Is Central Asia the Next Front Line of Global Power? with Peter Frankopan

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1:38To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by Acast. How are you doing there? It is time for the podcast and you will know that I have been traveling all around the place and I am now leaving the United States. And bizarrely, one of the strange, strange feelings you get from being in the United States is A, how remote America is, but also B, how America's role in the world is changing what it means to be a superpower is changing, what it means to being able to project your military and economic prowess is changing, and how the world is receiving American technology, American influence is changing.

2:32And many Europeans suggest, oh, the Americans are not that interested. But I can tell you the conversations I was having in the States and even looking at who was visiting the White House when I was over there, suggests the Americans are not only not disengaging from the world, but the fact is Trump White House is actively engaging with the world on a much more significant way than you could argue other White Houses have. So John, I think today, this is a final piece in an American jigsaw, is we're going to talk about a part of the world that very few people mention, but it's very, very clear that on the basis of resources and rare earths and mineral wealth is going to become again, and the reason I say again, because it was for many years the center of the Silk Roads, but again, a significant part of the world, which is Central Asia.

3:28But the reason I was thinking about this... A place close to my heart, Mac, as you know. That was my section when I worked in World Service. So like you say, it's one of these kind of places that not many people know about, But it really opened my eyes to the global geopolitics of that region and the importance that that region plays in the wider kind of politics of the world. So what we're going to talk about today is going to be a little bit of a swerve on the podcast. We are going to talk about the last podcast was about the difference between the engineering state, i.e. Chinese prowess, and the lawyer state, i.e.

4:08America's prowess. And one area of the world that China and America, but also Iran and Russia and Turkey are involved in is this place called Central Asia. What we used to know really as the stands when these republics separated from the Soviet Union. I always remember, John, the very first time I was ever in the Soviet Union was in the 1980s. And I was a student and I went on a trip to Russia and I arrived in Red Square. And what I couldn't understand in my Eurocentric worldview was how Asiatic the people looked. And of course, it was because the people who were in Red Square visiting Lenin's mausoleum were people from the stands, were people from Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan and these places, Tajikistan, all of which, of course, were Asiatic looking.

5:01And it was the first time I realized not only, A, Russia was very big, but B, that Russia was a massive, the Soviet Union was a massive empire. Yeah. Involving hundreds of different languages, hundreds of, actually hundreds of ethnicities, different religions, different complexions, all that sort of stuff. So what we're going to do is we're going to talk to a man who really knows about this part of the world, about Central Asia, why it's important, why it's significant, why in the future it's going to be a cauldron of political, economic, social, demographic, but also military power. it's going to be fought over, people won't have part of it, and it really is up in the air as to which superpower begins to control this part of the world.

5:55So let's go and talk to Peter Frankopan, who you will know is the man who wrote the unbelievably interesting book, The Silk Roads, and he's been knocking around that neck of the woods for a long, long time. Professor Peter Francopan. Peter, how are you? And great to see you. Very well. And when you said people don't know much about Central Asia, the list of places that people don't know much about is quite a long one. You know, I throw in Mexico, Central America, Latin America, the entire continent of Africa, Southeast Asia, China, the Gulf. We don't know anything. But you can everybody here listening to this podcast has heard of Nigel Farage, right?

6:33Unfortunately, or fortunately, I guess, depending on your point of view. so I'll and in fact you know this because we've spoken about this before too David people know quite a lot about Western Europe but you know get to get to Berlin and go east no one's got a clue you know the Baltics Bulgaria Hungary they might know they might have heard of Orban but beyond that so we're all in the blind so Central Asia is just one of the places that we're in the blind about that's not a very helpful start I suppose. No no but it's a very nice way of framing it so we know nothing but we're about to know a little bit more about something okay that's the point of this conversation.

7:04Your book, it was a very arresting opening image you hit the reader with on the Silk Roads. And you said, why do you think Alexander the Great turned left, not right? This really intrigued me. And you were making the point that over to the left of what is Greece, if we're looking at the map. You were facing south for it to go left. Otherwise, if you're looking at the map, you're going to go right. Yeah, but he said he's facing south and he says, I'm going left. Now, because all the action was there then, and all the action is there now. Tell me about this area of Central Asia. Central Asia for most people means the five former Soviet states.

