Rory Stewart sees fundamental evil in Trump

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0:33The New Statesman.

0:38Hi, Rory. It's Olly Dougmore here from The New Statesman. Can't wait to talk to you today. Plenty going on in the Middle East, but of course, Middleland, regionalism, Cumbria, I want to talk about all of it with you. See you soon. Bye-bye.

0:49Rory Stewart: Hi, Olly. Yeah, really looking forward to it. I'm going to grumble a little bit about the fact you're going to drag me up to some weird bit of Hatton Gantz to do some kind of jewellery heist. but yeah no I'd love to talk to you hope as well and see you soon Since leaving politics Rory Stewart has become one of the most influential voices on the matter in Britain In this episode of The Exchange I sat down with the former diplomat cabinet minister and broadcaster to understand the formative experiences that shaped him his early years in boarding school and the early influences that informed his view of Britain and its place in the world We also explore his views on the war in the Middle East, drawing on decades of personal and professional engagement in the region.

1:33And as geopolitics shifts and the old assumptions come under strain, he offers his view on how the history, politics and religion intersect, and where Western understanding has fallen short.

1:46Rory Stewart: What alternative really would it feel for the regime, if the regime wants to survive, other than to demonstrate that if you attack Iran, there are consequences? The conversation then turns to Britain itself. And what Stuart sees as a growing intolerance towards Muslims, what are the consequences of that misunderstanding? And what does it mean for our politics more broadly? Where does this go? What does this mean for the way that we think about fellow citizens, human rights, our equality as humans, dignity? Finally, we discuss the state of Westminster politics, its incentives, its blind spots, and how it can increasingly feel disconnected from the lives of the people it is meant to represent.

2:29I'm Oli Dougmore, this is The Exchange from the New Statesman, and here's my conversation with Rory Stewart.

2:37Rory, there's a great deal to talk about. We're going to talk about the Middle East, we're going to talk about Middleland, and I think probably a brief detour to English identity as well. I'd like to start with you, if I may. I want to talk about your life a little bit before we do that. I think by many people's standards, your life has been quite unusual. You've walked across Afghanistan, you've tutored the princes. Do you think about your life in those terms? Tell me how you conceptualise your journey to this moment now.

3:09Rory Stewart: Yeah, I don't know whether this is true for everybody. I certainly find as I become a kind of middle-aged guy, I have my idea about what my life is and what I've done and what I'm going to do keeps shifting around. So I guess when I was in my 20s and 30s, I thought of my life more as a kind of story or narrative where I imagined kind of dramatic moments. And definitely in my 20s, I imagined it would sort of end with a heroic death. So it had a kind of had a clean, clean shape.

3:50Rory Stewart: And once I failed to die and made it through into other bits. Such a shame. Such a shame. Exactly. And then, of course, leaving politics is another strange thing. I don't know how much politicians talk about this, but there's a sort of natural structure around your constituency or being a minister or the kind of... You have a sense, at least when you're a minister, sometimes you may not be getting much done, but you're sort of in the room and you're sort of around the edge of things that seem to have meaning and significance. You step back for a bit. It's a bit doubtful how much impact you really are having on the world, but it feels like you might be.

4:37Rory Stewart: And then since I left politics, I then have to work out who I am and what I'm doing and in particular I'm 53 now what happens next right I guess if I were lucky I might have another 20 years of working life and and part of the issue is do you change as a person do you run out of ideas you know certain things are not options for me I can't be a police officer anymore I've always wanted to be a police officer but that's not something i can do that's interesting so that question then about who you are and what you do now how do you answer it who are you now um sorry we're straight in at the deep end yeah you got me straight in the deep end yeah um

5:30Rory Stewart: well i mean one of the things that i am is somebody kind of very overshadowed by ai by artificial intelligence. I'm somebody trying to write a book, very conscious that I feel at least within a few months, a large language model would be able to write a pretty fluent, convincing version of my book without me almost instantly. And in fact, a whole series of books that I've been trying to write, I've abandoned because I realize that I'm beginning to sound like ChatGBT. So I was trying to write a book on geopolitics, you know, kind of the shape of the world since 1945 and where we're going. And that's, of course, exactly the kind of thing that large language models are really good at.

6:14Rory Stewart: I mean, they may be rubbish at giving you a recipe or remotely accurate advice on board games, but they're really good at kind of bullshit. Imitating a voice. Yeah, imitating a geopolitical arc. so that and podcasting too I mean I had an amazing experience very recently where I was trying to mug up on Nepal and I came across a podcast that was so brilliant on the micro detail of what was happening village by village town by town in a four-day period of a massive popular uprising in Nepal and it was only when I was about halfway through that I began to notice from the voices that clearly this thing was just an AI generated thing.

7:00Rory Stewart: I was beginning to pick up because the woman kept saying, oh, that's so interesting. And then what happened in Bhaktipur? And then the guy who does. And I realised someone had just fed all the local news reporting from Nepal and generating this beautiful structured thing. So yeah, I'm going through a midlife crisis inflected by AI. I think the way I've consoled myself with similar thoughts about that is that I believe or want to believe that things that we do that are human, whether it's the writing, whether it's the conversation, I believe because what you've just described, the moment you twigged, this isn't two people having a conversation.

7:45I imagine you perhaps felt slightly cheated, regardless of the value of the information that you were consuming. And I hope, I think that most people feel the same way. I think that there is value in, I think you could slap it across the top of the New Statesman and say, you know, AI not used in the creation of this product. You are reading human words edited by other human beings. The conversation you're listening to now, it could be replicated, but it's not authentic.

8:10Rory Stewart: I had a weird moment at breakfast this morning where my eight-year-old had, 11-year-old had asked how much sugar there is in a custard tart compared to a scoop of ice cream. And I reached for ChatGBT and my eight-year-old literally broke down in tears. It's kind of inconceivable. And said, Daddy, don't touch that. You said you weren't going to use ChatGBT so much. Why are you using it? You're not thinking properly. You're not even discussing it with us. this was meant to be an interesting conversation and you're just reaching for this large language model it was a really interesting kind of revelation of trying to remember what being a human is and and this and i guess it's i guess i mean it's not unusual because i guess our grandparents were being boring when they discovered google but oh let me get the encyclopedia yeah Yeah, very often I think, I mean, my daughter's much younger, she's only 18 months old, but there are still moments of inspiration.

