Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 508. Is Starmer Sleepwalking into War with Iran? About this episode Is Keir Starmer sleepwalking into a war Britain never agreed to fight? What are Trump's real objectives in attacking Iran? How far will Iran's retaliation go?
Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more.
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Transcript 12,144 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Alastair Campbell? That is chaos.
0:01 Rory Stewart? It's chaos which has been triggered by the US and Israel's actions.
0:05 Alastair Campbell? Iran at the moment is whacking off missiles at a fairly sizable number of places in one of the most volatile regions of the world. If that was Russia doing that today, we would basically be saying that this is now a world war.
0:19 Rory Stewart? You've got this extraordinary move from Starmer. What I fear he's done is he's managed to piss off both of them. I don't think we've won any credit from the US for doing that.
0:26 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, but it's not about winning credit. I don't see that it's about winning credit.
0:29 Rory Stewart? No, no, because this is what the national interest is about here. Let's be blunt. The UK is not protecting its citizens by getting involved in this war. The UK is endangering its citizens by getting involved in this war.
0:40 Alastair Campbell? You're being both naive and unfair because it's so easy to sit on the sidelines and say, I wouldn't do that.
0:54 Alastair Campbell? Welcome to The Rest of Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.
0:57 Rory Stewart? And with me, Rory Stewart.
0:58 Alastair Campbell? I think it's fairly obvious what we talk about on the main podcast this week. Rory, what do you think?
1:01 Rory Stewart? We're going to talk about Iran. Look, there are a lot of different dimensions. I'd love to know where you'd want to start. So one of them is how different international leaders are responding. So Britain, France, Germany, Canada. Second is what's happening on the ground in Iran. Third is what's happening in terms of Iranian response attacks on Dubai. And fourth immediately strikes me is the broader story of what Israel is doing simultaneously in Lebanon, Gaza, elsewhere. But what's caught your attention at the moment? Where do you want to start?
1:31 Alastair Campbell? I mean, I think you're right. Maybe the one I would add to that is what this all says about the state of America and the state of American politics and American leadership, especially now that Donald Trump has decided that even Keir Starmer has to get a whacking for not agreeing with every single word that he says and every single thing that he does. I'd like to start, Rory. Do you remember when we interviewed Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State? And I told him during the interview that, I told you, because you weren't there at the event, that we'd had that question of the audience, which is the greatest threat to global stability, the United States or China? And he looked absolutely gobsmacked that the answer was the United States. Okay. Now, if memory serves me right, this was pre-Greeland.
2:11 Rory Stewart? Yep.
2:12 Alastair Campbell? And it was certainly pre all this that we're living through now. But I wonder what in a... Educated audience, the answer to that question in most parts of the world would be right now, because it seems to me that what has been unleashed, you you you made this point on the very first episode we did on Saturday about the the the strikes, that unless you have some sense of clarity about what you're trying to achieve and how you're trying to achieve it, then there is a danger in any of these situations that they go off in directions that you simply cannot predict, let alone control. And I worry that that's where we are right now. And I was I was actually talking to Alexander Stubb, who is our next
2:54 Alastair Campbell? guest on Leading next week, and I was talking to him about something this morning. And we're making the point that he's got this thing about, you know, the global south is where the power is going to come from in the future. We're still very much focused on the on the west. But Iran at the moment is whacking off missiles at, you know, a fairly sizable number of places in one of the most volatile regions of the world. If that was Russia doing that today, say to Estonia, Moldova, Lithuania, Poland, we would basically be saying that this is now a world war. Okay. So and if you just think so right now, you have missiles in in, you know, and neither you and I are ever going
3:37 Alastair Campbell? to say a kind word about the Iranian Islamic Republic regime. But Hexis yesterday said, we didn't start this war. Well, no, but this particular phase, you certainly did. And the direct response has been the launch of missiles and drones at Israel, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Cyprus, which is the current president of the European Union, and also shutting down the the shutting down the Strait of Hormuz through which one fifth of all oil supplies flow. That is chaos. That is chaos in anybody's language.
4:14 Rory Stewart? And I think the first thing to start with is that it's chaos which has been triggered by the US and Israel's actions. This was not happening last week. It's happening because they chose to attack Iran and kill Khamenei. Now, that's a horrible regime. It's a threat to its people. It's massacre tens of thousands of its own people. The Iranian regime is incredibly unpopular. However, it was in the middle of negotiating and it did not pose a immediate threat, certainly not to the United States. It didn't pose an immediate threat to Israel. In fact, actually, as we've discovered, the ability of the Iranian regime now, in the short term, to actually hurt people is relatively limited. And one of the reasons why it's not like Russia is that it just can't do the type of damage shot by shot
4:59 Rory Stewart? that it could. In fact, the only thing that's actually created this situation is this attack, their decision to launch an attack. Now, this is where you get to these very, very strange questions about what the US thinks it's doing. So you have that Hegseth statement. And again, we'll put, I think, in the newsletter some links to, if people haven't seen it, the Hegseth interviews, the Rubio interviews, the Trump interviews.
5:24 Alastair Campbell? All saying different things about what they're trying to achieve.
5:26 Rory Stewart? Exactly. That's exactly my point. Rubio says, we're going to continue doing this until we've achieved our objectives and that's going to go on for a long time. Well, what are those objectives, right? And you get completely different accounts.
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6:33 Rory Stewart? This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.
6:35 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.
6:48 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.
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8:04 Alastair Campbell? Just before you leave Rubio, he also said, and I can't believe that he didn't realise what he was saying with this. He said that the reason that the United States got involved is because they knew that Israel were going to attack. And they knew that that would mean that America would come under attack as a result of it. We said the other day, we thought Netanyahu was maybe driving this more than... Than Trump, but he seemed to confirm that.
8:29 Rory Stewart? Well, there seems to be very little doubt in this. There's a good New York Times piece interviewing lots of people in the White House, essentially tracing this decision back to a visit from Netanyahu. And the story is Netanyahu's been pushing Trump for a long time to do this. We've been saying on this podcast that we've been expecting Netanyahu to do something again against Iran. He's been obsessed with the idea of taking out Iran for 40 years, and this will have seemed to Netanyahu as the greatest opportunity he would ever have, because it would be the most friendly American government he could ever have, so he wants to strike Iran. Iran has never been weaker, and America has never been more supportive of Israel. So why would Netanyahu not do it? Also, he's got, you know, this may not be the major thing driving him. I think he genuinely believes
9:08 Rory Stewart? that taking out Iran's capacity is his historical legacy, but it's also true that he's coming up for an election, and he has turned around his political fortunes, partly through this momentum of military operations. Again, but it's not very surprising to discover Rubio saying this, because what do we know about the last American attack on Iran? Well, effectively, what happened that time is that America, again, was in the middle of negotiating with Iran. Israel attacked. The initial instinct seemed to have been from Trump to criticize Netanyahu, and then he changed a dime and said, well, if Israel's going to do it anyway, why don't we join in and get the credit for it? Launched this great operation, and within about
9:49 Rory Stewart? 48 hours, it flipped from I'm telling Netanyahu not to do it, from I'm going along with him to do it. So I think, yet again, that that seems to be a big driver. Obviously, they can't quite stop that.
