Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 443. China’s Plot to Topple Trump: How to Bring Down a Superpower About this episode How is China forging a new world order beyond Trump’s isolationist America? Is Trump’s sudden turn against India uniting Xi, Putin, and Modi – for good? As Washington falters and Beijing rises, where does that leave South East Asia?
Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more.
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Transcript 9,739 words · 10 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Rory Stewart? This extraordinary meeting which brought Modi, Xi Jinping and Putin together. Increasingly, those countries now see the US as a more and more aggressive, unpredictable threat.
0:12 Alastair Campbell? I hate to say this, but it's been perfectly timed for Xi Jinping.
0:15 Rory Stewart? When China's seen as the US's big peer competitor. Instead of having China isolated with Russia peeled off, they've been forced together.
0:23 Alastair Campbell? There's so much trolling of Trump going on this.
0:25 Rory Stewart? Russia can say things China can't. They have this mate who can go out there saying unbelievably aggressive and hostile things against the West.
0:33 Alastair Campbell? We've really effed things up. Well, we're now in a position where the Chinese Communist Party can hold the moral high ground. This episode is powered by Fuse Energy.
0:45 Rory Stewart? Fuse are currently one of the fastest growing energy suppliers in the UK. And this September, they're raising the stakes. One lucky new sign up will receive £20,000 in cash.
0:57 Alastair Campbell? And on October the 1st, the energy price gap goes up again. And Fuse is one of the few things that's going to be trying to help you deal with that.
1:06 Rory Stewart? The average household could save approximately £200 by switching to Fuse. Takes just three minutes to sign up, three minutes to cut your bills and fix your rate and perhaps win £20,000 in cash.
1:18 Alastair Campbell? That's less time than it takes for VAR to overturn a dodgy penalty given to Manchester United against Burnley.
1:26 Rory Stewart? So add that to the back to school list. And unlike most transfer deadlines, in football, this one won't move.
1:33 Alastair Campbell? Go to fuseenergy.com/politics to switch to Fuse and be in with a chance to win £20,000.
1:42 Rory Stewart? TNC Supply, please go to the landing page.
1:50 Rory Stewart? This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.
1:53 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.
2:04 Alastair Campbell? Managed to watch it. There you go.
2:05 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. 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.
2:29 Alastair 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?
2:35 Rory Stewart? I 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.
2:52 Speaker 02 A BetterHelp ad. Imagine carrying a backpack every day, every conversation, every mistake, every expectation. You probably wouldn't notice how heavy it was until someone asked if you wanted to put it down. Sometimes feeling better starts exactly like that. Better isn't one size fits all. Better is personal. It's therapy tailored to you to help lighten what you've been carrying. Match with a therapist who truly gets you. Visit betterhelp.com/restpolitics.
3:29 Alastair Campbell? Welcome to the Rest is Politics, face to face with me, Alastair Campbell.
3:33 Rory Stewart? And with me, Rory Stewart. And you are back from Bosnia and Singapore.
3:37 Alastair Campbell? Yes, we talked about Bosnia last week. We'll talk a little bit about Singapore this week.
3:41 Rory Stewart? And I'm back from the Orkney.
3:42 Alastair Campbell? Is it the Orkney or Orkney or the Orkneys? It's Orkney, isn't it?
3:45 Rory Stewart? It's Orkney.
3:46 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, just say Orkney. Why do we say the Orkneys?
3:48 Rory Stewart? Well, I didn't put it as plural, but you're right. I put in a definite article, which I should have put in.
3:52 Alastair Campbell? The Ukraine, which is the wrong thing to say.
3:54 Rory Stewart? And it's like people who say Afghans when they should say Afghans. It's all very strange.
3:58 Alastair Campbell? So Rory, we've talked a lot in recent weeks about the United States, about Ukraine, about Gaza. We're going to stay very much on a foreign policy focus, but very much focused on Asia. On China, there's an extraordinary meeting that Xi Jinping has been hosting. Then in the second half, we're going to look at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
4:17 Rory Stewart? You were in Singapore right at the moment of this extraordinary meeting, which brought Modi, Xi Jinping and Putin together. So India, China and Russia together, Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. Give us a bit of a sense of of that.
4:31 Alastair Campbell? Well, I mean, I do think this meeting is very consequential. I mean, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation has been going for some time. It started with mainly Russia and China and four of the the stands, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, a few others. And then it's grown and the signs are that it's growing still because some of the people who are there are not full members of the SCO. But they're there at this thing, which I think has been, I hate to say this, but it's been perfectly timed for Xi Jinping. And the absent force in this is, of course, Trump. Because Modi, and I think, I'm glad to see the New York Times finally agrees with me that the real story at the heart of the India-US rupture is the Nobel Peace Prize.
5:14 Alastair Campbell? The fact that Pakistan has said that they would nominate Trump and Modi was really pissed off that Trump tried to take credit as this is one of his 10 wars it is now that he's stopped the India-Pakistan skirmishes recently. And so Modi's there and Modi is there very much, I think, signalling that the bipartisan American 25, 30-year effort to get Modi much more into the American orbit, he's kind of resisting that, not least because of the way that Trump has treated him. And of course Putin, fresh from his winner-takes-all summit with Trump in Alaska, is there very much looking just like one of the big three in this new nexus.
5:56 Alastair Campbell? And of course, Russia, India has been tricky, India, China has been tricky, not least because of the border skirmishes that happened a few years ago and the war of the 60s. But also China, Russia is tricky. And yet Trump has seemingly brought them all together in a way that, you know, makes them look like a, well, they're definitely vying to be a rival collection to the Western Alliance.