9:15The level of emotional intelligence displayed by a human being that doesn't have access to the tools that you and I have access to and therefore just has to navigate the world via their own intelligence. Very often can sort of ground you even when they're not even two years old. tell me about if we if we go back a little bit yeah put yourself in the shoes of your eight-year-old yeah tell me about that relationship in your household but were you the were you the precocious child saying put the encyclopedia down let's have a conversation yeah yeah i mean i was i was um

9:46Rory Stewart: i think although of course these things are so weird i mean when you look back as a 53 year old at what you were like as an eight-year-old so many myths and stories and nonsense get in. The story at least I've developed is that I was a very, very chirpy, super confident, quite extrovert, quite kind of punchy little kid, very, very small, I was tiny, but very kind of fearless, very into climbing buildings and kung fu and behaving like a monkey. And it wasn't really till I went to my secondary school at 13 that I realized that I was dressing in weird Malaysian batik shirts. I was a very eccentric little kid.

10:41Rory Stewart: But nobody really pointed out to me. I was just enjoying being me.

10:47That's strong. That's a really significant moment, right? Because there you are, a unique human being, and then you come into contact with something as institutional as the school you went to. And that's quite, I mean, there is the metaphor, right? You know, creativity, difference, the beautiful things about human existence. And it's like, well, welcome to Eton. No, you're going to dress like this, actually.

11:12Rory Stewart: Yes. And I think it's not just dressed like this. It's also, and I imagine these, I think actually these schools have probably changed. and what it is to be a boy has probably changed over 30 years, 40 years. But certainly the school that I went to 40 years ago was a school which was very, very concerned with a particular vision of what it meant to be a boy or a man. Very, very competitive, very much about being cool, very much about dominated by sporting heroes. I mean, this would be true of a lot of high schools, right? Yeah.

11:49Rory Stewart: and therefore there was this at the real certainly I felt the real compliance that was being demanded was not the school telling you to wear your uniform actually a lot of the pressure was on what you wore when you were not in uniform you know were you wearing the right kind of shoes were you wearing the right kind of you choosing the right kind of and it was horrible fashion at the time it was like hairspray and Pacey pattern shirts but you must dress like this regardless and winkle pickers and drain pipe black jeans yeah we've um we've covered at the new states from before the sort of the experience of boarding school the consequences both i mean in in extreme instances right there are multiple multiple stories about psychological physical abuse for children i'm not in any way implying that's what happened to you but that boarding school can be this really quite traumatic experience for young boys i mean we've we've We've been slightly jokey about it, but could you talk about how your experience has made you who you are now?

12:50I do want to come back to the question about boys and men, and I'm going to after this, but just to zone in on you specifically for a second, Rory. Yeah. So if I think about me, it prepared me very, very well, I think, for being in a military base in Iraq, for walking across Afghanistan, for

13:14Rory Stewart: politics.

13:18Rory Stewart: because along with the damage it might or might not have been doing, it also formed a certain kind of resilience, competitiveness and confidence. I remember my American female colleague in Iraq who was understandably getting pretty frustrated with the fact we were living in a shipping container with flies and sandbags around us and people mortaring us and living off military rations. she was getting frustrated with the fact that I seemed to be so sort of natural and enjoying it. And because in a way I'd lived a completely institutional life. I mean, I'd been in boarding school since I was eight, in canteens, living on my own.

14:07Rory Stewart: And being dumped in a military base in Iraq was not incredibly different to what I'd been doing since I was eight. and being on your own and having to improvise and make new friend groups and define who you are without your parents and without your family and outside of a home environment.

14:29Rory Stewart: So I think there is, but there may be also something specific about Eton because it generates a much higher proportion of or seems to kind of people going into politics, into public life, into journalism, into acting, than other privileged private boarding schools. Do you think those private boarding schools as a whole, do you think they're still an important part of Britain? I mean, the way you describe that classical training, if you like, that in the past might have been as a colonial administrator in Victorian Britain. Which is what it was designed for. Yeah, exactly. Do you think you could still say the same thing about them now?

15:10Do you still think they're an important part of our society?

15:13Rory Stewart: I think they definitely are. I mean, I think whether you've been to one of those schools or whether you haven't, you're incredibly conscious that there's a sort of subculture there. But they themselves are totally altered. I noticed that Charles Moore, who was this journalist, complaining that in an article that all 13 of the King's scholars that Eton last year were ethnically Chinese. So these schools are now much more like an American university. They're sort of global things where, As far as you can see in many, many of these schools, it's incredibly diverse, but it's the sort of global elite rather than the sort of British upper middle classes.

16:03They often have campuses, actually, in those countries as well. I think Harrow literally has a school somewhere in Southeast Asia. I want to circle back to what you were saying about the idea of what it meant to be a boy and a man. And if we could just talk about that in the present day, what you think it does mean to be a boy, to be a man in 2026 in Britain.

16:26Rory Stewart: Well, I think that we were talking just before we came on air with this amazing Louis Theroux documentary on the manosphere, where he's interviewing male influencers, projecting a particular vision, kind of Andrew Tate masculinity. and of course I've got two sons so I've been trying to get my head around this

16:50Rory Stewart: I think there seems to be on a sort of rough population basis

16:58Rory Stewart: biological differences in terms of male testosterone aggression, competitiveness appetite for risk particularly with young men and I think it's important to bring up boys and educate them in a way that recognize that roughly on average, they're a bit different to girls. And that I've been very moved by teachers. I was talking to a teacher in the state system recently who was talking in a very funny way about what it's like having 15, 16 year old boys in your class and the kind of things they get up to and the sort of tolerance you need to have for the madness of what people can do. And I do feel that is quite important, which is how do you celebrate aggressiveness but not violence?