10:01 Rory Stewart? Because, as you say, there's a contradiction Rubio's statement. Rubio says, you know, we've got these clear objectives, and we're going to continue till we've completed their objectives. If the objective was just, we don't want to be embarrassed by Israel doing something without us, so we'll come along with them. Well, that that objective's been achieved. So what are they doing now? What are they trying to do? Rubio tells us what he claims they're not trying to do. He says, you know, it'd be lovely if there was regime change, but that's not what this is about. This is about their ballisticness elsewhere.
10:26 Alastair Campbell? With Trump, it was before.
10:27 Rory Stewart? Right. And then you get all these other statements. I mean, Hex's speech is worth watching, because it's a very odd speech. I mean, it begins with a First line is a blatant lie. We didn't start this war. Well, obviously, they started this war, right? There's no sense at all. I mean, and the Pentagon itself has now, there's something odd happening inside the US administration. The Pentagon then itself briefed out against the US cabinet, saying there was absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Iran was about to launch an attack against the United States. That wasn't the reason why this thing happened, right?
10:58 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
10:59 Rory Stewart? So Hegseth says, we didn't start this war. And then the speech is very odd. Sometimes he sounds like a news anchor. Sometimes he sounds like a mid-level American officer giving a rah rah speech to his troops. And sometimes he sounds like a kind of high school debater, taking an extremely unpopular weird position for the sake of a debating championship, just putting one side of the case.
11:21 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, as he spoke, and particularly when he's doing the Q and A and sort of attacking reporters for daring to ask him questions. I sort of felt Michael Gove on steroids. I felt Michael Gove in there. Well, you're right. It was a sort of debating thing. I'm not saying that Michael Gove is a lot cleverer than Pete Hegseth, but let me just read you a few of the things he said. And I think one day we may hear these words at a tribunal in an investigation into this war. Regardless of what so-called international institutions say, right? So-called international institutions. So that's a way of saying, all you lot bleating on or clutching pearls, as he called it, about international law. We don't give a shit, okay? Regardless of what so-called international institutions say.
12:04 Alastair Campbell? Europe, United Nations, the whole lot of you, fuck off. No stupid rules of engagement. No nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars. No stupid rules of engagement. I'm not sure if it's the same in the United States, but I'm pretty sure that in the UK. We'll come on to Ikea Starmer said he wouldn't take part in this first phase of this. I'm pretty sure you have to have clear rules of engagement if you're the military. You have to know what you're fighting for. You have to have clarity about the rules of engagement. So no, what he's basically saying is that all rules of engagement are stupid. All rules of engagement. We can do what we want.
12:45 Rory Stewart? It's mad. I guess the most his defenders might say is that it's rhetorical exaggeration and he doesn't mean it. But as a statement from a US Secretary of War, it's mad. I mean, we've had these things called rules of engagement since the Middle Ages. I mean, that's what actually the whole of chivalry was about, was developing rules of war. Right in the middle of the English and French tearing bits out of each other, they began trying to set rules. They always follow them, but they set rules about what you did with combatants, with civilians under siege of populism, what warfare was about, right? What's the Nuremberg Trials about? The Nuremberg Trials and what are the Geneva Conventions about? I mean, all these things are about the same thing. They're about trying to define something very difficult, right? I mean, you can understand why people get frustrated with it and annoyed with it.
13:30 Rory Stewart? Yes, war is about killing people and you're doing something very difficult, which is trying to say, yes, it's about killing people. But within certain conditions and laws, certain kinds of things you don't do.
13:40 Alastair Campbell? That's why he says so-called international institutions. So when you mention this convention and Vienna this and Geneva that and San Francisco that. These MAGA people or the the Hexeth people, they just roll their eyes and basically say, you're weak, lily livered. And the insults, I think it's probably worth just briefly coming to the kind of insults of allies. Cause we've seen this before. We saw it most horribly when Trump said, yeah, they'll say they sent a few to Afghanistan, but they never went to the front line. He had to, he had to row back on that. But Hexeth was talking, I think he had Britain in mind. When he said, you know, our, when our traditional allies are wringing their hands and clutching their pearls.
14:24 Alastair Campbell? Then Donald Trump, I mean, as if you'd think he was busy, right? To have time to talk to the Daily Telegraph and the Sun, two kind of right wing propaganda rags. And basically attack the British Prime Minister, knowing that the right wing propaganda rags will absolutely love that. And I'd love to ask them sometimes, because they keep asking us, whose side are you on? I'm on Britain's side always. Whose side are they on? Anybody who damages the current British administration. You know, we talked to Gavin Newsom on leading this week and I thought he and Mark Carney, I think, they are showing the way in how to deal with this guy. I think Kier really does have to stand up to this. I felt when he slagged off Sadiq Khan in front of Keir Starmer a while back,
15:08 Alastair Campbell? Kier pushed back a little bit, he said he's a friend of mine. But I actually think he needs to be told in terms, stop fucking interfering in other countries' politics. We don't do it to you. If you want us to do it, then actually, we all get together, we can do you quite a lot of damage. Because he is now treating everybody with contempt unless they are absolutely slavish to his agenda.
15:27 Rory Stewart? Let's move on to that. The second elephant is the very, very disappointing response from all the other international leaders. So Mark Carney set us up in Davos for an idea that we were going to try to think about what it would be to have a foreign policy and an agreement of middle powers, independent of the US, that we weren't just going to be the tail of a Trump dog. What that was supposed to be, I thought, was that we were going to develop some forms of kind of strategic vision. We were going to decide what our threats were, we were going to decide what our principles were, we were going to build our own defence capacity together. And we were going to take a view on the world. I mean, maybe not always the same, but roughly speaking, the hope is Canada, UK, Europe,
16:12 Rory Stewart? begin to speak with something more like a single voice. And of course, what we've seen with this Iran adventure is the most humiliating mess, which will be absolutely feeding Americans who think we can be completely ignored and we're so pathetic that we couldn't organise the piss-up in a brewery. We've seen Canada came straight out of the traps with a much more supportive statement for what Trump was doing, hours before the European leaders spoke. And as far as I can see, I don't, I have no idea, but I can see no evidence at all that Mark Carney even picked up the phone to find out what the British, French or German position was. He was on a completely different time zone and immediately put out a reaction, which fundamentally seemed to say. Iran is an evil regime, end of.
16:54 Rory Stewart? Then we had this very interesting statement that came out, joint Britain, France, Germany, which was a bit more promising, sounded like the E3 had finally got their acts together, and they were setting out a relatively thoughtful, cautious, principled view, which included references to international law. And this was on Saturday, and the European Commission seemed to be roughly on that side, too. Fast forward 24 hours, the whole thing falls to pieces. You've got this extraordinary move from Starmer, which, you know, whatever the details, the legal position, seems really weird. It looks like he took a risky decision on Saturday to step against Trump and say he thinks this war is illegal and reckless.