6:18 Rory Stewart? Strategically, as you're saying, the the big US policy really for 20, 30 years has been to think about how to make sure that China is relatively isolated. I mean, China is seen as the US's big peer competitor and. There have been different US attempts to do this, and it went on through all these different administrations, Republican, Democrat, through to Biden. And through Trump one. And through Trump one. And the idea was, as you say, very important idea, that India, which is this enormous population and increasingly enormous economy, would remain within the Western orbit, that Japan, South Korea, Philippines, Vietnam, Australia would be on the US side. And then there was another idea, which was being sold by some of the people who are in the new Trump team. So Marco Rubio seemed to talk about this, Elbridge Colby, who's
7:03 Rory Stewart? the deputy defence guy, used to talk about this, of what they called a reverse Kissinger. And the idea was that in the 1970s, Nixon and Kissinger decided to isolate Russia by reaching out to China. The reverse Kissinger was going to go in the other direction, were going to isolate China by reaching out to Russia. And there were some people who thought when Trump started taking the Russian side on Ukraine, maybe this is what he's up to. But as you say, this conference in Shenzhen shows the collapse of the entire strategy because instead of having China isolated with Russia peeled off through Trump's charm offensive and Modi peeled off in the other direction, what's happened is they've been forced together, have been forced together in, I guess, one very, very fundamental way,
7:46 Rory Stewart? which is increasingly those countries now see the US as a more and more aggressive, unpredictable threat. If you're China, you're thinking, is the US Navy going to stop my oil supplies coming through? If you're Russia, you really are very conscious of all the stuff that the US and the West have done against its economic system. If you're India, you're now facing 50% tariffs, and you're facing it in a way that you can't predict. I mean, I wanted to turn to you on this because if you're Modi, you're going to be very perplexed. You would have thought that you'd done everything right. Ambani, who's the guy, the big Indian billionaire who processes the oil, had invited Jared Kushner
8:29 Rory Stewart? and Trump's daughter to his wedding, and this sort of kind of big deal. Modi and Trump seemed to be mates. And there was a general sense that Trump was like some sort of... Classic kind of old style dictator and all he needed to do was invite the family to the wedding and give some, there are ten Trump buildings, I think, in India. And yet, none of that worked.
8:48 Alastair Campbell? And that's why, you see, I think that, see, you have this bipartisan policy, Republican Democrat presence, as you say, and with very little resistance, basically saying, India's going to be a future power, we've got to get them on board, et cetera. Trump seems to do that term one. You have these, what came across as like lovenes between the two of them, going to, you know, I think there was a hundred and ten thousand people at one of the rallies that they did together in term one. And the only thing I can think of that's caused this rift is this India-Pakistan Nobel Prize thing. Two thousand and one, America lifted sanctions on India that it imposed because of its nuclear programme. Two thousand and five, it began actually negotiating a pretty generous nuclear cooperation deal, signed in two thousand and eight.
9:33 Alastair Campbell? And then two thousand and sixteen, they made India a, quote, "major defence partner", which made it access to some of the technologies without becoming a kind of fully fledged ally. So that's what's being, it would seem, being reversed. And if you think about it, the raising of the tariffs to twenty to fifty percent, which is going to hit their economy, and particularly small and medium sized people, really badly. The reason that Trump gave was because of Indian increase in the, in the buying of crude Russian oil, which is true, we've talked about this before, it went from, I think, one percent of their oil to something like a third. But China is a bigger importer of Russian crude, and yet, he's not gone after Xi Jinping in the same way.
10:16 Alastair Campbell? Just on the business side, Peter, one of, one of the really substantial thing that I think has come out of this summit is Putin and Xi have done some sort of deal on the new Siberian pipeline. So this is about, you know, energy from Russia to Mongolia.
10:31 Rory Stewart? And again, avoiding American ships.
10:32 Alastair Campbell? Absolutely.
10:33 Rory Stewart? You're not exposed to the navy in the sea.
10:35 Alastair Campbell? And if you look at what, what Xi Jinping said, "Member states", he's talking here about the SCO, "should, quote, oppose Cold War mentality", which is what we normally associate with them and Russia, "block-based confrontation and bullying". We know, and that by the way, he's looking at Modi when he says that and he's talking about the tariffs, and safeguard the international system with the United Nations at its core. And if you think about that, so China is often seen by the Brits and by the Americans as the country that is most blocking anything that happens at the United Nations. And he's flipped this around.
11:14 Rory Stewart? This is something fascinating. So Xi Jinping's been trying for years to sell this line and nobody's been listening. And Trump has suddenly made it plausible.
11:23 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
11:23 Rory Stewart? Suddenly, for the first time, China's attempt to say, we represent predictability, the UN system, fair business, which seemed ridiculous two years ago, now seems very interesting. Second thing. On Russia, the China-Russia relationship is amazing because on the surface, people say Russia's a much smaller economy. What's China got to benefit? You've talked about oil and there's some other material things like the fact that Russia is a market for Chinese goods. But I think there's a bigger thing, which is that Russia can say things China can't. So if we take your point that China is portraying itself as the guardian of the international rules-based system.
12:03 Rory Stewart? They have this mate who can go out there saying unbelievably aggressive and hostile things against the West. They have a friend in Russia who has nuclear weapons. They have a friend in Russia who has a network of allies in Africa that they can draw on and in Central Asia that they can draw on. And they have a friend who can propose things they can't propose. So Russia can say things like, we're going to create an independent payment system. We're going to get away from the old US-dominated system. And it's a very, I don't know quite how you define the relationship, but Russia is very, very useful to China.
12:37 Alastair Campbell? They also do though, have they? All three of them still have their tensions. I mean, the border stuff has never been fully resolved with India. Xi Jinping is probably a little bit worried about the extent to which North Korea is getting a bit too cosy with Putin. And Kim Jong-un is going to be at this massive military parade. This is apparently, and again, I think there's so much trolling of Trump going on this. They are, they are sort of almost willfully saying, you had your military parade, Trump. It was a total flop. This is going to be the biggest you've ever seen. This is going to be the kind of military parade that Trump really loved to see in Washington. Modi, who Trump would expect to be sort of, you know, down on his knees, begging to be allowed back into the American orbit, arrives at the meeting, literally holding hands with Vladimir Putin.