17:52Rory Stewart: How do you celebrate risk-taking but not careless irresponsibility? How do you celebrate competitiveness which isn't belittling other people? um yeah i mean i i feel like this is already a a pretty solid foreshadowing for some of the stuff that we're we're going to talk about in the rest of the interview but as particularly rates the middle east and perhaps also in england and our political culture here let's start to turn then to the middle east you mentioned earlier right and i brought it up as well your walk the book you wrote about it um how do you think about both that journey that you took but also turquoise Mountain, your legacy in Afghanistan, and obviously with the lens to, you start that book, the Taliban is just falling.

18:39And now, obviously, more than 20 years later, they're back in power. Well, I think, firstly, on the Afghan intervention, that is one of the biggest facts in the destruction

18:54Rory Stewart: of the whole post-war American order, the rules-based international order, a failure of that sort. I mean, nearly$2 trillion was spent in Afghanistan, so$2 ,000 billion. And in effect, nothing really was achieved. I mean, as you say, that book is written about an invasion that takes place to get rid of the Taliban. We spent 20 years on the ground. We spent thousands of billions of dollars, and we then hand the whole country back to the Taliban again. So that's the kind of big picture. And then the odd thing in my life is that at the same time, I set up a charity which is now run by my wife called Turquoise Mountain, which has been now running for 20 years and is still running in Afghanistan.

19:43and still has a few hundred employees on the ground,

19:48Rory Stewart: is supporting a few thousand female weavers, has primary schools, has clinics, has restored part of the old city of Kabul, has expanded to do things in Myanmar and Syria and the West Bank

20:05Rory Stewart: and in Jordan as well and in other parts of the Gulf. So I, and that, of course, a personal point of view, was probably the most fulfilling, satisfying thing I've ever done in my life. I loved it. I spent two years building this thing, and I just really loved the people I worked with, the communities I was working with, the challenges of operating in an environment like that, but also how quickly you can get things done. I mean, one of the things that maybe people who work in overseas development are not perhaps as honest about as they should be is that it can be incredible fun, real challenge.

20:53Rory Stewart: And that actually, particularly for a younger person, very, very exciting. You know, you compose in quite a kind of pious way and everyone like, oh, my goodness, you're so wonderful. You're an aid worker in Afghanistan. But actually the reality is it's such a privilege because you can build a school in a fraction of the time you could in Britain. You can get a health centre off the ground in a place that's never had health before. I remember talking to you a long time ago now, I can't remember when, about operationally when you would try to visit or go to Afghanistan. And I think you might have just left government and you were talking about the way in which obviously there are plenty of people in Afghanistan for whom the kidnap of a very recent British government minister would be a bit of a boon.

21:39Quite a valuable ransom, likely. And so, I mean, when you told me that, I obviously was sort of, I thought that would be an incredibly scary thing. But then there's also a part of my psychology was like, well, that does sound a bit fun though, doesn't it?

21:51Rory Stewart: Sort of last flight in. Exactly. Last flight in. Yeah, yeah. No, and I think that's right. You're completely right. I mean, we underestimate fun in things. I mean, sometimes in very disturbing ways, if we're understanding political evil, even at its most extreme, you can only understand it if you understand that a lot of things which are very disturbing are actually fun. You know, I'd be aware of that in my own time in Iraq. I think I am very, very clear that that Iraq invasion was a catastrophic, horrible error. that did a lot of damage to Iraqi people, killed a lot of people, made the situation worse.

22:32Rory Stewart: And at the same time, as somebody aged 30, working in southern Iraq, it was one of the most stimulating, exciting years of my life. And how do you weigh that up? Or how do you weigh up my father, who I think would probably have said he loved his experience in the Second World War, despite the fact it's also obviously horrible. Yeah. There's an axis there, isn't there? The exhilarating and the terrifying, I guess. You used the phrase there, political evil, extreme political evil, and it stuck with me. Looking around the world now, where do you see that finding its expression? How would you apply it to our modern moment?

23:17Rory Stewart: Well, the word evil means many, many different things. But for me, one of the most fundamental aspects is carelessness, that it's a reckless, casual disregard for consequences. Now, that could be us in our own private lives, the way we treat a romantic partner, just causing chaos, sleeping with lots of people, not carrying the misery it causes them.

23:59Or it could be what I see in Donald Trump, which is a whimsical, complete disregard for thinking through consequences.

24:10Rory Stewart: In this case, he gets out of bed in the morning and he thinks, Israel's going to bomb them anyway. And why don't I join in and we'll bomb Iran? And he upends all the economies of the Gulf. I mean, UAE, Dubai will struggle to recover in the next 10 years from what he's done. He has driven up oil prices. He's crippled the economies of Europe. people mean that very poor farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, will not be able to access fertilizer because he's driven up the oil price. He has unleashed misery on Iran itself. And my guess is he just doesn't care. And so for me, evil in Trump is just a sort of sense of a sort of slick, charming recklessness.

25:13Okay, let's talk about Iran and dial into it. I don't, I actually, I find what you just said very compelling. I suspect the challenge that the challenge that I will offer you now is if you consider Trump on the one hand and then the Ayatollah on the other, there will be a great many people who say to you, if we were to categorize one or indeed both of them as evil, that I would start with the supreme leader of Iran. And it's interesting to me, you turn to Trump first. Yeah, I mean, it's a good challenge.

25:54Rory Stewart: So the Iranian regime has killed tens of thousands of people in January, February this year. Machine gun people in the streets, snipers on roofs. It has been running prisons with political prisoners for decades. The revolution itself was born in a flurry of violence and killing. It propagated an Iran-Iraq war in which millions of people, including a lot of young men, were sent to their deaths through minefields.