7:43So Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Actually, the way which we think about Central Asia tends to be about defined by people from long distance. So about how this region is configured by Russia or China or the West, rather than what does it mean internally. And in fact, it's maybe not helpful. I mean, there's lots of reasons why these five states have some common legacies. They were all invaded and annexed by the Russians, more or less from the 1860s onwards. But, you know, I put Afghanistan is in that bucket too. At least the northern part of Pakistan, maybe all of Pakistan deserves to be in Central Asia.

8:19Iran as well, I guess. So I'd put Central Asia within the kind of whole block of the land that goes from Istanbul right the way through to Korea. So why is that important? Well, number one, it's got more people living in Asia than all the rest of the world put together, right? So if you're like you, David, you're thinking about opportunities, challenges, demographics always lead. Second, in terms of resources, right? If you're looking about fossil fuels, we're somewhere around about 75 % of the world's fossils sit within roughly that region. If you're looking at rare earths, their processing capabilities, provision of calories, whether it's rice, wheat, and so on, you're suddenly looking at a place that is blessed or cursed, depending how you want to look at it, with everything that people need, throw in copper, different metals, critical minerals, etc, etc.

9:05And it's kind of, well, what is it that we actually offer in Europe? What do we produce? Apart from clever people, some of them gathered at Kilkenomics the other weekend. I was lucky to be amongst the great and the good. And it was great to have you. We are very good at competition in Europe. We're very good at pretend killing each other and playing football or games. We're very good at being quite creative, but we don't have anything that anybody wants. And we've never had anything that anybody wants. If you have cows in Ireland, they will turn out and taste roughly the same as the cows you have in France or Italy or Germany.

9:37So, you know, there's not a lot, you know, you know, this having written about money, you know, there's not much metal here, there's not much gold in Europe, a little bit of silver in Spain, a little bit of Bohemia, a little bit tiny bit slivers in Bosnia. but you know scroll that forward over time metals scroll through scroll through into things like oil which was the story of the 20th century the fact that european states didn't have any apart from the north sea which was not a huge amount meant that the rest of the world got carved up in all sorts of different ways so the long long answer is always start with the fundamentals and yeah there's a reason why you know perhaps in the future i come and talk to you about about different parts of africa or south america that fit with a similar profile because I've been looking at those a lot for the last decade or so.

10:16But Asia and Central Asia as an arena that's important in its own right, rather than what other people are looking to it for, is, I guess, the starting point. So that's in its own right. So basically what you're talking about is the center of the world, in effect. Actually, what you're talking about is the place that's growing, the place that has the stuff, populations. But there's this thing, and we've talked about it before, the kind of the curse of resources. When you have stuff, other people want that stuff, if they don't have it. And is that what's really the background noise from the central new?

10:49You economists love this stuff. I can promise you it's better to have stuff than to not have stuff. You promised that your treasury is stuffed full with gold. Isn't it awful people keep coming and asking you if they can have some, et cetera? I don't think there's a curse. The curse is if you've got an absolute bugger rule. Then you're in trouble. Okay, okay. Resource curses are all dependent on are you able to build institutions? Are you able to have ruler law? How do you divide the spoils between different competitor groups? You know, I think one thing that's important is that these parts of the world, the connecting regions are important.

11:22And they're not just big as important because of the 21st century and people want to talk about uranium or beryllium or things like that, which just so happens you find lots in places like Uzbekistan. It's also that the land that goes from the north of the Black Sea right the way through to China, even to the Korean Peninsula, is basically flat lands. And that means it's the great conveyor belt for the spread of crops, technologies, of pathogens and disease, of everything in history. And so these regions are multicultural, they're multilingual, they have to work out how to get on with each other.

11:53And so they're quite used to being blowing in the wind and lots of people turning up and promising them lots of things, sometimes trying to conquer them. But by and large, they're significant in global histories because they've always are fundamental part of infrastructure. and we forget as historians that it all starts with fundamentals it always starts with logistics and connectivities and the ability to move goods ideas people etc around so these five soviet central asian states have a specific they're all very different to each other you know kazakhstan is the size of western europe huge differences within the country you know it's when people talk about kazakhs or kazakhstan it's like you know like talking about ireland that sounds fine if you sit next to someone on a plane and quite often they'll say do you know david at Williams and almost everybody I say that to says yes but you know whether you start talking from an island a lot depends not just which province you come from which county which village who's your father who's your uncle and some people are crazy some people aren't crazy some people are good at this good at that so you can generalize wildly and very easily and one of the problems for Central Asia is that it looks great on PowerPoint you get lots of people who reckon if they google it a few times look at a couple of maps and they go all the Soviet Union and China or Russia, you know, used to be Soviet Union, now it's Russia and China competing.