17:35 Rory Stewart? And then on Sunday, his position shifts slightly, and he says, actually, UK bases can be used, for whatever reason. It seems something pretty miraculous, right? He manages to piss off Trump on Saturday, and then piss off most of the left on Sunday.
17:47 Alastair Campbell? Well, no, I don't think he is right, because I think he, what he said was, when he said, we will give the Americans permission to use two bases, Fairford and Diego Garcia, it was in relation to defensive operations. When you said, you can use them for whatever you like. Now, Trump may decide that's the green light, so to do, but that's not what was agreed.
18:06 Rory Stewart? If I said that he said he could use them whatever he liked, I don't think I did say that, I apologize. But I think it's a really weird bit of political signalling.
18:13 Alastair Campbell? Okay.
18:14 Rory Stewart? If your view on Saturday is, we're not joining this war, and there are very good reasons not to join this, well, let me put one of them. If you start getting involved in this war, you become a legitimate target for Iran and Iranian terrorist attacks against Britain.
18:26 Alastair Campbell? Since when they fired drones at an IRA base in Cyprus?
18:29 Rory Stewart? Exactly. You start saying, we're going to be part of this war, even if it's only for defensive operations from two bases, you've blurred that line suddenly.
18:36 Alastair Campbell? Maybe.
18:37 Rory Stewart? Suddenly, Britain's security is now more at risk.
18:39 Alastair Campbell? Okay, I actually do think there is a logic to what he did. And actually, if you think about the history of US, UK relations, the relations between presidents and prime ministers, and you've been critical of Keir trying to be too close to Trump, I've tried to kind of maybe understand it. I thought he was very clear that he doesn't want to say the words, and I heard Darren Jones being interviewed this morning, they're desperate to say the words, we think the initial action was illegal, by the way, which clearly they do. What they've said was, they have been given advice. By the Attorney General that there was no legal basis for the UK to take part in that initial attack, okay?
19:19 Alastair Campbell? They think there is a legal basis to take part in defensive operations where UK interests have come under attack, which they have. And so, look, I think this underlines just how bloody hard this is, logistically, practically and politically. But I actually hope, my hope out of this is that, because I watched a lot of the statement in Parliament yesterday, and I think, I don't know if you saw it, I think if you had, you'd have felt actually Keir Starmer was really pushing back at the Americans in a way that thus far he has not. He was essentially saying that, and he didn't want to say in these terms, but essentially he was saying that so far as he is concerned, the UK will not take part in military action that it does not believe to have a legal basis.
20:02 Alastair Campbell? And Rory, look at the reaction there's been, look at the reaction there's been from Trump. Why has he phoned up The Sun and The Telegraph?
20:08 Rory Stewart? Yeah, well, that's why I think it's the worst of all worlds.
20:10 Alastair Campbell? Well, maybe.
20:11 Rory Stewart? I think it's really bizarre. I think people were quite proud of him on Saturday, actually quite proud of Merz on Saturday. I mean, there was a brief moment when it looked like at least Britain, France and Germany were taking what I think is the correct position, which only the Spanish government has really laid out, which is you can say this is a really evil horrendous Iranian regime and you can also say this is an illegal reckless war that we want to have nothing to do with. So that's the correct position, I think, right?
20:36 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, that's you.
20:37 Rory Stewart? And they came pretty close to that on Saturday.
20:39 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
20:40 Rory Stewart? And then on Sunday, right, we'll come back to Starmer in a second. I mean, I think at the very least, it's a communications disaster, you know, whatever else it is. I think most people in Britain who on Saturday were thinking, thank God, this guy stepped out of the war.
20:52 Alastair Campbell? Hmm.
20:53 Rory Stewart? Then think on Sunday, oh my God, Starmer's changed his mind, now we're involved in this in some way because we're allowing him use as basis for defensive operations and now we're legitimate target for the Iranians. Suddenly you've gone from Saturday where Reform and the Conservatives are saying, you know, you're weak and ill delivered, to saying at last, you know, Starmer's got with the programme, better late than never, thank goodness, he's now letting the basis.
21:15 Alastair Campbell? Well, they're not saying that, they're really not saying that.
21:16 Rory Stewart? That's what they were saying on Sunday. That's what they were saying on Sunday, and now by Wednesday, it's all shifted again.
21:20 Alastair Campbell? Okay, no, but I, I. I do honestly, Laurie.
21:24 Rory Stewart? I think you're too clear. I think literally everybody that I've spoken to over the last few days is just thinks Starmer is in a complete mess.
21:32 Alastair Campbell? No, he's in a bind, which is a different thing. I would say that I think you are showing the difference between being commentator and player. Keir Starmer is having to make the actual decisions about this. Let's take Sanchez. We're going to be speaking to Sanchez quite soon. Now, I agree from the position that I laid, that you and I laid out on Saturday, his was the clearest and you and I can both say, yeah, I want to hear that. What happens in the next few days if in Dubai, an Iranian missile lands on a five star hotel and a Spanish football team gets taken out? Okay. You've got to think through where you might need these alliances. You have to play a little bit shades of grey. I think Keir Starmer
22:15 Alastair Campbell? on day one, on day one, I think he pushed the boat out as far as he's pushed it thus far, basically saying to Trump, there's no legal basis, we're not taking part. Okay? That's quite a big message to put out when you think of the history of the US, UK in these war situations. Day two, when you've got drones flying at Cyprus and you've got the Cypriot president phoning Keir Starmer saying, what the fuck is going on here? And they're the current president of the European Union. I think that does change things a little bit and you have to adapt to that. You can say it's a communication. If there was a communications issue, it is that he, if you like, he communicated both with the same sense of gravity and the same tone for them.
22:56 Rory Stewart? What's the result? Let's, let's step back for a minute and say, let's say we're thinking about UK national interest.
23:02 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
23:02 Rory Stewart? The UK national interest basically in this is you don't want to be making an enemy of the US because the US can make life very uncomfortable for you.
23:11 Alastair Campbell? Correct.
23:12 Rory Stewart? And you don't want to be making an enemy of Iran because Iran can cause chaos in the British streets. So you make your call, right? It's a very difficult call.
23:20 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
23:21 Rory Stewart? But what I fear he's done is he's managed to piss off both of them.
23:24 Alastair Campbell? I'm not sure about that.
23:24 Rory Stewart? He's taken a position on the US, which he hasn't turned around by his decision on Sunday. I don't think the US particularly thank him for having come out, said their wars are legal.
23:33 Alastair Campbell? No, Trump says he took too long.
23:34 Rory Stewart? Then on Sunday said, by the way, you can use my airfields for defensive purposes. I don't think we've won any credit from the US for doing that.
23:40 Alastair Campbell? But it's not about winning credit. I don't see that it's about winning credit.
