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Podcast Episode Summary: The Rest Is Politics - Leading with James Rubin
Episode Overview Title: 61. James Rubin: Working for Biden, American Intervention, and the Fight Against Russian Disinformation Hosts: Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell Guest: James Rubin, former diplomat and commentator on international affairs Release Date: [Insert Release Date] Podcast Description: The episode delves into critical questions about foreign intervention, the perspectives of American leadership under President Biden compared to previous administrations, and the ongoing challenges of misinformation propagated by foreign powers.
Key Themes & Concepts
Foreign Intervention
- Limits of Foreign Intervention: The discussion examines the moral and strategic limits of American intervention in global conflicts, questioning whether the U.S. should continue its role as the world's policeman.
- Historical Context: James Rubin reflects on his experiences from the 1990s, particularly during the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, emphasizing the successful outcomes of these actions.
American Leadership
- Biden vs. Clinton vs. Obama:
- Rubin argues that President Biden's approach aligns more closely with President Clinton’s proactive foreign policy style rather than Obama's more restrained approach.
- The importance of a cohesive Western alliance in confronting challenges posed by authoritarian regimes, particularly Russia.
Misinformation and Disinformation
- Role in Democracy: Rubin emphasizes that disinformation is a significant threat to democracy, as it undermines the information ecosystem essential for informed decision-making.
- Asymmetry in Information Warfare: He discusses how authoritarian regimes like Russia and China manipulate information, creating an imbalance where they can operate freely while democratic societies face restrictions.
Personal Insights from James Rubin
- Career Path: Rubin discusses his journey from academia to high-ranking diplomatic roles, illustrating the unique aspects of American political culture and the importance of passion for issues over mere career advancement.
- The Role of Technology: The discussion touches on the impact of social media on politics and the challenge of maintaining factual integrity amid a rapidly changing information landscape.
Key Takeaways
- Lessons from the 90s: Successful interventions were possible due to strong leadership and a commitment to democratic values; however, the complexity of modern geopolitics requires more nuanced approaches.
- Future of American Leadership: The U.S. must grapple with its identity and role in the world as it faces challenges from adversaries leveraging misinformation.
- Collaboration and Regulation: There is a need for international cooperation on regulating social media platforms and combating disinformation, emphasizing the importance of labeling and transparency in information.
Notable Quotes
- "The information domain is how we're going to live our lives, how democracies thrive or fall." - James Rubin
- "Without America leading, good things probably won’t happen." - James Rubin
Conclusion This episode of *The Rest Is Politics* delves into the intricate dynamics of American foreign policy, the enduring impact of historical interventions, and the pervasive threat of disinformation in the digital age. James Rubin’s insights as a seasoned diplomat provide valuable perspectives on the challenges facing democratic societies today.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
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1:38Welcome to The Rest is Politics Leading with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. And we're joined today by a gentleman by the name of Jamie Rubin. Jamie Rubin came to a kind of global prominence of sorts under President Bill Clinton when he was an assistant secretary of state to secretary of state madeline albright having done pretty much the same thing at the united nations having been become a bit of an expert on arms control in particular kind of pretty serious heavyweight diplomat and i got to know him very very well in particular during the kosovo war when we worked together and pretty well pretty effectively and then post the clinton era jamie's basically dabbled in journalism broadcasting podcasting, a bit of academia, a bit of PR, then worked for the OECD for a while, had a bizarre time at the New York Port Authority.
2:31Was that right? Is that one of the things I remember? And now is back at the State Department. And actually with a pretty, I think, important job, especially the job is called Special Envoy and Coordinator of something called the Global Engagement Center, which, if I read it right, Jamie, is a kind of sort of taking on misinformation from Russia, China, Iran, other actors that might be trying to damage American and broader Western interests. So let's start with that. Back in June 2017, Jamie, you may remember when you were dabbling around in this and that and the other, you and I wrote a joint article for a British to an American publication about Russia.
3:15And I looked it up this morning and essentially was saying that neither of our countries were taking seriously enough the threat to our democracies from Russia's greater aggressive stance, including with this whole misinformation thing. So, hey, presto for us and our great prescience, but just tell us about the job. What does it do and what does it entail and why does it matter? Well, the article you sent me as well, and I was pretty impressed with it too. I mean, it was seven years ago and most everyone was sort of still thinking that Vladimir Putin was someone you could do business with or something like that.
3:54And you and I pointed out that everything had changed, that in the disinformation area, in the intelligence operations, in the military area, they were now a huge threat and neither the UK nor the United States were dealing with it. This issue of disinformation, I think, is the issue of the future because the information domain is how we're going to live our lives, how democracies thrive or fall. If we're not in a fact-based world, we're in an authoritarian world. And the Russians and the Chinese have figured this out. They've closed their information space. So we, the free world, can't operate inside Russia or inside China.
4:34And they, Russia and China, can operate in the whole rest of the world and do as much damage as they want, say the truth, not the truth, propaganda, disinformation, whatever. It's an asymmetry that is now built into the system. And the United States, frankly, built these tools, social media, Facebook, Twitter. We used to be promoting them as great mechanisms of spreading democracy 10 years ago. Now we realize they contain the dark side of globalization that Russia and China have weaponized and are using every day all over the world. Jamie, I'd love to come back to that. And I think it's a huge issue.
5:11But maybe start a little bit earlier in your life and talk us through your own life, the way the world has changed. And I wanted to start with giving international listeners a sense of your career, because you were very much, when I was a young diplomat, one of the great kind of pinups of the world of international diplomacy. But you had a very particular type of career, which is very important, I think, in the American system, but is a bit unfamiliar to a lot of other people around the world and helps understand where people like you come from, where maybe people like Samantha Power come from.
5:44my understanding is you'd basically been a sort of academic, worked for a nonprofit, and then you'd become one of these characters that one sees on the edge of the West Wing. You'd become a kind of staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and then you'd become an assistant to Madeleine Albright when she was the ambassador to the UN, and then you came back to work in the State Department. And then you started working on presidential campaigns. And presumably, if your bets had gone right, if instead of backing Hillary Clinton, you'd backed President Obama and this and the other, you would now be the sexual state.
6:15So tell us a little bit about the life of bright young things in the American system, the American government. Tell us a bit about what it was like in the 80s and 90s, where you were going, who you were. Well, ouch.