13:06That's not always very helpful because you have to understand these places from the bottom up. And then tell me, what was just in recent history, what was the, if there was collective experience under the Soviet Union, if there was one system, what was the perception of the Russians of Central Asia when they were running the show? A bit like the English sort of enslaved populations or thought of the Irish at their absolute worst. You know, the racism, which is casual, is still very much alive and well in Russia today. You know, the people who are driving the taxis, cleaning the loos, being treated badly, they tend to be Tajiks or Kirghis from poor populations.

13:45And so it means that the economies of some of these countries have a very high percentage of remittances. So Kirghistana and Tajikistan have about 45 to 50 % of their GDP of people living abroad sending money back home because standard of living is not huge. those are both countries that don't have enormous resources apart from hydropower and water which will be a big challenge for the future but the russians treated this as a as a place that was barbaric and needed to be civilized and you know as any empire you know we spoke about the roman empire recently david together you know the key to any business whether or you know whether it's the roman empire whether it's in elon musk's ecosystem you've got to be as close as you can to the decision makers.

14:28So if the Soviet Union or the Russian Empire, you're posted to Tashkent or Samarkand, you know, nice climate some months of the year, but you're a long way from any decisions being made. So it was a sort of duff posting. So they were very neglected by the Soviet Union. They were governed badly from Russia and they were attempted to be civilized and taught people how to read, write, and wash their hands with no sort of respect for their domestic cultures. And one of the things that's happened is, it turns out these parts of the world have huge resources that people want how do they balance having their own rights their own histories where they've got big neighbors next door who want to tell them how they should think about their past and that's not just russia that's not just china that's also the turks so turkey has banned in its school books using the term and all of its literature using the term central asia has to be called turkistan because the turks the ones who are now in turkey trace their heritage back to Central Asia in the past.

15:23This is where the Turks originally come from. And so there's lots of people pestering and giving their opinions about what it is that these people should do. And by and large, they're trying to keep everybody happy. And so tell me, is there, you know, a game then, I know it sounds very, very historical, but between the Turks, Chinese, and the Russians for hegemony over these areas? Are they trying to be left on their own? What's the geopolitics of the area at the moment? Geopolitics are as though we were raising money for a fund, right? If you are in Central Asia and you're raising money for your fund, you want as many people knocking your door down as possible because you can get a better deal from them.

16:03So the more people are on your backyard trying to build railways, extract minerals, give you concessions, the better. So welcome to the Russians, welcome to the Chinese, welcome to Iran, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Pakistan, India, Europe, you know, Ursula von der Leyen happened to be in Kazakhstan on the day that Trump did his Freedom Day when he liberated us all from common sense of economics on the 2nd of April, and in 2025. And so I think you want to look at it the other way around. So other people might think they're playing a great game. But the more cooks, the better the broth, I think is the general verdict in Central Asia that you can balance people, you can play people off against each other, you can get better deals if you can find people who think you're important, want to be your friends, that's a really good sign.

16:47So, you know, when we just had five Central Asian presidents all gather in Washington to sit with Donald Trump, Donald Trump said, you know, not many people realize that this part of the world is really very important. I'm one of the few people who do. So I wonder what he's been reading. And President Tokayev of Kazakhstan said, you've been sent by God. And he said that not because, well, he's probably trying to get onto Trump's evangelical good side. That's probably quite a useful thing to say. But if you're a and you have a new new player enters the game that's great news right so so i think it's we can think there's a great game being played and we assume that these people are going to be ripped off blind and get dominated by everybody else but i think that they're shrewder smarter that doesn't work that way around i think i think we we just retrofit it because it what we want to want it to look like rather than using common sense of how it's it's funny i mean i remember that sort of bizarre feeling, I mean, like a bizarre feeling in Russia in the 90s where every Westerner thought they were going to make a fortune in Russia.

17:50And at the end of the day, the Russians screwed them all. Screwed them. Very, very, very few. And listening to people talk about Central Asia, you hear, get a say, almost the same characters are back. Almost the same individuals or maybe younger versions of the same individuals are back trying to, as you said, extract deals, et cetera. Like the Wild West was, you know, people come across the Atlantic, thought they were going to do that in the 19th century. So, you know, the fact that you've got chancers and rakes and, you know, bad actors who think they can pull the wool over other people's eyes, you know, that's an old story about what people think they can do to the peripheries.

