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

For 40 years, America's answer to China was engaged with it, trade with it, invest in it,

liberalize 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 interesting getting along with Xi, so what's going on?

Is Trump an outlier in an America which has still committed to confrontation?

Or is America policy lurching back towards compromise?

Because America no longer wants to be the global policeman of the order it once built?

This episode is powered by Fuse Energy.

Most energy companies are counting on you doing absolutely nothing.

Not questioning what you're paying, not switching, just letting your tithe

are wrong-on, which is costing you hundreds of pounds every year.

But the apathy goes deeper than our bills.

We've almost given up on energy itself.

We seem to all be accepting energy's expensive the systems outdated.

But that complacency is costing us.

Fuse Energy does not accept that because the energy transition is not something that

just happens somewhere else.

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-gem price cap.

So switching isn't just about paying less, it's about expecting more from your energy

company and it only takes you three minutes.

Switch to Fuse at fuseenergy.com, stash of 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.

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 and 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.

Join millions, saving billions on hidden fees by downloading the Wise app today.

Be smart, get wise, TZC's apply.

Observe the North American dad.

50s.

Great polo collection.

He enters his vehicle information on Carvana and offers appears in minutes.

Remarkable.

He squints, reads it again, smiles and says,

Dang, that's a good offer.

The highest form of approval, no haggling, no hassle, no one called him, boss.

He's still on the couch, astonishing.

Sell your car today on Carvana.com.

Pick up fees may apply.

Welcome to the REST's politics question time with me Roy Stewart.

And me, Alice Campbell.

So amazing range of lessons 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 on the running.

And then we'll finish with a bit of lighter stuff around the Bayer tapestry and

Alistair's hero, one of his many heroes, Yorgon Klopp and his positive vision for German

patriotism.

Holly, what do 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 votes on Xi.

Well, I think, firstly, not a great deal happened at the summit.

So people who thought 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 we'll have picked up, the US was very, very pro engagement with

China from the moment of the Nixon goes to China 1970s, right the way through the 80s, 90s,

2000s China joins World Trade Organization, right the way through to the 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

hawkish on China that massively cut all connections with China in the first term.

Now seems the second term to be much more friendly towards China than any of the major

figures denied the Republican or the Democratic Party over to you.

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 attack on Canada, which he'd done recently, and also to comment on the bail

conditions that are put upon suspects in counterterrorism cases in the UK. At a time when Vladimir

Putin has just wiped a load of bombs on a medical facility bang in the middle of Kiev.

So I think that there was one issue, that the whole trip, I think 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 the plane since JFK did that for Harold Millen. At a time when Britain was the great

was the great power. So that's in 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,

hunger in the United Nations General Assembly was deemed to be less significant than this meeting.

And yet very little came out of this meeting and essentially you were used to a 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 for about the ureary is just what was said or was not

said about Taiwan because there were very different redouts. The Chinese redout of the meeting

gave the impression that Trump was inching towards their side on relation to Taiwan. The American

redout said absolutely nothing about Taiwan. 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. 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. Nobody's bored Roy. Nobody's bored. Nobody's bored with that. Nobody's

bored with that. It's in that is really interesting. Nobody's bored. Don't do down your facts.

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 what 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 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 races is given that he

doesn't seem in Ukraine to care very much about standing up for democracies in 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, 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. They've got 90% of the world's

advanced semiconductors. China's got a chokehold on rare earth, so he's probably worrying about

that much more than he is about the democratic or otherwise future of Taiwan. There was even a report

flying around that he'd asked she 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 against the law

in America. Now, I know he doesn't care too much about the rule law, but that was, if that is true,

that is kind of mind-blowing. And again, suggest that he feels to himself to be in a very weak

position of ease of each other. 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, and an enemy and a new Cold War. And I've been very interested in this because I know

a lot of these people. So, for example, Matt Potenture and Mike Gallagher, who I know quite well,

key figures, Matt Potenture, 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 more sort of

almost rude and brutal in the way they spoke about the Chinese government. And it came pretty close,

although they backed off of this in the end to 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, were saying, you know,

in the long run, there's a question of who rules the world, and we would rather have a world ruled

by America 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 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. I mean, it's very, very hard to read that because so

much of that would depend on who follows Trump. But I do think there is 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 we talked down to them if anything

he was showing respect. I also thought it was, we're very, very rarely Xi Xi Jinping laughs or smile,

other than that sort of, you know, 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 it 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 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 is really not all there. This guy is actually quite

easy to deal with. I just have to flash him a bit, like smile to him a bit. It's very hard to,

if you even if you read the White House read out 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 bigger multilateral meeting.