13:22 Alastair Campbell? They walk in hand in hand, they go and join Xi Jinping, who looks like he's the main guy. They're sort of slightly bowing down to him. Modi then posts a picture of himself in his car with Vladimir Putin, who of course Trump had got into his car, but unlike, unlike Trump, Modi has a camera in the car. So the picture of him and Putin, and he does a tweet saying, always interesting to talk to this guy. And then I think the other thing that's really interesting about what Xi Jinping is doing, because the other thing that they feel, and this is partly their fault, because they've always kind of never really worried too much about international communication.
14:02 Alastair Campbell? They feel that the story of the Second World War has been overly dominated by America and the Allies.
14:09 Rory Stewart? Yeah, so we, America, Britain, we think we won the Second World War.
14:12 Alastair Campbell? And they think that actually the real battles that decided the, the Second World War were fought in and by the Chinese and the Russians.
14:22 Rory Stewart? The Chinese against Japan, Russia against Germany.
14:25 Alastair Campbell? And, and, and that is another story that he's been, that he's been telling. So what this week has become essentially has been militarily with this massive show that we're going to see on, on Wednesday, diplomatically by bringing these powers together.
14:37 Rory Stewart? The rest of this politics podcast are not actually going to see that show. I mean, we're going to sit, actually, we're not flying to Beijing to witness the tanks.
14:44 Alastair Campbell? I've told you, we are going to be watching it on our television, right? Or in your case, on a sort of laptop. And then the other thing is this history stuff, which to them is incredibly important. And of course, that relates to Taiwan as well. Because what they feel is that out of the post-war settlement, that the French, the Brits, the Americans should have had a better understanding of China's, quote, rights to Taiwan. So this is like a big deal that's happening right now. And it's very, I think a lot of it is very psychological, geared towards an America. And they want the American diplomatic political class to be thinking and saying, Trump, I'm afraid you have created this.
15:22 Rory Stewart? David Rennie, who was the economist correspondent in China, and is now their geopolitics correspondent, has pointed out that the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation that you've been talking about a few years ago, didn't really look like it added up to very much. Nobody could quite work out what it was going to do. And he points out that China is perpetually kind of floating these funny organisations and seeing if they work or not. I think that there was another one called the Confidence and Stability Organisation. And BRICS is another one we can talk about in a second. And the story really here was it didn't make much sense because actually Central Asia was basically controlled by the Russians. The Chinese didn't have much influence over it. And then Iran joined and then India and Pakistan are both in and they don't really like each other.
16:06 Rory Stewart? So how are you really going to make this work? As you say, suddenly it's got new life because suddenly it's an opportunity for Modi to demonstrate he's not dependent on Trump. BRICS is another interesting one. So BRICS, we've talked about before, has begun to expand from Russia, India, China, South Africa, to take in all these other states that are now queuing up to join. I think this is the beginning of us looking at new organisations, which we can't quite define. They're not tight like NATO. They have those kind of security guarantees. They have Article Five. They're not the European Union, right? They're not providing those kind of trade things. We'll get on to one of them maybe after the break, which is ASEAN, because you've just come back from Singapore.
16:46 Rory Stewart? But they are a very, very odd shifting symbol. If you listen to analysts, I've been listening a lot to an amazing guy called Sasha Kobuyev, who's at Carnegie, is that Carnegie Russia expert. And he says, you know, they're blocks, but not economic blocks, they're clubs, they're not alliances, they're minilaterals. And then he produced this on this because he's Intellectual, their sentiments, their synonyms, their acronyms, their regions. But I think we'll keep coming back to these as we keep
17:15 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
17:15 Rory Stewart? Because I think they they are increasingly useful as the US alliances begin to fray. And the US had a few going. It had AUKUS, had this Quad arrangement in Asia.
17:26 Alastair Campbell? Still going, but must be, that's a classic example. What happens to the Quad? Which is America, Australia, Japan, India. What happens to that now that he's sort of based, he said to Modi, you are basically P and G, never dark.
17:39 Rory Stewart? And actually, he's been pretty aggressive on on Japan with tariffs too.
17:43 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, just to go back to my little trip to Singapore, because it relates to what you've just said. And by the way, Singapore have just, they're talking, I think with Morocco and the UAE about forming an organisation of smaller economies to try to get back to what they would say as more fair trading and so forth. So there are lots of new things are going to emerge from this. So I was at an event in in Singapore with people, about 500 people in the audience from the energy industries and the insurance industries and some quite big cheeses. And there was about half and half Asian and the rest were expat, American, British, Australian, German, whatever.
18:24 Alastair Campbell? And they very helpfully gave me one of those fancy polling apps that you can get instant answers, right? Now, the first thing I did, I asked them, you and I have done this before at events, and I said, hands up. This was without the app. Hands up if you've mentioned the name Trump in the last 24 hours, okay? And around about two thirds, three quarters, put the hands up. And then said, this was before the Shanghai thing, hands up if you've mentioned Xi Jinping in the last 24 hours. Three hands. I'll come back to why I think that's significant. It's basically just because he just keeps on going. He doesn't feel the need to be shouting and tweeting and all that stuff. Then said, which is, on the polling app now, which is the most powerful country in the world?
19:09 Alastair Campbell? USA or China? China sixty, USA forty, okay? Which country do you think will most benefit from Trump's tariffs policy? USA nineteen, China eighty-one. So this is serious business people thinking this doesn't add up. This is going to harm America more than it harms us. And this was the absolute killer for me. Which of the two superpowers do you see as the greater threat to global stability? I have a guess.