26:32Rory Stewart: And it makes the whole thing more brutal and sinister because it reinforces it with a particular Islamist nationalist doctrine. And it runs proxy militias and all this kind of stuff. So it's a genuinely disturbing, horrifying regime. And it's reminiscent of the horrors of totalitarian regimes all around the world. Very reminiscent of the way that Putin has run a lot of things in Russia. He's not necessarily shooting people in the streets, but it's definitely massive repression, political prisoners, corruption, and actually assassination internationally. It's certainly got echoes of the way Gaddafi ran Libya, the way Saddam Hussein ran Iraq, the way that the North Korean leader runs North Korea.

27:29Rory Stewart: And China's got its fair record of exterminations, killings, political prisoners, etc. So it's all completely true. And I guess what's so disturbing is that although Iran has essentially been in that situation for nearly 50 years and was preceded by a Shah whose secret police killed thousands of people, what one's struggling with when one's looking at the United States is a country that presented itself in a completely different way. that did not say to the world, we are a theocratic authoritarian state, but instead we symbolize liberal democracy, we symbolize rights, we symbolize constitutions, we symbolize rules-based international order, we symbolize progress.

28:23Rory Stewart: So yeah, there are different forms of evil. Could we actually dial into the history a little bit? because there are clearly moments in modern Iranian history and indeed much further back that are informing, I think, the strategic choices that are being made now, particularly around sort of endurance, pain thresholds, both for America and the global economy and for the Iranian society, around martyrdom. I mean, you mentioned the Shah. We could go back and probably talk a little bit about Mozadek. We could talk about, for example, you know, Kavala. There are moments, aren't there, in history that inform what's happening now.

29:05And would you talk about them a little bit?

29:07Rory Stewart: Yeah. I mean, I think everybody's nationalism is different. And there is in Iran, there's both a very strong form of traditional Persian nationalism with an architecture which is quite secular, which reaches all the way back into the ancient world and resistance to Rome and all this kind of thing. and very strong consciousness in Iran of the fact that Western powers basically cut the country up and stole huge bits of its territory in the 20th century. And then there's a very particular narrative, particularly driven through Shia ideas of martyrdom, particularly Imam Hussein and Karbala and the sense that Shia Islam has always been about being an oppressed martyr and sacrificing your life for a cause.

30:01Rory Stewart: And those two things came together very, very potently, for example, in the Iran-Iraq war. where you had nationalism, territory, Shia Islam, ideas of martyrdom together. And add to that a fundamental idea, which is shared by the Iranians, the Chinese and the Russians, which is that the West is determined to screw them over, that America has had only one objective in its mind since the 1970s, and Israel's had only one objective in its mind, in the Iranian mind, certainly since the 1990s, which is to destroy their regime and exterminate them. And the belief that if they give an inch, they will be wiped out.

30:49Rory Stewart: And they will have concluded from the last experience, the last 18 months, that they will feel their mistake was that they didn't cause havoc last time, that they were very measured in their response. I think you'll remember that there was almost a moment where when the initial Israeli strikes were happening, when Iran's response was to say, in 24 hours, we're sending a missile over. Are you ready? Are you ready? Here it comes, right? And where actually, although Hezbollah fired rockets and led to a situation where Israelis left northern Israel, they fired only a fraction of the rockets they had.

31:31Rory Stewart: They probably had 100 ,000 rockets they could have fired. They fired a few thousand. And what they will have concluded is that instead of getting credit from the US or Israel for restraining themselves, they thought what they were demonstrating is measured deterrence, right? You fire a missile at us, we fire a missile back. You know we can mean business, but if you don't attack us, we won't unleash our full force on you. There's been a shadow war going on between Iran and Israel for 30 years that's been conducted like that. Occasionally they attack each other's vessels, occasionally they assassinate each other's people.

32:12Rory Stewart: But Israel and the US were no longer playing by those games. Israel responded to the restraint of Hezbollah by saying, well, you're a bunch of suckers. You didn't use your missiles quickly enough and we're going to come and kill you all. and killed 1 ,500 of their leadership. And then when Iran didn't respond aggressively to the initial strikes, Israel concluded, well, you're a bunch of suckers and you're toothless, so we'll hit you even harder and we'll keep hitting it. We'll hit you even harder. And ultimately, they got to a stage where Israel and the US were signaling that they were going to kill all the leadership of the regime, topple the regime.

32:53Rory Stewart: they signaled that they might arm the Kurds to invade. At that point, there's no leverage left. At that point, what alternative really would it feel for the regime if the regime wants to survive other than to demonstrate that if you attack Iran, there are consequences? Hence, let's drive up the global oil price. Let's attack the Gulf. Let's cause chaos. let's show people that you can't just attack us and get away with it. And all the people who showed restraint, some of those people have actually been killed, people asking for restraint. Yes, quite. And then I suppose if you're considering much of this is centered around Iranian attempts, or lack thereof, depending on your perspective, to pursue its own viable nuclear weapon and admittedly I don't know, you may well do whether or not Mustafa Khomeini the Ayatollah's son is actually in a position to lead the country but by all accounts a slightly more hardline figure and one would anticipate the events of recent weeks you look at North Korea if you're on that axis of evil as George Bush described it, you can say well they're not being subject to this no, no, no I don't think it slows down that pursuit of nuclear.

34:14Exactly.

34:15Rory Stewart: There'll be a huge acceleration of people getting nuclear weapons because they will conclude it's the only thing that can defend you. And this begins really with Gaddafi because effectively what happened is a huge amount of effort was put into telling Gaddafi that if he gave up on his nuclear program, we would lift sanctions and he could become a friend of the West. He gives up on his nuclear program and then a couple of years later we invade and kill him. Ditto with Saddam Hussein, basically, who was put under huge pressure to step away from his nuclear programs and from his chemical weapon programs.

34:49Rory Stewart: He actually turned out to have abandoned his chemical weapon programs entirely under international pressure. And the only result was that we killed him. Ukraine, very similar situation, was encouraged to give up its nuclear weapons and told that if it gave up, and it actually had them, right? Unlike the others, it wasn't abandoning a program. It physically had nuclear weapons. gave them up because it was told they would be safer if they didn't have the weapons. What happens? Russia invades, right? So it's not just countries like Iran that are going to try to develop nuclear programs. It's Saudi Arabia will try to develop a nuclear program.