As Tony Blair would say, we don't want in all of this to under emphasize why the U.S. 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 color revolutions. It's got no desire to liberalize.

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 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 U.S. 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.

It doesn't feel the same after two years of Trump. Because now people say, well, okay, you're

accusing China of doing economic extortion, bullying Australia by stopping imports from Australia.

Where does that aren't you bullying everybody around the world with your own tariffs and

protection and you're accusing China of undermining the rules based international order,

but there are you trashing the UN turning off the aid system, lining up the autocrats.

It's difficult or more difficult than it was for the U.S. to create the alliances that it needs,

or at least to create the Moran values. You know the day Rory, I did a bit of pitilatory.

Well, I don't know with his counsel, Patel Jail, with Robert Peston from the rest of his money,

and Anita and Anne from Empire. And we were doing event at Lloyds of London for

Star, one of the big American financial institution. And I did my question, which, as you know,

I love to ask people, which is the greatest 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 side of the answer was to say that actually the USA is currently the greatest threat.

And I think China is playing into that all the time. I think they're doing it in terms of their

hard power and their soft power. Holly's 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 will have gone

home very, very happy. What did you make of panda diplomacy, by the way Rory?

The other one was, one of my favorite, I can't remember who cracked the line. It might have been

Alexander, but somebody cracked the great line. There are more pandas in Scotland than the

Rattoria bees, where there were two pandas that would be given to Scotland. And then in 2015,

there were twice as many pandas as there were labor and peace as well. Yeah. Yeah. The

joke which, which labor party, I remember being there when he cracked the joke, I think it's sort

of 2010, Jake. It's after the catastrophe of the 2010 election. And it's, I think it's an

Alex Salman 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 Kessinger and Nixon wanted to do it was a lot about these

strange cultural exchanges. We've talked to them past about ping pong diplomacy, but all

seen, Kessinger's desire to really get lots of business exchange, student exchange, cultural

exchange. And the pandas that, you know, one of the most dramatic things, I mean, the Chinese

withdraw pandas from people if they've been criticized. They did. We know Obama met

Dan Ilamah. They said, oops, that's don't like that. We're bringing the pandas back.

I mean, no 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 of Wildlife Fund,

and they've got that wonderful panda as there, as there. And it's a wonderful, wonderful creature.

So the survey that, you know, 28% of Americans said they would have a more favorable view of China

if they sent a panda to their zoo. I think partly because there's 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 any of their heads and buckets of water and generally. Yeah. The two that

would be giving a call ping ping and the food shwang. Very good. So they're going to become major

global celebrities. 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 2023 from Pew Research, favorability of China went from 50% in 2006 to 12% in 2023.

And from 30% for Americans, thinking China was the enemy in 2006 to 80% thinking China was the

enemy in 2023. 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. Yeah. You've talked a lot about the sort of 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. Yes, although of course America has much higher tariffs than places like Britain has.

And I think the big challenge for Europe, I mean, let's imagine your 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,

50% of the profits of luxury goods and automobile manufacturers in China. And Britain is now

sort of caught in the middle of this. We've talked about Andy Vernon 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

16% of all new cars bought this year, which Chinese cars, Chinese electric vehicles are subsidized

or technologically advanced, whatever they are, much cheaper, better than our getting stated,

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 and make it more difficult to do the energy transition

to electric vehicles. So China is in the center of every single conversation and we need to keep

coming back to China. Listen, this whole story about the new existential threats we're facing in

particularly global choke points. If anybody's not listened to my members' series, which has done some

great stuff with Yuval Noharrari on AI, Carlo Revelli 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. Yeah, finally,

I did a couple of events here where the Hamish foreigner 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 made in Europe stuff that is causing real

difficulties now, I think, between the UK and the European Union, because there's the European

Union, which he's 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 Dan do it probably another day. Great. Well, and I say, 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? Oh, I mean, this brought back some

absolutely terrible memories. Drum Cree and the marching in Drum Cree, which I mean, to get this

sort of full story of this, you've got to go back to the Battle of the Boyne. So long time ago,

we don't want to go right back to the Battle of the Boyne. We're talking about 1690. And then the

orange order was founded in 1795 and not far from Drum Cree. And this is very much regarded as the

birthplace of the whole orangeism, if you like. And as you know, they've got this history and

tradition of marching. And this is one of the most famous and most controversial marches because

we're talking about this town. And Alice, so just quickly to state the obvious again for international

listeners, these are unionist pro-British Protestants predominantly. Yeah. So the Battle of the Boyne

essentially was what led to the continuation of the Protestants being ascendant in Ireland.

