521. Trump’s Naval Blockade: Is America Becoming a Rogue State?

As Trump unleashes yet more global economic turmoil with his aggressive Strait of Hormuz blockade, is he creating a state of ‘permanent emergency’ and reshaping the world order in ways nobody can predict? Why did JD Vance give up on negotiations with Iran after just 21 hours, and why is the 'ceasefire' already collapsing? What surprised Alastair most about his interview with the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy? Join Alastair and Rory as they answer all these questions and more. If you’re Gen Z, take our survey ⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠ and if you’re 29 or over, use this ⁠⁠⁠link⁠⁠⁠. __________ Go deeper into the world of The Rest Is Politics by signing up for our free newsletter HERE, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis and weekend reads from Alastair and Rory. Join The Rest Is Politics Plus. Start your free trial at therestispolitics.com to unlock exclusive bonus content – including Rory and Alastair’s miniseries – plus ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, exclusive newsletters, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Stop overpaying for energy. Switch at https://fuseenergy.com/politics and get a free TRIP+ subscription. Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restispolitics It's risk-free with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee ✅ __________ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith, Bruno Di Castri Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Exec Producer: Chris Sawyer General Manager: Tom Whiter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Alastair Campbell?

  This is classic Trump. I've got a ceasefire, I'm going to send JD Vance and it's all going to be done. And they give up because Iran didn't fold on day one.

• 0:10Rory Stewart?

  What's beginning to happen here is an America which doesn't even pay lip service to global norms, in fact celebrates outrageously, chaotically defying them.

• 0:20Alastair Campbell?

  The worry that the lesson that Tehran has drawn is not that restraint on nukes brings security, but that if you're vulnerable, you invite an attack.

• 0:33Alastair Campbell?

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• 0:35Rory Stewart?

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• 0:50Alastair Campbell?

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• 0:54Rory Stewart?

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• 1:18Rory Stewart?

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• 1:23Alastair Campbell?

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• 1:31Rory Stewart?

  Visit fuseenergy.com for full details and terms and conditions.

• 1:41Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 1:44Alastair 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... Managed to watch it. There you go.

• 1:56Rory 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 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.

• 2:20Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think you're not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this. Or should I say Fiona Fiona managed to do this?

• 2:26Rory Stewart?

  I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/restispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 2:43Speaker 02

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• 3:20Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to the Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 3:23Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart.

• 3:24Alastair Campbell?

  Back from his holiday.

• 3:27Rory Stewart?

  There's been some requests from listeners for whether Alistair ever takes holidays. But that's maybe more of a question for question time than the main episode where we're going to be focusing on what's happening with the blockade that President Trump has announced of the Straits of Hormuz, the next stage in this conflict with Iran. And then we're going to get on to Ukraine and in particular, your recent interview with President Zelensky, extraordinary scoop to get an interview with Zelensky. And the issues we're going to be looking at are, number one, what on earth is going on in Trump's head late at night, in the morning? Is it possible to predict his next moves? Secondly, what does this mean for the global economy? Haven't begun to get into the consequences for the Middle East, Asia and Europe.

• 4:09Rory Stewart?

  And thirdly, I'd like to get into this question of is the US literally becoming a rogue state now? And how does the world respond if the United States becomes a rogue state? Quick explain on Iran. So since the last episode, Trump having threatened the end of civilization and the obliteration of Iran. There was then a ceasefire, a collective sigh of relief as everybody thought, well, actually, maybe this whole thing has come to an end. JD Vance, the vice president, flew to Pakistan in order to negotiate with the Iranian team. Came out after a 21 hour negotiation, saying they hadn't got anywhere. And Trump then followed up, saying that the US was going to block the Straits of Hormuz.

• 4:53Rory Stewart?

  Put a naval blockade in place, later clarified as a blockade on any vessels touching Iranian ports. And that's where we currently are. Global oil prices are now rising. Global economies are already feeling the shock because in effect, what this means is that vessels that were not favoured by Iran previously were very reluctant to go through the straits. But vessels with an Iranian stamp could go through. Most of them were going through freely. The US has now stopped that second category of vessels, which effectively means that nobody's going through. Because the people the Iranians don't like aren't going through anyway. The people the US don't like in the future wouldn't go through. And there are some exceptions. There's some questions about what's actually happening in the straits.

• 5:32Rory Stewart?

  But if you're Saudi Arabia, or if you're Qatar, or if in fact you're the European or Asian economies, you're very panicked at the moment. Because effectively the straits are now blockaded and we have no idea when this blockade will be lifted. Over to you.

• 5:44Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, if we just step back, so what are we in the seventh week now, seven weeks into this war? And of course, it was meant to be resolved in Islamabad. You said the talks went over 21 hours and Vance talked of this being a marathon. It's just worth remembering. Bill Clinton and his team spent nine months before Arafat and Rabin finally shook hands before Oslo. Richard Holbrook spent five months before they got anywhere close to the Dayton Accords. I've been trying to work out when George Mitchell first came on the scene for the ahead of the Good Friday Agreement. I think it was 22 months. And this is classic Trump. I've got a ceasefire, the Pakistanis have helped us, I'm going to send J D Vance and

• 6:28Alastair Campbell?

  it's all going to be done. And they give up because Iran didn't fold on day one. And meanwhile, just to underline how utterly unserious they are, Trump and Rubio, who seems to me these days just to be kind of glorified bag carrier, they're at a UFC fight. It's not even a fight, it's a video. It's a stadium full of people watching videos of old martial arts fights. And Trump is really weirdly flirting with the male fighters, he's hanging out with the ridiculous Infantino. Rubio is doing silly poses and it's just not serious. And our newsletter, the people apparently really like it, Roy, we recommend reads of the week.

• 7:10Alastair Campbell?

  My read of the week, as so often, is in Foreign Affairs Magazine. And I don't know if you saw it, Federica Mogherini, she led the negotiations of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran. And she's written a piece with Saad al-Shar, who was one of the people who was involved in the the architecture around what became known as the JCPOA.

• 7:31Rory Stewart?

  Just to clarify again, to remind people, JCPOA being this amazing deal which we discussed on the podcast when we interviewed Rob Malley on leading was of course the US counterpart in the JCPOA, which was this amazing deal put together to slow Iranian nuclear enrichment in return for sanctions relief. Back over to you.

• 7:48Alastair Campbell?

  And so what this article sets out, first of all,

• 7:53Alastair Campbell?