6:31I think you're right, though. I would have had probably a higher job had I picked Obama over Hillary, but I'll answer your question. What's unique about our system is that when a president wins, everything changes. They can change the entire administration from not just the top levels. So I started out as a young student without any clarity about what I wanted to do. And Ronald Reagan became president in 1981 and again in 85. And I actually thought he was going to blow up the world. I thought there was like a 50-50 chance we were going to have global thermonuclear war in which the world would virtually end.
7:12Some of my colleagues protested, and there was a million people in the street back then in the freeze movement. But I learned and studied nuclear weapons and became one of a handful of people in Washington who knew every nuclear weapon, knew every treaty, knew every article of every treaty. And in the course of that, became, met Joe Biden in 1987. And he hired me and I worked for him for five years. And then nuclear weapons weren't the issue. The Cold War ended and I evolved. And then the next issue for me that had the same salience, the same drive. And this is the lesson I tell younger people.
7:54I did all this stuff because there was an issue I really cared about. I wasn't trying to climb the political ladder. That wasn't my objective. I'm not saying I wouldn't have enjoyed it, but it wasn't what drove me. What drove me was nuclear weapons and then Bosnia. When the war in Bosnia started, I was working for Joe Biden and I brought him there. And the only trip he took in those five years, because he had a young daughter at the time, he didn't travel. And we went to Bosnia. He confronted Slobodan Milosevic. He met the leaders of Sarajevo in the airport, in the bunkers, traveled to Tuzla, saw the horrors of the war in Bosnia, and became an advocate on the left, which wasn't common, for the use of military power.
8:37And then that's how I met Madeleine Albright, because she was the only administration official in the first year of the Clinton administration that actually believed we should use military power in Bosnia. And Jamie, let's stay in the 90s for a moment because that was looking back the sort of high peak of the liberal global order, of American power, of these great interventions, Bosnia, Kosovo. And it was also a period of these very sort of dramatic, charismatic American diplomats, of which I guess Richard Holbrook would be a big example. Can you give us a bit of a sense of these personalities and who somebody like Holbrook was and the kind of influence the United States played in the world in places like Bosnia?
9:18Well, it's interesting because Alistair and I met each other during the second Clinton term. And this is when Madeleine Albright became secretary of state. And in the first term, the United States didn't really decide to intervene in Bosnia till very, very late in the game. But once we decided, it was a different time. We really had and we were called by the French then the hyper power. We had so much influence around the world that a decision by the president to go this way or that way changed everything. And it did. It brought peace to Bosnia. We used military power. The Serbs recoiled and were finally stood up to.
9:56And then they agreed to a peace agreement. We then faced the same situation in the second term. Richard Holbrook was famously the diplomat who implemented President Clinton's policy. I knew Richard Holbrook extremely well. He knew my ex-wife extremely well. We floated in the same circles. We weren't buddies because at that time, you know, he wanted to be secretary of state and Madeleine Albright became secretary of state. And he didn't like that very much to get to your secretary of state question. And so he saw me as a rival who was helping his rival become secretary of state. But he also was wrong about Kosovo because he wanted to continue negotiating with Milosevic till the bitter end.
10:44He didn't realize that Kosovo for Milosevic was different than Bosnia, that he wasn't going to make a deal, that he wasn't going to capitulate. And so it took the use of military power. And then when we started to use force, Richard told Wes Clark, the Supreme Allied commander, that Wes Clark has a gun aimed at his own head. Because Richard was jealous that Madeleine Albright and Wes Clark were running this and he wasn't. And he was also substantively differing with us in thinking that we should have made a deal. and he was wrong. I think demonstrably wrong because Tony Blair and Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright confronted Milosevic and it's the last war in which we absolutely won.
11:28We achieved our objectives. Milosevic went to prison and then democracy actually came to Serbia for a brief period of time and we did it without losing a substantial American life that I can think of. Jamie, I'm going to put in a last question and hand back to Alistair. But this is really interesting because for listeners, this is also about the way in which personalities, ambition, careers play into politics. So what lessons do you think you draw looking back on that period of your life in the 1990s about what worked well in the American system, what worked less well in the American system, what made characters like Holbrooke so successful, and also what gave them their limitations?
12:10What are the broader lessons you draw from that experience in the 90s? Well, the United States, in my opinion, is still what we, Madeleine Albright, called the indispensable nation. It doesn't mean we have the power today that we had then, relatively speaking. But it does mean that without America leading, things probably won't happen. Things, good things won't happen. And to the extent America is not leading, more bad things will happen. That was the lesson that I learned. And I think that the unique thing about it is that Joe Biden is closer to Bill Clinton than he is to Barack Obama. And that's why he has confronted Putin in Ukraine and put together a Western alliance because he's been around for 40 years and he learned one big thing.
13:01When the West sticks together, as Alistair and I wrote in that article, the Russians fold ultimately have to. And that's why we've stuck together. So after the failures of the Bush administration, the views I hold became very unpopular because they were seen as too willing to use American power and influence in the world. And the view that it was all hopeless and we can't do any good in the world. Kind of the view I associate with you, Rory, from reading your book on Afghanistan. Jimmy, we'll come back to that in a second. Yeah. It was dominant. And now the conventional wisdom, which always is wrong because it's behind the curve, is now swinging back towards the recognition that without American leadership, things don't happen.
13:49Now, there is a slight risk that if somebody is listening to this and listening to you for the first time, they're going to think that you're just the guy who likes military power. So I'm going to put the other side of the story. Right. And another place where you would argue that you showed a bit of prescience, and that was, and I only know this and you know this because it's in my diaries which have been published, which was when you, at a church service in the wake of September the 11th attacks, took me to one side and said, just be very, very careful about these people, these neocons, because they're going to use this to do all sorts of stuff that you shouldn't be involved in.
14:28Do you remember that? I do. I do. It was the Cheney Rumsfeld period of the Bush administration. Yeah. The early years after 9-11, the years in which we alienated the world. You know what's so ironic about this is that Bush seems like normal now because of what followed him. And I have to be very careful about American politics and what I say, but it seems normal. But we have to remember, imagine this, go back to 2000, change 500 votes in Florida. Al Gore is president. We don't invade Iraq. And we start global warming as an American mission 25 years ago. Think of where America would be. And the hinge of history hinged on 500 votes.
15:17So that's the power of the United States. We went to the Bush administration 9-11 happened and they went way too far. The pendulum swung way too far Unilateralism remember Donald Rumsfeld saying he didn't care how the prisoners were treated in Guantanamo I was living in London and he lost Europe with that sentence Because the idea of the treatment of prisoners pursuant to the Geneva Convention was a core value of Europeans And for an American leader to just throw that out the window, alienated all of Europe, not just new Europe and old Europe that he referred to, but all of Europe. Jamie, I have to come back because you slightly poked me with this allegation.