And this, this focus is on a town called Portedown, which is mainly Protestant, but it has this

significant Catholic minority. And the issue is about the march that they do, this Drum Cree march,

going through this very, very Catholic area. And I think in our very first week in 1997,

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. And in the march, which followed, there was a lot

of sort of mimicking stamping on the ground as though there was sort of reminding the Catholics that

they'd done this. Mo Mo on the Secretary of State, she let the march proceed and it led to astonishing

horrible violence. And this went on year after year. Drum Cree became every year. We had to deal with

this Drum Cree 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 a top of our agenda for day after

day after day. And then we passed legislation to the Public Possessions Act, which led to the

Parades Commission. Since when there have been, there's a lot of violence, I was looking at the numbers

in 1998, for example, just as a result of this attempt to have the march going through this one road,

650 in attacks on the Security Forces, 76 police injured, 632 petrol bombs, 45 homemade bombs,

24 shooting incidents, almost 500 vehicles attacked, 284 arrests. And then we had the three

horrible murder of three young Catholic boys, aged 89 and 10. 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. Since when massive protests

by the residents of the Galvaki Road, 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

United 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 back seat. But these old traditions, they keep coming out. One of the things that's

very difficult for an outsider to make sense of is this question of how fragile the peace is or

isn't. I mean, you can go to a dairy London dairy and people will say, listen, this is still on

the edge of a tender box. But in other ways, things seem to have changed so much in the last 25

years. I mean, it's very difficult, but just sort of gut instinct. What's your sense of the next 5,

10 years in all that? And 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 getting more peaceful all the time?

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'll 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 similar to the

Hadness, South Africa, 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-jordid guys marching, they tend to be

a bit older. But then when you see the resident association and the Gavahiro protest, you've got a

lot younger people. And then when you've seen, we saw some violence recently, there was much more

done by the Protestant side of things, and that was a younger generation. So you've got a younger

generation that has grown up not knowing the violence as a fact of life. But you can see that

they could have cultural pressures and the historical pressures are still there. So I think Chris

Bryant's Northern Ireland secretary has got a tough job in his hands right now. And don't forget,

we have this coalition, which is what we put in place with the Good Friday agreement. The whole

purpose was to have the two sides governing together. And I'd say this is tense. But the marching

season is always tense. The marching season is always tense. But this 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. Well, I think time for a quick break. When we come back

from the break, we're going to talk about a situation where genuinely a peace agreement has

collapsed and the civil war has broken out again. And that's Ethiopia. We're also going to touch

on Jürgen Klopp, the Bayer tapestry in the Brazil elections. Very good to see.

This episode is brought to you by Lloyd's. One thing that politics teaches you is that certainty

predictability is often an illusion. A Lloyd's market is summit earlier this month. I sat down with

Katty Kay from the rest of his politics US. And we got into very interesting discussion about the

challenges that 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. 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?

Well, the best leaders don't wait for that certainty. Instead, they build confidence through

insight, expertise and trusted relationships. Whether it's through summits or their insights hub

Lloyd's helps their clients understand the forces shaping global markets.

Search Lloyd's corporate for daily global market analysis. The download on tokenisation and how to

manage your company's energy transition. All from Lloyd's corporate and institutional banking. Bank on Lloyd's.

Hi everybody, it's Dominic Sambrook here from the Rest is history and we are here to tell you about

a thrilling new series on the blood soaked climax of the French Revolution, the reign of terror.

So the French Revolution is one of the most significant episodes in the whole of world history. It

essentially lays the foundations for contemporary politics as we know it, but it is also unbelievably

dramatic. We'll be discussing the murder of the firebrand Jean-Paul Marra in his bathtub. We will

be going to the guillotine with the Marriantouinette and in our final episode. We will be telling the

story of the extraordinary grotesque downfall of one of the chief architects of the terror, one of the

most evil men in history, some would say, Maximilian Crosbarsbier. So if you want to hear this

epic series, search for the rested history wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome back to the rest of the politics question time with me, Alistair Campbell.

And with me, Maurice Hewitt. Okay, Rory, nickel in Glasgow. How worried are you by the reignition

of tensions and the possibility of full-scale war and Ethiopian 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? 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 African minister in 26,

2017, growing at 8% year, then collapsed into a very, very nasty civil war. Really attentive

listeners will remember that Alice 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 and the new government of Abiyah, 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 Abiyah meds 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

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 and the last conflict is that going to begin again?