19:39 Rory Stewart? I guess you're going to say US now.
19:40 Alastair Campbell? USA seventy-nine, China twenty-one. Now, I just do not believe that would have been the case a year ago.
19:47 Rory Stewart? No, it's unimaginable because the I was thinking about this on the way in to see you this morning, that it's a kind of miracle that the US, given how rich it is, given how many troops it has, given it's had nuclear weapons, that it managed for seventy years to basically convince the world it wasn't for most people a threat to stability. That many, many countries in the world sort of understood where the US was coming from, understood roughly what the rules were. And therefore, you know, if you're in Europe, you allow yourself to be completely dependent on US security guarantees in a way that you wouldn't have accepted Chinese or Russian security guarantees. But once it flips, once America starts acting unpredictably, starts flinging bombs around
20:32 Rory Stewart? the Iranian nuclear sites, starts talking about clearing out Gaza, starts talking about grabbing greenlands, starts putting fifty percent tariffs, starts saying to Europe, by the way, we're not providing security guarantees, you can spend five percent of your GDP on defence, then people wake up and say, wait a second, this country is so big, so powerful, it's potentially unbelievably dangerous. What happens if the US Navy starts stopping our oil moving around? What happens if they start doing to us what they did to Russia? What happens if Trump wakes up and thinks, oh, I've got all these lovely toys in my inbox? You know, I can, tariffs is just the beginning. I can sanction you, I can invade you, I can bomb you. And then you really begin to think, well, how do we have other allies? How do we, how do we deal with this?
21:15 Alastair Campbell? It's interesting how, you know, we, we've got today, Tuesday, we've got this Bolsonaro trial starting in Brazil, which is of course part of the BRICS. But it's really interesting, if you think about it, that that is a case of where the institutions of a country like Brazil. Appear to be holding in a way that in America, the institutions don't appear to be holding. And of course, what the what the Chinese can can say, and and they've started to be much more open about this. You know, if you meet Chinese diplomats and people who are kind of in the Chinese sphere, they will start to say much more openly than they used to. You know, your your democracies just aren't working, are they? They can't get anything done. And the thing, the other thing I've noticed is that the French appear
21:57 Alastair Campbell? to be hitting back a lot harder. Macron did a tweet the other day, basically saying, we've now passed Trump's deadline on Putin. He's been played again. Le Point, the French news magazine, is out today, and the front page, Trump will see this, I've got no doubt, is basically Putin's man, you know, the man from Moscow, is a picture of Trump. In the last couple of weeks, two European countries have called in the American ambassador. The French, because Kushner, Jared Kushner's dad, who's the eminently qualified, pardoned, convicted criminal, who's now the ambassador, he got called in for basically saying that Macron was fueling antisemitism because of recognition of Palestine. And in Denmark, the ambassador's been called in because they keep going on about Greenland. So there's
22:40 Alastair Campbell? a little bit of sign of of fighting back. And do you know the other thing? I mean, maybe I'm over, I'm sort of overstating this. If you look at the picture that's sort of been dominant from the meeting in in in China, Modi, Putin, and Xi, it's very similar to the picture of Trump and Putin. It's almost in an identical room with interpreters just hanging back, and they're sort of smiling. And Putin looks a lot happier.
23:04 Rory Stewart? And and I guess there must be part of Trump that has a sort of fantasy that he could host this type of meeting and be one of the, you know, hang out with the three or four other strong men in the world.
23:15 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
23:15 Rory Stewart? But it doesn't work, because the problem is that nobody in the end is going to quite believe that the American Western liberal democratic system is going to be compatible with those types of relationships. So he can stage these things, and I'm sure he'd have a dream that he could do a military parade, and Putin and Xi and Modi would all turn up, and they'd all do it together. But it doesn't work. Whereas China can very credibly say, we've been at this for a very, very long time. You can rely on us. You can, we've got these big interests and pipelines.
23:44 Alastair Campbell? But that's why I was saying it's so interesting that so few people talked about it, because they don't need to talk about him. They kind of know what he's trying to do. It's clear and he has these very occasional big international moments. We've got one now. But then he just kind of gets on with stuff. And there was an Australian who was at this event that I was speaking at. There was a dinner the night before and he said, it'd been a typically Aussie way, he says, you know, I mean, we've really effed things up. Well, we're now in a position where the Chinese Communist Party can hold the moral high ground over our alliances. And and the point about the alliances is there's this meeting in China that's very ordered and you see the family photo and
24:26 Alastair Campbell? it's all sort of minute by minute, everything works. And the contrast was post the Alaska summit, the European leaders all getting onto planes and sort of rushing over to Trump to try to get something going on Ukraine, result of which has been literally zilch.
24:40 Rory Stewart? As I'm afraid we predicted, I mean, I do think this is a very, very odd thing that Trump managed to create an expectation in the media three weeks ago that I honestly never believed that he was on the cusp of solving it. You know, there was going to be this peace deal that the Europeans all somehow convinced themselves they could talk him into it. There was all this story about how Trump had been played and we sort of we emphasised it. But I think we keep coming back to the fact that Trump doesn't change as much as we want to believe that he's consistently been on Putin's side. He's still on Putin's side and he doesn't really listen to the Europeans.
25:12 Alastair Campbell? How does he feel? Because we know he watches a lot of television. We're assuming that this meeting will have been covered on Fox News. How does he feel when he sees them effectively laughing at him? Because that is kind of what they're doing. They're basically saying, you've given me, you've given me Modi this smack in the face and here I am, holding hands with the guy who's, you know, at war in Europe and bowing down a little bit to the guy that you say is your great superpower enemy.
