Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 516. Trump’s Iran Delusion and the Limits of American Power About this episode Why has opposition to the Iran war been so muted within Trump’s America, and how is the US uniquely insulated from the worst impacts of the war? Do American tech billionaires now pose a serious threat to British democracy – alongside Iran, Russia, and China? Should the UK follow in the footsteps of South Australia and ban political donations entirely?
Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more.
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Transcript 10,238 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Rory Stewart? Trump's gone after Iran. Nobody fully expected him to do so. And now they're creating justifications behind it. But they don't add up. It's a war that feels like the risk is taken by the US. The costs are borne elsewhere.
0:14 Alastair Campbell? This is decades of American arrogance coming to a head in the form of this guy.
0:21 Rory Stewart? Why was Iran considered a more important threat than Russia? They have spent colossal sums of money, which could have gone to Ukraine, in this Iran infection.
0:32 Alastair Campbell? It's just madness that we're dealing with at the moment. I honestly think this is a form of madness.
0:45 Alastair Campbell? Welcome to The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.
0:47 Rory Stewart? And me, Rory Stewart.
0:49 Alastair Campbell? And Rory, we're going to talk about Iran inevitably. We're going to talk about what's going on, but also talk about this business of betting on the war. We'll do that in the second half alongside a very interesting report that came out last week by former civil servant Philip Rycroft about trying to clean up the financing of British politics and deal with foreign interference. But on Iran, there is so much to get through. So where do you want to start?
1:13 Rory Stewart? Let me start with the fact that I'm in the US, so I'm speaking to you from Yale. And I have found myself in the last week very aware that I am in a completely different United States. I arrived here, of course, sharing many of your views on Trump and on Iran, and I continue to have those views. But I've walked into a United States in which I'm facing blank incomprehension from a huge range of people. Students, people who are Democrats, moderate Republicans, colonels in the military, academics, they are thinking in a completely different way, talking a totally different language. They don't feel anything like the level of outrage, shock and disgust that we feel about this Iran war.
1:58 Rory Stewart? I was here, for example, when there was a No Kings demonstration going on here in the streets of New Haven. But the sense, it's totally different, I suppose, just to sort of sum up, totally different from my experience. I was in the US during the Afghan and Iraq wars and, again, at a university at Harvard, I'm now at Yale. Then people were deeply interested in the legal justifications of the war, the moral justification of the war. They were very interested in deep conversations about what was going on on the ground, different theories of military strategy and strategy assessment. It doesn't feel like that at all. This is a war where the level of discussion and argumentation is very, very limited. And maybe I'll hand back to you on this. I was
2:42 Rory Stewart? talking to somebody who's a real, really dislikes Trump, is a big Democrat funder. And I said to her, you know, how shocked I was by the Iran war. And she said, I know you're right, right? And look what he's doing to the universities. And that was about all the, all the conversation I got out of it.
2:59 Alastair Campbell? That sort of goes against how it feels from reading the polls. I mean, the polls he is at the moment, as unpopular as any president at this stage of his term, any president in history. The war itself, the Iran war is polling with forty one percent support. World War Two had ninety seven percent, Afghanistan ninety two, even the Iraq war, against which millions of people marched, had seventy six percent support. So it's really, it's really interesting that you're getting that sense. And, and it's true. I, I thought the, the no kings marches were enormous. But a lot of people, I guess, were, they were marching against corruption, they were marching against ICE, they're marching against Trump's kind
3:42 Alastair Campbell? of general conduct and, and bluster. But that's very, very interesting. If you, I mean, you're, you're there and I have no intention of being there. So it's an interesting perspective.
3:51 Rory Stewart? Well, I, I guess it's an example of a situation where the majority of the American public don't support this war. But my sense is that for a range of reasons, people are not focused on the detail of it. They're not outraged by it. You know, when I talk to students, for example, and, you know, obviously when I was here two years ago, many, many people were demonstrating against Gaza and the university was, you know, almost shutting down in bits. They'd block the line of the river. None of that's happening against Trump or against the war, really. And they have different arguments for that. I mean, some of them say, well, it's because we're more focused on ICE. Others say we're just exhausted. Others say we're worried about our
4:32 Rory Stewart? future careers. We don't want to empower the university. But there's also an even more striking sense that if they talk about the war at all, I mean, obviously, I'm generalizing, but I've spoken to huge, very, very long, intense conversations now with dozens of different types of people from academics to serving military officers, to students, to energy experts. They very, very rarely talk about the consequences for the Gulf or Europe or Asia. It's a war that feels like one of the reasons it's not being analyzed properly is that it's moral hazard. It's like the 2008 financial crisis. The risk is taken by the US, the costs are borne elsewhere. And yes, gas prices are going up, but they're
5:16 Rory Stewart? not going up anything like as much as they're going up in the rest of the world. There's no equivalent of the US sitting in the position that Rachel Reeves is sitting at, seeing her public finances in trouble. Absolutely no equivalent to the kind of damage that you're seeing in the Gulf economies or in places like South Korea or Pakistan or Egypt. So it really is no body bags, limited economic repercussions, many other things to think about, and a long way away. So when I say, listen, our whole lives are being upended by this, and Europe and the Gulf and Asia is facing serious financial problems and we're not being consulted, people are a bit surprised. That's not really part of the conversation.
5:55 Alastair Campbell? Well, Rory, what that says to me is that even at the universities, they're perhaps more stupid than we realize. Well, listen, let's take a quick break. And then when we come back, I want to reveal to you the content of an article written in Harper's Magazine in 1952, which I think speaks a lot about what's going on.
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7:27 Alastair Campbell? And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.
7:40 Rory Stewart? I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creve, and of course, the thing flashed up saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN, and it was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.
8:03 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think, are you not already sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?