23:42 Rory Stewart? Well, no, no, because this is what the national interest is about here. Let's be blunt, right?
23:46 Alastair Campbell? Right, so you said.
23:47 Rory Stewart? The UK is not protecting its citizens by getting involved in this war. The UK is endangering its citizens by getting involved in its war. In what way are we making the United Kingdom safer by making ourselves part of a coalition against Iran?
24:00 Alastair Campbell? Well, one, we have not joined that war against Iran. But when you have upwards of more than a quarter of a million people, Brits, in that region, you are going to have to deploy some British assets to be part of an operation to take out the potential threat against them. And that's what they're doing. I don't think, I think you.
24:20 Rory Stewart? I don't even understand this. What are you, what are you saying? Have we joined it or not? Are we, are we fighting or aren't we? What are we doing?
24:25 Alastair Campbell? We, we've had.
24:26 Rory Stewart? You seem to be suggesting we are fighting. Although we're not joining the coalition, we are fighting. We're not, we are, what are we doing here?
24:31 Alastair Campbell? They've got, Roy, I think you're being, honestly, I think you're being ridiculous on this. I think you're so determined, basically to say that the position that you hold, which is we should have nothing to do with this, is so right that anybody who disagrees.
24:43 Rory Stewart? It's the Spanish position. It's the correct position.
24:45 Alastair Campbell? That is the Spanish position. No, it's the correct position in your view. It's your view that it's correct, okay? You're not the prime minister, you're not the cabinet, having to sit there thinking, okay, first day, we are pretty clear. There's no legal basis, but we don't want to say that because that's going to piss off big Donald in the White House, but we're not taking part. That pisses him off anyway, okay? But it pisses him off maybe a little bit less. Day two, they actually feel, not least when they see drones coming in on Cyprus, and they then see, I just listed 14 countries where they're whacking off missiles. Britain cannot just sort of sit that out. It's doing so from a defensive perspective. I was in Ukraine last week, right? We talked about Ukraine.
25:27 Alastair Campbell? I'll tell you one place where this is going to do real damage to our relations with the United States in relation to Ukraine. Because. Oil, the oil price is going to go up because that's a real factor. Trump probably won't have thought about it, but it's going to go up and Russia is going to start to make more money. At some point in the coming weeks, we're going to have to go back to Trump and say, please don't pull the plug on the intelligence. What Sanchez has done is quite easy for Sanchez to do. I think for the British Prime Minister or the French President or the German Chancellor, we'll see what Merz says in Germany today, they are riding quite a few horses at the same time. And the clarity that you're calling for, I think is totally naive.
26:05 Rory Stewart? We're not going to agree on Starmer because obviously you have a very different position on this. I think he's made a huge mistake and I think he's ended up in the worst of all worlds. I think he's pissed off both the US and the Iranians with very little benefit for Britain and I don't think Britain will be safe as a result.
26:18 Alastair Campbell? We pissed off the Iranians for the entirety of our existence. I wouldn't worry too much about that. Where you're right is he doesn't want to, he doesn't want the Yanks to be falling ours and he doesn't want the Iranians to be whacking off missiles. If the Iranians saw an opportunity tomorrow to take out a few Brits somewhere, they would do it. British forces have to be alive and alert to that. Our intelligence agencies have to be alive and alert to that. And if something happened in the next few days, Rory, if something happened that hit Britain's interests, you just watched the avalanche against Keir Starmer.
26:50 Rory Stewart? And how will his decision to let the Americans fly from Diego Garcia make any difference to that?
26:55 Alastair Campbell? I don't know that it will. I don't know because, you know, we'll have to see.
26:58 Rory Stewart? Well, you seem to be suggesting somehow that's relevant to the question of how we respond when Iran attacks British troops. I just don't see why he needed to do that.
27:05 Alastair Campbell? Look, he's asked first time, he says no. He's asked second time and he says yes for these limited purposes in which we're going to be participating ourselves, defensive operations against threats to us. Right. You felt, you don't want to see that there may become circumstances where that becomes the right decision, not the wrong decision. It's not black and white this.
27:28 Rory Stewart? I don't think any of these things are black and white. We're just being asked to use our judgment here.
27:31 Alastair Campbell? But you're saying there are, you're saying there's one decision.
27:33 Rory Stewart? But you're defending him, you're defending him, you're defending him very strongly here, Alistair. You're not saying it's a difficult decision.
27:38 Alastair Campbell? I am saying it's a difficult decision.
27:39 Rory Stewart? You're giving us the talking points, essentially, for the cabinet. That's their view, right?
27:43 Alastair Campbell? No, no, Rory, don't insult me.
27:44 Rory Stewart? Well, let's hear some criticism then.
27:46 Alastair Campbell? Okay.
27:46 Rory Stewart? If you're seeing this balance.
27:48 Alastair Campbell? Rory, we're having an agreeable disagreement because I think you're being both naive and unfair. You're being naive because it's so easy to sit on the sidelines and say, I wouldn't do that. I'd be like Sanchez.
28:00 Rory Stewart? Why is that naive, Alison? What's naive? Let's just follow this through. Okay.
28:03 Alastair Campbell? I've explained to you. I've explained to you why I think it's naive.
28:05 Rory Stewart? You make a big call on Saturday. It's a difficult call. It's a principal call. You hold to that call.
28:12 Alastair Campbell? You hold to that call.
28:13 Rory Stewart? And a drone comes into Cyprus, you hold to that call. It's not that difficult.
28:17 Alastair Campbell? And then, and then somebody else happens, and then somebody else happens, and then somebody else happens.
28:21 Rory Stewart? Look, if events change, if events change, maybe you have to change your mind, but you don't have to do it on Sunday.
28:26 Alastair Campbell? Okay, okay. You can say that. Let me tell you why I think it's naive. Because I think Sanchez's position is easier to take than to see through if and when. We've started, we started this podcast talking about how unpredictable this now is, and about how dangerous and how difficult it is. There will come a point through the next weeks and months where we will need all sorts of different allies in this equation. We will need the French, we will need the Germans, we may well, we will need the Americans at some point. I think you are wanting, I've said this the last time we talked about this, you're wanting the Hugh Grant moment where he basically says what we say, Trump, you're an evil bastard, go away, leave us alone. I'd like to hear a bit of that. I'd like
29:09 Alastair Campbell? to hear a bit of that. I said to you, I wish he would have absolutely called him out over slagging off Sadiq Khan. I wished he would say when he came out against what Trump said on Afghanistan, I would like here Starmer to have done it sooner and to have done it harder. We are not in the same position that we were. I guess the reason I'm defending, I'm not doing the talking points, I'm defending him because I, I think he's in a really, really, really tough spot at a time when most of our media and most of the opposition, I think, and let me tell you, Rory, I think Farage and Badenoch have made a massive mistake in my view by not giving any thought other than the idea that Trump may be right. You think Trump has to be wrong. I'm saying if you're the British Prime Minister, you have
29:53 Alastair Campbell? to weigh things up in the round, you're going to get attacked, whatever you do, and I think you're being very, very unfair. In saying that he got it right day one, got it totally wrong and he's ended up in the worst of all worlds. Let's see where it goes. And I think if you read Hansard from yesterday, you would have a sense of somebody who reacted in the way that he did day one, thought about it a bit more. Day two, I think was in a better, more rounded position and that's what we saw yesterday.