15:59Well, you were the one who poked me with the Secretary of State. So I think actually my position has always been much closer to President Biden's old position on Afghanistan before his catastrophic withdrawal. I was a believer in a light footprint. I think the problems of the world come from America lurching from overextended surges to total isolation. Fair enough. And that actually the model is much more Bosnia where you were much more prudent, as you say, you know, the more soldiers injured on the basketball courts in Sarajevo than outside the fence. You weren't trying to micromanage and nation build.
16:36You gave quite a lot of space to Bosnian civil society to build itself up. But let me address that because I know where you're going and it's fair to an extent. But during that time in the critique of Afghanistan and Iraq, this thing became called the forever war, the quagmire, the thing that will suck all American power. And that swung the pendulum too far. And thus, when President Trump came into office, he had this weird agreement with the far left about the quagmire. And we lost our ability until President Biden took power again to see the important role of the United States. So I think you're right.
17:20I obviously think Bosnia was done better than Afghanistan and Iraq because I referred to Gore probably not invading Iraq. He would have to tell you. But that was my understanding is that he voted for the first Gulf War and said he would vote against the second one. So these are subtle matters. And I was poking you. But the conventional wisdom at the time was that, you know, we need to stay away from foreign problems. And the problem, Jamie, there for me is I was trying to essentially say, don't do the search in Afghanistan. The problem is you bring in all these troops, you're going to be forced to withdraw.
17:58You're going to create this pendulum. If you could have the patience. And paradoxically, maybe people like Rumsfeld were right. Maybe Joe Biden was right when he was saying that he wanted a light footprint. That in fact, the best way for America staying the course is being more moderate, more prudent in its involvement in the world, not lurching from this huge to the little. Well, Rory, you're an expert on Afghanistan, and I'm not, okay? And it's not an area that I consider myself an expert on, and I consider you closer to an expert on it. And so I wouldn't dispute anything you just said except to say that it's easy to sit back and organize the perfect balance between intervention and avoidance.
18:40It's easy in the aftermath to know exactly what we should and shouldn't have done. People now, for example, say, well, if we had just given the Ukrainians all the weapons in the beginning, they would have not been in such a position. And they forget that two years ago, legitimately, President Biden was managing the risk of global thermonuclear war. He was worried about World War III. And from Putin's words, there was a reason to worry about World War III. And so I believe that hindsight and second guessing is a necessary part of our democracy. But but we have to put the context in place. And just as President Biden was asking the Israelis now to remember after 9-11, we did too much.
19:24And they should remember that we got too mad. There was a context in which Bush and Rumsfeld and all of them were operating and and and a large Tony Blair effort to do the nation building in Afghanistan. He was the one who led the Bush administration into nation building in Afghanistan. He was the one who believed that we needed to have a long war and change the Muslim world. It wasn't just the United States. Why do you feel so strongly that what we did in Bosnia and Kosovo was the right thing to do and Iraq and Afghanistan the wrong thing to do? And why do you think my old boss felt so strongly and still feels that they were both the right thing to do?
20:06I have the greatest respect for Prime Minister Blair for the time that I knew him in office and observed the important role he played in ensuring that the president of the United States and Madeleine Albright had a partner to win the war in Kosovo, the last war in which we really won. I think that's an objective statement. It's not a criticism. That's, I think, objectively true. We achieved our objectives at a reasonable cost. Afghanistan and Iraq are more controversial. Arguably, the net cost of all that we did compared to the gains are a much tougher balance. balance. I would say that I don't want to criticize Prime Minister Blair.
20:45I mean, you know that at the time when you were carrying around the dossier, you came by my house and I was someone who thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapons of mass destruction, biological weapons of mass destruction, not nuclear weapons. And I think that was a big difference that is so lost in the context. Remember, there was an anthrax attack in the United States. Everyone forgets about that. It was anthrax plus 9-11 that led George Bush to do Iraq. And because the fear of biological weapons was real. Anthrax attacks happened in Washington, in New York. So all I'm saying is that they're tough calls.
21:30I think objectively, we were too unilateral in Iraq and Afghanistan. We didn't have allies. We didn't have support. We didn't wait long enough on Iraq before using force. There's lots of things I would have done differently. I think for Tony Blair, once, let's face it, he felt like he had won a war in Bosnia, won a war in Sierra Leone, won a war in Kosovo, won a war in Afghanistan. And this was number five. And he had a pretty good record going in. You were right there. You know that. That was a factor. The confidence that you get when the last four times work. Jimmy, one thing that always struck me as strange is that I would be full of admiration for US generals and officials.
22:13But there seemed to be a real challenge somehow in the American political culture for accepting that there were some things that couldn't be done. For accepting, for example, that Afghanistan was one of the poorest countries on earth, that one person in each village could read or write, that it would take 20 years to turn Afghanistan into a country like Pakistan. And yet the administration was talking about creating gender sensitive, multi-ethnic, centralized state based on democracy, human rights, rule law. And Holbrook was getting behind all Ashraf Ghani's rhetoric. What is it about the American political culture which creates this sense of optimistic unreality?
22:49Well, I would say they were not as cynical as the British, because that's what I would say. The British developed a cynicism about their imperialism. And we were never an imperial country. We're still not an imperial country. The British system created a cynicism where you're always doing the hyper-realist maneuver, playing factors against each other. You know, the famous phrase of, you know, using in Iraq or in other places to get them divided and conquered. And that cynicism is not present in the United States because largely our global power came after World War II and the Marshall Plan and all the things that we did that were that were so successful in Germany and Japan and keeping the world community together in during the time of communism.
23:36And so we didn't have the grand collapse of our empire the way the British had a collapse of its empire. And the result was cynicism. And it took a Tony Blair who objected to the cynicism of the conservative party to believe in doing something in Bosnia, doing something in Kosovo. Remember, John Major didn't want to do anything. Maggie Thatcher did, but John Major didn't. And it took Blair for the British to act in Bosnia. They were treating it as a hyper-realist problem. and they're all the same and we should just let them kill each other pretty much. But then in Iraq and Afghanistan, right, you see the downside of this, right?