  The worry that the lesson that Tehran has drawn from the recent weeks is not that restraint on nukes brings security, but that if you're vulnerable, you invite an attack. They argue the argument for retaining the nuclear option is probably stronger now than it was. They then go on to say that that means that, just as it was when they did that agreement, which I think took, going on for 10 years, involving several countries. You had China, US, France, Germany, Russia, the UK, and the European Union. It went on for more than a decade, and it was the only time that Iran actually did start to identifiably

• 8:35Alastair Campbell?

  pull back on parts of their nuclear programme. They're basically saying that the diplomacy is the only viable way to get this thing back on track.

• 8:45Rory Stewart?

  One of the big questions, I think, that most of us have is what actually are the sticking points in this negotiation? It's very, very difficult to get a grip on that. You have an Iranian view, you have a US view, and you have some statements coming out of Pakistan itself. And a very odd thing, which just as a sort of sidebar, I was listening to the Today Programme this morning, and they have a style of leading with JD Vance says that the Iranian position is completely unacceptable, they're conducting economic warfare, therefore we're going to block the straits. And it's a very interesting style because I see it a lot, and I think it's one of the things that confuses people trying

• 9:25Rory Stewart?

  to analyse the situation, which is this tradition not of journalists trying to produce a full objective view on what the deal was and what the different sides are saying, but just to say, in this case JD Vance says this, or it was then followed by, we'll get into this maybe tomorrow with Question Time, George Robertson says the Labour Defence thing is in a mess, rather than trying to weigh up whether or not they're right. My sense of it, and I'd love you to come back on this, is that the Iranian 10-point plan involved, amongst other sticking points, a demand that Israel stop its attacks on Lebanon, which the US was reluctant. Put into the package that Iran also wanted compensations for the damage that has been done to them.

• 10:10Rory Stewart?

  So they've suffered hundreds of billions of pounds worth of damage through these strikes.

• 10:15Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 10:15Rory Stewart?

  And their proposal was rather than asking for reparations, they would charge two million on each vessel, one million of which would go to Oman, that has the other side of the straits, one million to them. And they would use that money to repay themselves over time for the damage that's been done to them. Effectively, the subsidy would then come actually not from the US really. It would come from the Gulf countries in Asia that are mostly reliant on these vessels. And that they had offered, or at least this is a story the Iranians are putting forward, a moratorium on uranium enrichment of five years.

• 10:48Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 10:48Rory Stewart?

  So the basic stuff that runs their nuclear bombs and the US was asking for a moratorium of 20 years. And and the Pakistani team definitely seemed to think, as did the Saudis and others, that they were within touching of some sort of settlement. And what would that settlement be? Well, the settlement roughly would be, we stop the fighting, there's some compromise on the nuclear stuff. I mean, after all, their uranium is currently buried under rubble and they're years off being able to build a nuclear bomb anyways. So it's not a huge concession. The straits reopen and we go to business. Instead of which, what's happened is the US has effectively blocked the straits to the horror of countries like Saudi Arabia, because of course Iran still has a big escalation option,

• 11:31Rory Stewart?

  which is to shut the other major route, which is the Red Sea through their Houthis proxies. Over to you.

• 11:36Alastair Campbell?

  If you just think about some of those negotiations that I mentioned, and if you, in particular, if I just underline the point that the deal that was done, which Trump unilaterally just decided to tear up in his first term, takes over a decade. Now, the point that these guys make in their piece in Foreign Affairs is that the process of negotiation did positively influence the behaviour of Iran. Okay?

• 12:01Alastair Campbell?

  What you have here, I think, is a complete clash of the nature of what good negotiations. So Trump famously, the master of the art of the deal in his own mind, okay? So his idea is you just go in there, you bulldoze them. And this is what Vance kind of said, he said, you know, we told them they've got to scrap their nukes. And they said, no, right? Deal's over, we shut down the straights. Always, they probably went in with a fairly traditional negotiating mindset. We put out a few points there, some of which are absolute red lines and some of which we're expecting them to have negotiation on. And what I was expecting mistakenly, just for an hour, thinking this was a normal presidency. I was expecting that Vance would come out and say, look, you know, we've made some progress.

• 12:45Alastair Campbell?

  There are certain really big sticking points, we've got to address them. I've got to go back to Washington, but here's the team that is going to now sit down in detail with the Pakistanis in the chair to try to take this forward. In other words, you have a process. And what they've done is they started a process, they decided it's not going exactly according to plan on day one, therefore we blow up the process.

• 13:05Rory Stewart?

  I mean, maybe an analogy, which I'd love from you, slightly putting you on the spot. But if we think back to your Northern Ireland experience, are there some examples you can think of, of things which might have seemed like red lines in the early nineties? You know, things that the Republican side would never have conceded, or the Unionist side would never have conceded, but which gradually over time shifted through patience?

• 13:29Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the very first big move that that we made was Tony Blair doing this speech in a very Unionist area at a very Unionist event. So the mood music was very kind of on the Unionist side. But the big story within it, the announcement, as it were, was that we were going to resume talks with Sinn Fein without them making any further concessions in relation to the activities of the IRA.

• 13:56Rory Stewart?

  I'm going to interrupt there because I just want to sort of develop this a bit more because I think this is a brilliant way into trying to think about what's going wrong in these negotiations. So there is a very, very clear red line, which.

• 14:09Rory Stewart?

  If you were a politician, you could defend with the public, which is we're not going to discuss anything with Sinn Fein unless they condemn the terrorism of the IRA. And yet, the instinct of negotiators has to be, we're aiming for peace here, we're going to have to give, and we're going to do things which sound very, very difficult. Back over to you.

• 14:29Alastair Campbell?

  I think I'm right, that not, I think it was that visit that later in the day, Tony did a visit to a shopping centre, and there were all these, there were all these old ladies out with rubber gloves. I know this is a different one, this is a different one, but it makes the same point. They're out waving rubber gloves at Tony Blair, and Tony said to them, why are they all got rubber gloves? And it's because you shook hands with Gerry Adams. And, and so even shaking hands with Gerry Adams at one point. Now, how much would it have cost JD Vance, for example? This is the highest level meeting between Iranian and American officials since the revolution, four decades ago, okay? How much

• 15:11Alastair Campbell?

  would it have cost for there to have been a picture of a handshake, or a picture that showed they were kind of human beings trying to work something out? And we're back to the point that we talked about a few weeks ago, this, this sort of belief in their omnipotence. They've worked out what's going to happen, they go in there, they say what they want to happen, it doesn't happen, and they throw their toys out of the pram. I was talking to a kind of American former diplomat yesterday, who was saying that he could work out how you could solve most of these problems. It would involve going back to some of the stuff that Federica is talking about in her Peace in Foreign Affairs. But he says, right now, he finds it very hard to work out how this Straits of Hormuz thing gets worked out at

• 15:56Alastair Campbell?

  all, unless Trump backs down, and Trump, as we know, doesn't like backing down.

