576. How Xi is Outplaying Trump and Tensions in Northern Ireland

As Trump becomes the first American president to personally welcome a visiting head of state off a plane since JFK greeted Harold Macmillan in 1962, did his summit with President Xi signal improving US-China relations, or does Xi have his counterpart in an economic chokehold? With the standoff between protesters and members of the pro-British Protestant Orange Order in Northern Ireland showing no sign of resolution, is the region's fragile peace in danger of unravelling? And as violence erupts in Ethiopia, is Africa's second most populous country on the brink of civil war – and does it risk dragging other regional actors into a wider conflict spanning the Horn of Africa and the Gulf? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more in this week's edition of Question Time. __________ Research: Evie Townend Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith, Lorcan Moullier, Oli Ortega, Joe Pettit Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Exec Producer: Bella Soames Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

  For 40 years, America's answer to China was engage with it, trade with it, invest in it, liberalise it, bring it into the international system. And then, almost overnight, Washington seemed to reach a new consensus. Suddenly, 10 years ago, China was presented as the enemy in a new Cold War. And now Xi Jinping has come to Washington to meet Trump. Red carpets, a state dinner, an extension of the trade truce. A major arms package for Taiwan has been put on hold. And Trump didn't seem especially interested in containing or confronting China. He seemed interested in getting along with Xi. So what's going on? Is Trump an outlier in an America which has still committed to confrontation?

• 0:44Speaker 00

  Or is American policy lurching back towards compromise? Because America no longer wants to be the global policeman of the order it once built.

• 0:55Speaker 00

  This episode is powered by Fuse Energy.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Most energy companies are counting on you doing absolutely nothing. Not questioning what you're paying, not switching, just letting your tariff roll on, which is costing you hundreds of pounds every year.

• 1:08Speaker 00

  But the apathy goes deeper than our bills. We've almost given up on energy itself. We seem to all be accepting energy is expensive, the system's outdated. But that complacency is costing us.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  Fuse Energy does not accept that because the energy transition is not something that just happens somewhere else.

• 1:26Speaker 00

  Fuse is building an energy company which is designed to bring down the cost of energy. And right now, its tariffs are up to £100 below the off-GM price cap.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  So switching isn't just about paying less, it's about expecting more from your energy company, and it only takes you three minutes.

• 1:43Speaker 00

  Switch to Fuse at fuseenergy.com/politics. Use the code POLITICS and you'll get a free trip plus subscription, allowing you to hear all the extraordinary members' content that Alistair and I are now producing for you. Visit fuseenergy.com for full terms and conditions.

• 2:03Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:18Speaker 00

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creve, and of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. And it was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Well, I think, are you not already sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?

• 2:48Speaker 00

  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/rchestispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rchestispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Wise. It's only when you start moving money between currencies that you really think about the exchange rate, the fee, and what might be hidden away in the small print. Whether you're living abroad, paying someone overseas, or just trying to manage your money across borders, you want a fair exchange rate, an easy transfer, and no surprises along the way. Wise keeps things simple. Wise is a smart way to move the currencies you need around the globe. It works in more than 160 countries and with over 40 currencies. Most transfers arrive instantly. Wise uses the mid-market exchange rate, like the one you see on Google, with no markups or hidden fees. So when money needs to move, you can see the rate, know the fee, and get on with it.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  Join millions saving billions on hidden fees by downloading the Wise app today. Be smart, get wise, Ts and Cs apply.

• 4:09Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Restless Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  And me, Alastair Campbell.

• 4:13Speaker 00

  So amazing range of listeners' questions today, touching on some incredibly serious issues. We begin with questions around US and China, that great G2 confrontation after Trump's meeting with Xi. We're then going to talk about some of the very troubling news that's come out of Northern Ireland with the parades. We're talking about Ethiopia, which has broken into war again. We're talking about the Brazil elections, that huge country where Bolsonaro's son seems to be in the running. And then we'll finish with a bit of lighter stuff around the Bayeux Tapestry and Alistair's hero, one of his many heroes, Jürgen Klopp, and his positive vision for German patriotism.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Holly, what did we actually learn from the Chinese president's visit to Washington? What was going on beneath the surface? And who do you think came out on top? My vote's on Xi.

• 5:08Speaker 00

  Well, I think firstly, not a great deal happened at the summit. So people who thought there was going to be a great breakthrough on AI safety would have been disappointed. But I think the summit is really important for what it represents about US-China policy, given these are the two most powerful, wealthiest economies in the entire world. And what it shows us is that Trump may be the outlier now in US-China policy. So basically, as everybody, I think, will have picked up, the US was very, very pro-engagement with China from the moment of Nixon goes to China, 1970s, right the way through the 80s, 90s, 2000s, China joins the World Trade Organization, right the way through to the

• 5:53Speaker 00

  middle of Obama. The idea was that engagement, basically, the bet was, would make China more liberal and a better player in the international order. And then, at the end of Obama, beginning of first Trump, there was a really dramatic change, where almost all the China analysts in the US switched from being pro-engagement to suddenly portraying China as the enemy in a new Cold War. And the great consensus emerged, Democrats, Republicans, that China was the enemy and needed to be kept down. And then, what we've seen in this summit is something really startling. Who knew? You know, the very Donald Trump who presided over a government that was one of the most

• 6:36Speaker 00

  hawkish on China, that massively cut all connections with China in the first term, now seems in the second term to be much more friendly towards China than any of the major figures in either the Republican or the Democratic Party. Over to you.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there are lots of reasons for that. One of them, let's start by suggesting that actually he comes at this with a more strategic and intelligent mindset than we often give him credit for, that he understands that China is in a very, very dominant position in relation to rare earths, that the US military and the US administration are going to need an awful lot of them, not least because he's going to need them for the Iran War, which shows very little sign of slowing down. But I also think there is another point, which he does genuinely seem to have a lot of time for dictators. We're talking at a time when he seems to think his priorities are to launch yet another

• 7:34Speaker 01

  attack on Canada, which he'd done recently, and also to comment on the bail conditions that are put upon suspects in anti-terrorism cases in the UK, at a time when Vladimir Putin has just whacked a load of bombs on a medical facility bang in the middle of Kiev. So I think that, you know, there was one, the whole trip, I agree with you, there wasn't much of substance that came out of it, but the pageantry and the kind of, the gift to Xi of something that he could sell very, very powerfully back home. I think I'm right in saying that this is the first time ever that an American president has been to visit, has been to welcome the visiting head of government or state off

• 8:19Speaker 01

  the plane, since JFK did that for Harold Macmillan, at a time when Britain was the great, was the great power. So that's him basically saying that China is the great power. And, you know, we said last week that of the two big events on the foreign policy agenda going on last week, UNGA, United Nations General Assembly, was deemed to be less significant than this meeting. And yet, very little came out of this meeting. And it's interesting, you used the word truce. I think there is a bit of a truce in relation to trade. Now, is that about getting through the midterms? Is that about just him worrying that he's got to get these rare earth deals sorted out before then? And then I think my final point before I go back to you, Rory, is just what was said

• 9:04Speaker 01

  or was not said about Taiwan, because there were very different readouts. The Chinese readout of the meeting gave the impression that Trump was inching towards their side in relation to Taiwan. The American readout said absolutely nothing about Taiwan.