24:12You see Holbrook getting into unbelievably weird stuff, trying to topple Karzai, prop up Ashraf Ghani. And exactly right. I mean, Holbrook was always saying people like me were kind of horrible old British cynics because we were trying to say, you simply do not understand the country you're dealing with. In many ways, you're repeating the mistakes of Vietnam. Well, Vietnam was one of the reasons President Obama had a problem with Holbrooke because he compared everything to Vietnam. And I think comparisons to Vietnam are not very helpful in the modern American culture. The people that I learned to work with during the Clinton administration saw the Vietnam analogies harm their willingness to engage in Bosnia.
24:50They were constantly fearing they were getting into another Vietnam. It took Madeleine Albright, who was older than the Vietnam generation, to say, now, hold on a minute. Bosnia is not Vietnam. The use of military power, even as Colin Powell saw it, if we used a little military power, we'd get sucked into a quagmire. That's what he said. So these things are tricky. I think analogies are generally not helpful. I think it's useful to treat each issue on its own merits. Yes, we probably overestimated. We definitely overestimated our ability to affect change in Afghanistan and Iraq. No question about it.
25:27And you know more about Afghanistan than I ever will. Maybe not as much as my sister, but a lot. And they clearly bit off more than they could chew. And President Biden's original policy was one that we ended up. Well, anyway, let me just leave it there. Roy, do you want to explain the in-joke about the sister? So Jamie's got this amazing sister, Elizabeth, who was an incredible correspondent in Afghanistan. I mean, she got into some very remote areas, wrote some great stuff. I tried to take her out on a date when we were both at Harvard. And at the moment at which she rung the doorbell, I was brushing my teeth and I managed to knock out my front tooth.
26:06So I literally looked like a pirate. So I went out for a date trying to impress Jamie's sister in this fancy restaurant, literally with looking like a pirate. I had no tooth in front. And she was very gracious, but she never really wanted to go out with me. Oh, well, okay. Oh, well. Now, listen, we've talked a lot about Madeleine Albright and really impressive woman, amazing story. The last book she wrote before she died, I was really impressed by and really struck by. Fascism, a warning. And the most terrifying thing is that she's kind of, you read it and yeah, she might be talking about Russia, she might be talking about China, but she's also talking about America.
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26:41That's pretty alarming. That's pretty alarming. I know you can't sort of pardon Donald Trump, But why has America become a very different country? Why has its power waned? And why do you have somebody that you clearly respect who can write a book on that theme with her own country in mind? Well, Madeline loved America. She used to call herself, you know, totally American Madeline. She was an immigrant. She came from Czechoslovakia. And, you know, I was very, very close to her in the 90s. Then I moved here and I spent less time with her, but I did stay in pretty close contact. In fact, I'm familiar with her views during the 2000s until she died about two years ago.
27:20The post-2016 period in America was a very tough time. I mean, you saw me during that period. I had a tough time because everything I had been taught and believed in in terms of American values was challenged. But in the end, President Trump had one term and President Biden has brought America's resilience and successful leadership in the world, brought our allies back as partners rather than people to be dismissed. and I have to be very careful going much beyond that other than to say that I think we have managed to take what was a change in the world over China where the Chinese president changed his policy and began to change the way in which he posed risks to the rest of the world.
28:23Trump recognized that but handled it ineptly because he didn't have allies supporting him. And so we've put those alliances together in Asia, in South Korea, Japan, trilaterals never happened before. The Quad, AUKUS, these are the terms of art of the diplomats in Asia. And that's been done by President Biden because he knows how to build alliances. That's what he's done in Ukraine. That's what he's done in competing with China, competing where we need to, confronting where we need to, and working together where we must. Jamie, one of the things that is going to be difficult is that we're in a world where isolationism and protectionism is becoming more popular.
29:06It's not an accident that Donald Trump's able to lean into that. And it's not an accident that he made that a big part of what he was up to in 2016. Is there any appetite really left in the United States for globalization, free trade, America as a global policeman? Or is Trump actually right in suspecting that a lot of voters in the U.S. want to move away from that? They're tired of all of that stuff. Well, I think President Biden has shown that he believes in American leadership. He uses the phrase indispensable nation. He has his own formulations for it. He has rejected the views that you're describing in building a coalition on Ukraine, in building a coalition vis-a-vis China.
29:53He's rejected the isolationism that you're describing and has won widespread support in Congress and the country for his foreign policy. You're focused on trade, and I would ask you to separate trade from the larger issues of American leadership. If you're going to push them together, it's a very tough conversation because it needs to be disaggregated. Trade has been globalization. The perception that free trade only benefited the rich is widely held in Europe and in the United States. But that doesn't mean that American leadership and globalization, whatever that means, needs to be affected. It's a trade issue.
30:37It's a little bit more complicated though, maybe, because obviously Joe Biden came in with Jake Sullivan talking about a foreign policy for the middle class. And a lot of that seemed to be about learning lessons from 2016 and trying to win back voters who were a bit unhappy with the amount of money and energy the US was putting into the rest of the world. And Biden signed up to this phrase, the forever war. He pulled out of Afghanistan. He, from the point of view of many people in the Middle East didn't really stand up for them when the Houthi were firing rockets into Saudi and UAE. Ukraine is in a way the exception in this story, but the feeling that the world has is not that Joe Biden has radically reversed the Obama Trump style.
31:22It's that the US is in a slow withdrawal from the world and that Biden's policy in Ukraine is a small exception and a general view that American voters don't want to play the role that they played in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. Rory, it must be nice to be able to declare what the feeling of the world is. You said there's a feeling in the world. How do you assess that? I'm actually in the diplomatic environment, and I'm meeting with the foreign diplomats, and I'm seeing what they're saying and doing and believing. And I think what you just said is nonsense, that the United States is retreating from the world.
31:59Yes, they would prefer some of them to have more free trade agreements and less of a use of trade. And what you've missed here is that there's a new development in the global world. It's called China. And you've assigned the trade policy solely to politics and ignored this fundamental problem that we face in terms of the Chinese role in the world. And the trade issues that you're addressing are mostly about what Jake Sullivan has called the small yard and the high fence. And so to just pick one of Jake Sullivan's remarks and miss the other one, you've left out a billion people and the leader of that billion people country that we believe has believes in a system authoritarianism and is trying to change the world to be a good place for authoritarian countries.
32:49And the diplomats that I meet with believe the United States has done a very, very good job in managing the U.S.-China relationship and leading the world to build AUKUS, to build the Quad, to build the trilateral with the South Koreans and the Asians. And for you to just say there's a feeling in the world that the United States is retreating, I think is overstating it just a wee bit. And Jamie, listen, look at the way that Mohammed bin Salman is treating you. Look at the way that Mohammed bin Zayed is treating you. Look at the way that so many African leaders are looking towards the United States at the moment.
