Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 270. Will Israel go to war with Hezbollah? About this episode How important is Putin’s visit to North Korea? What will the consequences be of a war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon? How worrying is Germany’s far-right problem?
Join Alastair and Rory today for a special episode focused on international affairs, where they will answer all these questions and more, taking you around the world from Lebanon to Pyongyang.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Rory Stewart? This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.
0:06 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.
0:19 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 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.
0:42 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think, are you not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?
0:49 Rory 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/rustaspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rustaspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.
1:42 Rory Stewart? Welcome to The Rest is Politics, a special edition with me Rory Stewart.
1:47 Alastair Campbell? And me, Alex Campbell. And what's special about it Rory is that we did a live stream yesterday, which we stuck with it, even though you were on a train with a bit dodgy wifi. And we talked about all sorts of things beyond the election. But the sound qualities are a bit irritating for people to put out on the general feed. So we're going to briefly recap, not the election stuff, because that's already kind of slightly out of date, frankly, some of it. But we're going to talk about Israel, Hezbollah, Russia, North Korea, China, and also stuff that's been going on in Germany. So kick off with Hezbollah.
2:21 Rory Stewart? Well, so the the big news there is that senior Israeli generals have now signaled that they're bringing together plans to launch a campaign against Hezbollah. And Hezbollah is this very large terrorist armed group located in southern Lebanon, much larger than Hamas, much better armed, much more directly supported by Iran. And that would represent a huge transformation in Israel's war plan. So at the moment, they're responding to October the 7th by going to Gaza, where the attacks came from. Instead of going west, they would shift north and go into southern Lebanon.
3:00 Rory Stewart? And, you know, the Foreign Minister has said, in a total war, Hezbollah will be destroyed and Lebanon will be hit hard. So there's a real stepping up of rhetoric. Many, many things to talk about here. There's the question of what would that campaign look like? Can Israel do it? How would the international community respond? But first over to you, your thoughts and your sense of this whole thing.
3:24 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think the the point about how the international community would respond, I suppose it depends partly where they are already on this. I think it does make it harder for the Americans, for example, to maintain the level of support. Because essentially what Israel's saying is that they're having to open, even though there's been quite a lot going on on this front already, but open a new front and in a situation that will make the region even more difficult, even more dangerous. And I think, you know, there will be part, I'm assuming there'll be part of the American system that will be, will be thinking, I think, you know, is Netanyahu just kind of now, I don't mean this in a bad way, well, I suppose I do in a way, using the war to,
4:08 Alastair Campbell? that made that the utterly defining purpose of his government? Because of course, everybody you talk to in Israel, including people that are quite close to Netanyahu, basically thinks that as soon as there's a general election, he's gone. And meanwhile, you've got what's going on in Gaza continuing to do a lot, quite a lot of damage to Israel's standing in the world. Just yesterday, UN Human Rights Office saying that they picked, they focused on six, what they call emblematic airstrikes, which they are saying systematically violated the laws of war, requiring that civilians and civilian infrastructure are properly protected. So that's the kind of, I think, the part of the backdrop to this. We should always point out, and lots of our pro-Israeli people point
4:51 Alastair Campbell? this out, just always point out, as it were, this is all in direct response to what happened on October 7th, which was unforgivable. But I think this now gives the sense that they're taking it to a different place and it's going to become much, much more difficult for the world to deal with it.
5:07 Rory Stewart? Yes. The, the reason why Israel might do it is firstly that there have been a lot of Hezbollah missiles firing into northern Israel. 10 civilians have been killed, 15 soldiers have been killed, and about 60,000 Israelis living in settlements, sorry, living in villages in northern Israel have, have moved south. The second reason they might do it is a sense that Hezbollah represents a much bigger threat to Israel than Hamas. And so there are people in the Israeli government who think we're going to have to go after them sometime, and we might as well go after them now.
5:45 Alastair Campbell? But one of the reasons, Rory, they represent a bigger threat is because they have bigger support from players in this, in this region who frankly, you know, would they, what will the Iranians think of this? Will they, will they think it sort of brings them further in or they try and stay further out? I mean, it just, I think, poses an awful lot of very difficult questions.