And what does this mean for the broader region? Now remember, it's coming unstuck at almost

the same time as the Pistil in Yemen, which had kept pretty static front lines since 2022, also

came unstuck just a few weeks ago with the Hussi 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 are recently in the new status, there's one of your

favorite 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. But this is also a story as Nicola implies, which stretches much,

much further because what's happened is now the Hussi 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 Hussi 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 recognized by

Israel as Somali land and then the Somali province of Puntland. 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

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 has now turned against the Emirates apparently in favor 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 the sort of UAE Israel enclave

around independent Somali land 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 collapse in a couple

of weeks ago, we've seen the Ethiopian peace deal collapsing. Now I wouldn't be a tall surprise

that the South Sudan relative peace that we've had since 2016 is also a bad collapse that's just

on the on the other border and where is America in all this? Whereas Europe in all this 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.

Nichols 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 the

more 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 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 under China and of Putin 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 all of us but they alone are not

going to be able to drive an international response to it and is you know I don't know if I said

it was one of my favorite countries in the world I said it was one of the I think it's one of the

I saw the most beautiful I think it's a beautiful country my my my first experience of it was

back covering the famine in the 80s in Ethiopia and then Eritrea and Tigray. There's a famous

photograph of you with the leader of Eritrea that we we always have to keep bringing up. No one

it's a lot of famous photograph it's a photograph that you like because it shows me as a young man

looking rather forningly at this handsome freedom fighter. Freedom fighter as we call it as we

call it 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 judgment right wrong okay

so 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 and you see horrific you know you see a lot of

poverty is weird that time saw a lot of violence a lot of death and you had the EPLF Eritrea

and people's liberation front and you had the TPLF the Tigray people's liberation front and of

course you talked about Abbey Ahmed's Nobel Prize that was because of reconciling coming to

peace with Eritrea but of course it didn't take long before he was then fighting up with Tigray

and and and of course you told 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

difficulty that they've they've had but I look 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 chaos becomes normalised

and that's what I worry is going to happen here well the change is unbelievable isn't it because from

the civil war that you were reporting in the 80s and the rise of the sort of Eritrea and

Chaguavira as he appeared through to the 90s and 2000s the 90s and 2000s 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 I-GAD 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 to say this

story was sort of working in the 90s and 2000s yes we were worrying about Somali pirates yes we were

worrying about terrorism but 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 and Somalia

turning up as the African Minister in 2016 I sort of feel I was at the beginning of seeing what

it 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 years earlier by the time I turned up the Turks were everywhere the Emirates

were everywhere and you could already sense things shifting very very very very quickly and Britain

less and less the US still matter but Britain matter said now what 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 60 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 why did you say

you said to me very interesting when you're going through the video why did you say that you thought

that South Sudan could be the next what's what's going on there that I haven't been across well so

South Sudan has these very very deep residual conflicts going on between the newer and the dinker

particularly two of the big ethnic groups that that play into this and particularly between two of

the leading figures particularly guy called reek masher 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 and felt like there were

all these deep historical roots and so many people have been killed and it was so savage and then

oddly a semi stalemate emerged which meant that for some years have the last 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 their major players and a lot of these things that we've been

talking these kuditas across the Sahel so Chad is very much connected with UAE and if people look

at South Sudan on the map the likelihood of things spilling over 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 a semi-pieced deal settlement 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 hallmills in the Red Sea closing the next checkpoint and this is also

funny to it's partly a technology point it's partly a point about the fact that the US has lost

partly because of drones it's real ability to prevent relatively weak states or even

insurgency groups doing extraordinary things to each other to shipping and drones keep popping

up into all these stories Yemen the the 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 in South Sudan but I also think we may be looking too much at

Africa and we may see see stuff happening in Asia and Latin America as well. South Sudan's

land lot doesn't it like Ethiopia both land lot yes absolutely and a quick 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 the of Bolsonaro the

old populist right wing leader what I make of them is that they are neck and neck it's a very very

foolish man who's going to bet his house on 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 elected representative as well.

