Geopolitics, Power, and Solutions — with Rory Stewart

25:26They've promised not to increase borrowing. How do they do that? If they're going to increase wages, how do they not increase the deficit of taxes? They've cut investment. And that, again, is pretty troubling. I mean, they've stopped most of the railroad investment. They've just canceled a big supercomputer that was being built in Edinburgh. They've announced they're not going ahead with big programs to rebuild hospitals. So I think they're in trouble. I mean, this is a left-wing government that's come in after 14 years in which the British public are fed up with austerity and want more investment in public services.

25:59It's a government that is trying to reassure the financial markets and felt that the only way of winning the election was to promise it would never put taxes up, but now finds itself having won a big majority with its hands tied behind its back by this promise. So what I'd like to do is I want to give you some observations of a bystander, and that is an American who's lived in London for two years and as a means of contrasting or using it as a jumping-out point for contrasting the U.S. and the little I understand about the U.K., but I'll give you some observations and I want you to respond to them.

26:32The first is, to the upside, as an American here, as someone who considers themselves a progressive, I find all the dumb arguments in the U.K. have been put in the past. Assault weapons. Well, of course we don't have assault weapons. Bodily autonomy for women. Well, it's not even a conversation here. Of course women have bodily autonomy. Trans rights. Okay, fine. It's not a big issue for us. We're not going to spend a ton of political capital worrying about a second or a third bathroom. So I really appreciate that about the UK. My observation is that, and this is a question, I'm generally flummoxed by the amount of intellectual property here, the amount of intellectual capital, the unbelievable quality of the education system.

27:13The thing I love most about the UK is my kids' schools. I just think they're fantastic. And I think the universities here are incredible. I've had the good privilege to, or the good fortune to speak at a bunch of them, just such incredibly bright people, an amazing culture, a rule of fair play, smart, funny, an appreciation for the arts, a global culture that appreciates other cultures. And yet they can't get out of their own goddamn way. And when I look at London, I think there's no organic value creation. The only people I know making money here are serving money made elsewhere. Do you agree with this, that Britain, UK, still has all the pillars to be just a robust, high-growth leadership economy and manages to steal victory from the jaws of defeat?

28:05I don't know why. Your thoughts? It's obviously the central question of British politics. And there's a lot of different ideology goes into trying to answer that question. Some of it is cultural. So we have a big problem with developing technology and ideas and then struggling to finance it. And that seems to be partly about the risk capital in the UK. I think another thing is that we have really struggled to unlock the potential of anything outside London and the Southeast. We've created a very unequal economy. And some of that is about infrastructure investment. If we had decent rail and road infrastructure connecting Leeds and Manchester, we would create pretty impressive urban conurbation and we might be able to generate some serious productivity.

28:56Productivity in London and the southeast is so far ahead of the rest of the country. And then we get into the ideology. I think we're too centralized. We should decentralize more. I think we've got really in our way when it comes to planning and building things. I mean, one kilometer of road, one mile of road costs twice as much to build as what it does in France. we're struggling to build housing. And a lot of that is because we have this very, very consensual planning system where people discuss everything for years. And every new argument, good and bad, for why houses shouldn't be built are aired and very little gets off the ground.

29:39So now do the U.S. You're a very thoughtful guy. Give us your no mercy, no malice view of the situation in America. I'm married to an American. I have been teaching at Yale. So what does the European notice looking at the US? I think one thing is you have a really magical economy. I mean, there's something astonishing about what's happened in the last 14 years in terms of the divergence from the Eurozone. We were almost level pegging in GDP per capita 14, 15 years ago, and US growth rates have shot off. and you're doing it in a way that doesn't really make sense to us. If I was being rude about the US, your state education system is terrible.

30:24I mean, I've just been in Chicago. The statistics from Cook County are beyond belief. The majority of people graduating high school who should not be in any position to graduate high school in terms of their literacy and numeracy rates. And theoretically, when we model these things, You know, smart people like you tell us that the way to create productivity is to have a great education system and all these people coming through. But my goodness, apart from the top, apart from the kind of the cream of America, these incredible Ivy League universities, the mass of people are not receiving good education.