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8:57 Alastair Campbell? So Rory, have you heard of Dennis Brogan?
9:00 Rory Stewart? Maybe, maybe. Go on, help me.
9:02 Alastair Campbell? Scottish historian, specialist in the United States.
9:06 Rory Stewart? Is it related with this guy called Hugh Brogan? Do you think he could be Hugh Brogan's father? I think it's Hugh Brogan's father.
9:12 Alastair Campbell? Well, we'll check.
9:13 Rory Stewart? Historian who specializes in the US, yeah.
9:15 Alastair Campbell? Well, he wrote a piece in 1952 for Harper's Magazine. The headline was "The Illusion of American Omnipotence." And the illusion he identified is an American worldview that he sums up as follows: "Very many Americans, it seems to me, find it inconceivable that an American policy, announced and carried out by the American government, acting with the support of the American people, does not immediately succeed. If it does not, this, they feel, must be because of stupidity or treason, fools or knaves." And what this does is he talks then of a second illusion. So the first illusion is that they can do anything they want. The second illusion is that if it goes wrong, it has to be somebody
9:57 Alastair Campbell? else's fault. So Trump at the moment thinks Europe's been too weak, the Democrats are, whatever they are, et cetera. Now, what's fascinating about this piece, it was written in the middle of the Korean War. So there's a time where Americans can't understand how their mighty United States is failing against a much weaker enemy. China then was not a superpower, and of course, against North Korea. And he says that there's a four-part pattern. And as he goes through this, this is written in nineteen fifty-two. First, the expectation that whatever they want to happen, they will make it so. Second, shock and anger when reality shows otherwise. Third, a hunt for scapegoats. Fourth, escalation or overt reaction. I think that's where we are now with Iran.
10:41 Alastair Campbell? And it's always why I worry, without worrying our listeners and viewers too much, is why I've always worried that the ultimate reality TV show for this charismatic charlatan is in America using nukes somewhere. Because he can never admit he's got anything wrong, so he always has to keep escalating rather than pulling back. And of course, the reason that this article is endured in the way that I think it has is because there he's writing in the Korean War. But actually, you could relate this to Vietnam, you could relate it to Iraq, and you can definitely relate it to what's going on now in Iran.
11:14 Rory Stewart? I think that's right. There's something, though, about the modern world which has made the pathology, this thing you're describing, even more intense, which is that the consequences are just not felt in the US in the same way. There are two big changes. One of them is a technological change. So the Korean War, you've got hundreds of thousands of American troops deployed, and it's really horrifying war, and these are conscripts who are being killed. This is a war where very, very few body bags are coming home. You know, the American pilots that were killed were actually taken down by friendly fire. And that's partly because we've now got a world where many of the military people I'm engaging with are not really thinking. You can see this even with General Petraeus, who we interviewed some time ago.
11:56 Rory Stewart? If you look at his public statements, he's still focusing a lot on kit, on how amazing their precision missiles are, rather than the big strategic questions around the war. But the second thing that I've noticed is, and then maybe this derives from this, I had a long conversation with a guy who is a Republican foreign affairs policy specialist.
12:17 Rory Stewart? And very close to the Trump administration in and out of the White House all the time. And one of the big changes is there's no longer the kind of risk assessments or comparison of threats that was part of the American psyche in the past. So one simple question, if you, which I keep asking is, why was Iran considered a more important threat than Russia? Right? I mean, you, you can see all these statistics, Russia's taken 20% of the European nation. Russia has resulted in the Ukraine war, 1.2 million casualties. America said, well, we can't afford really to support this war in Ukraine. We need our money for China, we need our missiles for China, but, you know, we're with you.
13:01 Rory Stewart? What they've actually done is that they have spent colossal sums of money, which could have gone to Ukraine in this Iran infection.
13:08 Alastair Campbell? So if you look at the, the spending on these various wars, hundred, right across the four years, 188 billion on the Ukraine war from the United States, and they're asking Congress for another 200 billion. So we're, we're clearly seeing that this war is costing them a hell of a lot more than the war in Ukraine.
13:25 Rory Stewart? That, that's the perfect illustration, isn't it? And as you can see, they're actually firing missiles that could have been supplied to the Ukrainians. In fact, there's been the story that the missiles that the Europeans bought have been redirected and we're not actually getting the missiles that we bought for Ukraine. On the China story, you've got these stories that defence systems are being taken out of Korea and brought back to the Gulf.
13:49 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
13:49 Rory Stewart? So if you say, listen, how can you possibly think Iran posed the kind of threat to the US that Russia does? Or even, how does this sit with your story that what you're doing is tilting towards a specific in China? Of course, they're very smart people, they can produce slick, complicated answers, they can say, well, it's all about a window of opportunity that we can see in three, five years to weaken Iran before we move on to China. But none of it really quite adds up. And after you've been arguing for 45 minutes or an hour, you realise that it's after the event, the decision's been made, Trump's gone after Iran, nobody fully expected him to do so, and now they're creating justifications behind it. But they don't add up. And one of the reasons I think that these two things connect is
14:33 Rory Stewart? that it's a bit like if you were very, very wealthy and you were going into, I don't know, a cornish shop and you bought a candy bar, you probably don't worry too much about what the candy bar tastes like because it doesn't cost very much. And in America that has gone through the shale gas revolution, it's no longer dependent on Middle Eastern oil in the way that other people are. It just doesn't bear the costs in the same way. So it doesn't need to think as hard about basic questions of strategy, such as whether Iran really is or isn't a threat. And the same would apply to Cuba, which I think we'll probably go on to in question time.