25:40 Rory Stewart? I can't get in Trump's head and I'm sure the mooch is much better at this than me, but my only one thing I would say is that with people like Putin, we imagine that Trump. Is on our side and therefore we imagine that when Putin refuses to accept Ukrainian demands, Trump will feel that Putin is laughing at him. My view is that Trump isn't on our side. Trump's on Putin's side. What he's really interested in is getting some minerals deal or some economic opening and lifting sanctions to Russia and he doesn't give a monkey's about the fact that Putin is flouting him about the about the European position on Ukraine because the European position on Ukraine is not Trump's position on Ukraine.
26:19 Alastair Campbell? The the other question I I I asked them was which other countries or entities could become a rival superpower or a replacement superpower of one of the two. Now, it was meant to be a word cloud, which didn't work. So in the end, they only had a choice of four. Okay, so it wasn't complete, but the the four probably aren't wrong. Three of them anyway. European Union, India, Saudi Arabia, or Brazil came up as well. So what what do you what do you think the rough sort of lie of the land was in a very well informed senior business audience in Asia?
26:54 Rory Stewart? Of of those four?
26:54 Alastair Campbell? Of those four.
26:55 Rory Stewart? Which they would put India first.
26:57 Alastair Campbell? By a mile, well over half, and then European Union, Saudi right back together and Brazil, kind of nowhere, which, you know, I think is fair enough.
27:04 Rory Stewart? Because India's there, a billion people, its purchasing power parity GDP is now enormous, you know, much bigger in purchasing power parity in the UK.
27:13 Alastair Campbell? The other thing that was that was you you use the word perplexed about Indians and that's the word that the Indian Foreign Ministry used about the tariff, said, you know, we're just very perplexed. And the other thing they're perplexed about is that if you read about who Trump has sent as his ambassador to India, he's sent this guy Sergio Gore, G O R, who is this guy that nobody's quite sure where he came from. He was head of personnel in the White House. There's some suspicion that he's actually is a Russian and he's not remotely qualified to be the ambassador to India. And they're just, they're perplexed. They're perplexed. Why have we got this guy?
27:50 Rory Stewart? Right. Well, back after the break.
27:52 Alastair Campbell? See you soon.
27:52 Rory Stewart? See you soon.
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29:45 Rory Stewart? Welcome back to The Rest is Politics with me, Rory Stewart. Me, Alastair Campbell. And Alastair Campbell, back from Singapore. So you were right, that is a long way to go, but you're right there in the center of Southeast Asia and in the center of ASEAN, which is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. And we don't, we don't talk enough about it. Five hundred million people, this is bigger than the European Union. This amazing zone that effectively historically linked India and China. Incredible historical influences. Indian Buddhism, Hinduism, spreading east, Chinese influence spreading down into Vietnam and later. Some of these countries, Indonesia becoming predominantly Muslim, Malaysia becoming predominantly Muslim.
30:29 Rory Stewart? What was your sense, looking at the world from that perspective? Did, did, did things feel different moving out of Europe and suddenly putting yourself in Southeast Asia and looking at the world?
30:39 Alastair Campbell? No, I, I think the, look, Singapore is an amazing country. It is one of the most phenomenal countries in the world, I think. They've got unbelievably clever politicians that they pay an awful lot of money to. They've had four prime ministers.
30:50 Rory Stewart? I love their foreign minister. And maybe we could, and maybe we could get him on.
30:53 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I'm, I'm very keen to get Lawrence Wong, the prime minister on, because he's a, he's a really interesting guy. They've had four prime ministers in sixty years. Lee Kuan Yew was there for thirty one years, I think.
31:03 Rory Stewart? Lee Kuan Yew's son?
31:04 Alastair Campbell? Lee Kuan Yew's son was the third prime minister. If I worked out, it's the only country in the world where I've met every single prime minister at some point.
31:12 Rory Stewart? Very good, very good.
31:13 Alastair Campbell? But it's, that's.
31:13 Rory Stewart? Since every prime minister since independence.
31:16 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, because I, I, I am eight years older than Singapore.
31:19 Rory Stewart? Brilliant.
31:20 Alastair Campbell? And I met Lee Kuan Yew when he was retired. Then you had this guy, Go Chok Tong, who was very, very tall. Then you had Lee Kuan Yew's son, and now you've got Lawrence Wong. And he's only been there a year or so, like four prime ministers in sixty years. How many did we have in the last decade? But there you have a sense of a country that is very comfortable in its own skin. It's also, you know, thinking about how these alliances shifting. It's relied very much on the United States and the, you know, Lawrence Wong, when the tariffs happened, he was one of the few who came straight out and said, this is wrong, this is dangerous, this is counterproductive, but we have to deal with it. Okay, the thing I'd say, you mentioned, you know, ASEAN as a grouping. I think it is a really interesting grouping, but it's not like the European Union.
32:03 Alastair Campbell? You know, they don't have that kind of, they're not sort of underpinned with all the kind of construct that the European Union has, but I think they're becoming much more a body that will over time possibly emerge into something much more concrete.
32:18 Rory Stewart? You, you, you go to Australia a lot and what I feel on my couple of trips to Australia is that looking at the world from Asia Pacific feels very different because our whole story really in the West is generally a story of decline. We have a feeling that our glory days sort of stopped in about two thousand four, two thousand eight. ASEAN feels so different because these are countries which in the nineteen seventies, nineties, I, I grew up in Malaysia, I lived there from seventy eight to eighty one, and then I was in the British Embassy in Indonesia in the late nineties. These are countries which when I was growing up, many of them had per capita GDPs and average wealth, which was like Sub-Saharan Africa, people were on three, four hundred dollars a year, right? And they have been
33:03 Rory Stewart? growing, many of them, Indonesia grew for years at seven percent a year, not quite Chinese rates, but very, very fast growth.