35:24Rory Stewart: It's European states will try to develop nuclear programs. I mean, who wouldn't develop a nuclear program if you're in a world in which Trump and Netanyahu can literally get out of bed in the morning, make no international legal arguments, not make any arguments to Congress, not bother to consult their allies, and destabilize an entire region, plunging the global economy into a horrible mess with no due process, no thought, no moral argument, no legal argument, no pragmatic argument, why wouldn't you break away from those alliances and try to set up your own way? Stay with us. We're going to take a short break, but we'll be back after this.

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37:21There's a sort of paradox in my head whilst we're talking, Rory, which is that on the one hand, I feel like our ideological paradigm of the way we're analyzing and understanding current global events. You see the surface of ideas that I think don't actually necessarily apply so well, whether it's responsibility to protect or the international rules-based order or the Monroe Doctrine. They feel to me like ideas from a previous century. Simultaneously, we're talking about Persian nationalism, which clearly has a centuries-long history and is equally as valid and relevant today as it was in the past.

37:57And there just seems to be this moment right now where there's this, things are in flux. I'm very glad you spoke about that, the shadow war between Israel and Iran as being 30 years long. Because I've seen in English language media, people talking about the fact that there was a 12-day war last year. And now there's a separate war happening now. That as if Russia's participation, which we don't know the full extent of right now, but understanding that is developing in this conflict and also its involvement in Ukraine, are two separate entities. The proliferation of drone warfare on the battlefield, the two things that they're not being viewed or increasingly are in tandem.

38:36And then the hybrid warfare that's currently being waged was waged in Ukraine and now via the Strait of Hormuz on global energy markets and commodities. I do feel like that word, Zeitung Wende, it does feel that rather than there's a war in Ukraine and there's been a regional conflict in the Middle East, it does feel like there is an increasingly global aspect to what's happening.

39:03Rory Stewart: Yeah, I think that's right. And I think what you're pointing to is that the world system has always been interdependent. And interdependency, in other words, the idea that Britain is reliant on oil from the Middle East or the United States is reliant on chips from Taiwan and rare earths from China has been a permanent fact. I mean, even the ancient world, the Athenians needed to get their wheat in from the Black Sea. And there's always been two sides to it. There's been one way of looking at it, which is all this interdependency, globalization is a kind of win-win, which delivers prosperity to us all, makes us interdependent, and stops us going to war because we realize how much we need each other.

39:56The flip side, which literally is just sort of, it's like one of those optical illusions.

40:04Rory Stewart: You're looking at the same thing, and the same thing viewed from another angle is vulnerability, you know, weaponized vulnerability. Oh my goodness, you know, I'm reliant on you for chips. I'm reliant on you for oil. I need to get that, right? And the genius of what America created from 1945 until the first Trump administration was a world in which somehow, by some miracle, a story, it's basically about stories, and it's a story about liberal democracy and a story about free trade and a story about rules-based international order, convinced us that this whole thing was sort of okay. and convinced us that nobody was going to wake up and use our mutual economic dependency as a weapon.

40:55Rory Stewart: But as soon as you've seen Trump do it, as soon as he's revealed that the dollar is a weapon, that the fact that we buy 70 % of our defense equipment from them is a threat, the fact that he can suddenly instruct Google to shut off all the account access to the head of the International Criminal Court. So we're completely vulnerable to US tech platforms, cloud computing, AI. As soon as you've seen that, you can't put the genie back in the bottle again. So the reason why Russia and Iran and China and what's happening in Latin America and what's happening in the Gulf is all part of the same story, is it's part of a story in which the collapse of that moral narrative has suddenly turned all the strengths of globalization into a series of intolerable vulnerabilities and weaknesses.

41:52One more question about this, and then I want to talk about England and Middleland. Just circle back to Islam for a second. So I'm interested in how I feel like there is a. An understanding that's characterized by empathy that actually is an understanding of that world. And when I look across national British political discourse, I cite some recent examples, whether it's Nick Timothy saying that, you know, Muslims play praying in Trafalgar Square during Ramadan. is some kind of act of domination, whether it's reform, other parties on the radical right in Britain pledging to do things like banning the burqa, that essentially the way that I think much of our politics engages with Muslims and Islam is a bigoted one.

42:44And whilst there are obvious downsides and consequences, not least for Muslims living in Britain for that, there is now increasingly, I think, in the explicit national interest, in this instance in foreign policy, that ignorance means that the west's activity in iran it's it's if it was more characterized by intelligence and understanding of empathy it seems to me that our national interest might be better served and i would just kind of invite your reflections on that culture on that the sort of animosity that exists in much of our politics towards people of this faith people of this religion that live here.

43:25Rory Stewart: Yeah, I think we've got to be very clear that this is basically racism. I mean, essentially, the AFD in Germany or the far right in Britain or all those people on social media who are talking about Judeo-Christian values and saying, I've got nothing against people of colour, I just don't like Islam, are basically racist. I mean, essentially what they're trying to do is drive hundreds of thousands, millions of people out of their country. I mean, the AFD, some of their leadership are very clear about it. They talk about re-migration. You're a Muslim, you're going to be shoved out of Germany. And it's the most amazing nonsense.

44:19Rory Stewart: I mean this idea that somehow Islam itself is a kind of inherently bad religion and other religions are sort of inherently good is completely demented. I mean the whole world history is littered with Christians doing horrible things. Buddhists doing. I mean you really want to see madness. I mean, even Buddhism has a kind of radical French Hindu nationalists doing bad things, right? Religious Zionists in Israel doing horrible things. All of them, if you're an extremist, appealing to some weird scriptural justification. But the point is that the extremism precedes the scriptural justification. It's not driven by the scriptural justification.

45:05This same Islam, and I've spent a lot of my life living in Muslim countries.