33:21And give you another example. I need to stop there because you can't just throw these things out. The three names that you've talked about are begging the United States to get involved in the Middle East peace process. The three men that you mentioned are working every day with the United States, asking us to do more, wanting us to do more. And for you to describe them as dismissing the United States means that you are operating at a very facile level. Behind the scenes, when the door is shut, when the diplomats are talking and working together, the two men that you mentioned, MBS and MBZ, which you called dismissive of the United States, that's not what I'm seeing.
33:59And I think for you to say that is just a little flippant. It's difficult to resolve. because it's difficult to resolve. You're a professional American civil servant. You're not going to agree with me that American power is waning. I travel a great deal. I see a lot of these people and the way in which people talk about the United States is very different from the way they spoke in the 90s. Well, absolutely. The world has changed. Your failure to intervene in Syria, your withdrawal from Afghanistan, the failure to respond to Putin in Crimea in 2014, your failure to respond to Houthi attacks on Saudi and UAE, all these things contribute.
34:36Well, as it happens, I wrote a public article about Syria that advocated the use of military power to work with the Turks to do something about it. And so on that one, if you're saying you were actually in favor of using military power in Syria, we might agree if you were actually for that. I don't know whether you were for that. Maybe you can tell us. Were you? I was in favor of responding to the chemical weapons. What does that mean? You mean upholding the red line? Not upholding the red line. Throwing a few cruise missiles in? Yes. What were you for? Just throwing a few in like Trump did? Yes.
35:11If Obama had done that, that would have made a huge difference. And your failure to do that was a big problem. And the use of you here is interesting. We're trying to have a conversation. And you're assigning to me the role of explaining every single government policy going back 25 years. And throwing out phrases like, you know, what the world thinks of you. And I just don't think it's constructive. I think we should pick the issue, discuss it. either agree or disagree, but to just throw a bunch of things together, MBZ and MBS are dissing the United States. That is flat wrong. Very good. Over to Alistair.
35:46I'm really happy just to sit here. I like people defending their position robustly. That's what we do here. That's what we did in the past, isn't it? That's true. And we were pretty good at it back then, weren't we? Tell us a bit about this stuff that you're doing now, Because I'm not a tech person, as you know. I'm here with my pen and my paper and my notes. You've done very well by social media. I do okay on social media, but I'm not – I don't – so when you say, for example, you did an interview at the Munich Security Conference and you talked about what the Russians are doing in Africa. Right.
36:21To turn people against America and to do it in a way that actually could cost people their lives. And when we talk about interference in democracy, what do they actually do? What is the stuff that you're trying to counter and what are you doing to try and counter it? Good. Well, thank you for getting back to my job instead of defending America for the last 25 years, which is, you know, depending on which president is easier or harder. The disinformation challenge is the hardest thing I've ever worked on. I worked on arms control and the Balkans, all these interventions we discussed. This is harder than all of that because we're trying to maintain a free and open information system in which the vulnerable still have a chance to get their views heard.
37:04And you don't want to be a censor. You don't want to block freedom of the press. You don't want to decide what's true or not true. But you still want to be able to stop the Russians and Chinese from exploiting this incredibly open information environment. It's hard. It's really hard. So after a year of working on this, what I've kind of figured out, the one thing we can do is try to make sure there's a made in the Kremlin stamp on information or a made in the PRC stamp on information. So when somebody sees a story, let's just start with Bulgarian and biological weapons. You're in Bulgaria, you speak Russian and you see on your screen, whether it's social media, old media, new media, the U.S.
37:48has biological weapons in Ukraine. You might or might not believe it. It's like even especially if it's in Russian and you speak Russian But if you saw Russia says the US has biological weapons in Ukraine You know, you're getting the Kremlin point of view and I think it would have less power so Labeling putting a label on it. I think is is the one safeguard we ought to have to prevent the Russians and the Chinese from doing uh but you can't you can't control what bulgarian media put out absolutely not but we can work with the bulgarians so that they impose rules requiring labeling right and and and it becomes the the the minimum standard in so we've developed this framework to fight disinformation which is essentially a list of rules that that are not laws that are ways to ensure truth in labeling But let me get to the Africa thing because it's really interesting.
38:42It's the ultimate cruelty. So we were able to reveal in the early stages a Russian intelligence operation in Africa, which was intended to dissuade Africans from believing in the value of Western medical care. You know, this is PEPFAR, the program that saved millions of lives. We've spent$100 billion in Africa, the America that Rory thinks is so disrespected in the world. $100 billion to save African lives. And the Russians are jealous of the respect that we have in Africa because of the spent money we spent and the lives we've saved. So they try to discredit it. But think of what the result is.
39:23And when you say they try to discredit it, how do they do that? I'll give you an example. They have a conference in West Africa and they bring in a bunch of local people they hire and intelligence officers posing as journalists. And they have a meeting in which it says dengue fever was started by U.S. health care. And then they get one little story in one little newspaper or one little radio report or one little African outlet says something. And then they use their tools to spread that story region wide. We were able to stop it and to get to the point. And then I will shut up and answer any other question.
39:57But this is important. Think about what they were doing. They were dissuading Africans from getting health care that could save their lives just to engage in geopolitics. warfare with the United States. They were using Africans as fodder. Now, as an American, the same values that I put in Bosnia that made me want to help the people of Sarajevo, that made me actually believe that America should intervene, makes me want to prevent the Russians from deterring Africans from getting their needed health care. And that's one of the most successful programs the United States has ever had. And being able to reveal the Russian attempt to discredit it was one of the highlights of my time in government.
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42:14jamie one of the things that social media has done since these days in the 1990s of bosnia in Kosovo is its undercut respect for authority. It's taken away the old hierarchies of the president, the big news anchors, and created a world of very unstable coalitions of revolt. And one of the consequences of that must be that it's much more difficult to have legitimacy and moral authority. I mean, I was thinking about that listening to you. I mean, a lot of what What you're saying to me is, you're wrong, Rory. United States is the indistensible nation. It's a great nation. Now, that assertion needs to come with a lot of moral authority and legitimacy for people listening to think, okay, Jamie's right.
43:02And presumably one of the problems of social media is that nobody trusts anyone anymore. It's created an atmosphere of relative truth where, yeah, sure, Jamie would say that, Rory would say that, who the hell knows, I'm going to get back to X or Facebook. Sure. That's a problem. Big problem in our in the Western democracies and what's ironic is that the social media was created by Americans in Silicon Valley Facebook Twitter, you know Instagram all of them and We thought it was a tool to spread democracy and instead is being used against us Against as Rory puts it authority what I would simply say is you know in the early days It was thought as a democratization tool that it would enable the people of Egypt to go to Tahrir Square and talk to each other.