30:58And, you know, I go on. We are also completely puzzled by health care and welfare. We're very puzzled by the fact that it just seems so rich, but also so poor. I mean, go up and down the Connecticut shoreline, there are just boats everywhere. I mean, you have tens of millions of people who are astonishingly wealthy, and then you have people living in Flint, Michigan or in Georgia in conditions that we couldn't imagine in Europe. So those are the kinds of things that puzzle us. And I think one of the things that puzzles us most probably is that an election in Europe, in the UK or Europe, would be talking about the state education system.

31:37It would be talking about public health and health delivery. That doesn't seem to be what's dominating the election between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris at all. Do you have kids, Rory? Yeah, I've got two boys. Two boys. How old? Nine and seven. Oh, you're in the golden decade. Four to 14 are wonderful. Zero to four, we pretend to like it, we don't. Once they turn 14, they stop, you know, they no longer look up to you. You become just this awful person that just gets, warrants eye rolls about 12 times a day. You're in the golden decade. My question is, where, if they said, dad, age 18 to 38, kind of the years starting my career getting going, would you want them to live in the U.S.

32:25or the U.K., and why? At the moment, I'd probably be tempted by them living in the U.S., I'm afraid. And it's a terrible thing to say because I've dedicated my whole life to Britain. I was a British politician. I love this country. I have huge emotional investment in it, but it feels to me as though we are really lost at the moment. And that's an awful thing to say, but I'm afraid I understand why so many people around the world want their children to move to the US. I mean, it just feels as though there's more space and, to come back to the old cliche, that there's more opportunity. But, you know, I hope I'm proved wrong.

33:06I hope we can find our way through this malaise and that over the next decade, we can get the UK back into a situation where I can say this is where our ancestors are buried. This is where my house is. This is where our roots are. And let's make a go of it. You describe democracy as increasingly fragile. What do you believe are the key threats to democracy today? I think the first fundamental threat is that liberal democracies haven't been delivering well enough for people. I mean, that for about 200 years from the early 1800s, we could tell a story where we convinced ourselves that democracies were naturally more prosperous.

33:46And as people became more prosperous, they became more democratic. And partly because of the rise of China, but partly because the success of other authoritarian regimes. We've broken the link in which democracies are not necessarily delivering for people. and in certain years it feels as though non-democratic states are delivering quite effectively. So that's one problem. I think the second, and that is a big problem, because I think the reason why people buy into democracy is not only because they believe in human rights and liberal values, it's also because it was making them wealthier. I think the second threat is, I'm afraid, social media.

34:25I think it's not a coincidence that the rise of social media from 2003-04 onwards and its explosion with the Arab Spring in 2010-2011 is part of the story of the rise of populism and the rise of authoritarianism because I think those are algorithms that drive people into polarized states. And I think they have been extremely bad for the key bits of democratic discourse, in particular compromise, meeting in the middle, explaining, having a shared frame of reference. What, in your view, is the impact on the UK and Europe of a Trump or a Harris presidency? Harris presidency, I think, doesn't trouble people too much.

35:08It feels like a continuity of what went before Biden, and we feel we sort of got a measure of where Joe Biden was coming from. Trump presidency, I think, is going to be more troubling for people because it will encourage populists like Viktor Orban in Hungary or Marine Le Pen, who's this far-right politician running to be the president of France, to feel that they're entering a new age of strong men or strong women. We would be worried that he would pretty quickly compromise with Putin in a way that would effectively give Putin power over Kiev. We would be concerned that understandable American tendencies towards isolationism and protectionism would accelerate.

35:54and we'd find ourselves facing significant trade barriers and that the world, as a result, would get less stable and less prosperous. We'll be right back.