15:06 Alastair Campbell? Well, I'm very alarmed, Roy, that in the short time since you've landed there, you're starting to talk about candy. We call it sweets in our country. And it's the English language. But what you're saying, though, doesn't compute with polling. Now, I know polling is only a snapshot and it's done in very different ways. But so, for example, was Trump motivated by distraction from the Epstein files to invade Iran? Fifty-two percent yes, forty percent no. Is that just vanished from the debate? Is that, is literally nobody talking about that now?
15:36 Rory Stewart? I mean, I think that fifty-two percent presumably are mostly, almost overwhelmingly democratic voters. So if I were to say to my father-in-law, mother-in-law, who obviously are going on no-Kings marches, deeply dislike Trump, they would say this is a terrible war. And they would absolutely say, you know, distraction from Epstein, corruption, polymarkets, the kind of stuff we're going into after the break. But what I'm missing is a really strong, detailed conversation with the old policy elite, either the Republican foreign policy analysts, or the professors, or the soldiers, about questions like, how does the threat from Iran compare to the threat from Russia? Or the secondly, the consequences.
16:20 Rory Stewart? I mean, we maybe haven't in the podcast had the time to explain what's happening to economies like Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, even quite advanced economies like South Korea, which are facing simultaneously, energy crises, currency crises, serious problems with their financing.
16:39 Alastair Campbell? Parts of Asia are running out of gas. And I don't mean gas petrol, I mean gas gas. And also Australia has just cut the tax on petrol. Two states are actually giving people free public transport to try and get them out of their cars. Fertiliser, I read a piece in one of the economics magazines the other day saying that the rise in the cost of fertiliser could actually lead to a bigger economic shock even than the oil and gas. So I just don't understand how these people cannot see. Is it because they're so locked into their own country, their own mindset?
17:09 Rory Stewart? It's mostly externalised. I mean, the the honest truth is the American economy is much more insulated from these things than other people, particularly since it started on shale gas.
17:18 Alastair Campbell? But Rory, Rory, let me just come in there. Trump's numbers on the economy are terrible. Minus twenty on doing well in the economy, minus thirty on inflation, lower on economic performance than Biden at any point in his presidency. So I don't understand.
17:31 Rory Stewart? No, no, I agree, I agree, they all think, yeah, I agree, this, I agree. Poor economic performance, but the direct impact of what's happening with the Israeli US strikes on Hormuz, on the US economy is much less than the impact on the rest of us.
17:45 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, no, I get that.
17:46 Rory Stewart? Do you think about it? If you're our friend Rachel Reeves, you are sitting there looking at the fact that your public finances are suddenly in the last four weeks have been thrown into a real mess. British growth has been downgraded by the OECD more than anybody else's growth. I think we've lost nearly one percent of GDP projection growth. Borrowing rates are going up. Her fiscal headroom, her her opportunity to spend on public services shrinking all the time. She's sitting there, it's not a war that she asked for. We're bearing the consequences. Italy's in real trouble financially. So we just, I mean, the consequences for Europe are less intense and elsewhere, but even if you look at Europe, really intense. And they're sitting there thinking, we didn't ask for this war.
18:26 Rory Stewart? The US are demanding to use our bases, our overflights are criticising us for not getting more deeply involved in this war, while our economies are suffering much more than the US economy. And then we're being humiliated, we're being insulted, told that we're not Winston Churchill, encouraged to be like Mark Rutger and get out there and champion the war. So it's, I mean, for for the long term alliance. Trying to get the US to understand how devastating this is if you're Europe, how humiliated you feel, how powerless you feel, how much damage you're experiencing, even more experience in the Gulf. And imagine you're Qatar, you're looking at this thinking, I'm losing billions of dollars of revenue a day, or UAE, which is trying to put a brave face on it, but is very dependent on very over optimistic ideas in UAE that somehow
19:12 Rory Stewart? Trump is going to be able to guarantee the Straits are reopened.
19:15 Alastair Campbell? There was a report this week by a cross party group of MPs and peers, which so far as I saw, got zero coverage, Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy. And it was really, it was very, very interesting because it basically said, we have to face the fact that we may no longer be able to view the United States as a reliable security partner. And we have to prepare for a worst case scenario. Now it sees that as far greater leadership on defence within Europe. But it's all, but even to be saying, this is cross party MPs and members of the House of Lords, even to be saying that we maybe cannot trust America, view it as a reliable ally, is such a shift. And of course, I worry,
20:00 Alastair Campbell? given that you and I have both agreed for some time now that Trump is basically on Putin's side in relation to Ukraine. I think the other thing you maybe have to add together when you put together JD Vance's speech in Munich, Rubio's speech in Munich, the way that Trump speaks about other leaders, Keir Starmer, he's been having a go at Meads this week, the Chancellor of Germany, that actually now they see, they want Europe to be weak. They maybe fear the idea that Europe is the only other power that could become a rival to the United States and China, which of course is what you and I would like to see. So that part of this maybe is deliberate, deliberately weakening Europe.
20:38 Rory Stewart? I think that my sense, and I've been talking to people who are great fans of Elbridge Colby, who's the, the kind of more intellectual Yale Law School graduate Deputy Secretary of Defence, who writes these big books on China. And their sense is a bit different. They basically are a bit like your interview with Mike Pompeo. They take Europe for granted. They think, yeah, okay, Europe may grumble, but in the end, Europe doesn't have any choices. That's something I hear from the big tech giants too. They're like, well, look, you can complain all you like, but you're never going to be able to have the money or the political will or the unity to be able to really become independent to the US. So. You may grumble, but in the end, you'll always side with us. You'll always suck it up.
21:22 Rory Stewart? And their vision of European rearmament is that Europe will still remain completely dependent on US satellites and US intelligence and US AI, but Europe will build more 155 millimeter shells, so sort of conventional old heavy munitions. And that American companies like Lockheed Martin will open European factories because they recognize that, you know, if we're spending all this money, we may want some jobs in Europe, but they'll want American factories to bid for those jobs. And and with us, as with the Gulf, they basically think they will, we'll always come in their slipstream.