• 16:01Rory Stewart?

  One thing that I did, because I was away in the Galapagos silence for a week, is I deliberately starved myself of any newspapers or media, and I was interested in the question of what would happen if I came back and then started catching up on a week's news, having missed it all. So I started reading the New York Times in order from the day that I'd stopped reading it through over a week. And I was trying to work out how much you could predict about what was going on with Trump. And my my conclusion, just to ruin the story, is that actually it's an endless exercise in humility because you really can't predict it. And so I could have given you a story on Sunday morning, which was, in the end,

• 16:46Rory Stewart?

  we've got to the best possible scenario, which is Trump has decided to stop this war, to declare victory and say, we're not going to do this anymore. And actually, in your discussion with Dominic Sandbrook, Dominic seemed to think that that was a possibility. And and it looked kind of plausible that the story I would have told you if he'd done that. He didn't do that, but if he'd done that is the amazing thing about Trump is because he just talks nonsense all the time and puts out five different justifications for the war and there's no real strategy. He's not as trapped as Obama or Bush were in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they had developed these very complicated stories about what they were doing, which made it difficult for them to stop. Trump can, if he wants, just say, I've won and move on.

• 17:30Rory Stewart?

  And the story would have been that he really cares about the markets. And in the end, he just passed it off to victory. He doesn't really like forever wars and he stops. Of course, he doesn't. What actually happens is that Vance comes out of an unsuccessful negotiation. You and I and most of the world assume that's just one stage in many, many negotiations over many months. And he immediately announces that he's going to do something which is incredibly radical. There hasn't been a formal US naval blockade of this sort really since the Second World War, since people were blockading Germany. Even what they did in Cuba was very different to what they're doing now. So suddenly, this question, what I was following through a week, which is, is Trump going to escalate, you know, wipe out a civilization?

• 18:16Rory Stewart?

  Is he going to just be trapped into more of the same? Or is he going to declare victory and stop? I honestly think that anybody doing geopolitical analysis or advising a company should be pretty honest about the fact that nobody can see into this guy's brain. And after he makes the decision, of course, you can with hindsight, provide a story. I mean, you're absolutely right. Presumably in this case, he doesn't like losing. It's his vanity, so he's just doubling down. But anyways, this point about prediction, over to you.

• 18:44Alastair Campbell?

  But so much of this is about what goes on inside his brain. And this is what makes it so, so difficult. Let's just take one night. Okay, so this is a guy who it seems doesn't, has a real problem sleeping. With gratitude to a gentleman on social media by the name of Harry Sisson. He, he did a timeline of all the social media activity of Trump over the course of a night. Not at daytime, over the night. Okay, here we go. First of all, nine forty nine PM, he posts the famous picture of him as Jesus, which he now says is him as a doctor. Okay, because the Catholics, the, the churches, unsurprising, were very upset about him saying he was Jesus.

• 19:25Rory Stewart?

  Just to explain the image for people who haven't seen it. I mean, he is fully clothed as Jesus with a golden light magically burning in his hand.

• 19:34Alastair Campbell?

  Laying his hands on a sick man.

• 19:36Rory Stewart?

  With angelic creatures flying into the sky behind him up to heaven. Okay, yeah, back over to you, yeah.

• 19:41Alastair Campbell?

  So that's a nine forty nine, and he later deleted it because there was a bit of a, an outcry. Nine fifty, so that's a minute after Jesus, he posts a picture of the Arc de Trump, as it's now known. This is this 700 foot thing that's going to be a sort of a Washington version of the Arc de Triomphe. He posts a picture of it on the moon. Okay, there you go. Ten ten PM, he posts a meme, ten thirty two, a news clip, ten fifty three, a news clip. Twelve forty three AM, most Americans are asleep now. He announces the blockade of Hormuz. Okay, 2:35 AM, he's maybe just had a little doze or he's had a hamburger or something. 2:35 AM, he posts an article about Joe Biden.

• 20:26Alastair Campbell?

  2:36, that's a minute later, he posts an article about the blockade. The thing that he's just announced, oh, somebody's written about it, posts that. 2:37, he posts an article on Swalwell, this guy in California who's pulling out of the race for allegations of sexual offenses. Same minute, 2:37, he reposts again the article about Biden, the same article. 2:38, he posts an article on his ballroom. 4:10, he posts an article about Iran. Honestly, Harry Sisson, he said this himself, he is not sleeping, he is pretending to be Jesus, he is posting all night, he is not well. And actually, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, others are out there on the back of his recent

• 21:10Alastair Campbell?

  behaviour, saying, this guy is seriously not well. So when you say, how do we get inside his head? I'd argue it's impossible. And the thing is, one of the things that we talked to Dominic about, it strikes me, he has nobody in his immediate circle who is able to say, who's able to say to him. You, you mentioned the Northern Ireland thing. If, if Tony Blair had, heaven forbid, ever had a night of social media activity like that, I guarantee, I, Jonathan Powell, Angie Hunter, Sally Morgan, Peter Hyman, Tim Allen, any one of us would have gone in there this morning saying, what the fuck are you doing? Have you completely lost your senses? They don't do that.

• 21:50Alastair Campbell?

  They basically, what's his face, Vance, yesterday was on Fox News, defending the Jesus thing, this is the great Catholic, defending the Jesus thing as a joke. And then he took it down because some people didn't get the joke.

• 22:05Rory Stewart?