30:19 Rory Stewart? Well, Alistair, listen, that was quite a tough, difficult conversation, where maybe we weren't always, certainly I wasn't always modelling the best example of disagreeing agreeably, for which apologies. So let's take a little break. In exchange, Alistair, I want to do a little plugging for you, which is you're doing a great show with Anthony Scaramucci in Belfast. So while we take it down a turn or two, time for a quick break and encourage people to get some tickets, a couple of tickets still left for the Belfast show, which should be fantastic.
30:49 Alastair Campbell? That's on Friday, Dublin's on Thursday, massively sold out with a huge waiting list. Belfast, you've got half a front row left, so see you there. And the link is in the description.
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31:30 Speaker 04 Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.
31:41 Speaker 05 Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.
31:47 Speaker 06 What would happen if I stopped going? You stall, you freeze in there, that's what.
31:51 Speaker 05 With great power comes great deniability.
31:54 Speaker 06 I'm not the first then.
31:55 Speaker 05 Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17 not a minute without parent.
32:06 Rory Stewart? Okay, we're clearly not going to agree on Starmer's decision. And Metz, I think that is even more disappointing, shocking. I mean, Metz has come out in a statement and a speech essentially saying we shouldn't worry too much about international law. That's a catastrophic thing for the Chancellor to say because what is our position on Ukraine? What is our position on Greenland? It's about international law. International law is messy, sure. It's hypocritical. There's always a conflict between morality and international law. There's always rail politic. There's always this kind of stuff. But it embeds the basic idea, which is that you cannot just get out of bed in the morning and say this is a nasty regime and therefore I'm going after it.
32:49 Rory Stewart? And it embeds an idea that you need to be cautious. And we can get on to talking about what we think is going to happen in Iran after this. But many, many of the scenarios are horrendous. And it's extraordinary that with this opportunity, which I felt existed for these middle powers to actually articulate a non-Trumpian foreign policy, to really explain what their worldview was, we have the German Chancellor essentially saying that international law isn't that important.
33:19 Alastair Campbell? I will agree with you on that. And I did think his statement was off. And I also think it was probably because as we speak, I think he's in Washington now and he's going to be the first world leader to sit down with Trump since this thinghole happened. That may have calibrated. Add it to which Germany is, as we've said many, many times on the podcast before, is always instinctively way, way closer to Israel than a lot of other European countries are, not least Spain that we've talked about. I think that this point though about international law. David Wolfson, Shadow Attorney General, he wrote a long piece and he hits back at Keir Starmer, Richard Herrmann, the Attorney General's position that the first, that if the UK had been involved in the first way, that that would have somehow been against international law.
34:05 Alastair Campbell? And he said some really interesting things. What he said, and when you read the argument in full, he is using his interpretation of international law to say why it would have been perfectly justifiable for the UK to be involved and we should have been involved. That's the Conservative Party position. It's the Nigel Farage position. And he says international law ought to provide a mechanism to restrain and if necessary end despotic and tyrannical regimes such as that in Iran. If the doctrines of international law prove unable to restrain Iranian terrorism and mass murder and tie the hands of democracies while forcing them to stand and watch Iranian atrocities, international law will have failed. And what that says to me is that on any side of these things, you will find people
34:46 Alastair Campbell? who will use their interpretation of international law to suit a political position. Okay. We got accused of doing that in relation to Iraq and paid a very heavy political price for it. I would argue that he's doing something very, very similar with this.
35:02 Rory Stewart? Yeah, well, on Wolfson, I think it's completely shocking that a shadow attorney general can take that position. I mean, international law ought to provide a mechanism. Well, it either does or it doesn't.
35:14 Alastair Campbell? Hmm.
35:16 Rory Stewart? He then goes on to say, if the doctrines of international law prove unable to do what he wants to do, then international law will have failed.
35:23 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. So he's in Mertz's position.
35:25 Rory Stewart? He then says, the inherent right to use force in the face of an imminent attack from a hostile nation. What is that imminent attack?
35:34 Alastair Campbell? There wasn't one.
35:35 Rory Stewart? So the whole point about the judgment on that is you need to show that it's, they have the capacity to do real harm and they're about to do it. It didn't meet that evidentiary standard.
35:45 Alastair Campbell? I totally agree. I totally agree.
35:47 Rory Stewart? I can't understand how someone as distinguished as David Wolfson can end up taking this position. It's completely bizarre. I literally, there's not a single international lawyer in the world who can make an, and Trump isn't even attempting to make an international legal argument. Israel isn't even attempting to make an international legal argument. So why is Wolfson making it for them?
36:08 Alastair Campbell? Because what he and Farage and Tice and Badenot, what they are doing.
36:14 Alastair Campbell? Is saying international law isn't like other sorts of laws where it's clear or it should be clear. It's really complicated. It's very, very political. It's how we interpret it. Give you another example. Paragraph five of his statement. The UK and also the US is permitted under international law to use force to aid another state which is enacting in self-defense. So he's trying to say America's under attack, which you and I, let's not fall out again, Rory. You and I agree there was no self-defense going on here. This is a war of choice. He then goes on. Moreover, the UK is under an obligation in international law to prevent genocide, not just to stop it. Stopping an ongoing genocide is required, but it necessarily means the action was taken too late. And as I read that, I thought, bloody hell.
36:56 Alastair Campbell? If we're to talk about, he's basically saying Iran wants to commit genocide against Israel. Okay. We had a discussion a few months ago about whether Britain actually was not fulfilling its international obligations in relation to the prevention of genocide in Gaza. And so the point I'm making with this is that we've, we're all, everybody's just making this about pre-existing political positions.
37:21 Rory Stewart? It's so weird. I mean, David Wilson, I think, was on record saying the accusation of genocide and the notion that she should be stopping Israel in Gaza because the genocide was completely unfair. And now he's using the same term that he said was dangerous, too vague, shouldn't be applied to Israel's actions in Gaza. He's applying it to the Iranian regime. I, I really don't understand what's going on in his head at the moment.
37:47 Alastair Campbell? No, I think what's going on is that his party, the Conservatives, have, who are in this sort of existential battle with reform, have decided that we, the UK, should have been in lockstep with the US from the word go. Now, you and I disagree with that, right? And so does Keir Starmer, even though you don't like what he did on day two. But they've made that decision. Now, as it happens, just to go to the politics of this, I think they've made a terrible mistake. Because even though I will get my usual suspects, including the person I live with saying, you know, for God's sake, she's, she's bound to say Rory was right and I was wrong. But I think the fact is, don't look so pleased about that, Rory. The fact is.