I'd love to know how much the Americans are getting involved in you know because we've seen

the extent to which the Americans like to get involved in these Latin American elections

and the reason why they're well this matters because Brazil is a huge country Lula and

Claudia Shambheim in Mexico are really the only two left from the left who are facing up to this

sort of right wing wave and because Bolsonaro senior he's serving a lot very long prison sentence

for doing something that the whole 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 F.D. magazine at the weekend it's clear that

the dad is still very very powerful in the whole the whole setup Flavio is even on record as saying

you know he's not these words but he's unbasically not fit to tie his shoelaces he's the man kind of

thing and of course Lula is I don't know he's exact age but he's pretty much in the Trump

generation he's in he's certainly 80 pluses 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 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

it'd be pretty grim for democracy if A. Bolson arrow came back. Worry we'll keep an eye on that

and as you say it's 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 from 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 hoopless left wing populist leaders across Latin America as

a bigger bigger conversation. Worry here's one for you because I know I know the answer to this

from your perspective Linda will you be going to see the buyer tapestry I've been invited to a

couple of things that I've not been able to do but I know you have been so was it worth the visit?

Went with Shishana and Chilson 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 like us 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 search you don't end up waiting a long time even when you book your time

slot on your tickets. That's a side I mean the tapestry is incredible it's I mean it's the first

thing which you'd love I think Alistair 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

and 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 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 arch and that's the first

thing 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

um Trajan's Colin or maybe the if you go to British music more like the Elgin Marbles or

something and the way that it gets the frees going all the way along rather than the sort of

blockie stories that you'd expect in a medieval manuscript so really exciting and I I think such a

great decision to bring it over because so few people were seeing it in Beyer and it means so much to

us and and I think means maybe even more to us in an age where we love graphic novels and cartoons

to see and also Alisa I promise you you will be able to read all the Latin all the way across

even just on the base of your French it's it's it's a wonderfully simple medieval Latin yeah

so do you think we should keep it like we kept the Elgin Marbles should we do that

yeah

finders keepers lose as we first what are you going to do what are you going to do I think

are you going to get it hey yeah honestly what are they going to do

well guess how long did it take to get around I mean you said until we complain to

isn't George Osborne the head of the British Museum which it was she complained to him about

the organisation he is and Tom Holland our great co-presenting rest histories of 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 of Feelers thing if you're not

prepared to put a moving staircase which is what which is what they have at the Tower of London to

keep people moving through the Crown Jewels a simple thing you could do is you could just have a

rope with knots in it and everyone has to cling onto their bit of the rope and then everyone would

move and come in in time because actually the problem is the gaps that emerged between people

I mean can you can you can you take pictures no they won't let you take pictures anymore because

that's one of the things they're blaming on on the cues so they've stopped pictures and videos but

the solution but you could take pictures before there's not a sort of reason why you can't

photograph no no you could before it's just that as they becoming more and more panicked by people

like me grumbling about the fact that they're waiting an hour and a quarter beyond their time

and missing their kids birthday party which is what happened with me and I there they're trying

to work out what it is I have a solution an old fashioned rope would not connect cling onto the

rope and then everybody would move together shoulder to shoulder at the same speed okay right

okay so this is very much an ask the question you're gonna clop 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 in practice that's an ideal ask the question isn't it that's

positive sense national pride and football altogether gum over to you 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's 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 um so you're gonna clop this is

really interesting is he's he's he's he's become the manager of Germany Germany which has been

struggling football wise um and he turned up for his inaugural press conference as a manager because

he always wears a baseball cap into a new baseball cap and it basically was a sort of modern version

of the flag and the slogan was um one of 80 million something like that and he sort of said I'm not

gonna get political I'm not gonna 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 could all

unite brand 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 I in a fantasticia familiar can get that one right I'm like that yeah that's

a bit like the Latin on the Bayer tapestry we can get okay you got you got I in a fantasticia

familiar yeah and oh I've been I'm glowy yeah crystals is he Christian I'm a believer in Christ yeah

which I have no idea so he said they were the two in things that that drove him anyway that's

nothing to do with patriotism uh but I thought I was very interesting anyway answer to 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 that you know reform

who call the RNLI note the word royal national lifeboat institution a migrant taxi service who

regularly attack the police um who at the uh who'd the the 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

forage, ruptalow etc then only then can you truly be a patriot so I thought what clock did in