18:27You massively underestimate who you're dealing with, what you're dealing with, and you come away feeling sorry for yourself out empty-handed. So I think these states, they're all quite different. You know, one of the problems is that they've got, it's a very tricky neighbourhood, You know, we forget that. If we're in the British Isles, you know, you've got to worry about, in Ireland, you've got to worry about relationship with us in the UK. We do look westwards a little bit, but, you know, we've only got the French and the Belgians nearby, and then it's all theoretical. But, you know, if you're in that part of the world, you've got Afghanistan that have been shutting off all education for women and, you know, having a very insistent form of what they think Islam looks like.

19:00These countries, these states are predominantly Muslim, somewhere between soft and hard, depending on who and where, etc. etc. You've got China has shares of border with several of these countries and is extremely interested in its Western approaches for security reasons, also for displacing the fact that China hasn't got any more motorways or bridges it needs to build. So it's got workforces, it's got materials, it's got expertise that's quite keen to export. And then you've got India and Pakistan around the corner, I mean, very close. I mean, it's a two hour flight from Dushanbe to Delhi, and it's not far away.

19:30And then Iran as well. So it's not easy to thread the needle. And none of these five states we're talking about have access to the sea as well. So they've got to find ways of how do they connect? How do they get what's right for themselves? How do they modernize? How do they democratize, which, you know, none of these states are what we would describe as democracies today. And also, why democratize? You know, there are lots of different kinds of shades of democracies. And what's the right model to pick? And, you know, that's something I think that's very active as a discussion in a lot of these parts of the world.

20:02See, what's fascinating to talk to you, Peter, is you are talking to them. You're one of the very few people who's actually talking to the players in these regions. You have their ear, they trust you. When you're down there, when you're talking to policymakers, opinion formers, strategic thinkers from these areas, and again, I am, you know, guilty of lumping large parts of the world into an area called Central Asia. I'm well aware of that. What sort of future are they imagining for their people? Well, first, I don't want to over-egg my own brilliance. I think what happens is that they're very interested in listening to ideas.

20:42What they then do with them, that's up to them. So I think they're not putting a coin in the slot machine and saying, right, solve our problems. I think they're just very engaged in asking questions. Something that's very notable about other parts the world I work in, in South and Southeast Asia, as well as in the Gulf, lots of people want to say, what do you think? And that's not my experience of every country in Europe, where quite often politicians and civil servants will go, this is what you should think. And at the very end, they go, do you have any comments or questions? And then you leave.

21:13So I think it's partly they've got quite an acute sense of their vulnerabilities. They've got an acute sense of the fact that having outside voices can be quite helpful but i don't have any illusions that when i fly home that somehow i've made anything better but you know there are lots of challenges in this region so i mean the big problem with these five states and you can put iran and afghanistan in there too are to do with environmental change and water in particular so the glaciers in the feed central asia will probably be gone by 2050 we we think possibly going to bring that forward by five years plus to maybe 2040 even so you know some of the air quality in cities like al-martie and tashkent are some of the worst in the world on bad days because they sit in bowls that traps bad air and they haven't moved industry far far enough away so you know i think there are lots of lots of problems there i think they're trying to work out how do they cooperate how do they how do they play the game and um how do they fit within a global family of nations where they feel that they've been rightly wrongly they've been ignored by historical mainframes but they want to you know they're trying to cultivate favors outside but they're all quite keen to be presenting their best possible self outside and in fact i've just been at something this afternoon where we're talking with a friend of mine about how some of these states are doing lots of glossiness of their historical monuments their histories and so on and and funnily enough i don't think that's either a stupid or bad thing to do that's what all states should be trying to do to think about their soft power footprint and trying to work out what they need to fix in the background but you Again, part of the challenge is that in places like Kazakhstan, if you're born there today while we're recording this podcast, listening to it in 20 years' time, I guess, your chances of getting out of the bottom 20 % are significantly better than if you were growing up in Ireland or in the UK.

22:58So things like social mobility... Social mobility is on the up. The economies are moving well. There's a sense of upward momentum as opposed to because you started with Europe where there's a sense of... Yeah, I think if we stood on the streets of Astana in Kazakhstan or Dushanbe, and we stopped a bunch of 20-somethings, and we said, what do you think? They'd say, our country's filled with bed blockers. There are lots of old people who control too many assets. And actually, we might have had a moment of going upwards, but right now we're sitting worrying that this is as good as it gets. And those are real questions that these states have to unlock.