43:51That it would enable the Arab Spring was enabled by Facebook. But I don't believe that the social media tools in the end are the decisive factors. And I don't believe that when we figure out a way, it will take time. It's every new technology has a period where it causes pollution, essentially. And it causes damage. And then you have to figure out a way to minimize the damage. I think the decline in support for authority has been going on since Watergate, essentially. That's when it really changed in the 60s. Prior to that, in the 50s, people believed their anchors. They believed their presidents.
44:31The killing of John Kennedy probably did more to ruin authority than anything social media has ever done. That was when conspiracy theories began, really, in the modern era. when people imagined the CIA was the responsible for killing John Kennedy because he was going to be against the Vietnam War. And so conspiracy theories have been a problem in America for a long, long time. And it's not new. How do you in this job now deal with the social media companies? Because I've talked to some of them at pretty senior level and they seem to me to be very defensive, don't really want to be part of the solution is the sense I get.
45:05They think that the problem is one for governments and you shouldn't be too heavy on them. And the problem I have with your point about, you know, you've got to get on top of the technology, the legal and parliamentary and congressional processes are so slow. And this technology is fast. And as you say, these dictatorships are exploiting it better than we are. So - Yeah, it's tough. It's hard. So what is the conversation you have with the social media companies? Let me give you an example why all is not lost as Rory was implying. um the world is not chicken little isn't coming in in the ai uh area the latest technology the companies that are making them are asking to be regulated because they know that the last time around they didn't do it right they've united and formed consortia to ensure that this time around they do better and i think in ai there's some ideas for ensuring that there's water marking that people know what's a AI and what's real.
46:06And I still use the word real versus AI. But again, government is slow in America. We have freedom of the press and we have no regulation of the social media companies in Europe. They have the digital services act. And so I've been working with Europeans because I believe that the battleground is largely in the rest of the world, then I'm fighting this information war, essentially. And the Europeans have tools that the United States officials like me don't have. And so when we put in this framework to fight disinformation, social media companies must ensure compliance with their terms of service.
46:45That's the whole ballgame. How much effort will they make to comply with their terms of service? Will they spend the money? Will they buy the translators? Will they help do it? And Europeans are in, frankly, a better position than I am to make that happen. AI is so incredibly rapid and creative in its generation and its duplication. I mean, it can now generate deep fakes and fake news and manipulate and spew out QAnon theories 10 ,000 times quicker than anything we've ever seen before. What is it that you're worried about with AI? I get that you're optimistic that they want regulation, they're going to sign up to watermarks, which for what it's worth, Jamie, I think is too optimistic.
47:25I think you're being naive there, but we don't need to get stuck in that. Naive? Oof. That's a tough word to throw around. I don't think they have the financial interests in the end to regulate as much as you'd like them to. In the end, they'd prefer less regulation. Well, having called me naive, I think I deserve a fair shot at responding to the word naive after working in this field for 25 years, having worked very hard in subjects that are very, very difficult. And naivete is something I don't ever remember being called until today. And so what I actually said about the AI companies was, isn't it interesting that this time around, in response to Alistair's point, they are more willing to be regulated and have come together and asked to be regulated as opposed to the last time around when they refused and have caused, I think we can all agree, social media has had negative effects in the information domain around the world.
48:28So I was merely pointing out a trend, not saying that everything was wonderful. Okay, well, give us the other side, Jimmy. The word naive is just a bit harsh. Let me invite you to give the other side then. Let me invite you to give the darker side of it. What could go wrong on AI? Look, the simplest thing is translations. If there are hundreds of languages in the world that you have AI translating and applying cultural sensitivity to, and you're the Russians and you want to use an information operation and you don't need 500 people to translate just into this part of Africa and you can use a machine and it can be culturally sensitive to all those places, the dangers of disinformation are multiplied significantly.
49:10AI can tailor disinformation to individuals, have a particular strain of thought that this person is particularly vulnerable to, and that can be used by the Russians and the Chinese. I can go on. Presumably also by politicians within our own countries. I mean, you know, I was an elected politician. I can see the temptations if you're desperate to get elected and a company offers you these tools for even people within our own democracies to want to make use of this stuff. I have a job. It's to fight Russian, Chinese, and Iranian disinformation. That's what I work on. I don't comment on the political class and their pluses and minuses, except with respect to foreign policy decisions, as we've discussed.
49:53So I just don't know what I could possibly say to that. But on that, though, it would be good if the political leaderships of all the democracies kind of tried to work together on this. And presumably that's part of what you're trying to do. Exactly. What I'm trying to do is alert the political leaders in Europe, in Asia, and ultimately around the world to the dangers of disinformation, that it's not just a communications problem, that it's a national security threat in each of their countries. I'd like them to think of their information domain as sovereign, the way territory is sovereign. And if Russia and China are interfering in their information domain without it labeling, that would be a covert influence into their sovereignty.
50:34And you alluded to this theme earlier. How do you get the balance right between wanting to maintain sort of long-held, much-respected, much-loved democratic values, such as freedom of the press, and what you've just defined as a kind of A -grade national security potential problem? Well, I'll give you a good example. So let's say you find a journalist who calls himself a journalist in Bulgaria and they are repeating Russian lies, flat out inventions that could lead Bulgaria to vote for politicians who would pull them out of NATO or not support Ukraine. Well, in our system, we can't sanction such a person for having views we find abhorrent.
51:22That's the limitation that freedom of the press imposes on us. We can call them out. We could have a, you know, try to say we disagree and why and let people know about it. But we can't impose a penalty. where that politician we find is paid by the russians to say that meaning it's a maiden the kremlin covert operation through that politician then we can use the powers of of prosecution and exposure and disruption to damage the uh ability to operate you're just going to be playing whack-a-mole the whole place aren't you just presumably they i mean how much money and And how much effort are they putting in?
52:02A lot more than we are, Alistair. And that's what I'm doing here. The purpose, I basically figured out I have two parts of my job. One is to expose these operations when we can, when we can work within our government to find things out uniquely and early and expose them. And we did that in Africa. We did that in the Western Hemisphere. And the second is to organize and galvanize. And by that, I mean to sensitize our leaders in all the places we've been talking about it to this danger so that they can use their own tools. And that's what this framework to fight disinformation, this document that's like building a coalition that each country will treat its information domain as sovereign and ensure that when Russia and China try through their Communist Party mechanism or the Kremlin operations, intelligence services, that they will choose to insist on labeling or exposure.