• 9:22Speaker 00

  Well, the Taiwan thing, I think, is maybe the moment where everything gets most revealed. The American support for Taiwan is a sort of historical accident in some ways. As Trump himself has pointed out to the fury of many, Taiwan is many, many thousands of miles from the United States, and it's only 70 miles from China. And the diplomatic compromise has circled around language about Taiwan being part of China, of course, to remind people it was simply a contiguous island with China for most of its history. And it ended up under a separate government because the nationalist government fled there when the communists took over China.

• 10:05Speaker 00

  The US ended up being anchored around there partly because of its presence during the Korean War. And the US increasingly saw itself as a Pacific power. And the Chinese may not have liked it, but their economy was so tiny compared to the American economy through the 50s, 60s, and 70s. I mean, as I keep saying that everyone's incredibly bored, the Chinese economy was still smaller than the Italian economy in 2004.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Nobody's bored, Rory, nobody's bored, nobody's bored of that. Nobody's bored of that. That is really interesting. Nobody's bored.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  Don't do down your facts.

• 10:39Speaker 00

  Don't do down my facts. So the Chinese had to put up with the fact that the US was effectively behaving around the coast of China, as though this was American home waters despite being, you know, what is it, almost 9,000 miles away. And a lot of the things that the Americans would have thought was completely unacceptable in Cuba, you know, the Americans were always complaining that the Russians and Chinese can put spy stuff in Cuba to spy on the Americans. Of course, the Chinese feel with Taiwan, right, here's the sort of forward American intelligence base right off the coast of China. So there was a natural sense that if you put that together with the fact that Xi Jinping, like most Chinese nationalists, see this as an inherent part of China and something should be coming back to China, that they would begin to challenge

• 11:24Speaker 00

  what the US was doing there and say to the US, how much national interest have you really got there? And the answer from the US used to be, or at least since Taiwan became a democracy, we're standing up for this democratic government, we're standing up for the rules-based international order, and that's why we're going to spend a lot of money defending Taiwan. But the question, of course, that Trump raises is, given that he doesn't seem in Ukraine to care very much about standing up for democracies and the rule-based international order, why would he continue indefinitely doing that in Taiwan? And will Trump inevitably, as he moves away from the idea that America is the global policeman, standing up for global democracy,

• 12:06Speaker 00

  conclude that actually Taiwan could be part of China if it weren't for the fact that it had 90% of the world's advanced semiconductors, chips?

• 12:15Speaker 01

  They've got 90% of the world's advanced semiconductors. China's got a chokehold on on rare earths, and he's probably worrying about that much more than he is about the democratic or otherwise future of Taiwan. There was even reports flying around that he'd asked Xi in these meetings whether China would like to buy weapons from the United States. Now, I don't know whether he's aware of that. That is, that is against the law in America. And I know he doesn't care too much about the, about the rule law, but that was, if that is true, that is kind of mind blowing. And again, suggests that he feels to himself to be in a very weak position vis a vis China.

• 12:54Speaker 00

  We would have said two years ago, the one consensus right across Democrats and Republicans is that China is the great competitor, strategic adversary, or to be less polite, enemy in a new cold war. And I've been very interested in this because I, I know a lot of these people. So for example, Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher, who I know quite well, were key figures, Matt Pottinger particularly in Trump's first administration, framing a very, very much more confrontational policy towards China. And Mike Gallagher was a congressman who ran the Congressional Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. And they were writing articles that were celebrated throughout the American foreign policy community, which were much

• 13:36Speaker 00

  more sort of almost rude and brutal in the way they spoke about the Chinese government and came pretty close, although they backed off of this in the end, suggesting that what they were going to try to do is hold down China till there was regime change, till the whole thing collapsed. And even the more polite academics, people like the American ambassador Nick Burns in Beijing, was saying, you know, in the long run, this is a question of who rules the world, and we would rather have a world ruled by America than, than ruled by China. In that context, Trump going into this kind of new relationship, if indeed it is a new relationship, is really interesting. And I suppose my question to you is, do you

• 14:17Speaker 00

  think that this means that possibly in two years' time, US-China policy might move back towards engagement? And that this moment of confrontation was something started by Trump and ended by Trump? Or is Trump an anomaly? And that when he goes, the US will get back into a much more confrontational attitude towards China?

• 14:35Speaker 01

  I mean, it's very, very hard to read that because so much of that would depend on who follows Trump. But I, I do think there is a, an emerging new attitude to China that most of the American political establishment doesn't like, but where Trump seems very, very comfortable. And I think that's what came out. And then we talked about the going to the airport, the sort of the pomp and the pageantry, which Xi Jinping loves to show off. He was treated as the only really comparable head of state or government. There was literally none of the talking down to leaders, which Trump normally does. He does something where he talks down to them. If anything, he was showing respect. I also thought it was, we very, very rarely see Xi Jinping laugh or smile, other than that sort of, you know,

• 15:20Speaker 01

  the, the Winnie the Pooh smile, that if you go on the internet in China and Google Winnie the Pooh, everything has been erased because you're not allowed to say that he looks like Winnie the Pooh. But he did actually smile and almost, I'd say chuckle, when, when Trump was showing him the array of photographs of previous presidents, where of course, he's put Joe Biden as the auto pen. Now, I think, I think Xi Jinping was laughing or finding that amusing, not because of an insult to Joe Biden, although he didn't necessarily like Joe Biden very much. But I think that was to him, a moment of, this guy's really not all there. This guy is actually quite easy to deal with. I just have to flatter

• 16:04Speaker 01

  him a bit, like smile to him a bit. It's very hard to, if you, even if you read the White House readout of this, this meeting, it's very, very hard. They can point to a bit of coal export, they can point to a couple of deals, but there's very little in this that you could say merits the idea that this would be projected as the most important foreign policy meeting of the year. Although they've got two more coming up quite soon, of course, he is going to go to China, and Xi is also coming back to the States for a, a bigger multilateral meeting.

• 16:34Speaker 00

  As Tony Blair would say, we don't want in all of this to underemphasize why the US foreign policy establishment is so suspicious of China. Because in some ways, China is a much wealthier, more successful version of Putin's Russia, like Putin's Russia. It's pretty paranoid about the West. It believes it's being encircled. It's very worried about colour revolutions. It's got no desire to liberalise. It doesn't really want to be a constructive player in the rules-based international order. It's got wounded pride. It sees itself as having a right to great power status. And of course, it does engage

• 17:15Speaker 00

  in industrial espionage. It's got some pretty phenomenal capacity. It engages in economic extortion of its allies. The problem is that that story was easier to sell during Biden because the US was better at presenting itself then as the great example of democracy. I mean, Nick Burns' whole story, you'd rather be ruled by a world ruled by America than China, doesn't feel the same after two years of Trump. Because now people say, well, okay, you're accusing China of doing economic extortion, you know, so bullying Australia by stopping imports from Australia. But wait a sec, aren't you bullying everybody around the world with your own tariffs and protection? And you're accusing China of undermining

• 17:57Speaker 00

  the rules-based international order. But there are you trashing the UN, turning off the aid system, lining up the autocrats. So it's difficult, or more difficult than it was, for the US to create the alliances that it needs, or at least to create them around values.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  You know, the other day, Rory, I did a bit of pedultery, well, not only with this counsel pedultery, I was with Robert Peston from The Rest is Money and Anita Anand from Empire. And we were doing an event at Lloyds of London for STAR, one of the big, this big American financial institution. And I did my question, which, as you know, I love to ask people, which is the greater threat to global stability, USA or China? And there were a lot of Americans, there was a huge audience, and there were a lot of Americans among the Brits and other Europeans who were there. And I think some of them were genuinely shocked just how one-sided the answer was, to say that actually the USA is currently the greatest threat. And I think China's playing into that all the time. I think they're doing it in terms of their hard power and their soft power. Holly's

• 19:00Speaker 01

  question about, you know, who got the most out of this, even on the optics, which Trump is normally very, very good at, I think Xi Jinping would have gone home very, very happy. What did you make of panda diplomacy, by the way, Rory? We, you know, there was a time, one of, one of my favourite, I can't remember who cracked the lie, it might have been Alex Salmon, but somebody cracked the great lie, there are now more pandas in Scotland than there are Tory MPs, where there were two pandas had been given to Scotland.