22:03 Rory Stewart? America just will do what America thinks is best. America knows what's best. America's gonna, you know, it's taken out Venezuela, it's gonna take out Iran, it's weakening Russia, it's weakening China. Europe, as usual, doesn't thank us for it, but they don't have any alternative and they're gonna come along with us, seems to be the tone.
22:19 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, maybe that is, maybe that fits in with Dennis Brogan and the illusion of omnipotence. It's hard not to feel that within all of the things that's going on in America and some of the things we'll talk about when we get on to corruption is a real sense of arrogance and hubris that they can do absolutely what they want, however they want. And meanwhile, you mentioned Ukraine. Again, barely on the news, Russia carried out the largest aerial attack in a 24 hour period since the start of the war, 948 drones. By the way, Zelensky, I mean, I think he did play a bit of a blinder at the weekend in heading off to the Gulf and and doing these defense deals with the Gulf, which I see he's now being criticized by America for doing it, as it were,
23:01 Alastair Campbell? what they say behind their backs. And the Saudis being criticized.
23:05 Rory Stewart? After Trump really insulted Mohammed bin Salman, I mean, I think.
23:10 Alastair Campbell? Why do you, why do you say the words, Roy? Say the words. I think it comes better from an older Toadian.
23:14 Rory Stewart? Come, what was, what was the, what was the exact phrase? Come, give us the phrase.
23:17 Alastair Campbell? He, he, he basically said that he doesn't want to, but he's basically got to kiss my ass, is what he said. And the Saudis are very upset about that.
23:25 Rory Stewart? Well, yes, because as you can imagine, there are culturalists who's here. I mean, this is talking about somebody else's satisfied in that way. Would be seen much, much more devastating in someone like Saudi than in even in Britain, where, you know.
23:42 Alastair Campbell? It's even worse than the saying he's no Churchill.
23:44 Rory Stewart? It's even worse than saying he's no Churchill, and it's really weird, isn't it?
23:48 Alastair Campbell? Well, it's not really, because it's all of it's all of a piece with who and what he is. He talks like this all the time about everybody, including his own colleagues. I mean, there is lots of rumblings that he's behind, you know, behind the scenes. He's very critical of Vance at the moment, thinks Vance isn't hard enough over on the war. So I think we're seeing, I I I loved reading this piece by this guy, Dennis Brogan, because it really felt like this is this is decades of American arrogance coming to a head in the form of this guy who honestly believes he is sort of some so special creature that if he says something is going to happen, it's going to happen. I'll tell you what's really doing my head in at the moment. If you think about how many times during when Gaza was top of the news every day,
24:33 Alastair Campbell? that we would hear Whitkoff and Kushner are off to see something, they're about to do a deal. Trump says the deal's within reach. Trump says we're about to do this. We're now getting the same in relation to Iran, and it leads the news every time he says it. The BBC the other day covered his entire cabinet live. Night a hundred minutes of him rambling about Sharpie pens and this this sort of competition of sycophancy of his cabinet. It's just madness that we're dealing with at the moment. I I honestly think this is a form of madness. It's a cultural madness, and it sounds to me, Rory, let me just ask you this. These people that you're talking to who don't want to accept that this is terrible for the world. Is there part of them that they just don't want to think and talk about all this?
25:14 Rory Stewart? Yes, I think there's a real sense of exhaustion. There's a real sense of we're so appalled by Trump, we don't really want to think about this. But there's also a sense that America. Look, I mean, I'm being critical of America. It is all the things that we love about America, too. I mean, you know, you it's you go outside, everybody's smiling, it's um it's beautiful, it's many, many parts that are incredibly wealthy and prosperous as long as as well as the big poverty. I was just talking to someone who's just been down in Mississippi and he was just saying, you know, endless towns with churches and people very proud of their towns, but just very insular. I my final thought on this, which struck me is I is I was thinking a lot about Suez,
25:56 Rory Stewart? because there's a weird circular argument going on here, which is the US on the one hand says the reason we had to attack Iran is it was so weak. And now they're saying the reason we have to attack Iran is their response shows they're strong. And then they're saying, well, we can't stop now because Iran has demonstrated it controls the Straits of Hormuz. And my response is, well, it always controlled the Straits of Hormuz. And they're like, yeah, yeah, but once you've seen it, you can't unsee it. You can't allow a country like that to have control over Straits. That was what Britain, France and Israel said with Suez. We said, you know, NASA, this Egyptian nationalist, had taken over Egypt, taken over the Suez Canal. And Britain, France and Egypt said, we can't allow an unfriendly nationalist regime
26:39 Rory Stewart? to take over this vital waterway. So we have to intervene. And of course, when we intervened, America moved against us. And Eisenhower had this amazing line when he basically destroyed our whole operation, which is we cannot subscribe to one law for the weak and one for the strong, one law for those opposing us and one law for those allied to us. And that's what I want to hear people say to Rubio and Vance and Trump. No, you don't get a different law because you're stronger, dear United States. You don't get a different law because you're allied to us, dear United States. And and and the problem is that what they're doing now with the Straits of Hormuz, which is saying this is such a vital waterway,
27:22 Rory Stewart? we cannot allow Iran to exercise territorial sovereignty over its own territorial waters. Is that causes chaos for the Chinese claims on the South China Sea. This raises issues around Turkey's control of the Bosphorus. I mean, America is in a very odd position. It refuses to ratify the UN Convention on Laws of the Sea. But it's trying to claim customary international law as a reason for keeping these straits open while defying international law in every other direction. And so this is really bad stuff. And it gives so many things to people like China to play with if they want to stop American vessels going through the South China Sea.