52:55That's the coalition building that I'm doing. Jimmy, this again, maybe it's unfair because you're very much in the foreign policy space, but I guess what's happened is that the distinction between abroad and at home is getting thinner all the time. It's very difficult really to be sure where one stops and the other starts. I just got a WhatsApp from an American saying, last night, 150 people spoke up in our legislative council meeting and angst about Gaza and lack of ceasefire. This in a smallish suburb of New Haven, where we might normally see a few people whine about sidewalks and taxes. Something's happening here.
53:29I mean, we're in a world now where this information war is absolutely central to our democracies, isn't it? It's going to define our democracies. We're not in a world in which foreign policy is separate. I think that's a fair point. Rory Stewart, I agree with you completely and utterly. But no, seriously, the information war has many parts to it. I think we should all acknowledge that in major crises that have happened, we've had three biggies. We've had COVID, we've had Ukraine, and now we've had Gaza. It's been troubling that Russia and China, official documents, official spokesmen, official media, have united in blaming all three on the United States.
54:17So when COVID started, the Chinese government blamed COVID on an American sportsman or some chemical, you know, made some story up. We know it was from Wuhan. We don't know whether it was a lab leak or an animal, but we know it was from Wuhan. And they and the Russians both blamed the United States. Ukraine happens. Russia blames America for the war in Ukraine. And Russia is joined by China in the information space on Ukraine, whether it's biological weapons, America's responsibility, or, you know, American companies are making money of it. All the Russian arguments are repeated by the Chinese government.
54:59Same with Gaza. We know whether you like the Israeli's response or you don't like the Israeli response to October 7th. This war began on October 7th when Hamas invaded Israel and slaughtered a thousand plus people in this gruesome way. And the Israelis responded. For the Russians, for the Chinese official sources, they're blaming the United States. And it kind of reminds me, Alistair and I are closer in age, you might remember, the Republicans used to call the Democratic Party the blame America first crowd. And that's what we're dealing with in the world. And Rory, I will confess I was probably a little defensive and sensitive when you try to assign.
55:40I don't believe that what America decides is all as definitive to what happens in the world as you seem to think. So when America is blamed by communist China and Russia and then from a defense intellectual like you and you know, I'm trying to fight a war on multiple fronts and it gets pretty tricky. And so I was probably a little sensitive. But Sandy Berger used to say, I remember this line. It was great. And you remember Sandy. He'd say that this is the he had some phrase like my daughter or something in the bathroom. He would say that people would ask the United States back then, what were we going to do about something that happened 10 ,000 miles away and why we let it happen?
56:22When we obviously had no control over it, we obviously weren't responsible for it, and there was probably nothing we could do about it. And yet we're now facing a world in which Russia, China, Iran, in certain cases, are picking these three crises, which clearly were not started in Washington, and blaming the United States. And so that's the information war at its most pure sense. Then there's all the secret covert stuff. And then there's our democracies debating what the right course of action is for the United States or Britain or whatever. Do you think there's a danger that in the democracies more and more people start to think, well, do you know what?
56:58Maybe democracy is the problem. Maybe we have to reevaluate our commitment to democracy. Well, that was a common theme about, I would say, about five, ten years ago when the rise of China first happened. And people would say, look at that Chinese government system. They can sit down and make long-range plans. And a small group of people can sit and do long-range planning and then implement it without the messiness of democracies. And now we're seeing that the PRC, broadly speaking, overreached in many different respects. President Biden has found strength in Japan, in Germany, in France. We have European allies working with us on the China problem.
57:43Never happened before. We have Asian allies working with us on the Russia problem. Never happened before. And meanwhile, in China, you could go down the list of the problems that they're having economically. And I would simply point out that the alternative of having, you know, Plato's wise men of nine people sitting around the table deciding everything is a fantasy. I think democracy definitely has, you know, had its ups and downs and people obviously overplayed their hands after 1989 and thinking there was the end of history and all that. I agree with all that. But nor is it fair to say that the democratic world is shrinking that much.
58:21I think it's getting stronger. I think the democratic world is seeing the threat from Russia and China very starkly and is responding extremely well. If we were on the radio two years ago, would we have predicted that Germany would send leopard tanks into Ukraine? We wouldn't have. So I think Japan doubling its defense budget. No, we wouldn't have. So I think that's why I get a little defensive, I admit it, Rory, about the doom and gloom about democracies. Jamie, final one for me. I'd love you to finish by telling us a little bit about something totally different, which is your time at the New York Port Authority.
58:57What did you learn from getting into domestic politics, administration, the gritty business of getting involved in New York State? Tell us a little bit about that part of your government life and what lessons you took from it. You know, it's funny. Alistair knows the prime minister of Albania. His name is Eddie Rama. and when I met him for the first time properly about a year ago in Albania and he heard that I had worked for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Remember, he had known me from Albania as the Kosovo helper of Madeleine Albright and Bill Clinton who helped prevent a genocide in Kosovo.
59:32You and I played our part in that. And he said, and now you're at the New York Port Authority? I mean, what happened to you? And he still can make me laugh about it. But I did learn something And I learned that one of the problems with our infrastructure is an unwillingness to pay tolls, that our infrastructure has to be paid through tolls. And none of the politicians want to ask to raise toll prices. And our infrastructure, you know, Port Authority was responsible for the bridges and the airports and the major infrastructure, the building of the New World Trade Center and all that stuff. And I watched these politicians and leaders try to figure out a way to build things without asking the user to pay any money.
1:00:19And when you look back at all the bridges and tunnels that were built, they were built through tolls. And then a time came that you paid off the debt and the toll booth went away and the bridge was still there. And we need that kind of vision that we don't have anymore. And that's why it's so hard to build infrastructure in America. That's what I learned. Well, listen, Jamie, it's been lovely to talk to you. I look back on that time during Kosovo as one of the highlights of my time in government. I do too. It was the highest, I believe it was the height of Western civilization. I mean, think about it.
1:00:54We all worked together. We had a mission that we didn't have to do anything about. It was the Kosovo Albanians were being threatened by the Serbs. We could have let it happen. And we worked together for a moral purpose because we could do it and we did it well. And it worked. And when we go to Albania and Kosovo, you know, you see these people that most of whom probably would have been dead. And that's very powerful stuff. And for me, that was still the highlight of my career. I'm glad you're back in the State Department. Thank you. And I hope you have success against these very powerful forces that are ranged against them.