23:36But like I said, they're all very different. Turkmenistan, it's not quite like North Korea, but it's basically a closed society. freedoms are almost completely restricted and that's very different to more open more vibrant societies where you sometimes need to be careful what you say and who you criticize but you know they're all on a different different course but they're looking at their neighbor you know places like uzbekistan share a border with with afghanistan and you know that stuff is exportable you know the way in which you get these demands uh to cover your heads and do not educate women that those are those are rising but you know for sure the the piece that's most important is that Kazakhstan is a massive producer of oil and gas, also of uranium, and then of rare earths, particularly in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

24:20So there are real reasons to be thinking about how to drive integration of this region. And so a lot of infrastructure investments into railway lines, tunnels, bridges, roads, because people understand that if you can reduce the costs of doing business and make it quicker, capital goes further, and you can boost prosperity. And are the Americans present there at all? Well, they moved into Afghanistan for 20 years, and they had military bases across a lot of the region. Now, not particularly, I mean, the big oil majors have joint investments with a lot of the big oil fields in the Caspian Sea and in Kazakhstan.

25:01So it also slightly depends whether you mean American state or American private enterprise, private business. I mean, it's quite vibrant in terms of the capital markets. And we had the first unicorn float in Uzbekistan in the summer of 2025. There's a sort of mega app in Kazakhstan that's huge, you know, valuation of the billions of dollars called Caspi that was set up a few years ago too. So there's lots of, I think there's lots going on, but the key piece at the moment is around national security. I mean, every single thing that I'm involved in more or less from a present day rather than the past and thinking about what did Alexander the Great sing at nighttime when he was drinking wine.

25:38It tends to be things around defense architecture and national security. And there are the critical minerals and rare earths that are crucial. So let's explore that a little bit. So what are their major concerns? Who were they afraid of? What were they worried about? Well, Central Asia, they're worried about everybody. I mean, they saw what happened in Ukraine. So they've been quite careful of watching what happens in Ukraine. I mean, possibly you could argue that they could have spoken about a little bit more. But I think if you were once part of the family government from Moscow, you're pretty anxious that you might be next on the buffet menu, depending on what happens.

26:14Kazakhstan is hugely significant. There's a big Russian population, particularly in the north of Kazakhstan. And of course, it's home to Russia's space program. So there's lots of reasons why there's military sensitivities. But I think from the outside, the key is, I think, around the critical minerals. So the reason why Trump has overexcited is that he's got to solve the problem of China not playing ball and using rare earths as leverage. So he's got to try to build up a capacity to process, to have supply and to have a way of, I guess, thumbing his nose at other actors. So, you know, it's so in fact, the meeting in Washington, it wasn't just Trump sitting in the Oval Office, as he sometimes does, sort of a bit folksy and does five minutes and then clears off.

26:55you know he lined up at a business meeting put on a put on a business table so the photographs look like it's people that are doing business and signing things and alongside him with jd vance alongside him with marco rubio alongside with scott besant right so the whole cabinet were there we are here to do business and that that has the optics that is are not missed in beijing and not missed in moscow that the u.s are here and the calculation they're trying to work out is is there potential opportunity for both these states? Is there a way which there's common ground? Will wealth be something they can work together?

27:30Is this a threat? Or what's the price of doing business? And those things are, I think, the diplomatic ways to say works in progress. Over the next five, 10 years, what are the chances of a military conflict breaking out in this part of the world? You mentioned Ukraine, the near impossibility of people to conceive in February of three or four years ago that Russia would just roll in and try to occupy the country. I think many, many people, even people who spent a lot of time in the region were still quite shocked at the brazenness of that. What are the chances in your worldview when you're talking about something similar happening in that region in the next few years?

28:11I mean, I don't know why you want to pick that region. I mean, you know, but in fact, I wasn't one of those people who was shocked and surprised. I mean, as it happened six months beforehand, they'd done a full dummy run where the Russians had put all their logistics and done a kind of taking the tanks up to the frontier. And it didn't come out of the blue. They went in in 2014 into Crimea and into Donbass. 2008, the Russians went into Georgia. You know, I think that we kid ourselves that we think we're in an age where we're too clever to think that war is going to happen. You know, Kill Economics, one of the panels that you asked me to do was about the economics of war.