28:03 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, absolutely. Well, let me just, just before we go to the break, a couple of quick points from me. The first is, I think we don't focus enough on the different objectives of the USA and Israel right now. And we're seeing that in the way that it's playing out in Lebanon. We're seeing it with Israel clearly worried that Trump might end the war before it's, you know, obliterated Iran's ballistic missile program and its ability to develop, develop nuke. So I think that's something worth watching. But the other thing, Rory, did you notice that there were, there was a tour of Russian parliament members in Congress this week? I mean, they are on their side. I mean, I can't, I, I just found it incredible.
28:45 Alastair Campbell? They were being shown around, was shown how nice everything was, and they were being treated with such respect. And meanwhile, congressmen and congresswomen were going in, those who are cleared classified to get, to get classified briefings on the war, including Republicans, were going in to get these briefings and coming out one after the other saying, we don't really know what's going on here. We are very frustrated. We still don't know what the aims are. We still don't know really what the details or the direction of this campaign are. So I still think we're in the, in the place of making up as they go along, everybody bowing down to Trump, whatever he says is right. And it's a recipe for catastrophe. And I think that's what we're living.
29:25 Alastair Campbell? And I'm just shocked. I'm even more shocked that all these people you're with, presumably a lot of the academics and hanging around university campuses, they kind of say, oh, you know, as long as we're okay, it's fine. And who cares about the rest of the world?
29:37 Rory Stewart? Let me just finish on that, because I think a lot of Americans listening to me will be enraged. And, and our mailbox will be full of enraged Americans writing in saying, what the hell are you doing, saying that we're not opposed to Iran war?
29:50 Rory Stewart? I think what I'm trying to say is that, yes, of course, as you say in the opinion polls, people are against it, of course. The majority of people I talk to think Trump's an idiot. What's striking is there just isn't anything like the level of detailed engagement into the strategy. The consequences, nothing compared to what I saw with Iraq, Afghanistan. It's a sense that the American political culture has become much less worried about allies in Europe, much more insular. And part of that is, is just things like the shale gas revolution, the fact that American energy is much less dependent on the Gulf.
30:27 Alastair Campbell? Okay, let's take, take a break and then when we come back, we'll, we'll talk about what was betting that's going on in the war. And related to that, there's this very interesting report written by former civil servant Philip Rycroft on the growing fears about foreign interference in our politics in the UK and what to do about it.
30:45 Rory Stewart? Great, looking forward to it very much. See you after the break.
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31:54 Rory Stewart? Welcome back to The Rest Is Politics with me Rory Stewart.
31:57 Alastair Campbell? And with me, Alastair Campbell. And Rory, I want to talk a little bit about Polymarket. This Polymarket betting has become absolutely enormous. And bear in mind, this is in a country that until not recently, you kind of had to go to Las Vegas to bet. So let me just explain what Polymarket is. It's a global cryptocurrency-based, largely cryptocurrency-based prediction platform that allows you to bet anonymously on the outcomes of events, whether that's a football match, or a ceasefire, or a military attack, or somebody being assassinated. You can bet on the... My favourite bet that I saw on the market this week was you can... 4% of people have got a bet on that Jesus will come back in 2027. So, good odds for that one. And you
32:42 Alastair Campbell? can do this without uploading any form of identity at all.
32:45 Rory Stewart? Can I just interrupt on that? That's a very interesting bet, because if the second coming happens, I think the question around whether or not you get your money back from Polymarket is a bit moot.
32:57 Alastair Campbell? So 4% of people who have bet on the second coming have bet that it's happening in 2027. Now Rory, insider trading, this arises when people know with certainty something that is going to happen at a certain time, something which may move the markets. Hence, as you remember from government days, market-sensitive is a classification upon a lot of government papers.
33:19 Rory Stewart? And just to interrupt for a second, I mean, without sounding too much like Dominic Sandbrook, this is a very, very long story. So Lloyd George's government before the First World War was almost brought down by something called the Marconi scandal, where the cabinet knew in advance, basically, that the British government was about to take a huge stake in Marconi, the radar company. And the chief whip and various others members of the cabinet made massive investments in the shares shortly before the government announcement was made. And it almost brought down the government. So it's been something we've been very, very aware of. In fact, a lot of the novels attacking corruption in British politics in the late 1800s, early 1900s are about ministers and others profiting from inside information
34:04 Rory Stewart? on the markets, on which, back to you.
34:06 Alastair Campbell? So with most betting, so for example, who will win the next election? Or who will win when Scotland go to the World Cup and play Morocco? We can't know. You and I cannot predict, even the players and the managers can't predict. Okay. In football, you're not supposed to bet on teams in which you're directly involved, either for, if you're involved in any game as a manager or a player, you can't bet on that game.
34:29 Rory Stewart? Right, right. So if you're the goalkeeper, you can't bet that the goalkeeper's going to let in four balls.
34:34 Alastair Campbell? No, four goals, Roy. You don't let in four, I mean, you do let in four balls, but you don't call them four balls. Anyway.
34:40 Rory Stewart? You can't do that, is the point.
34:41 Alastair Campbell? No, you can't do that. Some of the big markets, just to give you a flavour of some of the things that are on polymarket. How many times will Elon Musk post a tweet on X over a given period? That is a big market. Now, Elon Musk is the richest man in the world. It's a bloody easy way to get rich if you say, well, I know exactly how many times he's going to post, because I'm not suggesting for one minute he does that. There's a big market.
35:07 Rory Stewart? But it's anonymous, so there would be no way of proving. I mean, I don't think Elon Musk is wasting his time doing this.
35:11 Alastair Campbell? No, he probably isn't, but he might tell his friends.
35:14 Rory Stewart? But if he wanted to, it's anonymous.