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37:24From website design and marketing to boosting sales and expanding operations, Shopify can get the job done and make your dream a reality. Turn those what-ifs into... Sign up for your$1 per month trial at shopify.com slash special offer. so you brought up some geopolitics i apologize for skipping around so much here but while you're here i want to take advantage of this i'd love to just get your quick thoughts on the war in britain's role or non-role in uh the ukraine russia or ukraine russia um has flipped on its head in three very dramatic ways. I mean, initially, nobody expected Russia to go into Ukraine, and they thought Russia was going to definitely take Kiev.

38:13Then they got optimistic about a counter-offensive, and now we're in a situation where the Russian economy is growing fast. They seem to be able to mobilize a lot of people, and they seem to have a lot of missiles. And Ukraine's survival is dependent on the UK, Europe, but above all the US, putting in tens of billions of dollars a year and being prepared to do that again next year. It's also dependent on our willingness to take risk in terms of allowing Ukraine to use weapons against Russian territory and making the very difficult calculation of how Putin's going to respond to that right the way through to whether he's going to launch tactical nuclear weapons as part of a response to that.

38:58So I think we... We're right to fight. I think had we allowed Putin to simply walk into Ukraine, a world that was already getting more and more dangerous would get significantly more dangerous. In fact, I think the failure to respond in 2014 in Crimea, the failure to hold out red lines in Syria is part of the reason we're in this trouble. But equally, it's obvious to all of us that there needs to be a peace deal, that it's not credible that Ukraine is going to be able to achieve all the objectives that its supporters have. And I'm a huge supporter of Ukraine. But there needs to be some kind of negotiation.

39:40The only hope is that they can do that negotiation from position of strength and momentum rather than from position of weakness. The war on the Middle East? War on the Middle East? Well, I think that too much of what Israel is doing is driven by Netanyahu's attempt to hold his coalition together, and in particular hold Smotrich and Ben-Gavir on the far right of his coalition on side, rather than actual calculation about what is likely to lead to a more peaceful, stable situation for Israel. And what would that be? Let me just press pause there. What if you felt there was a more thoughtful administration?

40:20What do you think? What does that look like? Well, it has to move very, very quickly towards reconstructing Gaza, and it has to move very quickly towards some sort of path for political autonomy for Palestine. And it has to balance that with Israel's security. Now, that's not easy to do, but we had recipes for what that might look like in the mid-1990s. We still had those recipes in the mid-2000s. And killing 40 ,000 people in Gaza and leveling that place, I mean, it's destroyed. and now launching these attacks into Lebanon don't seem to me to be part of a long-term plan. I don't see where that goes in five or ten years' time.

41:08I don't see how that gets anybody to a situation of stability. And I'm afraid with the critics of Netanyahu on this, I don't think his objectives, his strategic objectives, are achievable. I don't think he can eliminate Hamas. I definitely don't think he can eliminate Hezbollah. And if he can't, he needs to find a path towards coexistence, however difficult that is. So just to play a kind of steel man this, so with respect to launching this offensive, I forget the words used, against Lebanon, what would you say to people who say, well, Lebanon has fired 8 ,500 missiles into Israel over the last 10 years?

41:52This war has been going on a while. And that the only way to have some sort of stable peace is to, quite frankly, terrorize a terrorist and have a preemptive strike. Because it's not as if, I mean, I'm thinking about the pager detonations. It's not as if these folks were hoping to give peace a chance and seem to be really open and biased towards a peace deal. I feel like it's a very American thing that, okay, we need peace, we need a ceasefire. Versus recognizing throughout history, the only way you kind of get, in my opinion, a stable peace through a war is to win it. And that a lot of what Israel is doing right now is, in my view, I think Netanyahu's been diabolical and a disaster for Israel.

42:33But at the same time, I think the response in Gaza has been fully warranted. And that the collateral damage there is horrific, but is on a civilian to combatant ratio more humane or less inhumane than any recent war that the West has prosecuted. And it strikes me that when the media says that Israel has escalated the war in Lebanon, I see them as trying to de-escalate future conflict by going after an incredibly precise anti-terrorist operation, in my view, trying to preempt a future war that threatens their very existence. Your thoughts? Well, that's definitely the view of the people who back it.