28:45and uh you know it it's it feels like it's a crazy decision to ever engage militarily but it's about solving problems i mean when you ask what's the chances i mean actually only this year we had the resolution of a frontier dispute that had involved military confrontation and an actual soldier being killed between kyrgyzstan and tajikistan there's no question that the water table and the war and the problems about water will lead to likely friction but i think we're living in a world that's extremely dangerous and one that is hyper fragile our connectivities allow for higher levels of fragilities i mean in fact over the last couple of days i've been i've been following very closely the detention in phuket of a guy who works for a unit called 26165 which is the fancy bear hacker unit part of russian military intelligence almost certainly it's the guy that we i think it is who's been picked up with a joint operation between the Thai royal police in the US.

29:40And the ways in which you can compromise people's national security, even sovereignty, politics, by doing the kinds of things that we learned how to deal with in the Cold War, I think is something that is no longer restricted to single actors. In those days, it was the Soviet Union, and then a couple of little proxies. Now it's non-state actors as well. It's mega caps, particularly digital platforms that have a vested interest in cooking the books. I mean, we've just seen Meta's release its results where 10 % of its revenues were from fraudulent adverts, you know, and Meta will be, you know, if you make it, if that's measured in the billions of dollars, by the way.

30:16Peter, I know all this because one of the fraudulent adverts is involving AI of me. Is that right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What are you selling, swimwear? I'm selling mankinis, actually. It's a particularly fine mankini that I'm modeling it. Shadwell green? It's any color you want, darling. I think the leopard print is the best. We cater for all tastes and picadillos and weirdness. So I think those virginities are very real. And so if you are willing to look past international law, which increasingly states are, if you're willing to stand out of international rules-based order, as we like to call it in the West.

30:56And just a quick reminder, Marco Rubio, in his Senate confirmation hearing, said that not only is the global order obsolete, that's the word he used, it's being used against the United States. So when you see the USA, we're not going to play ball in the same way alongside everybody else in the playground like we used to, we're going to look for advantage, sometimes using threats, sometimes using action, sometimes we might not fall, maybe we'll just lose concentration and we won't invade the places we say we're going to invade. I think you'd be a fool to think that military confrontation between states is off the table.

31:27And I thought anybody listening to this podcast will take the view, rightly that defense expenditure around the world is only going to go upwards and the kit that's going to be spent on it's only going to get cheaper so that would suggest that there's going to be lots of fragility points and so it's not surprising that lots of states are putting a lot of energy and investment into working out how do they support themselves you know you guys when i was with you in kilkonomics reminded that ireland cyber budget is about 10 million euros which is you know less than less than a small business would spend defending itself here in the uk and you've got 7 ,000 or 8 ,000 servicemen and women looking after not just islands, territories and so on, but your almost million square kilometers of ocean seabed that keeps the financial institutions of the world moving.

32:11And those will be mapped, we know that, by surveillance ships. Those maps are not just going to be used by potentially the Russians, they have a ship called the Yantar that regularly maps these ones, but that's valuable on the dark web, available for the right price to anybody who wants to cause problems. and those problems will cause consequences. You know, there might not be anybody coming for Ireland. The Irish don't have any enemies in the world, as far as I know, you'll tell me otherwise. But, you know, those financial institutions which favour the global north are things that really annoy people in the so-called global south or the low-income economies.

32:43They think that we have it too good, that we built the world on our image, we exploit everywhere else. And so for us to get bloody noses and be taught a few lessons about what it's like to suffer, you know, it's something that I hear more and more and more in different parts of the world. And not just in the well-developed, and I don't, funny enough, I never hear that in Central Asia, but in Latin America, in Southeast Asia, and definitely all over West and Sub-Saharan Africa, it's the kind of, look, what is it you're complaining about? Because you've got a pretty good life where you've got money that you can work out how to deal with.

33:14We're dealing with structural things that are much more complicated. So, you know, I think in that world, we should probably be thinking about those vulnerabilities and how good we are at managing to benchmark them and to work out how do we cope with those in ways that will be sustainable in the long term. But, you know, I'm involved in some of those discussions. They're the best ones because those are proper problems and you can work out how to solve them. And you can also see if you're doing a good job. Well, no, Peter, we will leave it there. We will leave it there. There will be images of Irish sailors off the west coast of Ireland looking for cables, which is probably expel out of your head the image of me in my mankini.