6:06 Rory Stewart? It's incredibly dangerous. I mean, it'd be incredibly dangerous thing to do. So stepping back from the rationale for doing, unbelievably dangerous. So firstly, Hezbollah is a very considerable enemy, much better equipped, much better trained than Hamas. I mean, their fighters have really active combat experience in Syria. They were the people who turned the Syrian war. They have a lot more anti-aircraft missiles, they're able to shoot down UAVs. If a full war started, they would try to be landing rockets right in the middle of Haifa. And Iran has been a very strong supporter of Hezbollah. They've created Hezbollah, they've funded Hezbollah. And I remember The Iranian rockets were flying over a few weeks ago. Remember the standoffs around the killings of Iranian diplomats in the embassy in Damascus. So there's a big question
6:51 Rory Stewart? about dragging Iran further, and particularly at a time when almost certainly the next Iranian president is going to be somebody closely connected with the Revolutionary Guard. So very, very dangerous. Also, Israel will almost certainly lose its remaining connections to a lot of the other regional countries that won't support this, and it's going to be very difficult for Israel to do. The reservists have been called up three times already, and this means that we're in a position in which people are talking about having to conscript the ultra-orthodox community, and Israel will only be able to go into Lebanon with equipment support from the United States. This will be all about the United States, and it's going to play deeply into the question of is America getting behind this at a time
7:36 Rory Stewart? when Biden's special envoy has been in Lebanon, calling for peace and trying to get people back to this peace plan that Biden announced two weeks ago, which is meant to be about the release of hostages and a ceasefire in Gaza. So it could lead to a much more militarized situation, could lead to Israel being ever more marginalized in an ever more violent fight. But of course, from the point of view of the Israeli far-right and many people in Israel, they increasingly see this as an existential fight for survival. Over to you on North Korea.
8:02 Alastair Campbell? Well, so and this kind of is related, because of course, the other thing that it does is it further reduces, if you like, Ukraine in terms of the international agenda. And Zelensky, I think, does an extraordinary job at keeping Ukraine as close to the forefront of other leaders' minds as he can, but it gets harder when all this other stuff's going as well. And meanwhile, Vladimir Putin flies off to Pyongyang, first visit to Pyongyang in 24 years, almost a quarter of a century, at which he and Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, signed lots of sort of diplomatic and...
8:44 Alastair Campbell? Military relationships, essentially, almost it seemed to me, taking the NATO principle, an attack on one is an attack on all, just the two of them, but an attack on one of us, that means an attack on the other. Kim Jong-un doing something that Xi Jinping has not done, essentially saying full support for Putin in his invasion of Ukraine and his claims on Ukraine. So, and pretty extraordinary kind of theater to this. Putin arrived at 3am, right, in the dead of night, Kim Jong-un is there to give him a big hug, honor guards, the whole of Pyongyang,
9:23 Alastair Campbell? just huge posters of the two leaders together, very, very kind of, you know, flaunting this newfound special relationship. And of course, part of it is about the continuing suspicions that Russia is taking ammunition and other military supplies from Korea, North Korea, in exchange for money and in exchange for further support. And Xi Jinping, little bit skeptical about the whole thing.
9:51 Rory Stewart? Yeah, it is traumatic. I mean, we're so far and deep into this that we almost take it for granted. But the point is that Russia was prepared to criticize North Korea relatively recently, to criticize its missile tests. It's one of the few subjects where the Security Council actually stayed together, you know, North Korea being a nuclear threat destabilizing the region. So this is a big change. And it's not just Putin turning up, he turns up with this Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and as you say, first visit 24 years, and the Russians could involve themselves in providing support for North Korean submarines, support from ballistic missile launch. So given that North Korea is one of the most dangerous tinderboxes in the world, putting the support of Russian technology behind it is really going to destabilize further.
10:36 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. And the response to China is absolutely fascinating in this because, of course, they both want to have close relations with China because China's so powerful.
10:46 Alastair Campbell? Um. But I was uh I was told that when Putin went to Beijing last May, I think it was, that the original plan was for Putin to fly back to Moscow via Pyongyang to drop in and see Kim Jong Un then. And the Chinese said, no, hold on a minute, you're not doing that. Because, you know, that looks like we're too much part of the thing. So he and and this is interesting what China will be thinking of this. Uh. Because of course China has its own problems economically and trying to deal with some of the political fallout from decisions that are made in the in the West. So this is one that I don't know. I've been in Germany and France, as you know, so I don't know how much coverage this has been getting in the UK, but it's it's quite a big deal.