33:12 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
33:12 Rory Stewart? And they came through the financial crisis in a way that other people didn't and they began to attract an enormous amount of Chinese investment. So there are many problems and maybe we can get on to one of the biggest issues, which is the question of democracy in these countries by looking at a couple of examples that have come up recently. But, but I still think there's a sense of optimism, energy and change.
33:31 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, sure.
33:31 Rory Stewart? Because people's lives over forty years are immeasurable. I mean, they, they've, the wealthiest of these countries, I think, just to, to run through them to give a bit of a sense, you've got Singapore, which as you say is hugely wealthy. So purchasing power apparently maybe a hundred and forty thousand dollars a year when.
33:47 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, which half a century ago was kind of, you know.
33:49 Rory Stewart? A very poor country. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you've got countries like Malaysia, which I guess are beginning to get to the level of about sort of Greece or Romania. Middle income status, below them Thailand, those are probably the richest, Thailand's the kind of Detroit of Asia, making all the cars. Then you've got one notch down, which are these new emerging manufacturing powers, Vietnam, which benefited enormously from first Trump and Biden as they began to put tariffs and sanctions on China, trying to tilt people away from manufacturing in China. People began manufacturing in Vietnam. Indonesia, another big example of this, big, big growing economy, three hundred million people. And then you've got the countries that are struggling more. So Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar,
34:33 Rory Stewart? Burma, which has had a really torrid time.
34:36 Alastair Campbell? Philippines?
34:37 Rory Stewart? And Philippines, I guess, probably in the category I'd put with Vietnam and Indonesia.
34:42 Alastair Campbell? Brunei?
34:43 Rory Stewart? Brunei right up there with Singapore.
34:45 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. When you go through them, a lot of those have got real problems. I mean, Myanmar, you mentioned, and, you know, two of them have recently been at war. One of the many wars that Donald Trump has successfully resolved and brought to an end, and they'll never fight again, and there's no trouble between them at all. Not. Let's just take a look at two of the countries in particular. So you mentioned Indonesia. Indonesia was meant to be, the president of Indonesia was meant to be at this great shindig in China, but had to call it off because of all these massive protests, which the spark was the revelation that the five hundred and eighty parliamentarians
35:23 Alastair Campbell? get a generous housing allowance on top of their salaries. And then the police, quotes, accidentally killed a protester who was on his motorbike. And the riots have kind of, they've gone on pretty, pretty badly, even to the point that President Prabowo Subianto has actually visited the family to kind of, you know, apologize on behalf of the state, et cetera, et cetera. They suspend TikTok. They've got a hundred million people on TikTok in Indonesia, and TikTok suspended their live function because that was clearly having a bit of an impact. So the protests seem to be still going on. It's actually, you mentioned the population there, it's now the
36:07 Alastair Campbell? fourth most populous country in the world. After India, China and the and the States, it's got the highest number of Muslims of any country in the world, the biggest number of mosques. Economy has been doing well, but growth projections slightly slightly slipping. And and one of the big things which I think is behind this is there's the the inequality, you know, we've seen this around the world. The the growth and the wealth that's being created, it tends to be going towards people at the top rather than people at the bottom.
36:35 Rory Stewart? Indonesian, as I say, I I I lived there for two and a half years and I I Indonesian is one of the only languages I can speak or could speak reasonably well partly because it's not a very difficult language.
36:45 Alastair Campbell? They're not.
36:46 Rory Stewart? No, it's a it's a it's a it's an amazing language because it was a trading language. And the the original languages, Sumatran, Javanese, Balinese are very, very complex. But Indonesian, which is essentially Malay, is a kind of archipelago trading language. So if you say I went to the market, you'd say I to go market yesterday. Sayaparigi kapasar kamarin, I I will go to the markets. Sayaparigi kapasar besok, I I go to the market, I to go market tomorrow, right? But they went through this incredible transition when I was there. And you'll remember this because actually when I was there, I was in the embassy when you were taking over. Robin Cook turned up as the new foreign secretary, I arrived in ninety.
37:28 Alastair Campbell? Did he elect you on the ethical foreign policy?
37:30 Rory Stewart? Absolutely, absolutely turned up, told us about the ethical foreign policy. And then ninety eight, we had the big Indonesian financial crisis. And then Gordon Brown with his then assistant Ed Balls turned up and then your friend Gus O'Donnell turned up. So I took him shopping. So I saw all your mates and in the as a baby diplomat in the nineties. But in nineteen ninety eight, I was standing in the streets of Jakarta with, I think, two hundred thousand students with the police firing plastic bullet sets, looking very much like the scenes you've just seen. And reformasi came, Soeharto, who'd been in, military dictator, had been in for thirty two years, steps down. And Indonesia then rapidly became one of the great democratic miracles and everybody was very, very hopeful. Two thousand and four, things began to stagnate a bit under a guy called
38:13 Rory Stewart? Sisilo Bambong Yudhoyono, but still for the next ten years, the most democratic country probably in Southeast Asia. And then in two thousand and fourteen, a man called Jokowi came in. And for the last ten years, Indonesia has begun to go backwards. So they've begun to shut down this very good anti-corruption organisation that used to fearlessly pursue ministers. Civil society's been sidelined, but it was still a pretty inclusive settlement. The only lot that were not allowed back in were the old military dictator Suwarto's family and his son-in-law, Prabowo Subianto. Prabowo Subianto had commanded the special forces, killing people in East Timor.
38:55 Rory Stewart? During that time, ninety-eight, they were abducting student protesters. It was his guys who were crashing into the side of the crowd and ripping away, and the bodies never been found. So he was the one persona non grata person. Very difficult to quite, I'm trying to think of what the analogy would be, but I suppose it'd be like if Russia had a massive democratic change and Putin was out, and then suddenly.
39:17 Alastair Campbell? A Gorbachev figure came back.
39:19 Rory Stewart? And then, no, and suddenly Putin's son comes back.
39:21 Alastair Campbell? Oh, I see. Okay.