Germany was good and of course Germany's got the same sort of political problems we have at the

moment well it's lovely but he's basically just copied garasasca yeah good good point good point

garasasca did do something very similar um another opportunity to plug James Graham's latest play

we we loved garasasca can you get clop on the show please we'll definitely give it a go it

isn't do many sort of I'd not have I seen many podcasts he's done I'd love to know where he said

the thing about Christ um yeah we can try to get you again clop he's a very very very he's a very

very fine man I've also got a very funny story about clop I um I share his vet

well I want to say I share his vet I have one you're sure his manager King Charles Spaniel goes to

the same vet that you're in clops dog went well did once did once because of the ludicrous

as a Brexit our poor dog although she doesn't know it she has now we we've we've got so many

passport stamps for our dog every time you take your doctor Europe you have to go and see a vet

before you bring it back okay and so Fiona and I were in salt in northern Germany and we took it

to the vet and on the on the front was a on the reception desk was a book and the book was a

written by the vet and the vet what the vet's claims to say was that you're going to clop

took his dog there when it swallowed a jellyfish oh that's a really good story I like very much

so they are so jellyfish yeah anyway the dog was saved and it's all fine and

yoghons happy I hope the dog still happy and we yeah so there we are share yoghons vet

was lovely lovely thing to lovely thing to end on well I was just thank you very much and

took forward to talking again next week see you soon bye 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 Yuvaal

Noah Rory to discuss what he calls AI imperialism kill switches how alien intelligence could

seem create a world that we cannot and can never begin to understand have a listen 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 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 homolyterranean 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 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 military terms the Roman Empire if if you're a Roman merchant and you sell the

latest model of bows to some picks are beyond Adrian Wall they can then use it against you 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 sell a 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 it presses the button all these rifle stop working with AI this is the case that if you buy

your AI drone swarm from the Americans there is a button in Washington that when they press it stops

working and that and this means when you have this kind of 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 so um so imagine I'm running a I don't know

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 call center people 1,000 of them are software engineers and an

American company anthropic or open AI develops a new program which replaces all my call center

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 center workers thousand uh uh 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 well

fair benefit to these people but it's not even able to tax the corporation the corporation has

now in the United States yes 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 vacuum cleaner sucking the wealth of Britain over to the United States yes exactly 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

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 it what is I mean what you get again it's an extreme

imperial economy 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 in

things like that yeah everything which is based on humans like human intelligence this can be

done from the hub with AI's and under something else which is also true of the imperial economy which

I didn't understand to live as 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 is sub-Saharan Africa is small in the population of Belgium

and he defined middle classes 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 yeah absolutely and we don't have any precedent for 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 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 these new kind of economics okay here's here was a here was a story given to

me by somebody in Afghanistan so some 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

her at and Kabul we are living a subsistence life as person farmers the United States

already tried for 20 years to spend two trillion dollars with all the latest technology in the world

to try to conquer us and they gave up and left will be fine our life won't change very much

it is true that villagers in Afghanistan in this sense are in in a much better situation

than lawyers in London whose life could be the life is that they know could be completely destroyed

and the villager in Afghanistan his life not necessarily completely destroyed no nothing the

short term in the long run the the danger of the planet dominated by AI is not that the AI will

try to unsuccessfully build democracy in Afghanistan wasting two trillion dollars and and you know

creating so much havoc the AI's will just not care about the humans and they can go on living

whatever they they are doing until the moment the AI needs 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 we cannot imagine the concerns the ambitions the plans of the more intelligent entities

like if you live in a in I don't know in some some jungle you're a monkey yeah and some oil

company is coming to and destroys your your your forest to drill for oil and you cannot imagine

what is driving this process like you say other coming to get my bananas and no no they are not

coming to get your bananas it's just that the price of oil is now a hundred and fifty because of

a war in the Middle East and therefore it it makes sense for them to destroy your forest and

and you cannot understand it well because I mean it is particularly strange in that example

because the monkey has to understand that what they're really interested in is trees an organic

matter that rotted a hundred million years ago rather than the trees that are actually standing

here because somehow they're able to set the stuff on fire and generate energy from it to do

something which they use in order to watch funny cat videos on their smartphones yeah exactly yeah

that was from part two of my conversation with Yuval Naurari sign up at the rest of politics

dot com to hear the whole interview as well as so much more member content that's the rest

is politics dot com

are

The Russians. Russian.

Holden Derussians accountable is world war.

They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex.

You've got to ask yourself, you want to play or not.

You are the prime minister.

If done, nothing!

We would need to understand the policy context.

All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today.

And disseminated into an operation order.

Or frago.

A frago that says to kill the president of Russia.

Yes.

New from Golhanger.

Who is going to be able to pull this off?

You're my soldier, are you Sergeant Toppiddafi?

An audio drama journey like no other.

Men like Duffy, they are our most valuable weapons.

Devised as a technically rigorous geopolitical action forever.

We're in a place that's strongest, huh?

He's the best.

Against his strongest foe.

Don't do it, Duffy!

Bear hunt.

Available now wherever you get your podcasts.