  I think the other thing that I've taken from this, and it was partly listening to you and Dominic. Is, and I'm obviously a little bit more on your side on this than Dominic, but I might even put in a third way, right? So you were having a debate about whether he's a fascist or not. And of course, his point about you is that whatever Trump is, he's not a classic 1930s fascist. A lot of that seemed to be Dominic saying he's not a sort of pseudo-intellectual in the way that Mussolini and Hitler were. But where I differ from Dominic is the idea that somehow this is normal. You know, he was trying to situate it in a long American tradition of isolationism going back to the late 19th century. I don't think that's

• 22:46Rory Stewart?

  the right way to read him. I think the two words that occurred to me were permanent emergency and theater of cruelty. Those are my two pretentious phrases. I think there was a temptation when he came in at the beginning of his term to think, okay, we know what's happened. We've gone from democracy to populism. We've gone from global free trade to protectionism. We've gone from a rules-based international order to America first. So that sort of story would be the kind of Dominic story that we're kind of returning back to the isolationist world of, I don't know, Andrew Jackson, or even the pre-Second World War. But it doesn't feel like that anymore. It now feels like actually, and this is something you pointed

• 23:28Rory Stewart?

  out in the debate with Dominic, he during the election campaign had said, this isn't a guy interested in aggressive war. Well, you've pointed out that actually warfare is very, very central to the way that he approaches things. Everything is turned into an aggressive emergency. And if you put together the pattern, using tariffs against Europe to try to steal Greenland, abducting Maduro, assassinating a head of state with Hamani, posting himself as Jesus, putting in a naval blockade, which, you know, we need to get into in more depth, is a very, very startling thing to do in terms of international law and warfare. Yeah. What's beginning to happen here is an America which

• 24:08Rory Stewart?

  Doesn't even pay lip service to global norms, in fact celebrates, flouting, celebrates outrageously, chaotically defying them. In fact, what I would say is that the United States is increasingly behaving like Israel. But Israel's reason for doing it was always that it was a small country facing existential threat. That was the justification Israel came for rejecting the UN, declaring the Secretary General of the UN persona non grata, rejecting international legal arguments, attacking Lebanon, attacking Gaza, etc. The US doing it is something completely different. The US is demanding, like Israel, the right to just pursue its sovereign interest and ignore completely what this means for global

• 24:52Rory Stewart?

  norms, law, precedent setting. But the US isn't Israel. It's not a small state with no peer competitors in the Middle East. It is the architect of the entire global order, and it faces with China a peer competitor. So the repercussions and ripples, if America becomes a rogue state, is much more profound.

• 25:10Alastair Campbell?

  The other Rory, my son has just sent me the, how didn't you have seen this Rory? President Xi Jinping's Four Propositions on Safeguarding and Promoting Peace and Stability in the Middle East, which he's put out today. One, stay committed to the principle of peaceful coexistence. Two, stay committed to the principle of national sovereignty. Three, stay committed to the principle of our international rule of law. Four, stay committed to a balanced approach to development and security. Now, that is, one, that is pretty sophisticated trolling, but also it's underlining to the rest of the world that at a time when America appears to be so unreliable

• 25:50Alastair Campbell?

  and unpredictable, China is operating according to what he's setting out as a group of principles that they stick to. And I was reading, if I, it might have been, was it in the New York Times? I don't know. I haven't read them all, as you have this week, Rory, but I was reading, no, it might have been in a Middle East paper, but it was the, you know, the Arab barometer that measures public opinion in the Arab world?

• 26:15Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 26:16Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, since October the 7th and the Israeli and American reaction to it. The reputation of both those countries has gone to a very, very bad place. Now, Trump may not care about that, but I think any previous president would have done. So essentially, what it's showing is that on the whole, they now regard China, Russia, and Iran more favorably than the United States. Now, not all of them. There are some countries that, you know, that is not the case. And so Trump's foreign policies, if you look at the favorability, 24% of Iraqis, 21% of Lebanese, 14% in Tunisia, 12% in Jordan and the Palestinian territories.

• 26:58Alastair Campbell?

  And then you look at the the support for Xi Jinping's policy towards the Middle East. It's 26 points up in Tunisia, 25 points up in Jordan and Palestine, 19 points in Morocco, five points in Iraq. Now, in the end, these are just polls, but they reflect something quite profound that's going on in the global assessment of the USA and China.

• 27:21Rory Stewart?

  If it's right that what the US is becoming, that the architect of the global system is itself becoming a rogue state, I think there are three broad paths that we could be going on over the next five years. One of them is what the US is gambling on, which is that we all suck it up and acquiesce. Britain, Europe, cut-side deals, Canada folds, we don't have any options, we can't really go anywhere else, we have to accept it. Second option is that actually we collapse into global chaos, that a lot of other countries begin to think, well, screw it, US does this, well, we can do our own naval blockades. You know, we can blockade the Black Sea, we can blockade the South China Sea, we can bomb people, we can assassinate people. And and and why?

• 28:06Rory Stewart?

  Well, because if another state were to do this now, what exactly was the US supposed to say? And the USA, we can't like, we don't like it, but they can't say anymore, you violated global norms, or you've done something scary. The third possibility, though, is the one that you're pointing to, which is the emergence of a new global order. China would have an interest in that, and a lot of that would be China in the developing world and Africa. But the big question, I suppose, is Europe, and in particular, Germany. Is Germany really prepared to put itself behind thinking about how Europe could become more non-aligned? This is UK, Ukraine, we'll get on to your conversation with Zelensky in a second.

• 28:46Rory Stewart?

  Canada, thinking about how Europe genuinely can become a sovereign, independent actor with its own values. And then, I think, bolt on the Gulf, because one of the things that we keep forgetting is the impact on everyone else in the world. I mean, the sad thing about these US papers is, I mean, they're great, but obviously a lot of it is focused on the impact on the US economy. And the impact on the US economy is relatively muted.

• 29:13Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, compared to the rest of the world.

• 29:15Rory Stewart?

  Well, I was looking at a recent model, and I mean, these are difficult things to predict, and it's maybe an exaggeration, but Capital Economics, which is a reputable think tank, predicts that Qatar's economy will contract by 13% this year, that UAEs may contract by 8%. To put that in context, under normal growth conditions, that would be seven years it would need to get back the growth. South Korea is spending billions on trying to underpin its welfare state. Malaysia, South Korea is struggling to get the helium to build their semiconductor chips. All the inputs into the Chinese economy are being choked, particularly around polyethylene. The European economies, Germany's growth rate, you know, I was saying we're relying on Germany.

• 30:00Rory Stewart?

  Germany's growth rate now being massively downgraded. Hence, this sense that we keep coming back to of an American presidency that behaves like the bankers during the 2008 financial crisis, they take the risk and the rest of us suffer the consequences.

• 30:15Alastair Campbell?

