as easily. And we may find that it may not be in Israel, may not be in Russia, Ukraine, maybe at frontlines as places like Sudan, where people start hacking and using AI systems to take humans out of the kill chain entirely and where we'll first see these drones just flying around making their own decisions about who to kill and when.
- [56:11]
Alistair Campbell
Well, Rory, maybe that's a good place to end and to trail Question time tomorrow, because one of the things we're going to be talking about is prisons. And the last time I was inside a prison, one of the things they were briefing me on was the use of of drones. They were having to tackle the drones being used to smuggle in drugs and telephones and very sophisticated operations going on inside prisons using drones to get stuff into the prisoners. I thought that was a very neat and useful segue. We're also going to be talking about the right wing of politics more generally. How do the Tories restore Britain and reform deal with each other? We're going to talk about Abdul Al Said, who's just won this primary in Michigan and what that says about the future of the Democrats. And I want to talk about the River Rhine because I am very, very, very alarmed about what's happening in the River Rhine.
- [57:01]
Rory Stewart
Good. Looking forward to it very much.
- [57:02]
Alistair Campbell
See you then.
- [57:03]
Rory Stewart
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- [57:34]
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