39:22 Rory Stewart? Twenty years later, right? I mean, it's a really, really weird moment. Or, you know, North Korea, you topple the dictator and suddenly it's your horror. After twenty years of democracy, then the North Korean dictator's son comes back. So Prabowo has spent the last fifteen, twenty years trying to reinvent himself in different ways. He flirted with being an Islamist, so he went with the extreme Islamist parties. He then flirted with going very anti-foreign, anti-elite. And finally, he started using AI to do weird dad dancing and portray himself as a cuddly Japanese anime to get young voters. And won this incredibly convincing victory in which
40:04 Rory Stewart? the police put a lot of pressure on village headmen and village chiefs, started saying, we'll investigate you for corruption, basically, unless you deliver your village. For a provo, so Indonesian democracy now in big, big trouble.
40:18 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, and well, and the other thing that's happening, because partly because this is about parliamentarians allowances. Some of the violence has been directed at the homes of politicians, arson, government buildings.
40:30 Rory Stewart? So my friend Srimulyani, because something's never changed in Indonesia since Srimulyani is the finance minister, has been essentially the finance minister and the central bank governor on and off for thirty years, but her house was looted and attacked, yeah.
40:42 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, yeah. And then we've got Thailand.
40:44 Rory Stewart? Yep.
40:45 Alastair Campbell? Where this is a name that is well-known in the United Kingdom, Rory. Why is the name Shinawatra well-known in the United Kingdom?
40:52 Rory Stewart? Football connection?
40:53 Alastair Campbell? Correct. Which football club was owned by one of the previous Shinawatras you don't know? Manchester City.
41:01 Rory Stewart? Oh gosh, a really big club.
41:03 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, yeah.
41:04 Rory Stewart? And when did it, when, when did he get rid of it?
41:06 Alastair Campbell? He went just before they became really successful, I would say, because they then got the big bucks in.
41:12 Rory Stewart? He didn't put in enough money despite being a massive Thai billionaire.
41:16 Alastair Campbell? I think he did a fair bit, but nothing like what the, the current owners have done.
41:19 Rory Stewart? Just off the back of Manchester City, and I'm, I know you're very keen to talk about what's just happened, but sort of quick, quick memory. I don't know anything about football, but I know a little bit about Thailand. As you say, taxing Shinawatra came in as prime minister in, in two thousand and one, was toppled in a military coup in two thousand and six. Then his sister came in as prime minister in two thousand and eleven, same family, toppled in a military coup in twenty fourteen. There was then nine years of military rule. There was an election in twenty twenty three, which we covered on the podcast. People remember that Peter Lim Jong-rat, who was leading the Move Forward Party, who was really an exciting, I think Ivy League educated young guy, who was going to lead Thailand away from its domination by the royal family and the military,
42:02 Rory Stewart? won the election, but was then sidelined in a weird deal, where the military then brought back Shinawatra. He was pardoned from his crime of laissez-moi majesté, and eventually his daughter ended up as prime minister over the years.
42:16 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, and she's now no longer prime minister. So if you throw in another member of the family, one removed. You've had four members of the same family essentially kicked out of office by the Constitutional Court. This was because of a phone call that she had with the leader of Cambodia, which was leaked by Hun Sen, Cambodian. Clearly, I imagine to damage her, in which she was, in the eyes of the Thai people and the Thai institutions, overly familiar, overly flattering, overly conceding to his power. So she's now got the boot as well.
42:51 Rory Stewart? And as you say, it's one of these really interesting examples that we can see in Brazil. And we can see in Latin America a great deal. Is it that we have this wonderful, strong institution called the Constitutional Court, which is holding people to account? Or if you're from the opposition, and this tends to be the position I'm from, actually, the Constitutional Court is an absolute toy of the military and the monarchy.
43:16 Alastair Campbell? Well, it may be that.
43:17 Rory Stewart? And any sort of populist democratic party immediately, because that's how Peter was disallowed as Prime Minister is because the Constitutional Court suspended him, accusing him of some violation.
43:29 Alastair Campbell? But I assume that you're in favour of Lays Majesté, that one should not be allowed in any shape or form to criticise.
43:36 Rory Stewart? We have covered, I mean, as you point out, somebody's in for 50 years for criticising the Thai king. And the Thai king is this very eccentric figure who appears to live in a small village in Germany and who famously has this dog who's been made a general and all these kind of things. Because we're talking ASEAN, how interesting the democratic movements are. So again, if we go back to the 90s, the glory days of democracy, we believed, or at least we believed in our little embassy, that the world was getting more and more democratic, because it wasn't just that Indonesia got rid of its military dictatorship. In 1986, the Philippines had got rid of Marcos, Coria Quino was going in a democratic direction. In Cambodia, you'll remember in the early 90s, there had been a UN-led intervention,
44:19 Rory Stewart? which was one of these things, a little bit like Bosnia and Kosovo, where the UN sent in 44 nations, 20,000 troops, took over the government, set up this uneasy coalition between the king and Hun Sen. There was demobilisation of the Khmer Rouge, there was truth and justice commissions. A lot of my friends my age were there in Cambodia doing this stuff. Fast forward. Things look much, much more dubious. Indonesia, as I say, gone backwards. Thailand, basically different forms of military rule. Hun Sen kicked out his partner, the king's party, and has now handed over to his son, General Sen, and has made a public statement saying,
45:01 Rory Stewart? "My son will be prime minister in 2020s. My grandson will be prime minister in the 2030s." So he's setting up his own little monarchy committee. Meanwhile, the Philippines, again, if you were to go back to your time in government, the key figures now in the government are Marcos's son, Bong Bong Marcos, who's the president, Duterte's daughter, who's the vice president. One of the leading opposition figures in the senatoral race is Bam Aquino. And if you look at the Senate itself, the Senate's only got 24 people in it. There are four siblings out of those 24, two Viljas, two Estradas, two Kaitanos, two Torfos. So eight out of 24. So whatever the Philippines is, I mean, yes, it's a democracy,
45:46 Rory Stewart? but it's a very different type of democracy to the ones that we're used to.