33:50I would suspect that's probably as good as we're going to get. Love it. All right. Love that. I'll come and buy one too. All right, you talk to you later. Cheers, Pete. Thanks a lot.

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35:38Yeah, as I said at the beginning there, Mike, that part of the world is a fascinating, fascinating place. And it's so incredibly massive. But I was also, yeah, it's incredible. I was looking at some of the figures of that region and the likes of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in particular are growing economically. They're growing at about between 6 % and 9 % a year, which is pretty enormous. I mean, granted from a low base. So they are kind of coming into their own, as it were. But it was interesting what Peter was saying towards the end there about the security. And that's where the focus is for a lot of these nations.

36:21And particularly when they're bookended by China on one side and Russia on the other, more or less. You know, it's becoming more of an issue. Well, I mean, it's becoming an issue everywhere. I think that in the recent past, states and governments thought about economic strategy. Where do we position ourselves? Who are we allied with? who are our trade routes with, where are our capital flows coming from, where are our demographic flows, where are our products doing well, where are we importing from, all that sort of stuff. I think what Peter said at the end there is interesting. He's saying that the world has very clearly, since the Ukraine war, gone into a new phase where national security is an issue that is going from maybe number 10 to number two or three for many countries.

37:16Now, interestingly, he ended there by talking about Ireland's extraordinary lack of preparation in the area of national security. He was saying that our cybersecurity budget was like 10 million, which he suggested was probably about the same amount as a medium-sized British listed company would spend on its own security. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was also, I don't know if you saw it the other day, a big article in the Financial Times about how Ireland is the weakest link in the European chain. I saw that, yeah. For example, if Russia really wanted to go at the European Union, but not have a go at NATO.

37:59So, I mean, it would be have a go at Ireland because we're not in NATO. We're the weak link. And of course, Ireland is saying, we don't want to be in NATO, but we want them to protect us, right? We don't want to spend money on defense, but we want the RAF to patrol our airwaves. We don't want the RAF to patrol our areas because we're neutral, but you know what, if they really have to, we'd like the British Navy to help us. All this sort of stuff, right? It is interesting. I don't think there's any great movement, urge, or desire in Ireland to change our neutrality stance. I think that's kind of baked into a bit of our political DNA.

38:37But what is fascinating now for the first time ever in my memory is that other countries are saying, you guys are cheating. You guys are taking us for a ride. I think they're right. You're the people with a massive budget surplus. You're the people with all the money and you expect us to defend you. if and what appears likely, a lot of people are saying, when a Russian ship decides to interfere with the cables under the ground, all of which have to be defended by Ireland. It's our maritime water. Yeah, and I think as a result of that, I think we have a responsibility. Like take the neutrality thing, you know, put that aside for a moment.

39:21But, you know, we need to have a strong defense and to be able to know, at least know what's going on in their waters, whether it's with military ships or with proper surveillance. We need to know who's in the waters, even to look after the environment and the fisheries and all that kind of stuff, but also to stop the drugs cartels, which use Ireland as well. We are very much the weak link, and I think we have a responsibility. And we could be much more like Switzerland, which is a neutral country, but heavily armed and heavily defended. And got no fisheries or no waterways. True. True. No, but I'm, no, look, I think you're absolutely right.

40:06Maybe we will discuss this because it is quite interesting. You mentioned Switzerland there. Finland and Norway, Norway is a member of NATO, but is neutral on a variety of other fronts, for example, not a member of the European Union. But both these countries used historically their neutrality as a very active place, i.e. carving out to a degree safe space for people to negotiate with. So the Finns used to hold Russians and the Americans. Of course, the Norwegians hosted the Oslo Accords, the Israelis and the Palestinians. And what they did was they used their neutrality as an active part of their diplomacy, right?

40:43Whereas we don't. We just use our neutrality as a way of distinguishing us from our neighbors, as opposed to an act of neutrality. And you mentioned the Swiss there, who basically regard neutrality as something that should be defended by them, right? So it's not an opt-out. It's basically, we will defend ourselves, and therefore we don't have to get into military alliances with anyone. If we are moving into a world of national security, of cyber technology, of, as Peter was saying, not just threats from Russia, possibly, but also threats from, you know, non-state players, right? Drug cartels, all this carry on.

41:28It could be a fascinating area to explore. So why don't we, we're going from Central Asia to Middle Ireland, John. That is our jump, okay? And what we will do is we will discuss the economics of neutrality at some stage in the future, but we will leave it there and we'll chat to you on Tuesday.

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