45:09Rory Stewart: I grew up partly in Malaysia. I lived in Afghanistan. I lived in Iraq. I lived in Pakistan. My lived experience is of extremely generous, dignified, thoughtful, empathetic societies, which don't begin to resemble the kind of ideas that white non-Muslims develop. And it's partly just pure ignorance. I mean, it's not very different from the kind of way that, well our experience I suppose with other forms of racism that the kind of ways that people thought about black people when they hadn't met any black people or the kind of ways that people thought about people who were gay until they actually had some gay friends I mean a lot of it is simply that they just don't know any Muslims right they don't understand the lived experience of it they don't understand that Add to that the way in which this is being weaponised around the world.

46:16Rory Stewart: It's really disturbing, profoundly disturbing.

46:24And I mean, you can do things to sort of illustrate it.

46:30Rory Stewart: I mean, somebody was pointing out to me last night that Muslims, on average in Britain, give twice as much to charity as anyone else. But I'm not sure that's the way through, to sort of look at the kind of statistical anomalies on that. But it's much more about just trying to get people to develop some love and enthusiasm and respect. Now, look, the same would be true if you were dealing with anti-Semitism. And maybe the route through is anti-Semitism. I had an example recently. I was got in a fight on X with Tommy Robinson. sounds productive it's really productive and one of his guys came into me and he said you're such a slippery politician will you please answer two questions straight number one are there too many Muslims in Britain and number two if so how many should there be so I wrote back and I said number one no number two C1 but what I really should have said is just think about what happened if you change that word to are there too many black people in Britain?

47:46Rory Stewart: Are there too many Jews in Britain? Where does this go? What does this mean for the way that we think about fellow citizens, human rights, our equality as humans, dignity? I mean, you can develop these things, right? All of us probably have elements of structural prejudice in our lives. Of course we do. I mean, in a sense, the Black Lives Matter and was about many of us having to discover all the ways in which there are profoundly racist structures in the way that we view the world. And I'm sure there are Islamic phobic and anti-Semitic structures in the way that we engage with a lot of things.

48:23Rory Stewart: But it's incumbent on us to recognize these and recognize they're basically the same thing, right? The same hostility that people felt towards ultra-Orthodox Jews in the 1930s, and in fact, for some people even today, that they dress differently, they're wearing different headgear, they are an isolated community, is exactly the same as people saying, I don't like seeing Muslims walking down the street dressed as Muslims. It's the same thing. It's saying, I'm uncomfortable with an alien religious culture that is isolated from me and that I can't relate to. but you have to try to break through and realize that if you get beyond the costume here are warm generous funny inventive people let's um turn to something more hopeful than let's let's turn to democratic renewal rejuvenation perhaps discovering a little bit of that love in our society your book middle and let's talk about it i mean tell me what does the word mean politically, culturally?

49:31Rory Stewart: So for me, the Middle Land is a way of talking about this extraordinary border territory, which spills from southern Scotland into northern England, and of which Cumbria is an incredible symbol, and which historically really wasn't part of either Scotland or England. It was a middle land. It's a separate land. Separate land before the Romans came, separate land for about 700 years after the Romans left. Cumbria was an independent kingdom with its own kings and bards and its own completely different language, nothing like Scottish Gaelic or Anglo-Saxon English. And it still retains in the landscape, in upland sheep farming, in the place names, in the geology, in the culture, things which are really distinct traditions, which challenge our ideas of Britishness.

50:27Tell me a little bit more about the landscape and how it informs your understanding of being English and English identity.

50:35Rory Stewart: So the book Middleland is centered particularly on the Lake District and the area around Hadrian's Wall. And it is above all a human landscape, but it's a human landscape that's now got caught up in arguments about rewilding. So it's in a very interesting space. Like so many other beautiful landscapes in Britain, it's dominated now by tourism, so billions of pounds made a year by people like you and me going on holiday in the Lake District. But it's also a place where communities continue to live, including upland farmers with hundreds of years of attachment to the land who have created that landscape.

51:16Rory Stewart: The colours of the hills, and you'll remember the classic colour in the Lake District is that it's a bright green down at the bottom. It's a sort of yellow in the middle and then right up at the top, it's a kind of beige-y gray, right? And this is because of the way that farmers manage grass and sheep. It's to do with nitrogen in the soil. It's to do with these very ancient dry stone walls that divide the common land at the top from the bottom. Now, that landscape is there in Wordsworth's poems. It's there in Turner's paintings in the 18th century. is the birth of the whole romantic movement in Europe comes out of this landscape.

51:54Rory Stewart: But it's a landscape created by very small farms of very tough, incredibly hardworking people, often keeping native breeds, but predominantly increasingly reliant on sheep. And it's now at the front of a new form of culture war, where sheep are now regarded as a plague. And there is a great enthusiasm for the idea of abandoning farming and letting nature just take its course, which is the end of those farms. Should we talk about that a little bit? I mean, there is, I think there are people like Derek Gow who's written about sort of rewilding and rewilding predators apex predators back into the british landscape primarily wolves that finds its expression in the deer population uh in this country which i know this this is a contested figure but many people will tell you that there are now currently more deer in britain than there have ever been at any point in its history because they don't have predators anymore in fact the only predator is a man with a rifle and so therefore what do we what do we do about that because if you're trying to grow forestry in scotland and a herd of red deer move through it can be a bit of a problem for you same for the same for the row same for the rest of it and so there is this debate isn't there about should we reintroduce the links i think wolves yeah probably slightly far off i'm not sure that's going to happen anytime soon rory but there are people who say and this i think it's what you're alluding to when you're talking about the culture war is that there are people who say well if a farmer loses 10 10 sheep from his flock every year so be it because there are broader ecological questions here.

53:39And I think the other side of it is that there's a lack of understanding about the rural way of life, how people try to week out their livings. I mean, tell me what you

53:47Rory Stewart: said that. I mean, obviously, like any one of these debates, there's some really important points on both sides. So it's true that to start with, there is a biodiversity crisis in Britain. We've had a catastrophic collapse in species. There have been unbelievably bad farming practices. We have polluted our rivers. And so a healthier, better British environment would be good for biodiversity, good for climate, good for water quality, good for air quality.