43:21I just don't think it works. I don't understand how they think this is going to deal with 20 ,000 armed and highly experienced Hizballah veterans who have formed up over 40 years, who fought in Syria, who have 10 times the number of weapons they had in 2004, including precision guide munitions. short of a ground assault into Lebanon. They're never going to be able to tackle that. And I think a ground assault into Lebanon is beyond them. I think it's beyond Israeli capacity because Hezbollah is a much more formidable enemy than Hamas and their positions in Lebanon are incomparably more difficult to attack.

44:06So they can blow up pages and they can destroy some missiles. but the idea that that is going to win a victory, I mean, in a way, the logic of your argument would require them to win a victory so decisive that there's no coming back. But they can't do that. They don't have those resources. They don't have the manpower to do that. They don't have an option of wiping Hezbollah off the face of the map. But let's talk about what are the options to just sort of sit and take it and hope that the Americans of the West come in with some sort of diplomacy? Like, what is, I agree, this is, it's a much more formidable fighting force.

44:53What, what, what, I guess, what are the options here? Well, the options from the very beginning of the state of Israel have been very difficult. This is a situation in which Israel was created out of conflict and war and has existed through conflict and war ever since. I mean, that has been the situation since the 1930s. And I guess, do I think that there is a military end to that? No. So I think the situation was best in the mid-1990s when they were getting towards an accommodation and when they were trying to be serious about what a two-state solution would be. But I think this path of backing the settlers, backing people in the...

45:46I mean, remember, Smotrich and Ben-Gavir don't want the existing boundaries of Israel. They don't even want the existing Boundary of Israel plus the settlements. They have a vision of a historic Israel from the Bible, which involves displacing and occupying much, much more territory. So, there's no path there. I feel like it's unfair to say that without acknowledging that they're surrounded by people whose only constitutional amendment is the extermination of Jews. So it's one thing to have. I think there's some outright, far-right bigots in the Knesset. I think it's been a disaster for Israel.

46:30Oversettlements. 100 % I'm with you. But meanwhile, the only thing I can see resembling a constitution or a mission or a purpose statement about the Houthis and Hamas is the elimination of Israel and the extermination of Jews. So that to me, like one is awful, awful practices on the part of a government or society. Another is a genocidal death cult. And it strikes me that this peace we're talking about that we'd like, it takes two to tango. My sense is that Israel and the West have come to the table with some semblance of an offer that Hamas has said they're not interested in. Well, I mean, there's many things to unpack there.

47:12I mean, one is Netanyahu who's not been serious about any offer. He has no interest in these peace deals. the more fundamental thing, this is a horrible thing to talk about, and it's very difficult to talk about sensitively. But I guess the question is, what is it exactly that Israel is worried about, that they're trying to deal with here? There was an extreme barbaric, horrifying atrocity in October. But what actually happened there? What actually happened there was a pretty low-tech assault across a very poorly defended border, with the Israeli army and security intelligence services, I'm afraid, not competently defending that border.

48:00If you're trying to fix that problem, there is a hell of a lot that you could have done to prevent that assault happening. And for the last 30 years, there's been no evidence that Hamas and Hezbollah pose an existential threat to the survival of Israel, nor what happened, horrifying though it was, was not an existential threat to the survival of Israel. What happened was a brutal, horrifying terrorist assault with all that went with it. And that's something that could have been dealt with, I'm afraid, by reasonable military security and intelligence procedures at a border. This is also where I disagree with the U.S.'s approach to 9-11.

48:43I don't think 9-11 was an existential threat to the United States. And I think the way to deal with it is to improve your intelligence security procedures, not to think that you can somehow solve the problem once and for all by invading someone else's country. So you are being intellectually honest. I would argue that you're sort of blaming the victim and the second worst day in Jewish history since the Holocaust. does warrant a response. And to your point, when 2 ,800 Americans were killed, we went on to kill 400 ,000 Iraqis and Afghanis. And I would argue that in some ways that conflict set the stage for what's going on now.