35:16 Alastair Campbell? Here's, here's, here's another one. There is a huge market at the moment on when will Donald Trump meet Xi Jinping? Okay.
35:24 Rory Stewart? Right. And this is an anonymous crypto, so there's no way of knowing whether it's actually Trump's secretary making the bet.
35:30 Alastair Campbell? Correct. And we have no evidence that he or she would make that bet. There are a lot of bets made on this market, on Maduro in Venezuela being taken. There's an ongoing dispute about an enormous multimillion bet, which gave the accurate date for what the better called an invasion. But the market is insisting, well, it wasn't an invasion, it was a capture. So you're not getting paid.
35:54 Rory Stewart? So one of the most grisly examples of this is a Israeli journalist who suddenly found himself receiving abusive messages online.
36:02 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
36:03 Rory Stewart? Saying, why did you describe a particular missile event in Israel in a particular way? I want you to redefine the way it's described. And he responds in a relatively calm way initially, saying, well, this is the information we received from the military and this is the kind of missile it was. And it becomes clear that somebody has made a bet. On what kind of missiles going to land and whether or not he gets paid out is being influenced by how the journalist does or does not describe whether what fell with the interceptors or the missile itself.
36:36 Alastair Campbell? And and the reason why, and it was a very, and he wrote, we talked about it a couple of weeks ago, he wrote it in the Times of Israel, and what was interesting was how the level of intimidation upon him grew and grew and grew to the point where he became really quite, really quite scared about his own, his own security. But the point is, there is a lot of betting going on, on when bombs are being fired, where they're landing, the damage they do, when there'll be a ceasefire, when they won't. And of course, the other form of betting is, and this is what happened when Trump announced that he was not going to go ahead with obliterating Iran's energy plans, is shortly before that was this, these massive bets went on, buying and selling of oil at different prices and so forth. So I'd like to think that if this was Britain, Lloyd George notwithstanding, we would, we
37:20 Alastair Campbell? would think, well, hold on a minute, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, they're not going to be doing that sort of stuff. But I regret to say, with the current American administration, your instinct is think, well, yeah, they probably are doing this sort of stuff because they do think they can get away with, with absolutely anything. And the other thing, Rory, the public integrity section of the Justice Department, a recent move by the Trump administration was that it reduced the number of attorneys from thirty to two. So there are now two people in the Department of Justice who are looking at these integrity issues. I just think this is all part of the sense that if you have power and you have money, basically you are entitled to, to go out and get more and, and hang the consequences
38:05 Alastair Campbell? if you have to fly a bit close to the wind.
38:07 Rory Stewart? So, so one of the things you're pointing to here that I hadn't thought about is how on earth is anybody supposed to police this? I mean, if the point is that. The crypto is anonymous and the bets are completely anonymous. How are law enforcement agencies supposed to prove that administration officials are or are not benefiting from insider information in this way? And it's also very weird, isn't it? Because it's also a little bit different from defrauding shareholders or defrauding a bank. What you're doing is you're basically defrauding the other person on the other end of the bet, aren't you?
38:44 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
38:45 Rory Stewart? It's very similar to throwing a fight or throwing a goal.
38:48 Alastair Campbell? You don't know. This is the other thing. If you put loads of money on there, let's say that you'd been successful with your bet that Kamala Harris was going to be president and you owe lots of money by a market, you don't know where that money is coming from. You don't know whose money is actually coming your way and how much of it is going through some sort of money laundering and, you know, washing process. You just don't know because the whole thing can be anonymous.
39:10 Rory Stewart? So just a final one, because we didn't push Nancy Pelosi hard enough on this.
39:14 Alastair Campbell? No, we didn't.
39:15 Rory Stewart? There's an extraordinary set of statistics around her husband's trades, which are massively outperforming the market and many of which seem to have a strong correlation, says he politely, with the kind of information that you might be able to receive if you were on the inside in Congress. And the defence seems to be it's not illegal. In other words, the United States just hasn't put proper legal frameworks in place to try to stop this kind of insider trading, either from Congress on the stock market or now you're saying this polymarket betting on what's happening in a war. Just a reminder, because Alistair mentioned it, this weekend we'll have a Sunday read on the disturbing world of polymarkets and the people who've made tens of thousands from betting on Iran.
39:58 Rory Stewart? Our reporter has interviewed one man who made $20,000 in one day predicting when the Ayatollah would be killed. You'll find that in our Sunday read, our newsletter, this weekend. Sign up via the link in the description below.
40:10 Alastair Campbell? And that leads us, I think, nicely, Roy, to the Rycroft Review. This is the review, report of the independent review into countering foreign financial influence and interference in UK politics. And this was largely prompted by the conviction of Nathan Gill, Reform MEP, former leader in Wales, who's now in jail after pleading guilty to eight counts of accepting Russian bribes. There were 17 recommendations in the report. The big ones are... A cap on political donations from British voters living abroad, one hundred thousand a year, and a moratorium on crypto donations, not a ban, it was being described as a ban, I think it should be a ban, it's a moratorium which says the ban will, quotes, remain in place until the electoral commission in this parliament has satisfied the sufficient
40:55 Alastair Campbell? regulation in place. Let's see where that goes, because I think it should be banned, not least because some of the things we've been talking about in relation to America. But I'll tell you the paragraph, Rory, that really kind of made me sit up, goes back to our early discussions. So it says, "The UK is a target of long-term strategic foreign interference and espionage from Russia, China and Iran, which in different ways seek to further their strategic interests and cause harm to our institutions. Separately, beyond these hostile state threats, I am cognizant of a potential new threat, an emerging willingness of foreign actors and private citizens, including from allies like the United States, to interfere in and influence politics abroad in pursuit of their own agenda."
41:36 Alastair Campbell? I mean, he's basically adding the United States to Russia, China and Iran as forces that we have to be very, very worried about in terms of interference in our democracy.