• 19:23Speaker 00

  And then in 2015, there were twice as many pandas as there were Labour MPs as well.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:28Speaker 00

  The joke, which, which Labour Party, I remember being there when he cracked the joke. I think it's sort of a 2010 joke. It's after the catastrophe of the 2010 election. And it's, I think it's an Alex Salmon joke. So panda diplomacy, and pandas feature all the time, don't they? Because part of the whole Nixon goes to China thing, this amazing shift towards embracing Communist China in the 1970s, for all the complicated reasons that Kissinger and Nixon wanted to do it, was a lot about these strange cultural exchanges. You know, we've talked in the past about ping pong diplomacy, but also Kissinger's desire to really get lots of business exchange, student exchange, cultural exchange. And the pandas are, you know, one of the most dramatic things. I mean, the Chinese withdraw pandas from people if they've been criticised.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  They did. When Obama met Dalai Lama, they said, oops, that's done like that, we're bringing the pandas back.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  I mean, look, I know pandas, pandas are absolutely gorgeous. And actually, one of the, I'm up in Liverpool, as you know, and one of the meetings I had this week was with the World Wildlife Fund, and they've got that wonderful panda as their, as their, and this is a wonderful, wonderful creature. I saw this survey that, you know, twenty eight percent of Americans said they would have a more favorable view of China if they sent a panda to their zoo. Why, why?

• 20:46Speaker 00

  I think partly because they're such a social media phenomenon. I mean, that we all feel like pandas because pandas spend their whole time sort of falling off things and ending up their heads in buckets of water and generally.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, the two that it'd be giving are called Ping Ping and Fu Shuang.

• 20:58Speaker 00

  Very good.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  Uh, so they're going to become ma- major global celebrities.

• 21:02Speaker 00

  Final thing on American views of China, startling shift in American public opinion towards China. And I wonder whether it's going to shift back again. But if you took a snapshot in twenty twenty three from Pew Research, favorability of China went from fifty percent in two thousand and six to twelve percent in twenty twenty three, and from thirty percent of Americans thinking China was the enemy in two thousand and six to eighty percent thinking China was the enemy in twenty twenty three. So interesting, maybe that'll tie into your panda point. And interesting also whether Trump, who is the great political entrepreneur in many ways, senses the shift in public opinion where people are less interested in the idea of China as the enemy and are more interested in internal than external enemies.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, you've talked a lot about this sort of the, the economic consequences of China. And, you know, we've talked a lot recently about Germany. And one of the big things I think driving the difficulties for the German government is the extent to which China, in terms of its exports into our market and markets around the world, has moved up from all the kind of made in China, cheap T shirts, hats and all that stuff into high end, quality, high value production, not least in the, in the automobile industry. And that again, didn't really, we didn't really get a sense from Trump of sort of trying to push back on what is a very aggressive, very assertive export policy.

• 22:23Speaker 00

  Yes, although of course, America has much higher tariffs than places like Britain has. And, and I think the big challenge for Europe, I mean, let's imagine you're Germany. On the one hand, you're getting killed by Chinese imports. And that's the stuff we've talked about in the past, which is China's not playing fair in terms of its currency. It's not playing fair in terms of industrial subsidies. And that's now beginning to wipe out German industry. But until quite recently, German industry felt it was a real beneficiary of low tariffs for China because it was selling an enormous amount of BMWs and Mercedes to China at a premium rate, fifty percent of the profits of luxury goods and automobile manufacturers in China.

• 23:01Speaker 00

  And Britain is now sort of caught in the middle of this. We've talked about Andy Burnham in the, in the main episode, but one of the things, of course, that he's struggling with is how we define a new relationship with Europe. And this is partly about customs union. And in Britain at the moment, I think something like sixteen percent of all new cars bought this year were Chinese cars. I mean, Chinese electric vehicles are subsidized or technologically advanced, whatever. They are much cheaper. And better than now getting such that they can recharge a battery in four and a half minutes in the latest models in China. And one of the things that Europe will be asking is for Britain to put much higher tariffs up against, which of course will hit customers, make it more difficult to do the energy transition to

• 23:42Speaker 00

  electric vehicles. So China's in the center of every single conversation and we need to keep coming back to China. Listen, this, this whole story about, uh, the new existential threats we're facing, and particularly global choke points. If anybody's not listened to my, uh, members series, which has done some great stuff with Yuval Noherari on AI, Carlo Rovelli on nuclear war, we're now this week talking to Edward Fishman about this new global choke points, which is a huge story that's becoming more and more relevant with what we're just seeing, not just in Hormuz, but in the Red Sea.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, finally, I did a couple of events here with Hamish Faulkner, who's the minister in charge of trying to get a better deal with the European Union post Brexit. And we should probably come back to this and do it in detail at some point. This, this made in Europe stuff that is, is causing real difficulties now, I think, between the UK and the European Union, because there's the European Union, which sees itself as Europe. And then there are countries like us, like the UK and others who are really in danger of getting, you know, really whacked by this thing. So we should come back to that and do it properly another day.

• 24:45Speaker 00

  Great. Well, Alyssa, here's a question very much for you from Louis. Can you explain the context of what's going on in Northern Ireland right now? Why was the peace process so tested and strained this weekend?

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, this, this brought back some absolutely terrible memories. Drumcrey and the marching in Drumcrey, which, I mean, to get, to get the sort of full story of this, you've got to go back to the Battle of the Boyne.