49:21And that is an unchecked Iran because we've taken out the buffer of Iraq. So I agree with you to have the viewpoint you have on Israel would need to require or augur a similar response on what you feel is probably an over-response from the US. Crazy response after 9-11. It made no response. I mean, the problem is this is too emotionally charged for people on every side. I mean, people have lost relatives. They've seen images of rape and murder and there are hostages being kept. So nobody's going to want to think about this in objective terms. Nobody wants to think about the long term. People want revenge, and they want to believe the fantasy that there is something that you can do that can guarantee this can never happen again.

50:07But the world isn't like that, and that region isn't like that. And the same will be true on the Palestinian side. What they see is 40 ,000 people killed and women and children dead. And they're not interested in having any conversation around this either, because everybody is too traumatized. I want to move to something lighter. I don't want to end on that. So I don't know how to segue out of this. I'm going to ask you two very, very trivial questions. The first is we're going back to our sons. We have a lot of young men who listen to this podcast, a lot of new dads. What are your observations around parenting, being a good partner, and being a good father?

50:49I think it's very easy to say that you acknowledge that your children are different to you, but in practice, it's very difficult to live that out. I mean, the great wisdom is that these are very different human beings with very different characters and minds, and they're going to find their own paths. But there is so much in our parenting, which is about trying to model the parenting that we received or repeat the parenting we received or to try to make kids do things which we enjoyed or read books which we like reading or become the kind of people that we either were or even worse trying to become the kind of people we wished we were.

51:34So getting out of their way and getting the balance between really testing them, challenging them, pushing them, but also accepting when they're not going to be very good at something, acknowledge when they're not going to enjoy something. I mean, I'm struggling with this in my seven-year-old at the moment. I'm obsessed with reading books. I read books all the time. He tells me he doesn't really like reading books. So we're in a continual standoff where I, of course, say to myself, oh, he just says that, and I just need to find the right book for him. So the poor boy is now buried under 200 different books that I've tried to produce in the hope that I can.

52:13And I come up with every kind of bribe and trick and story to try to get him to do these things. Maybe at some point I have to acknowledge that he actually, when he says he wants to play football instead of reading a book, he genuinely does want to play football instead of reading a book. Let me just say it gets worse.

52:30I have the same issue around, I would really like to inspire my kids to get their face out of their phones and to read more. And for me, it was in junior high school, this great book series called The Great Brain about a young kid who is smart and funny. Do you know this? I'm going to write that down. Oh, it was wonderful. It was just really fun. It was about a kid in, I think, 19th century middle America and just his adventures and how he was always kind of very Mark Twain-like. And then as I got into high school, I started reading John Irving, and I just thought that was so wonderful. Anyways, your turn.

53:05If I were to try and put a book in front of my 17 and 14-year-old that might inspire them or reignite them, their interest in reading, what are two or three titles you would recommend? Well, I think getting people into really good short detective and spy fiction is a great way of developing people's literary tastes and skills while having fun. so I think Michael Connolly who writes these amazing Los Angeles police detective procedural novels is great the Harry Bosch series I think John le Carre's spy stories I mean it's a little bit more adult but he's an extraordinary prose stylist there's a great French detective writer George Simonon writes very short books the May Gray novels but I also think non-fiction is fantastic there's some great stuff recently about But, well, I think that Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens is a great thing for a young adult to get into.

54:03There's an American academic at Edinburgh called Steve Brussetti. He's written a great book called The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, which I'd recommend. It's a lovely book because he's explaining some pretty complex stuff about paleontology through stories of his friends in Poland and his adventures. and history. So I'd be trying to ship that at them. I think historical novels can also be a great way through. I don't know how young your youngest son is. Maybe a little old now, but there's a series called The Young Samurai Series set in Tokugawa, Japan. It's about 1600. Did you see Shogun? Yeah, exactly.