41:47 Rory Stewart? And partly that's Elon Musk explicitly saying he's going to be funding far-right parties and finding ways of getting money to Tommy Robinson or Rupert Lowe or whoever. The only thing that strikes me is how weird our system of funding is. I wonder how many British voters understand that at the moment you can be a British citizen who doesn't live in the UK, doesn't pay tax in the UK, and you can still funnel money into a political party in Britain. You can also be a non-British citizen, I mean, not have a British passport at all, not even be UK resident for tax purposes, but have a company in the UK and be funneling money into British politics. I mean, I just don't understand how we allowed
42:31 Rory Stewart? that situation to happen, because in many countries in the world, that just can't happen. You know, I complained a lot about funding for Labour and Conservatives and others, but Labour, the problem, was things like trade union funding. The Conservatives... A loss of the funding that we were receiving, I don't know how you'd put a number on it, someone would have to go through the numbers. But was coming in from people who were not residents in the United Kingdom and weren't British citizens. And I'm interested why Philip Rycroft doesn't go further. I mean, why is he saying there's a cap of a hundred thousand? Why is he not saying it's banned entirely? Does he have any reason to say that British citizens who don't live in the UK should be able to give money to political parties? Why should they be able to?
43:14 Alastair Campbell? I think he's referring to people who are on the electoral register in the UK. So you can be living abroad. But if you're on the electoral register, you can you can make donations. I look, I would be much tougher than this. The problem that he goes through, and I think this is probably part of his brief. Was that he's saying there is no public or political support for state funding of political parties.
43:34 Rory Stewart? Is that true?
43:35 Alastair Campbell? I think it probably is true.
43:37 Rory Stewart? Turned out in South Australia that he managed to get that, didn't he?
43:39 Alastair Campbell? It did, it did, it did.
43:41 Rory Stewart? Oh, I bet the polling suggested there wasn't much support before he did it. And then he pulled it off and it turns, I mean, this is why I'm suspicious of polling in general. I mean, it's like your point about the Iran war. I mean, the polling may suggest everyone's disgusted, but if nobody's actually talking about it.
43:53 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
43:54 Rory Stewart? Level of priority is it?
43:55 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, and you're right, Peter Maluskas did get that through. The point about crypto is that because it's developing so fast, its impact on our politics is potentially enormous. Let's just take Reform UK. Reform UK objected to this for obvious reasons because they got ten million quid out of one guy, this crypto guy in Thailand, Christopher Harborn. And it was very, very interesting that the Prime Minister's questions that preceded the Cabinet Minister Steve Reid's statement on the Rycroft report, they staged a walkout. Farage led his MPs out of the chamber, I suspect because they didn't want, he didn't want to be around when the Commons was talking about all this stuff.
44:36 Alastair Campbell? But I watched one of Farage's press conferences the other day, and the production values are extraordinary. Now, that doesn't necessarily win you an election, but what it revealed to me is they have got money to burn right now. And if we don't know where that money's coming from, and the truth is with crypto, you don't know. Because it can be anonymized. And the fact that they have jumped up and down to the extent that they have makes me think that there's something really, really fishy about crypto funding, which I'm glad they've stopped it for now and I hope that they go further. And do you remember when we were in Moldova, or he's interviewing Mayasandu, the Prime Minister? And that guy, I can't remember if you were there, we're talking to one of the security guys about the levels that Russia was going to, to try to influence the outcome of that
45:21 Alastair Campbell? election. And a lot of it was money pouring in via crypto. We have the same thing in Romania, and we're now seeing the same thing in Hungary. If you go to Hungary at the moment, you would think there was an election going on. This campaign largely funded by the Russians, you'd think the election was between Orban and Zelensky and von der Leyen, because there are posters absolutely everywhere. People have been bombarded online with stuff. So the reason I like this report is because I think it's drawing attention to a problem that we probably thus far, this answers your earlier question, why were we allowed this to happen? Because we've always made assumptions that we're not really a corrupt sort of country. And if you read Oliver Bullock, Oliver Bullock has written a lot about financial crime.
46:04 Alastair Campbell? You read his books, London, the UK has done a terrible job at keeping our economy clean, truly terrible.
46:12 Rory Stewart? And then you've got this story that Kwasi Kourting, the former Conservative Chancellor, has now taken over as the Chair of a crypto firm into which Nigel Farage has invested over £200,000, taken a 6% stake. There was reporting, which I don't know whether it's been validated, that Farage would make an enormous amount of money if the company grew to a certain height. And that actually the news around Kwasi Kourting and Farage had helped to get a lot of excitement and money pouring into this crypto firm. But just stepping back for a second, I don't quite understand Philip Ridcroft's statement that there's no public appetite for funding parties and therefore you should allow people
46:57 Rory Stewart? who don't live in the United Kingdom or who aren't British citizens to put in money. I mean, what's the worst case scenario? Let's say you stopped people outside the United Kingdom, living outside the UK or who weren't British passport holders, from putting money to political parties. The parties would just have less money. And then the public could decide whether they're comfortable with the parties having less money to spend on leaflets and advertising, or whether they want to fund it themselves. But I don't see why the fact that the public doesn't support public funding of parties means that we have to take money from people who aren't British citizens resident in the United Kingdom.
47:28 Alastair Campbell? They would argue that, so Christopher Harbaugh, living in Thailand, would argue that he is a British citizen.
47:33 Rory Stewart? But he's not a British citizen living in the United Kingdom. I mean, I'm trying to say there should be two requirements, yeah.