• 25:09Speaker 00

  So long, long time ago.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  We don't want to go right back to the Battle of Boyne. We're talking about sixteen ninety. And then the Orange Order was founded in seventeen ninety five and not far from Drumcrey. And this is very much regarded as the birthplace of the whole orangism, if you like. And as you know, they've got this history and tradition of marching. And the, this is one of the most famous and most controversial marches because we're talking about this town.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  And Alyssa, just quickly to state the obvious again for international listeners, these are unionist, pro-British Protestants predominantly.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the Battle of Boyne essentially was, was what led to the continuation of the Protestants being ascendant in Ireland. And this, this focuses on a town called Portadown, which is mainly Protestant, but it has this significant Catholic minority. And the issue is about the march that they, they do this Drumcrey march going through this very, very Catholic area. And I think in our very first week in nineteen ninety seven, there'd been this murder of a guy called a local Catholic, a guy called Robert Hamel. He'd been kicked to death by a gang of loyalists on the main street.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  And in the march which followed, there was a lot of sort of, sort of mimicking, stamping on the ground as, as though there was sort of reminding the Catholics that they'd, they'd done this. Mo Molyneux, Secretary of State, she, she let the march proceed and it led to astonishing, horrible violence. And, and this went on year after year. Drumcrey became, every year we had to deal with this Drumcrey march. And honestly, you think the Prime Minister's got a lot to do, to deal with. It was, there were some years when we would be like, this would be at top of our agenda for day after day after day. And then we passed legislation, the Public Possessions Act, which led to the Parades Commission. Since when there have been this, there's a lot of violence. I was looking at the numbers in, in nineteen ninety eight, for example,

• 27:07Speaker 01

  just as a result of this attempt to have the march going through this one road, six hundred and fifteen attacks on the security forces, seventy six police injured, six hundred and thirty two petrol bombs, forty five homemade bombs, twenty four shooting incidents, almost five hundred vehicles attacked, two hundred and eighty four arrests. And then we had the three horrible murder of three young Catholic boys, aged eight, nine and ten. So eventually this was banned. And what's happened this year is that it was banned again for July. But then there was an appeal and the High Court allowed it to go ahead under certain conditions. Okay.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Since when massive protests by the residents of the Gavakie Road, uh, the Orange Lodge have been doing the march, but then going into a police wall. And there's currently a bit of a standoff and Chris Bryant, the Northern Ireland Secretary is trying to get the two sides together. But the reason it brought back such memories is because this is just one of those things that you hoped with the peace process might just have taken a bit of a backseat. But these old traditions, they, they, they keep coming out.

• 28:17Speaker 00

  One of the things that's very difficult for an outsider to, to make sense of is, um, this question of how fragile the peace is or isn't. I mean, you can go to Dairy, London Dairy, and people will say, listen, this is, this is still on the edge of a tinderbox. But in other ways, things seem to have changed so much in the last twenty five years. I mean, very difficult, but just sort of gut instinct. What's your sense of the next five, ten years in Northern Ireland? Are you terrified that it's about to collapse again? Or do you see this as a bit of an anomaly and that broadly speaking, we're, we're getting more peaceful all the time?

• 28:50Speaker 01

  I think broadly speaking, yes, but I think that we've seen too many of these incidents where you can see the extent to which it wouldn't take much for violence to erupt. Now, whether we'd ever get back to the scale of violence and the scale of organized violence, I'm not so sure. I would be, I would be reasonably optimistic about that. But I think what it shows, you and I've talked before about whether we shouldn't have tried to have in the Northern Ireland process, something as similar as they had in South Africa, you know, truth and reconciliation. Because what you're seeing with these, you're seeing a new generation. When you see, okay, when you see the Orange Order guys marching, they tend to be a bit older.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  But then when you see the residents association and the, and the Gavakie Road protests, you've got a lot of young, younger people. And then when you've seen, we, we saw some violence recently that was much more done by the Protestant side of things. And that was a younger generation. So you've got a, you've got a younger generation that has grown up not knowing the violence as a fact of life. But you can see that the kind of cultural pressures and the historical pressures are still there. So I think Chris Bryant's Northern Ireland Secretary, uh, he's got a tough job in his hands right now. And don't forget, we have this, we have this coalition, which is what we put in place with the Good Friday Agreement. You know, the whole purpose was to have the, the two sides governing together. And, you know, so it's, I'd say, I'd say this is, this is tense and, uh,

• 30:14Speaker 01

  but the marching season is always tense. The marching season is always tense. But this, this, this felt, this week felt like a bit of a throwback. And I think we've got to keep very, very focused on this and make sure that it doesn't spiral into something much, much worse.

• 30:27Speaker 00

  Well, I, I think time for a quick break. And when we come back from the break, we're going to talk about a situation where genuinely a peace agreement has collapsed and a civil war has broken out again. And, and that's, that's Ethiopia. Um, we're also going to touch on Jürgen Klopp. The Baya Tapestry and the Brazil elections.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Very good. See you soon.

• 30:48Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Lloyds. One thing that politics teaches you is that certainty, predictability is often an illusion.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  At Lloyds Markets Summit earlier this month, I sat down with Katty Kay from the Rest is Politics US. And we got into a very interesting discussion about the challenges that the chief execs from large companies and institutions face every day. Governments come and go. Markets can be unpredictable. The conversation kept coming back to the same point. Ambitious organisations need more than capital alone.

• 31:18Speaker 00

  And one of the key issues for leaders of large corporates and institutions the world over is this. How do you act when certainty never arrives?

• 31:27Speaker 01

  Well, the best leaders don't wait for that certainty. Instead, they build confidence through insight, expertise and trusted relationships.

• 31:34Speaker 00

  Whether it's through summits or their insights hub, Lloyds helps their clients understand the forces shaping global markets.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  Search Lloyds Corporate for daily global market analysis, the download on tokenisation and how to manage your company's energy transition, all from Lloyds Corporate and Institutional Banking. Bank on Lloyds.

• 32:00Speaker 02

  A BetterHelp ad. BetterHelp is one of the world's leading online therapy services. Now, insurance options may be available nationwide with average copays of just $23 per session for eligible members. But cost isn't the only thing holding people back. Many of us weren't taught to manage stress or overwhelm. Therapy gives you tools to keep stress from building. BetterHelp works with more than 125 health plans, making it easy to get started with low-cost sessions. Don't have eligible insurance? Get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com/restpolitics. Cost and coverage may vary. Discount cannot be combined with insurance.

• 32:36Speaker 03

  For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters. Tremfya offers self-injection or intravenous infusion from the start. Tremfya is administered as injections under the skin or infusions through a vein every four weeks, followed by injections under the skin every four or eight weeks. If your doctor decides that you can self-inject Tremfya, proper training is required. Tremfya is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis, serious allergic reactions, increased risk of infections or lower ability to fight them, and liver problems may occur. Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis.

• 33:19Speaker 03

  Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms or need a vaccine. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about Tremfya today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit tremfyaradio.com.

• 33:36Speaker 01

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

• 33:39Speaker 00

  And with me, Rory Stewart.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  Okay, Rory, Nicole in Glasgow, how worried are you by the reignition of tensions and the possibility of full-scale war in Ethiopia and Eritrea? Which regional actors could this drag in around the Horn of Africa and the Gulf? And will the international community continue to stand idly by if another humanitarian crisis emerges?

• 33:59Speaker 00

  Let's start with the sort of basic facts. So there was an incredible shift. Ethiopia, which was in many ways the kind of darling of the West, the great developmental state, because it was gone from extreme poverty and had a relatively stable government. You know, this would have been true when Tony Blair was in, this would have been true almost right the way through to me as an Africa minister in 26, 2017, growing at 8% a year. Then collapsed into a very, very nasty civil war. Really attentive listeners will remember that Alistair and I covered the Ethiopian civil war, which was really a fight between people from Tigray in the Highland North, a traditional governing group of Ethiopia for many of the last decades,

• 34:41Speaker 00

  and the new government of Abiy Ahmed, the federal government, which was resolved by something called the Pretoria Accords, which brought peace at the end of 2022. Since then, the Tigray group split, hardliners took over, and a new coalition has emerged, an unusual coalition, where some of Abiy Ahmed's key allies, both ethnic groups inside Ethiopia and the Eritreans that he were relying on last time, now seem to have swapped sides in an unstable coalition with Tigray. And now the fighting is breaking out again. And lots of things follow on from that, including are they going to be able to cut off the access to Djibouti, which is Ethiopia's only access to the sea? Hundreds of thousands of people died in the last conflict. Is that going to begin again?