  I'll give you a few other, more figures from, from the Gulf. So, stock exchanges in the Gulf, Dubai, 15% drop since this all started, Qatar, 10%, Abu Dhabi, 5%. Travel and tourism industry is reckoned to be losing $600 million a day. The projected loss of economic output due to contracted growth, reduced exports and general disruption of the oil sector, $200 billion. So that's the Gulf. But then, and you're right, the Americans, in part because they've become much a bigger producer of oil and gas. They they maybe they're not feeling it as much, but here's a really interesting thing. The University of Michigan has been measuring consumer sentiment since nineteen fifty two.

• 30:59Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, and we'll put the graph in the in the newsletter, but it is since in the last six weeks. It's fallen to the lowest point at any time in history, including previous wars and pandemics. Inflation is that they're going to get hit by it. They're not going to get the interest rate cut that he's been been going on about. Now, the oil price has actually dipped just below a hundred dollars a barrel this morning, I think. But we're still talking about it going from sixty dollars at the start of March to seventy dollars fairly recently. So it's a seventy percent increase whichever you which way you look at it. And Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, she's outlined that the European Union's bill

• 31:41Alastair Campbell?

  for fossil fuel imports since the war began has risen by more than twenty two billion. So it's economically catastrophic, it's environmentally catastrophic, and it's all caused by this one guy and his decision with Netanyahu to do what they've done.

• 31:59Rory Stewart?

  And we just I mean, just just to underpin that the whole point about this is it is entirely unnecessary. I mean, we just have to keep underscoring this. Somehow we forget in the coverage that Iran did not pose an immediate threat, right? Its nuclear weapon programme was years of completion. Its uranium was buried under rubble. They were in the middle of negotiations with Oman in Geneva. There was no reason to trigger this, and everything that he's done since is him trying to respond to the chaos that he himself has unleashed.

• 32:31Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 32:32Rory Stewart?

  And Iran still has escalation ladders, the still stuff that Iran could do to make the world suffer much more, shutting down the Red Sea. Again, the Houthi may be weaker in Yemen, but as like we keep saying, they don't have to hit every vessel going through the Red Sea. They don't even have to hit one out of a hundred.

• 32:50Alastair Campbell?

  Just do one.

• 32:50Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, they may even just have to threaten that they might hit one out of a hundred for the insurance price to go up, people not be prepared to sail through. So it's a situation in which unnecessarily, for no reason that remotely fits US national security, US interests, he has launched a war which is crippling the global economy. But this is my final point before, and then back to you before we go to a break. But the other thing I slightly disagreed with in your conversation with Dominic. Is this idea that the midterms is going to change everything? I agree, he's going to almost certainly lose the midterms, almost certainly lose the House of Representatives and the Senate. But I'm not so sure that Dominic's analysis that he's going to be a lame duck applies.

• 33:34Rory Stewart?

  It would have been true with previous presidents, but this is a guy that doesn't want to run again, rules by executive order, largely ignores most of the norms and institutions anyway. So I, I think, and you can see this in his statements. He's now openly saying, yeah, oil prices remain up, costs of them remain up, probably remain up through the midterms, may even go a bit higher. No normal person would say that, and it's beginning to suggest to me he doesn't care too much about what happens in the midterms.

• 33:59Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I, I, I must admit, I, I, I'm closer to you on that than, than to Dominic, because in the end, regardless of the midterms, which hopefully will be terrible for him, regardless of that, he will still be the President of the United States, and he's established a certain style of governing that I suspect he'll continue. Now, hopefully, Congress will finally get its act together and start to sort of put some proper accountability on this lot and what have you. But I don't think it, it can be remotely guaranteed. And let me just say on the economic stuff, you were quoting one of these companies that sort of analyzes this stuff. I was reading the report from another one, which said that Europe and Japan is going to be hit far harder than the United States. So Europe's got some really big choices.

• 34:43Alastair Campbell?

  You mentioned Merz, interestingly, Merz yesterday, I watched the thing he did, they've got a bit, a little of a sort of political problem going on with this row between one of his ministers and, and other members of the coalition. But he was pretty, he was pretty hard over in criticizing Trump on some of this. The other thing I've found, Maloney's been criticizing him in particular in relation to his attack on the Pope. I mean, this underlines the narcissism that we're dealing with here. The Pope's job is actually sometimes to speak truth to power and to say wars generally aren't very good, okay? And that's kind of what he's saying, at which point. Trump comes out and basically says he's pro-Iranian and he's soft on crime.

• 35:25Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, the guy's nuts. I think we've got to stop pretending this is a normal president. Your point about the Today Programme, I don't listen to the Today Programme every day, but I was speaking to somebody last week who does, who's a member of the Cabinet, who said that last week, or was it the week before, five out of the seven days of the week on the BBC main bulletin at seven o'clock began with the words Donald Trump or a variation thereof. What he says is deemed to be newsworthy, even when it's completely insane and actually needs a bit of context. Maybe my final point before the break, Roy, is I've said to you before that one of the worst periods of my time with Tony Blair were the fuel protests,

• 36:08Alastair Campbell?

  20 odd years ago now. These fuel protests that are kicking off in Ireland are looking really bad and I suspect they're not going to be the only country. I'm in France at the moment, there's quite a lot of garages saying no diesel. The cost, I was speaking to somebody who says that their bill for their heating fuel has doubled since this thing started. So this is going to eat into every country's politics and economics everywhere. And all because, as you say, this guy decided I'm going to take out Iran, even though everybody has told me, you've thought about this before, this is a crazy, crazy thing to do.

• 36:44Rory Stewart?

  Well, quick break and then back to talk about this extraordinary interview that you did with Zelensky. See you soon.

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• 38:13Rory Stewart?

  Welcome back to The Rest is Politics with me Rory Stewart.

• 38:16Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Azte Campbell. So Rory, how much did you, how much do you wish you'd been with me talking to Zelensky?

• 38:22Rory Stewart?

  A lot, a lot. That was, that was very, very sad. It's the great interview. It's the one that we've been aiming for now for, for four years. And you finally pulled it off. And there was I looking at blue footed boobies and seals. I was tempted to try to join from my boat, but I can assure you, you would have been really, really angry with the internet speed off a boat in the Galapagos.

• 38:44Alastair Campbell?

  Probably, probably. Just, just so that our listeners and viewers understand, I did postpone it once.

• 38:50Rory Stewart?