47:37 Alastair Campbell? I suspect that that, that he was following a brief in that. There's a couple of points in the report where he says, "This was not part of my brief, but..." And I wonder whether that was, that was one of them. But I think this is, I think this is a fair start. But I'll tell you something else. When you were on the way to America, I did this, a long interview with Liam Byrne, the Labour MP, who's written this very good book about populism, which is coming, we're doing as a mini-series in the near future. And his team have calculated that one hun- this, this is, funding works in different ways. One hundred and seventy-three million is the total money that has gone into what he calls the UK's populist right media political complex. So this is in particular GB News, The Critic, Unheard, these sort
48:21 Alastair Campbell? of things. We talked recently about GB News and the New World's investigation into them. And likewise, not just Nigel Farage, who's a very wealthy man now because of all his outside earnings, but people like Lee Anderson gets paid by GB News, Jacob Rees-Mogg gets paid by GB News. Now, that can get reported, there is transparency around those payments to those MPs. But there's something weird about 173 million is not money to be sniffed at. It might be in American politics, but in ours, that is a lot of money. And that is, that is the equivalent of funding if you have a political objective in a broadcast media operation.
48:58 Rory Stewart? Well, Anna, I mean, I, listen, we, we've just got to get behind the Malinovsk state funding of political parties. I, it doesn't matter that it's unpopular. It's not that unpopular. It's not going to cost a huge amount. And just roll it through. Because I challenge an incoming government to turn it in the other direction and say, "We're giving up on state funding. We're going to return to a world where somebody living in Thailand can send you..." In making their money in Bitcoin can send $10 million randomly to a political party and completely skew the power between different political parties in Britain. I mean, you know, there can't possibly be any citizen who thinks this is normal or fair.
49:35 Alastair Campbell? It's absurd.
49:36 Rory Stewart? Okay, maybe people don't want to pay money, but we live in a world where we're very suspicious of elites, we're very conscious of, I mean, look, in fact, actually, if I go back to my obsession at the beginning about consequences, there are two paradoxes here which link the point about Iran and the point about Reform and crypto. The first is that this is about people who don't bear the consequence. If you're living in Thailand, you don't bear the consequence directly of what happens. Again, if you're very, very wealthy, you're insulated from most of the consequences of what happens on the street. You don't have the same kind of stake because you're protected. And the second thing is this paradox that these parties like Reform that portray themselves
50:20 Rory Stewart? as being patriotic nationalists are relying on foreign money coming from people domiciled in other countries, right? Chris Harborn has a Thai name, lives in Thailand. This really weird thing about, on the one hand, we're all about, you know, presumably patriotism, blood and soil. On the other hand, we're investing in a completely anonymous, globalised, oligarch, underwritten cryptocurrency platforms to fund our nationalist movement.
50:51 Alastair Campbell? I've just found a bit where it talks about who can and can't. As the 1998 Committee on Standards in Public Life report concluded, it should be confined to those who live, work and carry on business in the United Kingdom. The only exception to this should be British citizens who live abroad but are on the UK electoral register. That is a tricky one. That is a tricky one.
51:10 Rory Stewart? I think certainly my experience of the kind of donations coming into the political parties is that clearly there is a lot of movement there in definition of things like business. You know, one of the suggestions, for example, is that even if Musk couldn't directly contribute, his British registered business could.
51:27 Alastair Campbell? Well, the other point is that, and the report says this, is that there are no AI technologies. That you could end up paying through different anonymised names, just if you have a limit, just go just below the limit and keep doing it with different usernames. I mean, there's so many ways to get around that. That's why I think the easiest thing to do would be to say, crypto, sorry, in our politics, you're having no role whatsoever. But even now, they'll be trying to work out how we get around this. And of course, don't forget a lot of the foreign interference is done through crypto as well. What they told us in Moldova was that Putin and his team would literally pick an oligarch in Russia and say, right, you're funding the anti-Maya Sandu campaign in Moldova. Just get on with it, get the money in there somehow.
52:11 Alastair Campbell? So it's a very, very murky world, but I thought it was a pretty good stab at it. And I hope the government sees it through as the beginning of big reform.
52:20 Rory Stewart? Great, great first stab. Well done, Philip Ridcroft, because remember, until this came through, I think there might have been literally no limit. I think actually you would have been able to have some wealthy individual give 400, 500 million without being in the UK.
52:34 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
52:35 Rory Stewart? But I also don't know why we don't use caps on donation, caps on spending more aggressively. We do caps on spending well in local constituency committees. In the US, there are caps on donations, which were then ruined by this terrible, terrible invention of these political action committees. But caps on donations is also a very logical way to do it. Try to drive it towards, you know, the classic story about the Obama campaign, which is small grassroots donations is a much healthier way of thinking about politics.
53:02 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. Okay, well, question time. Tomorrow, we're going to talk about Cuba. We're going to talk about these very interesting cases on social media in the United States, where Mr Zuckerberg and others got a bit of a whacking. We're getting lots of people continuing to ask us for our cultural recommendations, Rory, so we'll do a bit more of that. And final plug for me, Rory, the interview series that I've done with Liam Byrne, Labour MP, on populism, first episode is out on Friday, this Friday, and if you're a member, you will get that. If you want to become a member, you just go to therestispolitics.com and you'll also get it.
53:40 Rory Stewart? Great, thank you, and it's covered a lot of very disturbing issues about contemporary culture, contemporary money and lack of responsibility and accountability. Thank you very much. See you soon.
53:49 Alastair Campbell? See you soon. Bye bye.
53:51 Rory Stewart? Bye bye.
53:55 Speaker 05 Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig.
53:58 Speaker 06 On October 2nd.
54:00 Speaker 05 Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.
54:04 Speaker 06 Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.
54:12 Speaker 07 What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.
54:16 Speaker 06 With great power comes great deniability.
54:19 Speaker 07 I'm not the first nanny.
54:20 Speaker 06 Digger. See the trailer online. Only eight years, October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.
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