45:51 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, well, you can see that Trump is studying these things very, very closely, can't you?
45:56 Rory Stewart? Final thing I just want to finish on, on the Southeast Asian story, because it's such a, not just 500 million people in this critical place between China and India, not just one of the big economic stories. So as I think you'll find as you go around talking to businesses, people very interested in Vietnam and Indonesia, and even the French, the Germans, the Brits, who think maybe they've missed the boat on China, keep hoping that in Indonesia and Vietnam, they could provide alliances with the economies of the future.
46:24 Rory Stewart? But the story that we keep coming back to of social media disinformation. Most of these countries in Southeast Asia have a very big overseas Chinese community. Singapore is basically an overseas Chinese island state. In Malaysia, maybe 25% of the media is in Chinese. And you have these farms of social media accounts that are used sometimes to promote commercial products in Malaysia, for example, sometimes to broadcast back into China to promote products in China with a Malaysian angle, then being used apparently by the Chinese government to promote Chinese views around these disputes in the South China Sea. So there's been a
47:07 Rory Stewart? a big standoff recently between the Philippines and China in the Spratly Islands in something called, I think, the Second Thomas Reef, which is a most of these islands are basically underwater. This is sort of lagoon shaped like a carabiner and the Philippines beached a landing vessel on this atoll some years ago and have been resupplying it.
47:29 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, we've we talked about this a few months ago, yeah.
47:30 Rory Stewart? Absolutely. The Chinese have been blocking their resupply and then they've sent Marines and others. Anyway, the Chinese bot farms are perpetually trying to dig into Duterte supporters who are considered more pro-China against Marcos, who's considered more pro-American. And the same thing is is being played out across Southeast Asia. And what you will have seen in Singapore is this very interesting question they all have to face, which is, what do they think of China? When they're being optimistic, they would say, look, we've known China, we've dealt with it for literally thousands of years. All you have to do is be polite to it. It's this enormous giant. At least they're predictable. We understand what the rules are. We don't
48:14 Rory Stewart? necessarily like what they're doing in this, but we get them. Whereas America is now increasingly unpredictable. But I guess your Australian friend, who was at your conference, would probably say they're being naive that China is increasingly a blue water power. I think seventy destroyers have been around Indonesia in the last few years from China. And that they need to understand that if something happened, let's say. China went after Taiwan. All these instruments of social media, economic leverage and power will be used to make sure those Southeast Asian nations do not take the American side.
48:44 Alastair Campbell? Well, the point, the point that the Australian guy made was actually that this is happening with a record and reputation that Trump is shaping for them, which they don't deserve because of their human rights stuff, Uyghurs, Tibet, Hong Kong, all the other stuff that they, the intellectual, intellectual property theft, all that stuff that we know about. So, yeah, it's, listen, it's really, really interesting. Your, your democratic picture, though, is not a healthy one.
49:07 Rory Stewart? No.
49:07 Alastair Campbell? Um.
49:08 Rory Stewart? No, and, and a very strange one. If you go back to those days of optimism of the toppling of Marcos, toppling of Su Hato, the emergence of Thai democracy, people wouldn't have predicted. And of course, this confirms the general Chinese worldview and a bit of worldview you get from Singapore, which is pretty authoritarian, that what matters is economic growth, that human rights and democracy is not necessarily what's cracked out to be. Many of these countries have elections.
49:33 Alastair Campbell? And, well, Singapore's elections, which they, they had last time, they, they ended up with pretty much the same result. I've talked to people, they do worry about the opposition. So it's not like they rigged the result. The, the result is not rigged. They worry about the opposition. The opposition plays a role within the parliament. But it's a kind of, you know, it's a well, what you call a controlled democracy, I think. But it's a fascinating place. I like going there. And this thing, you know, we talk here about whether our politicians get paid enough. They, they are the best paid politicians in the world.
50:02 Rory Stewart? Over a million dollars.
50:03 Alastair Campbell? Over a million dollars, yeah. But they go and headhunt them. They find them from the, the sort of brightest and the best. And they say, look, do you want to come and, a lot of them come through the civil services.
50:10 Rory Stewart? Not sure I'd describe that as my fellow colleagues. I don't think we were headhunted for our jobs in the cabinet.
50:15 Alastair Campbell? I thought David Cameron had an A-list. And you were on the A-list.
50:18 Rory Stewart? Maybe that's the A-list. Liz Truss, pretty fertile. We've been talking a lot about the new world that Trump has created. And we began with. China, India, Russia, the Shanghai Cooperation Agreement. We then in the second half talked about ASEAN. But all of this is about a world tilting away from the West, tilting away from European American models of liberal democracy towards these authoritarian semi-democracy states, which haven't gone in the direction people expected over the last thirty, forty years, forming these new alliances from the Shanghai Cooperation Agreement, to BRICS, to ASEAN, which are not quite NATOs, not quite EU's, but are probably the things to watch
51:03 Rory Stewart? if we're thinking about the future shape of the world.
51:05 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, and it's also probably why Donald Trump, whose instincts are authoritarian anyway, is thinking, you know, maybe they've got it right. He gives himself a kind of historical intellectual justification for some of the authoritarian stuff that he's doing. So this has been a very, not just foreign affairs, but one specific region. So on Question Time, we'll maybe broaden out a bit, should probably talk about this new Downing Street team that's been announced. We've got some very interesting questions this week about the Online Safety Act, about AI. And we should probably have a little chat about Farage wandering off to America to attack his own country.
51:39 Rory Stewart? Good, look forward to it.
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