38:31 Rory Stewart? It's Fiona, it's Fiona whose views I'm interested in really. As long as she's on my side, I don't mind too much.
38:37 Alastair Campbell? No, Fiona Fiona's views aren't dissimilar to yours. They're not dissimilar to yours is that and she was angry on the second night when that statement was made. I would have liked to have heard Labour people out today attacking Donald Trump for saying what he said about Keir Starmer. And I'd also like to hear Labour people attacking those media outlets that are so gagging for the Labour Prime Minister to be slapped down by the American president. I think what Newsom said, if without Murdoch, there is no Trump. What Trump says about the way he and Hexeth yesterday, the way that I hate the way they do it.
39:16 Alastair Campbell? But I think the public know that there is something wrong in the way that really difficult, complicated government positions that a prime minister has to take kind of on the spot, surrounded by millions of views and Twitter and all this stuff. That at least give them a bit of credit for trying to think things through when they're fast paced and incredibly complicated. That's all I'm saying.
39:42 Rory Stewart? Well, one of the things that I think would help with this is if we really got to a stage where Britain, France, Germany, and goodness knows maybe Canada, began to develop a bit of joint thinking.
39:56 Alastair Campbell? Hmm.
39:57 Rory Stewart? And and the reason they need joint thing is they need to work out, you know, what threats are really happening. Well, for example, I could imagine a conversation between Britain, France and Germany saying to the US, listen, you told us that you couldn't afford to defend Europe because you needed to focus on priorities elsewhere, in particular China. We're a little puzzled that you told us the reason you couldn't support Ukraine with Patriot missiles as they were so precious and you needed to keep them all for China. And now you've apparently blown them all up. And I'll blow them up, but used a fair quantity of them in a war of choice against Iran. But our view is that the real threat to our security is Russia. Iran hasn't taken 20% of the territory of a European state. Iran hasn't ended up with 1.2 million casualties.
40:42 Rory Stewart? We're focused on Russia, thank you very much. And actually, our view is that this war against Iran is wrong. It's going to drive up oil prices, which will help Russia, as you pointed out. Which it already has. It's going to use up American money and missiles, which we were hoping to purchase for the Ukrainians, right? Which is going to help Russia, et cetera, right? So that would be one type of, you do your threat assessment, you work out where your priorities are. Let's say it's Russia, right? Second thing you might do is you might develop a view on the world. You know, what do you think about international law? And maybe take the Wilson view, maybe you take whatever view, it doesn't really matter. Thirdly, work out how much you can defend on the United States. What kind of relationship do you want with the US? Do you going to have to make your own Patriot missiles? Or are you going to continue to buy them?
41:24 Rory Stewart? Two perfectly valid views, you know, one of them is actually the US in the end is always going to send us these things. So we don't need to make them. But nuclear weapons, we've just had this announcement from Macron about the French nuclear shield. Yeah, huge news. So, you know, even if we start spending hundreds of billions more on defence, we're not going to be able to spend that money well unless we have a joint threat assessment, right? Money on defence without a shared view of where the threats are is money wasted. Right? That could be, you know, what's our relationship with the US? What do we think about the Middle East? What do we think about Russia, Ukraine? So I think what would have helped here is if we'd had a sense, not that all these guys were surprised and had to respond on the hoof, right?
42:06 Rory Stewart? You know, one of the defences I've heard for Canada is what's supposed, of course, we didn't call them what we're supposed to do. We were suddenly surprised. What do you mean surprised? For months now, a massive American fleet has been sitting off the coast of Iran. Israel has been pushing for intervention around. So I could imagine. Europe, Canada, having a really strong, clear joint position weeks in advance. Signaled to the US weeks in advance, so that if you have a situation where the US doesn't consult its allies, barely informs you of what it's doing, doesn't go to the UN, doesn't go to Congress, you come up with a clear joint statement saying, you know, we're with you or we're against you. I would suggest we're not with you, but anyway, whatever it is, and not get this sense that everybody's thrown off balance and changing their position
42:50 Rory Stewart? every, you know, whatever. I mean, I don't want to get Dr. Starmer again, but certainly with Metz, the position is very odd. Certainly with Carney, the position doesn't really seem to track with this Davos position. I mean, I don't get what's going on with these people.
43:02 Alastair Campbell? No, and also with Metz, I mean, I think I sent you a clip. He was speaking at a party congress by the weekend, and he does a very, very good impersonation of Donald Trump.
43:11 Speaker 04 What did you say? Sixty percent? I don't believe it.
43:18 Alastair Campbell? He was basically suggesting that you can only deal with Donald Trump. It's a bit like Scaramucci says, you have to show him pictures, and he's going to show him graphs. He was trying to explain, he was explaining that immigration is falling in Germany by sixty percent. So that was him the day before, taking the Mickey out of Donald Trump, and the audience was lapping it up. As you say, the next day, he comes out with this statement, essentially saying, you know, they can do pretty much blank check. We'll see what he says in Washington today. I thought the Macron statement, by the way, got a lot less attention than I thought it would.
43:48 Rory Stewart? This nuclear thing, incredible.
43:49 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
43:50 Rory Stewart? Incredible.
43:51 Alastair Campbell? They're changing the nuclear doctrine, they're increasing the number of warheads in direct response, essentially, to the fact that China is getting more and more nukes, America is behaving in a much more irrational way. And then there's all this talk about whether other European countries will be able to, will be protected by that shield, et cetera. So I thought that was one of the most under-reported, significant developments of the week.
44:16 Rory Stewart? Can I just finish on the Macron point? Because there was something, something interesting there that I thought, I mean, it was incredible. It was staged with the French president flying in on a helicopter with two French jets alongside it. The speech was made in this massive kind of James Bond-style building, and he's announcing the French nuclear territory, the implication was going to cover Poland and Germany. It's like the biggest news, and he'd presumably been planning it for weeks. Would there be, have been an argument for not doing it right at the very start of the Iran war, when everyone, every news station is only covering Iran, doesn't really feel that it has much bandwidth for this, and delaying it a couple of weeks?
44:51 Alastair Campbell? Well, possibly, yeah, possibly. I mean, the only thing is, I wonder whether it had already been planned. And I also think that
44:56 Rory Stewart? Right.
44:57 Alastair Campbell? in France, it was kind of wall to wall. It's seen as, and I think in Germany as well. I mean, we do have such a sort of inward looking kind of media here. And of course, America, it's even it's even worse. But no, but I thought that was really, really significant. And by the way, I agree with you. We're both friends and fans of Mark Carney. I think he's great. But there was something slightly going against the tenor of his Davos speech and the way that Canada reacted this week. I thought the closest it got to was day one, the E three. There was something, we said that on the podcast on Saturday, there was something in that initial statement.