• 35:25Speaker 00

  And what does this mean for the broader region? Now, remember that it's coming unstuck at almost the same time as the peace deal in Yemen, which had kept pretty static frontlines since 2022. Also came unstuck just a few weeks ago with the Houthis storming down the side of the Red Sea. And that raises a whole series of questions, one of them for Ethiopia itself, which, you know, is a country which you, I think, recently in the newsletter says is one of your favourite countries in the world and posted some lovely pictures of yourself in Ethiopia. But it's an enormous place, 160 million-odd people. It's the great land-based market for all of the Horn of Africa ports.

• 36:08Speaker 00

  But this is also a story, as Nicole implies, which stretches much, much further. Because what's happened is now the Houthis have come all the way down the side of the Red Sea, and you now need to look at both sides of the Red Sea in order to see this whole new unfolding problem, a real geographical problem. Because you've got the states down the Arabian side of the Red Sea, Saudi Arabia down into Yemen with the Houthis now controlling one side. And then down the other side, you've got this chain of states which runs down from Egypt through Sudan, I hope I'm not going to miss anything here, Eritrea, Djibouti. What's now been recognised by Israel is Somali land and then the Somali province of Puntland.

• 36:49Speaker 00

  And what's really interesting there is that you've had the United Arab Emirates trying to position itself all the way along that coast with port deals, most of which have begun going horribly wrong. So if we go stage by stage, they backed the RSF in Sudan. And so the Sudanese military has taken control of the port that UAE had there. Djibouti kicked them out. Eritrea's now turned against the Emirates, apparently in favour of Egypt. The Somali government, under pressure from Saudi Arabia, has now said they don't want any UAE ports. And so they're clinging on to this funny enclave, which is a sort of UAE-Israel enclave around independent Somali land.

• 37:31Speaker 00

  And they're facing against them a coalition which feels like a sort of Saudi, Egyptian, potentially Turkish, Sudanese coalition with Ethiopia, with UAE and everyone else with the other lot. Now, that's a complicated story, but where am I getting to here? Where I'm getting to here is this is the collapse of the global order in miniature. And it's the beginning. It's just the beginning. You know, we've seen the Yemen peace deal collapsing a couple of weeks ago. We're seeing the Ethiopian peace deal collapsing. Now, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the South Sudan relative peace that we've had since 2016 is also about collapse, it's just on the, on the other border. And where is America in all this? Where is Europe in all this?

• 38:13Speaker 00

  Because what you've got is American allies fighting each other. And America completely unable to define what its national interests are, which should be pretty clear, should be an open Red Sea and support nation-states, instead of which they are allowing Israel and UAE to essentially encourage failed states, breakaway states, strange groups in order to create this network of alliances and ports.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Nicole's question about where is the international community in all this is the right one. And you could say, well, there are so many conflicts going on and nobody can be expected to be across them all. And that historically has been the role of the United Nations. This is, you know, we talked about this last week, the, the chief purpose of the United Nations has been peace and security. Okay. And what you've just described there is an area where there's been a history of conflict. But then there has, there have been periods of relative peace and security. And one of the reasons for that is that at the right time, the international community has found ways of becoming properly engaged. And we're now in this world of Trump and of China and of Putin.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  And we're just, we don't have, I'd like to think that both Andy Burnham and Emmanuel Macron, the other two leaders of the, the permanent five of the United Nations, do care about this, do understand why it matters to, to all of us. But they alone are not going to be able to drive an international response to it. And it's, you know, I, I don't know if I said it was one of my favourite countries in the world. I said it was one of the, I think it's one of the, I saw it was the most beautiful. I think it's a beautiful country. My, my, my first experience of it was back covering the famine in the eighties in Ethiopia. And then Eritrea and Tigray.

• 39:57Speaker 00

  There's, there's a famous photograph of you with the, the leader of Eritrea that we, we always have to keep bringing up.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  No, yeah, one, one, it's not a famous photograph, it's a photograph that you like because it shows me as a young man, looking rather fawningly at this handsome freedom fighter.

• 40:15Speaker 00

  guerrilla leader, exactly.

• 40:16Speaker 01

  Freedom fighter, as we call him, as we called him at the time, who we thought was going to deliver a peaceful, democratic, and he's now become one of the world's longest-serving dictators. You can't get every judgement right, Rory. Okay. So, but, but anyway, I did find that conflict and that war astonishingly interesting. And Eritrea is, is a beautiful, is a beautiful part of the world. I mean, you see horrific, you know, you see a lot of poverty. We, at that time saw a lot of violence, a lot of death. And you had the EPLF, Eritrean People's Liberation Front, and you had the TPLF, the Tigray People's Liberation Front. And of course, you talked about Abiy Ahmed's Nobel Prize.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  That was because of reconciling, coming to peace with Eritrea. But of course, it didn't take long before he was then fighting a war with, with Tigray. And, and of course, you told me Ethiopia is a huge country, but at the same time, it has real difficulties in terms of access to the sea. And that has been a cause of a lot of the sort of difficulties that they've, that they've had. But I, I, look, I, I just, I just wish we could get back to a place where an issue like this, both in terms of political interest around the world and media interest as well. Because without those two things, these things just fall off the agenda and, and chaos becomes normalised. And that's what I worry is going to happen here.

• 41:38Speaker 00

  Well, the change is unbelievable, isn't it? Because from the

• 41:43Speaker 00

  Civil War that you were reporting in the eighties and the rise of the sort of Eritrean Che Guevara as he appeared through to the nineties and two thousands. The nineties and two thousands, we sort of thought, the world sort of thought it had a model, didn't it, for dealing with this. It would have talked about the African Union coming in, the UN, IGAD, which was a coordination structure, we would have been talking about the developmental state, we would have been talking about justice, we would have been thinking about governance reforms, and it looked pretty good for a bit, right? Looked as though this story was sort of working in the nineties and two thousands. Yes, we were worrying about Somali pirates, yes, we were worrying about terrorism, but

• 42:23Speaker 00

  we were not at that stage imagining, because they didn't really count, nobody was talking about the Gulf states. I mean, what's really changed? I remember this, in Somalia, turning up as the Africa Minister in 2016, I sort of feel I was at the beginning of seeing what had happened. I turned up in Somalia where Britain was still talking as though it was the major player or one of the major players in Somalia, because I guess we probably had been very influential, probably just a couple of years earlier. By the time I turned up, the Turks were everywhere, the Emiratis were everywhere, and you could already sense things shifting very, very, very, very quickly. And Britain mattered less and less, the US still mattered, but Britain mattered less

• 43:08Speaker 00

  and less. Now, where does that mean that we go now? Well, I think just the brutal numbers are shocking. The Uppsala Institute that manages this now says that we have over sixty live conflicts in the world, which is the most that they've measured in any time since 1945. So before anyone gets the impression that we're just suffering from some global derangement syndrome, and that actually everything's going in the right direction, the statistics suggest this is not an anomaly at all. This is what happens when the global order begins to fray.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  Why did you say, you said something very interesting when you were going through it, why did you say that you thought that South Sudan could be the next? What's going on there that I haven't been across?