  You did? Because I was on a plane. Yeah.

• 38:52Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but I thought, no, I can't turn down.

• 38:55Rory Stewart?

  No, no, you can't. No, no, I, I, you're completely right. Listen, the guy's a busy man. If he offers you an interview, you've got to, you've got to take it. I mean, I thought it was a great interview. But there were a lot of things that were surprising and strange. I mean, but can I just start with what struck you about how he would compare to interviewing a American politician? So let's maybe take the governor of California, Newsom, as an example. Or how he would compare to interviewing a British politician. I don't know. Let's take Keir Starmer to take a couple of people we've interviewed.

• 39:26Alastair Campbell?

  Okay. I was talking to Luke Harding, who covers Ukraine for The Guardian. And he was saying the great thing about Zelensky is if you ask him a question, he tends to answer it. And I I did get that feeling. He knew roughly what we were going to talk about. I thought at one point, I worried he might get a bit fed up with all he's got to deal with, you know, do I really have to talk about childhood? Being a comedian and all that stuff. But actually, he really seemed to enjoy talking about his past and about his mum and he has to phone her every day and and all that stuff. So I think he was very open. He was very, very warm and kind of relaxed because at the start, Elisa from the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, who was brilliant in helping us to get this thing set up. But she said, look, you need to understand sometimes when he's very, very tired, he prefers to speak in Ukrainian. Okay?

• 40:11Alastair Campbell?

  So they had an interpreter on standby. So I was chatting up the interpreter, explaining why it was always best if we kept the interpreter quiet or what have you. Anyway, Zelensky came on and Zelensky have the inter- all my questions were being translated to him, which is why there was sometimes a little pause at the end. But then he spoke in in English and only very occasionally said to the interpreter, how do I say such and such? But he was very relaxed, incredibly energetic. He just literally just got back from Syria. And, you know, I I think I said when we did the um trip to Ukraine for the fourth anniversary, that every time he goes, even he as president, every time he goes in and out, he has to do 12 hours on the sleeper train. But he didn't look tired. And I think he was just, I found him very open, refreshingly kind of open. And I didn't find him theatrical.

• 40:56Rory Stewart?

  I mean, one thing that that surprised me is um that given that he was a, he's an incredibly funny man, he's a professional comedian.

• 41:06Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 41:06Rory Stewart?

  But I sensed that the Ukrainian style of leadership is quite serious. It really inhabits the role of a wartime president. And and compared to someone like Gavin Newsom, there isn't that much kind of lightness of touch. And maybe I think culturally, because he wouldn't consider that appropriate. I mean, it's and and often when you ask him a personal question, he would broaden it out to a sort of, he'd say, yeah, of course, you know, we have these issues, but and then he'd he'd come back to the main thing.

• 41:43Alastair Campbell?

  I saw that more as he, I don't think he liked making it all about himself.

• 41:51Alastair Campbell?

  So for example, he would talk about his son becoming an adult before his time, or he talked about his mum maybe feeling it more than he did. I didn't get the feeling that he wanted to make it all about himself, whereas a lot of politicians love to make it all about themselves. And I thought the other answer I thought was really interesting, which sort of relates to what you just said, was when I asked him when he was running for office, it was post Crimea. Putin had already started his operation. Was there not a part of him that thought he might have to end up as a war leader? And he basically said, no, he didn't ever think that was going to happen. So I think he was an accidental politician in some ways, and I think he became an accidental war leader. But I think he's brilliant at both.

• 42:32Rory Stewart?

  It's also, though, a reminder of how we can get our models wrong. So in, or at least I get my models wrong. Because he was basically a, an inclusive populist when he ran. I mean, he ran a campaign where he refused really to engage with the conventional media at all. He ran off the back of being this enormous comedy TV star who'd acted as the president and was running to be president. And actually, his supporters registered a party named after this fictional thing.

• 43:02Alastair Campbell?

  Serve him to the people, yeah.

• 43:03Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. So there was this sort of, everybody kept coming up with, all these political scientists said, you know, is this populist, hyper-reality, valence populism. But I mean, attempts to try to describe this, and people drew analogies with Pepe Grio, who'd been a comedian who ran, or they even draw analogies with, of course, Trump, who'd been a reality TV star. So that would make one think, if one didn't understand Ukrainian culture, that he might be a bit more like Pepe Grio or Trump. In other words, much more outrageous and free-rolling and provocative in his speaking style. But actually, he isn't like that at all. Or maybe he hasn't been like that since, since the invasion. He's a, he's, he's a deeply serious man, isn't he?

• 43:45Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, or maybe it's harder in what is ultimately his third language. Because English is, so he's, he's a Russian speaker, perfected his Ukrainian fairly late in life, and English is his third language. I got a sense of a very good, humid guy, though. I mean, I talked to somebody when I was out there who said, don't underestimate how lonely he is. He's got very, very few people he can absolutely trust 100%. He's got this amazing collection of world leaders that he has to kind of keep on board. And, you know, can he trust any of them? One hundred percent? Not really. Can any world leader really trust somebody who's running another country? Very frustrated and very suspicious about Trump, but can't really say that.

• 44:29Alastair Campbell?

  And so I think actually his wife, and they, as he said on the, in the interview, they, they met when he was, she was a comedy scriptwriter, he was an actor and a writer. And, you know, and he said that, you know, they have to sometimes just have a laugh and try to find things funny. Because if you don't have a sense of humour, you kind of finish, you know, your world sort of literally collapses. So I think he'd be conscious of not wanting to be flippant about anything. But I got, I always got the feeling of somebody who actually does have a lightness of touch, but is harder in a third language, I think. I'll tell you the bit I absolutely love though, Rory, the bit I, go on, guess what I'm going to say?

• 45:04Rory Stewart?

  No, the bit where he, the bit where, where you basically say, is Trump on Putin's side and he doesn't challenge you?

• 45:10Alastair Campbell?

  No, no, no, it's similar. It is something that I, I want people to believe in. No, it's when I suggested that the UK should join the European Union on the same day as Ukraine. Yeah, yeah.

• 45:20Rory Stewart?