54:31Rory Stewart: but we're also a very small island and we're a very small island which is very very densely populated we're more densely populated than India and we're also an island where the same bit of land is used for a lot of different things so if you move away from the kind of abstract to the real and look at a Cumbrian valley that same bit of land can be used to produce sheep, and we still eat lamb. So part of the problem is we're going to, if we're not going to become vegetarians, we've got to get that lamb from somewhere. Now, if you shut down the Lake District farmers from producing lamb, we will buy it from New Zealand.

55:14Rory Stewart: What is the result? Well, not just the sheep has to move a long way, but that sheep is destroying the New Zealand biodiversity. diversity. I mean, that's the thing that we do a lot in Britain, which is that we feel good about ourselves. We push the problem to China. So China has coal-fired things. And then we buy all the t-shirts from China. We pat ourselves on the back and say, we're not polluting. But actually, our consumption of t-shirts, our consumption of land is just creating that problem for someone else's country. So if we're going to eat lamb, take some of that responsibility and accept that sheep have an impact on the environment.

55:48Rory Stewart: Secondly, think about living human communities. Think about the fact that the farmer also is the person whose kids keeps the local school open, whose tractor clears the local roads. Think about the fact that the landscape that the tourist is paying to visit is not actually likely to be a landscape of scrub, gorse, and bracken. But in fact, they may want to see farmers, sheep, dry stem walls. And think about how you could do this in a varied way. You know, think about the possibility that the RSPB could rewild this valley, but another valley could be protected for sheep farming. Another valley could be commercial forestry, because we need that too, right?

56:28Rory Stewart: Our houses, our power stations require fast growing soft wood, not native wood, right? These are really difficult stuff. We need renewable energy, but where do we put that renewable energy? What kind of renewable energy? And that's what isn't happening in this debate. At its worst, what happens in this debate is on the one hand, you have extreme traditionalists saying, I'm not going to change anything, and I have a right to pollute and wreck the landscape. And on the other extreme, you have people who I'm afraid often actually are not from rural backgrounds, they're from urban backgrounds, with fantasies about wolves and beavers and lynx,

57:15Rory Stewart: who don't really, are not really forced to think about the impact on the ground in Cumbria. And actually, I'm not even being honest with themselves with the truth, which is if they really wanted to improve biodiversity and air quality and climate, it would be much more efficient to rewild the greenbelt than to get involved in cumbria because biodiversity per square meter is much much greater in southern england than it is in the uplands do you know it's i could talk to you about this for a very long time rory and i think there are you know another frame on this is the really quite stringent animal welfare standards that we have in this country rightly so that mean that there's quite a high cost imposed on farmers for producing livestock for human consumption but at the same time if you're going to permit the imports of products from countries that don't have as rigorous animal welfare standards you can have farmers in other parts of the world i probably think more about australia and as relates to beef than i would lamb from new zealand but nevertheless who is actually cheaper for suppliers to ship their products from halfway around the world than it is to buy them from british farmers and that's such a good challenge right because if we agree ethically that we you know let's take some which i think is difficult to disagree with which is that battery chickens are horrendous.

58:34Rory Stewart: I mean, the life of a chicken living for a few weeks with its beak cut in total distress for the sake of our chicken or eggs is horrendous. How can it make any sense to say we're going to stop that happening here, but we're going to continue to buy those things? The chicken is suffering just as much abroad as it is here. So that I don't get. I also don't get why we don't understand that turning the green belt into the largest forest in England would have much more benefit because we're closer to it. A loss of the natural capital benefit comes from the number of people that are near that place.

59:22Rory Stewart: Here there are 12 million people that would be able to benefit in terms of air quality, leisure, access from those woods. why are they all dumping it all up on what was my former constituency well the answer is because it's the most vastly populated constituency in england it's not a it's not an accident they treat it like a blank space on a map right they almost the implication sometimes when i read these articles is well nobody really needs lives there it's not going to make any much difference to anybody you know why don't we put our wolves there because they're you know there really aren't any people there are there and actually it's a pattern the reason to be suspicious the rewilding when it's pushed to the lake district is those were the arguments used why we should have the munitions factories why we should have the nuclear facilities you know why are we spending billions of pounds a year in cumbria cleaning up nuclear waste well because some lovely chap in the 1950s looked at him out and thought well nobody really lives there why don't we do that there do you know I think this is such an important issue.

1:00:27And again, even the idea of, I think quite a lot of people, they had this idea of the English countryside and the rolling hills and the field of wheat. And so, well, you're looking at a monoculture. You're looking at an industrial version. That's not actually a wild place, the perception you have of it. But I, even talking to you about this now, Rory, I feel like I know that this conversation will sound slightly eccentric to significant parts of the audience because they're not from Cumbria. they don't live rural lives they don't necessarily see the value or the importance of food systems of farming and i would publicly suggest that perhaps international events right now demonstrate quite the importance of having slightly less extended global supply chains but nevertheless there is a it relates to the gap doesn't it between the issues on a local level you could talk about cumbre you could talk about the west country to pick anywhere in britain and then our national political discourse where people will be listening, thinking, why on earth are they talking about sheep farming in Cumbria?

1:01:24Yeah.

1:01:24Rory Stewart: Why are we not talking about Prince Andrew, for example? Right. So one of the interesting things that I learned as a politician is that there isn't a direct relationship between what actually matters and what the media talk about. And that if you try to challenge that, you get in real trouble. If you try to say, okay, this thing that is dominating all the headlines, yeah, I get it. It's a problem, but it's not a problem remotely on the scale of the fact we've got hundreds of billions of pounds worth of debt, right? Or it's not remotely engaging with the reality of, yeah, the kind of conditions that Naz Shah or Angela Rayner's family grew up in.

1:02:10Rory Stewart: The conditions of people, I guess, the bottom four or five percent of extreme poverty in Britain. We don't talk about at all. Homelessness, we don't talk about very much, right? And it's very difficult to challenge. It's very difficult to say, here's this scandal that's dominating everything. And for two weeks, we're talking all the time about this thing. But you're not talking about the really difficult, interesting things, you know, where our food comes from, what we're doing about homelessness, what we're doing about the poor elderly, what we're really doing about adult social care, and actually what we would need to do to actually grow our economy, reduce taxes, reduce regulation.