54:44It's very much Shogun for children. Wonderful. I read Shogun when I was 15 and loved it. Yeah, James Clavel. I remember that, yeah. I like all of those. Rory Stewart is the former UK Secretary of State for International Development and co-host of the popular podcast The Rest is Politics. He serves as a senior advisor to GiveDirectly, a notable direct cash charity, and is professor in the practice of grand strategy at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs. Rory is also the author of several books, including The Places in Between, How Not to Be a Politician, and Politics on the Edge. I could go on forever, but the thing I found so interesting here is that he walked on foot for two years across Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, India, and Nepal in 2002.

55:26Rory, I could not disagree with you more on Israel, but I find you are so sober and thoughtful and reserved and intellectually honest about your comments that it softens the beach for me. and while I haven't changed my view, I do learn. And I hope that more people are exposed to you and your views because even if they don't change their mind, it just helps us all move forward and think, all right, there's got to be a way we can find common ground here. Thank you for your good work. Really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you, Scott. Really appreciate it.

56:11Algebra of happiness. I was really moved by a TikTok I saw of a young woman who was talking, she had left her house for the first time without a wig. She suffers from alopecia, has some baldness, hair loss, whatever you want to call it. And she said it was the first time she'd left her house without a wig. And it was a very trying and emotional moment for her, and that she wasn't going to let alopecia rule her life. And I really related to it in the sense that I think as young people, we're just so focused. We're so insecure. We're insecure beings. And we're insecure for a reason. You're meant to be worried about shit because that's a survival instinct.

56:52You're meant to worry about what others think about you because being shaming and kicked out of the tribe meant certain death. So shame and also your attractiveness to mates, wanting to be attractive such that the species propagate. I think that men are especially susceptible to shaming around their economic viability, and women are unfairly judged based on their aesthetics. So I think they can be especially insecure around their looks, especially young people. And it kind of took me back to when I lost my hair. Believe it or not, my hair used to be one of my best features. I had a ponytail in graduate school, which is an image, isn't it?

57:30And then when I started losing my hair, it was just sort of devastating is the wrong word, but it was really upsetting. And the worst thing about losing your hair is the losing part. It's great to have a full head of hair. It's great, in my opinion, to be bald. I love having a shaved head. But the in-between is what sucked. And it used to be a huge source of insecurity and upset for me that I was losing what I thought was my best feature. And obviously, it represents the loss of masculinity and youth and all those good things. But what I would say to anyone who's struggling with one thing about their physical appearance, keep in mind that people just look at you and they make an assessment on the whole you.

58:07And I was looking at this woman. She had really cool nails and beautiful skin and a nice smile. And I remember thinking that people who look at her or men that look at her think, oh, there's a nice looking woman. And they might think if they look closely, oh, she has hair loss. but they don't, it's not what they zero in on. They zero in on how the whole person, your personality, your intellect, your character, your smile, your clothes, the way you dress. So my advice to young people is to lean into your strengths. I started working out such that I could take advantage of some of my strengths. And I tried to take, you know, I tried to take some pride in the way I dress, despite the fact that losing your hair in your 20s is not a very good look.

58:48I also had terrible acne when I was younger. And I started getting scarring on my face, which I was really self-conscious about. And then I remember telling my ex-wife that I was so self-conscious about my acne scars. And she looked at me and she said, where do you have acne scars? And I thought, wow, people really don't notice what you think they're noticing. And so what you're going to be upset about when you get older is not that you had acne, Not that you had hair loss. Not that you were a little bit overweight. Whatever it might be. You're going to be upset at how upset you were. Don't focus on the little things.

59:24Don't focus on what's wrong with you. The thing you're going to be upset about is looking back. You're going to wish you'd been kinder to yourself. You're going to realize that you were better looking than you thought. This episode was produced by Caroline Chagrin. Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer. And Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn. And please follow our Prop G Markets Pod wherever you get your pods for new episodes every Monday and Thursday.

1:00:03I got a zit coming out of my face. I haven't had a zit in a while. Hmm. Makes me feel 18 again. Actually, it makes me feel 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, and 23 again. Oh, my God.