  I missed that. No, you're completely right. And, and, and I think that was a really interesting argument. Because again, you know, we were talking just before the break about how if America becomes effectively a rogue state, there is an opportunity not for the world to descend into chaos, but instead to reorganise itself. And Germany being at the heart of that. But his story, which I thought was very interesting, is that what could happen is Europe could transform its security architecture if it took in the UK, Norway, Ukraine and Turkey. Effectively, what he's saying is if you actually want Europe to guarantee that it can defend itself against Russia, those are the countries you need to bolt on. So it's not just a statement about values,

• 46:04Rory Stewart?

  not just a statement about European extension, it's a solution to America withdrawing.

• 46:08Alastair Campbell?

  It's so interesting. So we should say to people that also on YouTube, the, the film that I made in Ukraine, including the interview with Martin Koscielny. Enlargement Commissioner. Now, I think she'd love to do something, be able to do something as kind of big and dramatic as that, but it's very, very hard because there are processes, there are rules, et cetera. But he's basically saying Europe has to become a bigger political project. And when he said it in those terms, just think about it, UK, I mean, okay, you mentioned George Robertson, and George Robertson is saying that we're not remotely in the state that we should be, but we're still one of the bigger European powers. You take UK, Norway, Turkey and Ukraine, you're adding an awful lot of heft to any military alliance at a

• 46:51Alastair Campbell?

  time when the Americans do appear to be leaving us to it. Now, we're still going to be, it will take a long time to fill any gap that Ukraine might be left by the United States. And that's why he's pretty careful about how he speaks about them.

• 47:05Rory Stewart?

  But it was fascinating, wasn't it? And it, again, isn't something we hear much in the British press. So, of course, I guess listeners will understand why Ukraine joining the European alliance would transform it, because this is a country that's single-handedly is holding back Russia on its own and has completely innovated and created whole new forms of drone warfare and is probably the most advanced innovative military nation on earth at the moment. Norway and the UK is interesting because he's making the point that we actually give the other flank against Russia, that's the Arctic flank, as he pointed out, but it's Turkey maybe that we don't talk about enough. Just how many soldiers Turkey has, how many weapons Turkey has, the heft that Turkey has in the region. And Turkey,

• 47:50Rory Stewart?

  of course, is a NATO member. So what you've got there is basically NATO plus Ukraine without the United States as being the absolute bedrock of containing Russia. And there's a logic to it, and logic is very powerful, too.

• 48:03Alastair Campbell?

  And this morning, Zelensky, there's a post that we read, Zelensky, for the first time in the war, an enemy position was captured entirely by ground robotic systems and drones without any infantry. A robot entered the most dangerous zones instead of a soldier and took the positions, which you think, wow. And David Petraeus, who we interviewed, the former CIA chief and very senior military figure in the US, he said that, you know, Ukraine is becoming one of the really major military forces in the world. I thought that bit of the interview was interesting. The other thing I found really interesting was his analysis of Putin.

• 48:44Alastair Campbell?

  And his disbelief really that Whitkoff and Kushner in particular, but Trump as well, feel they they have to believe him, they have to trust him because they don't want to think that he might lie to them. This is a guy who lies to everybody.

• 49:00Rory Stewart?

  Well, there were a couple of other things, weren't there, which really struck me from your interview. One is him saying very flatly that Whitkoff had basically refused to meet him. I mean, I hadn't actually fully got this into my head, that Steve Whitkoff, Trump's negotiator, is flying out to meet Putin in Moscow again and again and again, and won't meet Zelensky. That's really odd. The second thing is, he was explaining something that's quite difficult to explain, and will have been very difficult to explain, particularly to the US, which is, why just putting a ceasefire in place, which must be very tempting for people, is not actually a smart idea. That if you were just to say, okay, let's just announce the ceasefire tomorrow, what actually happens is Russia uses that to consolidate its position, lick its wounds,

• 49:45Rory Stewart?

  remobilize its army, retrain its officer corps, retrain its NCO cadre, and find itself ready to project itself into another part of Europe. Now, that's a difficult message, but it's a that's the central message, isn't it? That what he's saying is, you you can't just say, let's all pause.

• 50:04Alastair Campbell?

  I also thought it was interesting, the phrase that he used, you can't just have a week of celebration. And I'll tell you what that put me in mind of was Gaza. So Trump claims he's brought peace to Gaza. Well, there is a ceasefire of sorts. We're still stuck. Nobody talks about it anymore. We're still stuck in phase one. And what's going on in Gaza? There was a brilliant, another read of the week for you newsletter people. New York Times, Khada Abdul Fatah, I don't know if you saw this piece in your week of reading, Rory, rubble doesn't just destroy the past, it erases the future. It forces your mind to stop imagining, to stop thinking, to stop dreaming about life after today. This is a writer who's living in Gaza, who wrote this unbelievably moving piece about just how awful their life is there right now.

• 50:49Alastair Campbell?

  And so Zelensky is basically saying that is, you know, yes, you can have a ceasefire, but do please don't trust Putin to deliver on the promises that he made to attach to the ceasefire.

• 51:02Rory Stewart?

  We don't find it easy to really get our heads around the permanent economic and total social damage done by war. You know, Iran has probably in the last five weeks suffered 200 billion pounds worth of damage. Gaza, hundreds of billions, Ukraine, hundreds of billions. I mean, I really felt this when I was in Aleppo a few weeks ago, just looking at a city destroyed and the impossibility of imagining that a relatively poor country with a limited budget can ever rebuild these buildings and get things back together. And of course, in Gaza, you've got the fact that, I don't know, one estimate is 72,000

• 51:43Rory Stewart?

  people were killed in Gaza, that 749 have been killed since the ceasefire.

• 51:49Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly.

• 51:50Rory Stewart?

  And that a lot of the medical conditions that people were suffering were put on hold during the crisis. And now people are trying to go to hospitals which are barely functioning. There are about 20,000 people with acute and critical conditions who are not able to leave Gaza, despite that being part of the deal. And things actually paradoxically get worse in the aftermath because it's a bit like what happened after the end of Covid, which is that everybody having been kept out of the hospitals, all the cancer treatment having been delayed, all the chronic conditions have been delayed, they're now trying to flood facilities which simply aren't functioning at all. Meanwhile, in Lebanon, we have 1 million people displaced.

• 52:32Rory Stewart?

  And as you said, I think in the first half, this very odd spectacle of so-called peace deals with just a Lebanese ambassador talking to an Israeli ambassador with Marco Rubio in Washington. It's the accumulation over the four years that we've done this podcast of just...

• 52:52Rory Stewart?

  The amounts of damage, the hundreds of billions of pounds worth of permanent damage as well as death.

• 52:58Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 52:58Rory Stewart?