• 43:52Speaker 00

  Well, so, South Sudan has these very, very deep residual conflicts going on between the Noor and the Dinka, particularly two of the big ethnic groups that play into this, and particularly between two of the leading figures, particularly a guy called Rieke Masha. And that seemed a little bit like Yemen, and I guess a little bit like Somalia, and probably at times a little bit like Ethiopia, a conflict that was almost indefinitely going to continue because it felt like, no, no, it felt like there were all these deep historical roots, and so many people had been killed, and it was so savage. And then oddly, a semi-stalemate emerged, which meant that for some years, over the

• 44:33Speaker 00

  last few years, it's been much, much less bad than the world that we saw in the late teens. And it now feels to me that these things spill very, very quickly across borders. You know, all these players that I'm talking about, Israel, UAE, Saudi, Egypt, Turkey, some cases with Iranian drones or Chinese drones, are now major players in disrupting Libya. They're major players in a lot of these things that we've been talking, these koudetas across the Sahels, so Chad is very much connected with UAE. And if people look at South Sudan on the map, the likelihood of things spilling over

• 45:18Speaker 00

  again from Sudan or Ethiopia into South Sudan seems to me really strong. And that's before you get on to insurgency in the DRC. And I don't want to be too grumpy about this, and I'm also worried that in trying to predict where the next sort of semi-peacemix settlements collapse, I'm missing other things. I mean, I still remain very concerned about the fact that if I were Iran, I would be trying to sink a ship in Suez, now that you've closed Hormuz and the Red Sea, closing the next checkpoint. And this is also funny, it's partly a technology point, it's partly a point about the fact that the US has lost, partly because of drones, its real ability to prevent relatively weak

• 46:03Speaker 00

  states or even insurgency groups doing extraordinary things to each other, to shipping. And drones keep popping up in all these stories. Yemen, the Tigray front was basically blocked from its advance on our list by drones paid for by UAE and bought from Turkey, Iran, and China. I think that's the kind of stuff that will drive us to South Sudan, but I also think we may be looking too much at Africa, and we may see stuff happening in Asia and Latin America as well.

• 46:34Speaker 01

  South Sudan's landlocked, isn't it, like Ethiopia? Both landlocked?

• 46:37Speaker 00

  Yes, absolutely. Alasdair, question for you, because you've been following this closely. Josh, what do you make of the upcoming elections in Brazil that seem neck and neck between Lula and Flavio, who I think is the son of Bolsonaro, the old populist right-wing leader?

• 46:52Speaker 01

  What I make of them is that they are neck and neck. It's a very, very, very foolish man who's going to bet his house on the outcome. I think until recently, I think there was a sense that the Bolsonaro mythology with the dad in jail and lots of difficulties between the son and his stepmom, who's also campaigning to be an elected representative as well. I'd love to know how much the Americans are getting involved in, you know, because we've seen to the extent to which the Americans like to get involved in these Latin American elections. And the reason why, well, this matters because Brazil is a huge country.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  Lula and Claudia Schombain in Mexico are really the only two left from the left who are facing up to this sort of right-wing wave. And of course, Bolsonaro senior, he's serving a very long prison sentence for doing something that Donald Trump got away with, which is basically trying to resist the outcome, the democratic outcome of an election that was held. His son Flavio is the candidate, Flavio, but it's clear, there was a very, very good piece in the FT Magazine at the weekend, it's clear that the dad is still very, very powerful in the whole setup. Flavio is even on record as saying, you know, he didn't, not these words, but he's basically not fit to tie his shoelaces, he's the man kind of thing.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  And of course, Lula is, I don't know his exact age, but he's pretty much in the Trump generation, he's in his, he's certainly eighty plus, as it were. You know, you've also got the elections to the Chamber of Deputies, there's a huge election across the weekend. I think rather than speculate now, probably best if we come back to it next week, when we actually know what the outcome will be. And it's probably going to be some sort of runoff, but I wouldn't put my money on Lula holding on, and I think he'd be pretty grim for democracy if a Bolsonaro came back.

• 48:43Speaker 00

  Worrying, we'll keep an eye on that. And as you say, it's interesting how successful, from Trump's point of view, he must feel that he's being all the way from Venezuela across to Argentina and all these, all these elections, he seems to be getting a sort of full slate of his sort of El Salvador vision of Latin America. Although, of course, some of my more right-wing Latin American friends would disagree with me and say that we've been too sympathetic towards hopeless left-wing populist leaders across Latin America, that's a bigger, bigger conversation.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  Rory, here's one for you, because I know the answer to this from your perspective. Linda, will you be going to see the Baye Tapestry? I've been invited to a couple of the things that I've not been able to do, but I know you have been, so was it worth the visit?

• 49:28Speaker 00

  Went with Shoshana and children, absolutely worth the visit. I love the British Museum, so I'm not going to hit them too hard on the organisation, but just spoiler alert, if I cast you go at three in the afternoon, you're waiting a very, very long time, because they still haven't sorted out how you move down that tapestry so that you don't end up waiting a long time, even when you've booked your time slot on your tickets.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 49:51Speaker 00

  That aside, I mean, the tapestry is incredible. It's, I mean, the first thing which you'd love, I think, Alasdair, is it's an amazing exercise in storytelling, because somebody sitting down not long after the Battle of Hastings was having to work out, how do you tell the story in pictures? It's basically a graphic novel or a cartoon strip of what happened. And they're having to choose very dramatically, you know, okay, let's start with Edward the Confessor sending off Harold off to Northern France, and then he's getting captured, and then he's fighting with William, and then an oath is given, and then Edward's handing over the throne, and he's crowned, and now the boats are coming across, and now the horses are gathering in the arches. And that's the first thing.

• 50:36Speaker 00

  The second thing is, it's actually an amazingly innovative piece of art. I mean, I can't think of any other medieval art before that, which actually tells the story in that way. It's more like Trojan's Column, or maybe the, if you go to the British Museum, more like the Elgin Marbles or something, in the way that it gets the frieze going all the way along, rather than the sort of blocky stories that you'd expect in a medieval manuscript. So really exciting, and I think such a great decision to bring it over, because so few people were seeing it in Baye, and it means so much to us. And I think means maybe even more to us in an age where we love graphic novels and cartoons to see, and also, Alasdair, I promise you, you will be able to read all the Latin, all

• 51:20Speaker 00

  the way across, even just on the basis of your French. It's a wonderfully simple medieval Latin.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  So do you think we should keep it like we kept the Elgin Marbles? Should we do that?

• 51:29Speaker 00

  Finders keepers, losers weepers.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  What are they going to do? What are they going to do? Are they going to come and get it?

• 51:36Speaker 00

  Honestly, what are they going to do?

• 51:40Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, sounds good. How long did it take you to get around? I mean, you said, and should we complain to, isn't George Osborne the head of the British Museum? We should, we should complain to him about the organisation.