45:30 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
45:30 Alastair Campbell? That felt like these are serious people taking this seriously. They're not going to slag off Trump. They're all sitting there thinking, Christ, what's the guy going to do next? This is going to cause chaos. But since then, I agree, I think it's become much more nation by nation. And the other reason why that happens is because, and this is the nature of the globalized world. Every country in the world has people who are kind of flying in and out of Dubai who are now stuck. And they've got families and friends and media saying, you know, what are you doing to help us? We've just, I just heard this morning that the Australian military headquarters in the Gulf has just taken a couple of, a couple of drones. So this is, this is the point. This is going to go in any which way. And I think until it becomes a little bit clear, we haven't even gone on, I'm sorry, we got so dragged into the sort of row about Kier.
46:16 Alastair Campbell? We haven't even got on to what's actually going to be happening inside Iran and where that might lead. We haven't got on to how Israel now moving further into Lebanon. Basically saying that they're entitled to do that because Hezbollah have been whacking off a few missiles at them again and in breach of the deal that was done.
46:36 Rory Stewart? We've got quite caught up in this question of international law and international reactions. But the heart of this, of course, is what's happening on the ground.
46:45 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
46:46 Rory Stewart? You've talked about Dubai, which is, will be terrifying. For people living in UAE, it's also terrifying for the government of UAE. I mean, that's a government that has spent 25 years pursuing a development model, which is about providing safety, technology, low tax, predictable life for expatriates, for expatriate place. And suddenly, that whole model is under sustained fire.
47:13 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
47:14 Rory Stewart? And it's really exposing how potentially vulnerable somewhere like the Emirates can be. I mean, it doesn't have a big military, it doesn't have a big ability to defend itself.
47:22 Alastair Campbell? Hmm.
47:23 Rory Stewart? When these things happen. But let's just do Iran for a second. I I'm hoping we'll, we talked a little bit about Kareem Sarajpour perhaps coming on the program. But I I sent you something that he'd written.
47:34 Alastair Campbell? Hmm, I saw it, yeah.
47:35 Rory Stewart? Yeah, I thought it was quite interesting. I mean, what Kareem is saying, he's a big, big Iran expert, is that he thinks that what may happen is that it may feel a bit more like Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He points out Iran's actually only had four leaders in a hundred years.
47:51 Alastair Campbell? Hmm.
47:51 Rory Stewart? Two shahs, Khamenei, Khamenei. That everything may collapse and there may be chaos. But what happens if it's like Russia is the Soviet Union collapses, you then have seven, eight years of chaos and then a new sort of nationalist strongman emerges. And he thinks there's quite a lot in the Iranian structure, the paranoid systems, oil, oligarchs. The reason why he's a bit gloomy about people who think that this is going to be great for the human rights of the Iranian people, or it's going to end up with liberal democracy, is because he can see structural elements which suggest that you could end up with a Iranian Putin at the end of this.
48:25 Alastair Campbell? Is that sort of what we were saying the other day when we thought we went through the four possibilities of what might happen? I think you and I both coalesced around the idea of a military dictatorship that was less interested in the exterior world and much more interested in internal power. So that, I guess you might say that's an early stage Putin as opposed to the Putin that that developed. We were being critical earlier about the way that perhaps the middle powers, as Mark Carney calls them, hadn't sort of thought through, right? Well, what are the what ifs? We've all been saying that this what's just happened might happen. If Netanyahu and Trump get together and they whack out Khamenei, what do we do? Okay. You do get the feeling. That if that discussion hadn't happened amongst those powers, that it had certainly
49:07 Alastair Campbell? happened amongst the Iranian regime. So as we said on the podcast on Sunday, a lot of them got taken out.
49:14 Rory Stewart? Well, there was this amazing moment, just quickly on that, where Trump seemed to say that he'd been given a list of successors, his sort of Delcy Rodriguez figures in Venezuela, the kind of deputies who were going to take over. But unfortunately, he killed them all by mistake. So he isn't quite sure he's supposed to be taking over now. Yeah.
49:29 Alastair Campbell? If you think about their response, I mean, it has been quite strategic in its own way. I mean, it looks chaotic because they're just whacking off missiles here and there everywhere. But what is the strategy at the heart of it? I think it is to have the effect that they're having, which is to drive the oil price up very, very high, which to get these nations in the Gulf that Iran thinks have much more influence upon Trump than Iran ever does, and certainly than Europe seems to be able to do. So the Saudis and these guys actually say, come on, Trump, this has got to be over sooner rather than later. So I think there is a sort of method in what they've been, what they've been trying to do. Do you know the other thing that's really surprised me in
50:12 Alastair Campbell? recent days, Rory, is, I mean, I've got the scars of several sort of military situations. But if we go back to the early days of our time in government, the Kosovo War, every time there were kind of civilian casualties, there was a big debate about it. There was political pressure over it. You had a situation the other day, I watched the footage this morning of the funeral of some of these 175 kids, or well, people, including a lot of kids, who were killed in the, with this school that was bombed. And I've not even seen that on our media. It was just a kind of online thing that I saw somebody had posted.
50:49 Rory Stewart? Really kind of, you know. It's completely horrendous. And as you say, that was not true in Kosovo. I mean, there's been a sort of, there's a real sense of decline. And I'm afraid Gaza's part of that.
50:59 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, yeah.
51:01 Rory Stewart? I mean, there's also been not that much coverage. I mean, just you mentioned Lebanon, but essentially there's been another incursion into Lebanon. Hezbollah struck Israel, Israel struck against Hezbollah. I was talking to someone who's in Gaza today. I hadn't got the fact that effectively the border's now closed with Gaza. So food is not going into Gaza at the moment.
51:18 Alastair Campbell? They've opened it again this morning, apparently. But no, yesterday was horrific.
51:21 Rory Stewart? But then again, international NGOs, international NGOs struggling to operate. Many of them basically can't do anything in Gaza at the moment. The Technocratic Committee that's meant to be running Gaza is apparently basically sitting in Egypt. So yeah, we're not hearing much about that either. And I wonder whether that isn't something, you know, something kind of worries me when you talk about this, which is that God forbid the these kind of middle powers, Europe, Canada, the UK, end up in a world where they start talking about international law and the strong not bullying the weak, but they mean it only in relation to them, that they don't really end up applying that to what's happening in the Middle East. And they start treating that as that's kind of the law of the jungle.
52:01 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, but that's what's that's what the Global South will says that the international order has meant for quite some time. I think the other thing that that's starting to come through in, I said to you the other day, I've been following the Israeli media quite closely. And I don't know, do you think I think Israel probably has a greater stomach for a much longer fight than America does. And you really get the sense that Netanyahu has got the bit between the teeth in a pretty alarming way. I don't know, sorry, I said I sent you a couple of things this morning. First was a piece in The Guardian about the Americans using AI, which is now faster than humans. And the reason is to get through the kill chain faster. That sent me a bit of a chill.