  Done by these wars. We've had 1.2 million casualties in the in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. I mean, it's almost unimaginable for for people who grew up in a world that seemed to be getting every year more peaceful, more prosperous, more stable. Just the cost of these wars.

• 53:15Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm hmm. I suppose the the piece of good news for Ukraine was something that we're going to talk about in Question Time, which was the election in Hungary. You know, again, Zelensky was being quite diplomatic in the interview. He just said, look, I'm not on the side of the guy in Hungary. Didn't want to say who he was, but he and he and he did make the very sensible observation that he wasn't sure it was a very good idea for Orban, that J D Vance turned up to help him in his in his campaign. Before we go, anybody who hasn't seen the Zelensky interview, just go to the rest is politics leading. You can also find it on YouTube. Rory, there's a book here. You really got to learn German because some of the best books at the moment are coming out in German. This one. Do you know Franz Gaub?

• 53:57Rory Stewart?

  No.

• 53:57Alastair Campbell?

  Well, she works for NATO at the research place in Rome.

• 54:01Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 54:01Alastair Campbell?

  And she's written she's written this book called Scenario: Die Zukunft steht auf dem Spiel, which basically means future is at stake. Okay. And it's absolutely extraordinary. A lot of it is about the Arctic, the Battle of the Arctic that we talked about on the mini-series with Ken Rosen. But essentially, she she writes these chapters, and at the end of the chapter, you, that's you, the reader, or you, a diplomat, or you, the military, or you, you, we, you read it. She sets out a set of options that you can maybe take forward, partly to reveal just how complicated the world is right now, but also just to sort of get your mind thinking. And what I'm only halfway through, but what it the basic message coming through, and she's somebody who's European, German, working in NATO

• 54:45Alastair Campbell?

  and what have you, but what's coming through is that China and Russia. Are doing a much better job of carving up the world in the future as they see it.

• 54:57Rory Stewart?

  A little plug on that for another talking multilingual. I've talked about him in the past, but Odianne Vestad, who's a Norwegian and who, you made this point, Dominic, being a Norwegian, of course, he speaks fluent English, fluent German, fluent French, but also being, Odianne Vestad, he also speaks fluent Mandarin and fluent Russian. So he's right in the archives of China and Russia. And his book, The Coming Storm, which draws parallels from the lead up to the First World War and tries to chart why he feels this is a moment like the lead up to the First World War, I think is something that we might pair with this book, which hopefully you're getting translated into English.

• 55:36Alastair Campbell?

  Well, publishers need to do this because these German books, it is honestly, it's the yet another book I've read thinking, God, I wish I'd written that book. It's really clever and I love the way she sort of brings you in and says at the end of every chapter, she doesn't just say, and then what happens is this. She basically says, you can now decide, do you want to go to this bit of the future or that bit of the future? But the Arctic, the Arctic is so big in this. And George Robertson, you mentioned George Robertson, former Defence Secretary, former General Secretary of NATO, one of the three people who did the Defence Review, and he's clearly, really believes that we, the UK, are not well set up for this developing, changing world.

• 56:17Rory Stewart?

  Can I just finish with a bit of a plug to follow up? The Zelensky interview is really beautiful, but there's a lot of other great interviews on leading. So if people are doing a long car journey or going to the gym, catch up on the back catalogue. Naz Shah, a kind of blistering, bewildering interview about her experience. She's a British Member of Parliament of her early childhood in Britain and Pakistan and her family and incredible family trauma. One of my favourites that we haven't talked about enough, Sarah McBride, who is, again, will challenge some listeners, but is a transgender congresswoman, talking in the most open, lovely way about what it is being trans. So I would encourage people who find

• 57:02Rory Stewart?

  this debate uncomfortable and the many listeners who dislike the way that Alistair and I approach it, to listen to Sarah McBride and maybe come back to us and again, you know, have another go at us about that. But. So many other wonderful things. I mean, if we're talking about the global order, Pedro Sanchez, the one that is defying Trump, President Stubb, Gavin Newsom, Olive Schultz, all in the last few weeks. So please, please just have a look at the back catalogue. And actually, if you go back further, we've got some great interviews with Iran specialists, military specialists, intelligence chiefs and the rest.

• 57:38Alastair Campbell?

  And coming up on Monday, Anas Sawa. But meanwhile, do check out Zelensky.

• 57:44Rory Stewart?

  Congratulations again on Zelensky. And I thought startling and really, really matters. And the only thing that I would add as my final thought is he's in trouble in some ways because of what Trump's doing in Iran, because in effect, Russia is now making much more money from its oil revenue. It's probably one a year or 18 months, which it wouldn't otherwise have had when it was in real trouble on the frontline. It's now economically stronger. And he will be worried, as he said, that they're firing a lot of the Patriot interceptor missiles that he needs for Ukraine in Iran. I mean, it's another sign that Trump is not just heedless

• 58:23Rory Stewart?

  of consequence, but by doing this completely unnecessary, chaotic, world economy destroying madness in Iran, he's actually totally undermining the West's position against Russia and against China by distracting and blowing all the credibility, legitimacy, missiles and money on this unnecessary conflict, rather than saving them for things that matter most.

• 58:46Alastair Campbell?

  Although that is the, that's the reason why it is good news that all power has gone and Magyar has indicated that he will no longer act as a block on the European money that is meant to be going there. I forgot, by the way, today, we're recording this on Tuesday, one of the several prime ministers who sent me a message saying, really enjoyed your interview with Zelensky, it was Jonas Karlstor in Norway, and Zelensky is in Norway today. So hopefully they're discussing this great plan. And Rory, I'm going to leave you with a, I'm going to leave you with a little conundrum. If you had a, an acronym for a military alliance composing of the UK, Ukraine, Norway and Turkey, what would you call it? There we are. Worked out

• 59:28Alastair Campbell?

  and out, and I'll see you at question time. We'll talk about Hungary. We'll also talk a bit closer to home about the upcoming Scottish, Welsh and local elections and lots more. See you then.

• 59:37Rory Stewart?

  See you then. Bye bye.

• 59:44Speaker 06

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig.

• 59:48Speaker 07

  On October 2nd.

• 59:49Speaker 06

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 59:54Speaker 07

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:00:01Speaker 08

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 1:00:05Speaker 07

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:00:08Speaker 08

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:00:10Speaker 07

  Digger, see the trailer online, only theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.