• 51:48Speaker 00

  He is, and Tom Holland, our great co-president of Rest History, is a trustee and doubtless they will accuse me for being bitter that I'm not the chair or the trustees. But I do think, here's an idea for the British Museum, if you're listening. If you're not prepared to put a moving staircase, which is what, um, which is what they have at the Tower of London to keep people moving through Crown Jewels. A simple thing you could do is you could just have a rope with knots in it and everyone has to cling on to that bit of the rope. And then everyone would move in, in, uh, in time, because actually the problem is the gaps that emerge between people. I mean, the day goes on.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  Can you, can you take pictures?

• 52:20Speaker 00

  No, they won't let you take pictures anymore because that's one of the things they're blaming on, on the queues. So they've stopped pictures and videos, but the solution.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  But you could take pictures before. There's not a sort of reason why you can't photograph.

• 52:32Speaker 00

  No, no, you could before. It's just that as they're becoming more and more panicked by people like me grumbling about the fact that they're waiting an hour in the quarter beyond their time and missing their kid's birthday party, which is what happened with me and Ida. They're trying to work out what it is. I have a solution. An old fashioned rope with knots in it cling on to the rope and then everybody would move together, shoulder to shoulder at the same speed.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  Okay, right.

• 52:54Speaker 00

  Okay, so this is very much an Alistair question. Jürgen Klopp recently spoke about reclaiming the flag for ordinary Germans through what he calls positive patriotism. Arguing that national pride should not be left to political extremes. Do you think public figures, particularly in sport, can successfully separate patriotism from nationalism? Or is reclaiming national symbols from political movements much harder? And that's an ideal Alistair question, isn't it? That's positive sense of national pride and football altogether. Come, over to you.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  Well, it's, it's got football. It's got one of the most charismatic public figures on the planet who's happens to be German, but who's well known in England because he was manager of Liverpool where I am now. And it's also got a really good opportunity to, you know, to lay into the populist far right. So Jürgen Klopp, this is really interesting. He's, he's, he's become the manager of Germany, Germany, which has been struggling football wise. And he turned up for his inaugural press conference as the manager because he always wears a baseball cap and a new baseball cap. And it basically was a sort of modern version of the flag and the slogan was, uh, one of eighty million, something like that.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  And he sort of said, I'm not going to get political. I'm not going to be political. But he basically, without mentioning the alternative for Deutschland, he kind of said he was sick and tired of the flag being, you know, taken by the extremes. And he said, the one thing that football can do is actually that, you know, we can all unite around the flag as the symbol of our country. I also saw a really interesting interview with him this week. I had no idea about this. He was asked why he always seemed to be so positive. And he said, because he had eine fantastische Familie. Can you get that one right?

• 54:38Speaker 00

  Translate that. Yeah, that's a bit like the Latin on the Bayeux Tapestry. We can get that.

• 54:41Speaker 01

  So you got, you got eine fantastische Familie. Und auch ich bin ein gläubiger Christus.

• 54:47Speaker 00

  Is he Christian?

• 54:48Speaker 01

  I'm a believer in Christ. Yeah. Which I had no idea. So he said they were the twin things that, that drove him. Anyway, that's nothing to do with patriotism. But I thought that was very interesting. Anyway, answered your question, Matt. Yes, is the answer. Because this is something that the extremes often do, mainly the extremes of the right rather than the left, but they, they seize, they try to pretend that they alone represent the patriotic voice. And I would argue at the moment that there's a case to be made for attacking the far right, not least in our country where we now have the, you know, reform who call the RNLI, note the word Royal National Lifeboat Institution, a migrant taxi service, who regularly attack the police.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  Who at the, uh, who, uh, on the back of the recent arrests at Fairford, as ever, just used it to try to sort of, you know, make this somehow about, about immigration. So I just think that there is a, there is, there is a positive patriotism, which is you love your country, but you want your country to be better. And there is a negative patriotism to me, which is a divisive patriotism. This is that only if you follow my sort of politics, Farage, Rupert Lowe, et cetera. Then only then can you truly be a patriot. So I thought what Klopp did in Germany was good. And of course, Germany's got the same sort of political problems we have at the moment.

• 56:08Speaker 00

  Well, it's lovely, but he, he's basically just copied Gareth Southgate.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, good, uh, good point, good point. Gareth Southgate did do something very similar. Another opportunity to plug James Graham's latest play.

• 56:19Speaker 00

  We, we loved Gareth Southgate. Can you get Klopp on the show, please?

• 56:22Speaker 01

  We'll definitely give it a go. He doesn't do many sort of, I'm not, have I seen many podcasts he's done? I'd love to know where he said the thing about Christ. Yeah, we can try and get Jürgen Klopp. He's a very, very, very, he's a very, very fine man. I've also got a very funny story about Klopp. I, I, um, I share his vet. Well, I want to say I share his vet. I have once.

• 56:43Speaker 00

  Your miniature King Charles spaniel goes to the same vet that Jürgen Klopp's dog went to.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  Did once, did once. Because of the ludicrousness of Brexit, our poor dog, although she doesn't know it, she is now, we, we, we have got so many passport stamps for our dog. Every time you take your dog to Europe, you have to go and see a vet before you bring it back. Okay. And so Fiona and I were in Salz, in northern Germany, and we took it to the vet. And on the, on the front was, uh, on the reception desk was a book. And the book was, uh, written by the vet. And the vet, what the vet's claims to say was that Jürgen Klopp took his dog there when it swallowed a jellyfish.

• 57:28Speaker 00

  Oh, that's a really good story. I like that very much. Swallied a jellyfish.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. Anyway, the dog was saved and it's all fine and Jürgen's happy. I hope the dog's still happy and we, yeah. So there we are. I share Jürgen's vet.

• 57:42Speaker 00

  That's lovely, lovely thing to, lovely thing to end on. Um, well, Alistair, thank you very much and look forward to talking again next week.

• 57:50Speaker 01

  See you soon. Bye.

• 57:53Speaker 00

  Hi, it's Rory here. I've been thinking a lot about the big existential questions that we often don't want to address, the things that don't feel immediate, but which could actually change our entire world. And I was joined today by Yuval Noah Harari to discuss what he calls AI imperialism, kill switches. How alien intelligence could soon create a world that we cannot and can never begin to understand. Have a listen.

• 58:23Speaker 04

  I think we are entering a new age of imperialism, which is radically different from every previous age of imperialism in history. Because in every previous age, there was a, a certain inevitable limit to how much power you can concentrate in one place. If you look at the Roman Empire, so the Roman Empire economically, even if it conquers the whole Mediterranean, it cannot move like the, the main source of economic wealth is ultimately agriculture and wheat fields. It cannot physically move the wheat fields from Egypt to Italy.

• 58:58Speaker 04

  And so a lot of power remains in the provinces. If you look at the British Empire, it cannot move the oil fields from Iraq to Yorkshire. It's impossible. So a lot of the power remains in the provinces. With AI, you can move all the assets, which are ultimately just code, to the imperial hub with really nothing remaining in the provinces. Similarly, if you think about it in, in military terms, the Roman Empire, if, if, if you're a Roman merchant and you sell the latest model of bows to some Picts, uh, uh, beyond Adrian Wall, they can then use it against you.