52:42 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
52:43 Alastair Campbell? A long said a piece that somebody sent me, which has this in it. A combat unit commander told non commissioned officers at a briefing on Monday that the Iran war is part of God's plan, and that President Donald Trump was anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his returning to earth. From Saturday morning through Monday night, more than 110 similar complaints about commanders in every branch of the military have been logged by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. That's sort of my, I mean, once you start saying the whole war is a religious one, remember the trouble George Bush got into to talk about a crusade. This is way more explicit. And again, we're not, it's not even on the news. It's
53:28 Rory Stewart? I don't know, it's all very, very alarming. We haven't talked so much about what Israel's objective here is, but Netanyahu seems to be coming pretty close, and Yair Lapid as well, to suggesting this is fundamentally, from Israel's point of view, they're going to continue until this regime change. Hmm. But there's another part of the security establishment that I think tends to see it in more, more in the terms in which they would perceive operations in Syria or Lebanon, which is kill the leadership, get rid of their weapons capacity, and not worry too much about what kind of political or economic states left behind. Yeah. In Iran at the end of this. It's also worth bearing in mind, and we talked about this a little bit, another reason
54:12 Rory Stewart? why people in the region are very troubled and confused. So these Gulf countries, as we said, UAE, Qatar, or any of these countries, are very aware that they're quite small, very wealthy states, but they're very small, they're very fragile. And one of the reasons that some of them were trying to convince Trump not to do this is they were happier with what they felt was an Iran that had basically no longer had a path, credible path, towards nuclear weapons, no longer had much air defence, no longer posed much of a threat to the region because its proxies and Lebanon and elsewhere had been degraded. So they thought better to contain it, leave it alone. These are all bad worlds, but the least bad world was leave Iran alone because at least
54:56 Rory Stewart? it's not going to kick off and create regional chaos. Now the regional chaos has started, they're now torn between two positions. One of them is, can we please stop this, right? Because our own cities are now being attacked. But on the other hand, because their cities are being attacked, they feel they need to do something in response against the Iranians. Then they're worried Israel's becoming a regional hegemon. And then you get, a lot of the stuff on Middle Eastern media is now retweeting a former Israeli prime minister who said Turkey's the next Iran, and then in the same breath mentioned Qatar as a space scientist terrorism. So then there are going to be some people in these states who are like, well, wait a second, if there's no process with Congress or international law, what happens if Yeah. suddenly they decide that, you know, we Are a threat that can be attacked or our regime can be changed.
55:39 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, yeah, but don't worry, Rory. Melania was at the United Nations banging the gavel.
55:44 Rory Stewart? You see, that's another one. Can I just just to finish on that one? I mean, I saw that and I initially was like, is this AI? I mean, initially we've entered a world where I don't I don't know anymore when I see this stuff, whether this is an AI joke or whether it's real. It was real, was it? Melania Trump was actually presiding at the UN.
55:59 Alastair Campbell? And because she cares about violence against this and that and the other. And but just and the other thing about Trump. So I watched the thing where he, you know, we had four American servicemen killed on the on the first day of all this, okay? And Trump's first public appearance was in this big grand room in the White House and it was presenting the Medal of Honour to troops who'd served in Afghanistan. He very, very briefly mentioned these four guys. And and sort of said, it is what it is, kind of is what it is. There's going to be more of this. It is what it is. He was so kind of lacking in any sort of empathy. He then talked about how he'd been trying to get a Medal of Honour for himself.
56:39 Rory Stewart? And how he deserved it and he wondered whether he could do it because he deserved it so much. Yeah.
56:44 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, yeah. And and then started talking about his bloody ballroom. And the gold and these drapes, I chose these drapes myself. This is on the day. This is his first public utterance since this whole thing kicked off. And he said, I love gold. I've always loved gold. Look at these drapes. I chose them myself. If you peek through those drapes now, you're going to see a big hole. It's going to be a big, beautiful ballroom. It's going to be the biggest, most beautiful ballroom in the world. I mean, it's it's sick. It's sick. Final point for me, Rory, unintended consequences. Did you know thirteen percent of Chinese oil all comes from Iran? So they're going to be looking at that very, very carefully. India said, if you remember, we've talked before about how India
57:28 Alastair Campbell? relying on Russian oil and helping the Russian war effort by so doing. So they agreed with Trump to cut back on Russian oil in exchange for tariff relief. So they switched to Saudi Arabia and the UAE. How does that look for them now?
57:50 Alastair Campbell? And how does it look for the nine million? You know, there are nine million Indian workers in the Gulf sending home remittances, huge part of their their economy.
57:59 Rory Stewart? Yeah, and people aren't talking enough about refugees. I mean, I I I keep, you quite rightly told me off, I went on the Today Programme yesterday and didn't plug the podcast properly. But another thing you could have told me off for is that I mentioned Libya, and I probably didn't think enough about the fact that people can barely remember what happened in Libya, because it's now fifteen years ago now. But just a memory of it, just to remind people very quickly, what happened there is something that on the surface feels a bit like what's happening in Iran. A decision was made to go after Gaddafi, and Gaddafi was killed. And then, basically, Britain, France and the US stepped back. They didn't really want to get involved in nation building, and they sort of thought it would be enough to topple the leader, and then regime change would
58:42 Rory Stewart? follow, and good things would follow. What actually happened, this is the Arab Spring, obviously, what actually happened is civil war in Libya, Libya being broken into two hostile states, and then weapons pouring into all those countries that we've talked about in Sahel, Mali, Chad, Niger, and probably most dramatically, ultimately Sudan. So a lot of these heavily armed Islamist militias that have emerged and that have destabilized that entire region were powered by what was happening in Libya. So the reason I, you know, I shouldn't explain this more, but the reason we need to think a little bit about Libya is not that Iran is like Libya, but one thing that is worth thinking about is what happens to neighboring
59:25 Rory Stewart? states when a country starts collapsing, and what happens to refugees. I mean, again, Syria, what happened in Syria? Six million refugees start moving. And that, of course, is where the far-right parties in Europe draw a lot of strength. So, you know, what happens if you had, you know, I'm talking to an Iranian on my street, I've got a neighbour who's Iranian, and not surprisingly, His grandmother is in a car trying to cross the Turkish border at the moment.
59:47 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, this is what's so nauseating about the the sort of Farage position of, you know, let's be with the Americans, let's do this, let's go with it, we should be alongside them. When you know that the minute some of those consequences start to play over, he'll be absolutely livid and absolutely furious and be saying, you know, send them all back home. So there are so many unintended consequences about this. I think you and I have agreed on most of the things we've talked about. I just was trying to be a little bit more reasonable about the horrible bind that Keir Starmer is in right now, and I feel he's got so many people kicking him, including my missus, that I had to stand up for him a little bit, Rory. I hope you didn't mind too much.
1:00:26 Rory Stewart? That was good, good to stand up for him, Elsa. Well, we'll be back, and what you'll have another chance to stand up for him in Question Time tomorrow on the Gordon and Denton by-election and the subject of student loans.
1:00:36 Alastair Campbell? Oh, yes, yes, that went very well, it went very, very well.
1:00:42 Rory Stewart? Good, looking forward to it, Elsa. See you soon, bye bye.
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