1:02:55Rory Stewart: These are really important questions. What would it actually mean to have an AI policy or a defense policy? Talk about any of that, right? We get caught up in, and I have this sort of debate with Alistair. I mean, Alistair's got a much better, on the rest of his politics, he's got a much better feeling for what the public want to talk about this week. But if you were a Martian looking at it, it would be very difficult to guess what it is the public wants to talk about because it's not necessarily the most difficult, interesting issues in the country. Do you know what's interesting about that? I read a column.

1:03:34It was about you and it was about Mitt Romney. and it said that you'd been proven right on most things, but that you didn't have the fibre of a national political leader or something. And I thought it was so... It was Jananganesh, and it was so interesting about what it revealed about our society, that someone can give an incredibly prescient contribution about the need to increase defence spending in Britain, but at the end of the day, if you're not prepared to make an intervention on the Prince Andrew scandal, or whatever, then it's your sort of, politics doesn't reward you for being right.

1:04:10Rory Stewart: Right. That's not how politics works. It doesn't also, I mean, I've been wrong about lots of things too. And it doesn't necessarily particularly punish you for being wrong. I mean, it's, it also finds it very difficult to accept that all you can hope for from a politician is that they're trying to learn and that there's some humility and they're trying to be a bit more right than wrong.

1:04:39Rory Stewart: But what I notice is the right and the far right and the Brexit right have this amazing current tendency, having been catastrophically wrong in their decision to pursue Brexit, right? Which I think the majority of the British people now accept they screwed. That was a stupid decision. Catastrophically wrong in their flirtation with Trump. Catastrophically wrong in their vulnerability they exposed to US tech. Catastrophically wrong in the way that they managed immigration in the British economy after 2017. And yet their brilliant trick is to suggest that the liberal center have no judgment, are universally wrong about everything.

1:05:31Rory Stewart: And it's a really interesting move because the truth is we're all wrong about lots of things. Right about some things, wrong about some things. It's very difficult to predict the future. But this weird thing that I've noticed when I'm engaging with Tommy Robinson, which is there's a particular, maybe this is about a particular type of manosphere story, right? there's um him saying i am so a lot of folks on strength right so rory stewart is spiritually weak intellectually weak physically weak and that's quite a big thing because we see that the u.s secretary of war and the u.s ambassador to the un are posting images themselves lifting heavy weights and doing a lot of press-ups when i was fighting jd vance on on x there was a lot about can you do more press-ups than J.D.

1:06:23Rory Stewart: Vance, right? Then there's a lot of attacks saying, Rory Stewart, P's sitting down, right? P's sitting down, right? Then there is an enormous amount of, and then it gets into sort of weird stuff, right? There's sort of weird stuff around, you know, he's ugly, and maybe he's a child molester, and then there's this stuff around and he's wrong about everything, right? And you navigate your way through, you know, he's weak, he's wrong, he's a child molester, he's ugly, he pees sitting down. And it's basically, that's the repeated playlist, right? And it's an interesting playlist because it doesn't really bring you into the heart of political discussion, right?

1:07:16Rory Stewart: What do I actually want to debate? All these people who are sorting it. The Spectator, for example, at the moment's got it in for me, and it's had a good go with five different articles in about two months. What I really want to say is, but dear Michael, what was this decision on Brexit? And what was this decision on Boris Johnson? I'm currently having an argument with Dominic Cummings. Again, what was this decision on Brexit? And why did you decide to go with Boris Johnson? I mean, I agree, you know, you are world shattering geniuses who are omniscient and have predicted every single thing since the Peloponnesian Wars to COVID.

1:07:55But those were screw ups, right?

1:08:02We're running out of time, Rory. So I'm going to rattle through a few quick ones and I'll let you get on your way. how much of your interest in these local issues in Cumbria has to do with the mayoral election that's happening there next year?

1:08:15Rory Stewart: I'm very interested in Cumbria. I have decided not to go for the mayoral election. I mean, it was a difficult decision. I really, really love Cumbria. I spent some time walking around trying to work out how an independent campaign would work. So to be honest, I was very interested in the idea. But I have decided that it's not for me. What does being English mean to you? I appreciate it. I said quick, far in that. It means a lot to me because I would also say that I feel at many levels deeply Scottish and a lot of my idea of language, history, tradition, character is derived from Scotland.

1:08:59Rory Stewart: but yes I think it's

1:09:10Rory Stewart: yeah it's a form of lightness of touch it's a form of a lot of things that I'm not but that I admire in other English people yeah in 2024 you described yourself as a passionate monarchist do you still describe yourself as that? yes absolutely i i love all that stuff and i love it partly because i mean i can make an argument for you why i would rather have uh king charles than an elected president like donald trump and i think i'm sort of helped by that but but it's not really a practical argument for me it's um it's a wonderful british compromise with past and tradition um of course it doesn't you know fully make rational, logical sense.

1:09:56It's an accident and it creates a lot of anomalies

1:10:00Rory Stewart: and it will create a lot of people saying, what exactly are their powers? But the truth is, without being disloyal to the monarchy, the power of the monarchy in practice is extremely limited compared to the power of a president, right? And that's probably quite a good thing. My last question to you, Rory, during the London mayoral campaign, you said that PrEP was your favourite restaurant. Were you lying? I said it's my favourite pub actually You said it's your favourite pub That's what my favourite pub was And I said Pret I read that and I thought that must be a typo That can't be right What's your favourite pub in London I said I'm more of a Pret-a-Manger man Nice I still think it's a hell of a quality product It's a very reliable lunch option Rory Stewart Thank you so much for giving us your time I really appreciate it Thank you very much you've been listening to the exchange from the new statesman with me ollie dougmore and my guest rory stewart this episode was produced by katherine hughes the exchange will be back next wednesday

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