1:01:33Yeah, that's true. It's pretty powerful, and it's a different time. America doesn't have the relative power today that it has then. We'll now close by asking Rory to kiss and make up. Well, Jamie, thank you. It's been lovely to see you. I think you're a terrific spokesman for the U.S. government, and my very best to your sister. I will pass that along. A fully-toothed Rory Stewart. Yeah, tell him my tooth is back in. Yeah, exactly. I will. Thank you. I'll pass that along. Very good. Thank you very much. Glad we had some sparks. It's more fun that way. Late in the afternoon. How are we going to keep, you know, the energy level up?
1:02:07Because you're following Anthony Scaramucci. There were plenty of sparks with that one. Oh, boy. Yeah. Well, he can answer the Trump question. Oh, he's good on Trump. He's great on Trump. Jamie, thank you very much. Thank you, Alistair. Thank you, Rory. Thank you, Jamie. Bye-bye.
1:02:24so rory you're upsetting my friend there getting all agitated and you call him naive you said that he was getting dissed by people that he spent his whole time not being dissed by i mean god i think this was about the sister i think you just you feel rebuffed by the sister you have to take it out of the brother yeah that that's probably true probably true it's probably deeply deeply psychological. No, I think Jamie's got a tough job because the truth of the matter is I don't want to keep this going and it's not fair to do this when he's not on the show, but I think he's wrong. I'm afraid America is in a very different situation to what it was in the 90s.
1:02:59And I guess he probably knows that. And one of the reasons he gets very prickly and reacts very aggressively is that he knows that Mohammed bin Salman didn't really push out the red carpet for Biden and did push out the red carpet for Xi Jinping. And it was the Chinese who broke up the Saudi Iran stuff. And yes, they want America involved, but the reason they want America involved is that they feel that America's been retreating and it's not playing the role that they were expecting it to play in the world. I think what happened was that he was coming over as the archetypal, you know, very confident, very strong American government official.
1:03:31And I think he was beginning to, he'd been talking about British cynicism. And I think he was seeing he was a bit of a British cynic pouring fuel on his troubled waters or water on his troubled fuel. I think the Kosovo thing is so important, isn't it? Because as he explains, the mess that we got into Iraq and Afghanistan was a lot of it just came directly out of the successes in Bosnia and Kosovo, that it gave people a sense that we could do anything that, as he says, we were saving the world, we were stopping thousands of people being killed. And I think when people look back at it, it's a story of how the glories of the 90s led to the humiliations, the 2000s, and now the uncertainty today.
1:04:14These things are all related, aren't they? Yeah. I thought he, I do think this, um, you know, and sorry to keep banging on about this piece that we wrote together, um, for the new European. And we also wrote it, and I think it was the daily beast in America. Um, and, but it is interesting how we were both saying back then that there is this coming problem to do with technology, to do with Russian and new attitudes from Russia and China. The truth is, both of our countries were, I think, very, very slow to this. And I think the job he's doing now is all the harder because they're actually very late to this.
1:04:50And I know that he's been here. The reason he's in London is because he's been talking to people inside the British government, the reason he was in Munich, talking to other governments. And it was interesting, he went there with Antony Blinken. I think that was for them to signal that, you know, America is now taking this stuff very, very seriously. But I honestly don't know how, as a democracy, you can compete with some of the resources they've got and the capacity that they have to run these influence operations. And I'm afraid I think it's going to be very, very difficult to do this kite marking and making sure that everything that's up there is identified from where it came from.
1:05:25Because it seems to me that this stuff is just, they have every incentive not to do it. and the truth of the matter is we can see this in our everyday lives when you look at bank fraud banks are losing money hand over fist i mean fraud is everywhere and the idea that suddenly we're going to get better at this stuff and magically somehow we're going to be able to be better at that than we are people stealing money out of our bank accounts and sending us our gmails i think is for the birds i think we're in a world in which identity gets more and more tricky and his job is just going to get worse and worse.
1:05:58We've recorded two interviews today, and I think Jamie's going out and then will be followed by Caroline Lucas. And it's interesting that what we're talking to Caroline Lucas about was actually her argument that the left needs a new narrative. And I think actually a lot of this is about the narratives that countries put out. And the American story and the American narrative, he was acknowledging this has changed. It's changed in part because of the rise of China and because the Chinese and the Russians and the Iranians put out this sort of relentless propaganda against them. But it's also changed because America's sense of itself has changed.
1:06:36And I think that that sense of what is the bigger narrative within which you can then challenge some of this stuff, because the truth is people still, I think, do see America as a country they'd like to live in. They still see Britain as a country. I'm talking about people outside our countries, countries they'd like to go to. Do people from America and Britain want to go and live in China? Not many. Do they want to go and live in Russia? Not many. They're not going to live in Iran. So having that sense of, and this stuff he's talking about in Africa, we've talked before about the whole kind of, you know, the way that China and Russia is all over Africa diplomatically, business, media, that's the stuff that's not being challenged.
1:07:08And I think what he's doing is part of the response, it's not the whole response. Yeah, you're right. What's missing is the really clear story, positive story about the United States for a very different world, for the world of 2024. Because it can't be a repeat of the kind of hoorah story of the 1980s and 90s. It can't be, we're the greatest superpower on earth, we're a great liberal democracy, all these people are communists and whatever. It's got to be a much more nuanced, humble story where America doesn't sound like it's flexing its muscles and showing off. Anyway, I'm going out for dinner with him now, so I can't wait to slag you off behind your back?
1:07:51Just a very quick thing. I mean, it was interesting because, you know, Jamie's got these sort of vague memories of this whole world that you brought me to. You talked about his world with Kosovo. When he's calling me a defense intellectual and saying that I was the gloomy guy on Afghanistan, that's taking me back 20 years into my fights about Afghanistan and Iraq. And you're completely right. One of the problems that I always had is that as a Brit, you're immediately labeled as a kind of cynical old imperialist. And if you try to say these guys are off their heads and doing things they can't do.
1:08:17The basic response is, well, Rory, you would say that, wouldn't you? Well, have a lovely evening. I'll find out what happened to the sister. I'll find out who she's with and whether he's got a full set of Nashors. Thank you very much. All the best. Bye-bye. Bye-bye, Haster.
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Instagram:
@restispolitics
Twitter:
@RestIsPolitics
Email:
restispolitics@gmail.com
Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen
Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport
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