• 59:41Speaker 04

  There is no button in Rome that you press the button and all these bows stop working. In the 19th century, if some British merchant sells, sold rifles to Afghan tribesmen, they can then use it to do things the British don't like, like kill British soldiers. Victoria doesn't have a magic button that if she presses the button, all these rifles stop working. With AI, this is the case. That, uh, if you buy your AI drone swarm from the Americans, there is a button in Washington that when they press, it stops working.

• 1:00:14Speaker 00

  And, and that, and this means when you have this kind of, uh, kill switch, of course, in the extreme case, they press it. But long before they press it, they use the existence of the kill switch to extort and exert their power. Your knowledge that they have the kill switch already means that you have to cooperate. Let's just dig into the economics though. Um, so imagine I'm running a, I don't know, a medical insurance company in Yorkshire, employing lots of people in small towns and they're working, I don't know, 4,000 of them are, uh, call centre people, 1,000 of them are software engineers. And an American company, Anthropic or OpenAI, develops a new programme

• 1:00:59Speaker 00

  which replaces all my call centre people because suddenly the AI can take the calls and speak very beautifully and replaces all my software coders because now actually the Claude code can do all the work that these people can do in an instant, right? Now the medical insurance business in this place is being served from the United States with their products, right? And now all these people have lost their jobs. 5,000 call centre workers, thousand, uh, software engineers. Now the government is no longer receiving, the British government is no longer receiving income tax from these individuals because they don't have an income. In fact, the British government now needs to pay unemployment welfare benefit to these people. But it's not even able to tax the corporation. The corporation is now in the United States.

• 1:01:44Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:01:45Speaker 00

  So the revenue base of the British government collapses. The economic growth is removed, the productivity benefit goes off the United States and there is a huge sucking sound, like a, a vacuum cleaner sucking the wealth of Britain over to the United States.

• 1:02:02Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:02:04Speaker 00

  So I just wanted to, you know, see if we can develop this a little bit as, as one of the, uh, risks before we get on to, you know, killer drones of what it could actually mean for economies like the British or European economy, if we end up in a world in which the very latest frontier models are located uniquely in the United States and China, and they choose to use those to run the companies themselves rather than allow us to build off the back of them.

• 1:02:30Speaker 04

  What is, I mean, what you get, again, it's an extreme imperial economy.

• 1:02:36Speaker 04

  Where the only thing that remains in the provinces are certain raw materials that are still needed and cannot be moved physically. So it's oil, it's rare earth minerals and things like that.

• 1:02:48Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:02:49Speaker 04

  Everything which is based on humans, like human intelligence, this can be done from the hub with AIs.

• 1:02:55Speaker 00

  And there's something else, which is also true of the imperial economy, which I didn't understand till I was the African minister. One is tempted to say, and we also have a market. But as we get poorer, our market matters less and less. I remember talking to a businessman about trying to encourage him to invest in Africa. And he said, I'm not investing in Sub-Saharan Africa because the entire middle class of Sub-Saharan Africa is smaller than the population of Belgium. And he defined middle class as having an income of more than $800 a month. So one of the interesting things is that if your economy collapses, you don't actually have the leverage of saying, you need our market.

• 1:03:31Speaker 04

  Yep, absolutely. And we don't have any precedent for such an economic scenario from history, which is why it's so difficult, and going back to the issue of thinking the unthinkable, to really come to terms with it. But I think this should be the number one or number two worry of all the countries in the world, except for the two leading ones, the USA and China, which will benefit from this new kind of economics.

• 1:03:58Speaker 00

  Okay, here was a story given to me by somebody in Afghanistan. So someone in Afghanistan said, we don't really need to worry. We're barely connected to the internet. We don't really have very much electricity between Herat and Kabul. We are living a subsistence life as peasant farmers. The United States already tried for 20 years to spend $2 trillion with all the latest technology in the world to try to conquer us. And they gave up and left. We'll be fine. Our life won't change very much.

• 1:04:29Speaker 04

  It is true that villagers in Afghanistan, in this sense, are in a much better situation than lawyers in London, whose life could be, the life as that they know, could be completely destroyed.

• 1:04:42Speaker 00

  And the villager in Afghanistan, his life not necessarily completely destroyed?

• 1:04:45Speaker 04

  No, not in the short term. In the long run, the danger of a planet dominated by AI is not that the AI will try to unsuccessfully build democracy in Afghanistan, wasting $2 trillion and, you know, creating so much havoc. The AIs will just not care about the humans. They can go on living, whatever they are doing, until the moment that the AIs need something from that particular place. And then they just don't care what is the impact on the humans living there. The thing is, we cannot really imagine the scenarios. If we can imagine them, they are not realistic. As a less intelligent entity,

• 1:05:30Speaker 04

  we cannot imagine the concerns, the ambitions, the plans of the more intelligent entities. Like if you live in, I don't know, in some jungle, you're a monkey.

• 1:05:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:42Speaker 04

  And some oil company is coming to and destroys your forest to drill for oil. And you cannot imagine what is driving this process. Like you say, are they coming to get my bananas? And no, no, no, they are not coming to get your bananas. It's just that the price of oil is now $150 because of a war in the Middle East. And therefore, it makes sense for them to destroy your forest. And you cannot understand it.

• 1:06:08Speaker 00

  Well, because, I mean, it's particularly strange in that example because the monkey has to understand that what they're really interested in is trees and organic matter that rotted 100 million years ago, rather than the trees that are actually standing here. Because somehow they're able to set this stuff on fire and generate energy from it to do something.

• 1:06:25Speaker 04

  Which they use in order to watch funny cat videos on their smartphones.

• 1:06:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That was from part two of my conversation with Yuval Noherari. Sign up at theresthispolitics.com to hear the whole interview, as well as so much more member content. That's theresthispolitics.com.

• 1:06:51Speaker 05

  Are you looking for support in your weight management journey? ZepBound terzepatide may be able to help. ZepBound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity or some adults with overweight who also have weight-related medical problems to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off. ZepBound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15-milligram injection. ZepBound contains terzepatide and should not be used with other terzepatide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if ZepBound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens or reuse needles. Don't take if allergic to it.

• 1:07:34Speaker 05

  Or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop ZepBound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain or a serious allergic reaction. Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia. If you're nursing, pregnant, plan to be, or taking birth control pills. Taking ZepBound with a sulfonylurea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems. Talk to your doctor.

• 1:08:14Speaker 05

  Call 1-800-545-5979 or visit zepbound.lily.com.

• 1:08:21Speaker 06

  Kayak searches and compares hundreds of travel sites. But unless I repeat the word kayak, Kayak thinks you won't remember that. So Kayak asked me to say kayak as many times as possible. Kayak. Kayak. Kayak. Kayak. Kayak. Kayak. Kai. Ooh. Ak. Kai, Kai, Kai, Kai, kayak. Kayak, kayak, kayak. Search, compare, and save on your trip. Kayak. Got that right. Back to school, practices and games. Fall fills up fast for families. That's why at Cracker Barrel, comfort comes easy. Stop in for our crispy homestyle chicken deals, starting at just $9.99.

• 1:09:04Speaker 06

  Hand-breaded chicken, prepared the way the family likes it. No matter how they build it. You can start with a classic sandwich or plate for $9.99, then make it saucy or loaded up. It's home style, your style. With so many choices, comfort comes easy. Welcome home to Cracker Barrel.