11:26 Rory Stewart? And and why and just quickly before we bring you on to Germany, um. Why has this all changed? It's changed because as Russia gets more and more isolated, as the sanctions build up, as it's excluded from world trading systems, payment systems. It is falling back on the only allies it's got left, which are places like North Korea. And in it, this is all part of the world solidifying into these much more violent confrontational blocks than would have been the case before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Um. Over to you on on Germany. Tell us a bit about Germany. Yeah.
11:59 Alastair Campbell? Well, so briefly on Germany, talking of uh of increasing violence. Um. There's an organisation in Germany, it's it's called the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Um. And they, as you know, have a post-war written constitution. They take it very, very seriously, constitutional courts and so forth. And this organisation, uh BFV, which is sometimes compared to MI5, but they're they're they're they're similarities, but there are also differences. But they produce an annual report, and this annual report, which was published a few days ago, is is reporting with data the surge in far-right violence, surge in Islamic Islamist extremism, and also increasing cyber attack from Russia and China, which led to the interior minister Nancy Faeser
12:44 Alastair Campbell? actually talking about what she called a significant threat to German democracy. And so, for example, far-right offences, the number of extremist crimes, as they're called. Increased to almost forty thousand, twenty five percent rise in offences of far right people and organisations, quite a considerable growth in people that they believe are prepared to use violence, and above all, both on the hard left and the hard right, hostility to Germany's rule of law, which of course includes things like the Constitutional Court. So genuinely quite worrying, and also the fact that both the war in Ukraine and the
13:28 Alastair Campbell? war in the Middle East, that these are being exploited on both sides, both to, if you like, fan the flames of antisemitism, but also to fan the flames of Islamism as well, of anti-Islam. So really quite a disturbing read. It's a long, long report. I read the summary and it's really, it's quite a worrying thing, particularly as, you know, we see the far right operating pretty successfully in America, the role that Farage is playing in the UK election right now, some of the changes that have been in the European elections. I think people should take this pretty seriously.
14:07 Rory Stewart? Well, just to conclude then, so thank you. And a reminder that while we're all focused on the UK elections, there is an enormous amount going on around the world. The stakes for democracy are very, very high. And we're going to have to get back into these subjects in more detail when we come through this electoral period. But thank you, Alastair, for that short update.
14:25 Alastair Campbell? Now, just on a lighter note, Rory, that was all a bit heavy, but I've just noticed in this room that I borrowed to do the podcast, look what's sitting in front of me.
14:34 Rory Stewart? Oh, it's a very beautiful blue and white Chinese pot in the shape of a pomegranate.
14:38 Alastair Campbell? I mean, the pots are just...
14:40 Rory Stewart? And it blends very well with your lampshade and with your bed cover. But many people are listening to this on the podcast, so just finish in your mind's eye, if you're listening, with a vision of Alastair posing like somebody from Antiques Roadshow with a rather interesting pomegranate-shaped blue and white pot.
14:56 Alastair Campbell? But it also is exactly the same colour as your thousand-pound pots.
14:59 Rory Stewart? Yeah, so there's an in-joke running here again for international listeners on the fact that I was grumbling that I had to pay a huge amount of tax importing from Holland. And this was an example of the costs of Brexit. Okay, Alistair, thank you very much. Good luck, have a good time in France.
15:12 Alastair Campbell? I will. And the final reminder for listeners, we'll put this out, this is going out, well, this, I'm sorry, this is already out, otherwise you wouldn't hear it. So next up on the Restless Politics, you've got Restless Politics US on Friday, on on Monday. Great, thanks. We've finally got a serving member of the Cabinet during the campaign to come on. It's Alex Chalk, the Justice Secretary. West Streeting will be followed up a few days after that. And we should also let people know, we've just, we've just recorded this morning a fabulous interview with Lord Gus O'Donnell, former Cabinet Secretary, who has a lot to say about a lot of things. So all that to look forward to.
15:48 Rory Stewart? Thank you, Alistair. Good luck with everything. Bye bye.
15:51 Alastair Campbell? Bye.
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