143. The world looks to Beijing, Putin vs. Africa, and Rory's sliding Brexit doors

26:41I think on that occasion, I was with that friend of Johnson and his wife, Henry Newman. I can remember the psychology at that time in the sort of, and I was seeing a lot of people, I and a subriand Dominic Grieven, why are you? I think this psychology wasn't because things felt like they were moving our way, certainly with the public, and also Parliamentary opinion was growing for the people's vote campaign. I think we did genuinely think that we could get the whole way, and therefore that made us less interested in possible compromises, and look, I'll be honest, I mean if you could have got away with a softer Brexit and not ended with a the total disaster that we've got now, we would agree, we'd all have been better off.

27:24But in a way, I do think the next generation will undo this whole thing or try to find the way to undo this whole thing. I really do. Okay, well, here we are, maybe time for a break.

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28:51This week's episode of The Restisted Politics is sponsored by the new European, one of the few good things that came out of Brexit seven years ago. And it's what I like to call a real newspaper because it's full of brilliant original writing and some amazing photography. And yet again, may I say, I had the front cover this week with a piece fantastically damning about Boris Johnson and his political obituary with the headline never again and a big red cross through his face. Now, it's not just politics, is it, Alisa? And I think one of the reasons that I quite nerdly like the New European is we've talked a bit about its cultural pages, but there's also a wonderful weekly philosophy column by a philosopher called Nigel Warbutton.

29:37So he's just written a great piece this week, for example, about the American philosopher Cornel West running for President, which connects analytical philosophy, critical theory and politics. I know. He also reaches the conclusion and I think is right. The person who will be most worried about anybody running as a third candidate is Biden because I suspect an American philosopher is unlikely to be pro -Trump and Cornel West certainly isn't. Anyway, I'm very, very pleased to say that the new European is one of the fastest growing newspapers in Europe right now. And here is your chance to do something positive about the sorry state of politics and media in the UK which together have taken this country downwards.

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31:08Welcome back to the RESTAS Politics with me, Rory Stewart. I'm me, I was to gamble. And I hope everybody has had a chance to listen to at least the first part of our interview with John Major. Now, of course, if you want to hear episode two right now, it's already available to members of the RESTAS Politics Plus. Just go to therestaspolitics .com to sign up. And it's a great benefit. It allows you to get these double interviews immediately, rather than having to wait for next week. If you're an iPhone user, then we've got some good news there too. We've just launched the RESTAS Politics Plus on Apple Podcasts and we've included a trial option.

31:44Just click Try Free on the RESTAS Politics Show Page on Apple Podcasts to start your one month free trial today. And here, done, done, done, John Major Part 2. Now, John Major, we had a lot of time with John Major. And we essentially we split them into two. first part was his life and times up to becoming Prime Minister and then Prime Minister. But even with all the time we had, we didn't actually cover Brexit. He mentioned at one point that he felt that the British government wasn't handling China properly, and I'd love to go back to him and find out more deeply what he meant about that. But should we talk about China for a bit?

32:25Because I think one of the most important stories this week has been Anthony Blinken, the American Secretary of State is visit to Beijing. I've been involved in a few bilateral visits to China and the Chinese coming to us and my experience of them is that everything is planned to the last minute. So do you buy the idea that they just sort of decided, you know, let's see how it goes and then we'll we'll see the president or do you think it was planned? I think they were expecting that he was going to see the president unless he said something so horrifying to them that they were going to have to cancel that at the last moment.

33:00But they are very, very much about using protocol as ways of dealing with people. A friend of mine called Nick Burns is the US ambassador to China at the moment. And I don't think he would mind my saying that it's been pretty tough. The Chinese have been very reluctant to grant senior access. He's had a pretty rough ride over the last few years because China is clearly very, very, if you put it one word prickly, other word, understandably angry about the fact that they feel the US is really lining up for a new Cold War and that they have become public enemy number one in Washington. And they're very keen to try to turn that narrative around.

33:39But they're also, they're also flexed, their muscles are a lot more, don't they? You feel their strength. I think we saw this in, we see it, what we see in Latin Africa, we talked about it last week in relation to Latin America where the old style diplomacy of stealth and discretion seems to have been replaced by something much more robust. And I'm fascinated by this guy. Blinken went to see first through all the foreign minister, King Gang. But then he had a meeting with Wang Yi, who I think is a much more interesting character. And this is a guy whose former, he's a former foreign minister, but he's now, I don't know quite know how the structures work, but he essentially he's described as their top diplomat because he's the Communist Party foreign affairs kind of main guy.

34:22But he is much more the kind of diplomat that we would be used to in that he can do the subtle diplomacy. I remember in particular, I think it was an Australian foreign minister when he had, you know, when they had in the cameras for the bit of the start where they all smile and sip tea and it's all very, very gentle and very jolly. And he absolutely laid into the Australians over something. And the ambassador, the Australian ambassador went over to his foreign minister and whispered and said, you can't just take that, you've got to get it engaged. So the media absolutely loved this. It was the sort of stuff you see behind closed doors, but it was in front of the media.

34:59And that was Wang Yi just being very, very strong, very robust, very clear. Because Blink and I thought came across as he looked, I thought he looked quite very, very serious, very, very sober, really quite nervous when he arrived. But what happens with these visits is you get all the protocol, you get all the formality, and then bit by bit over time, you get a sense of what actually was said and what actually happened. Yeah, well, I mean, I think that the fundamental thing to go back to is that the United States decided about probably the mid -2000s, but really from Obama onwards that China represented the largest growing strategic threat to the United States.

35:37And the story was very quick. So China joins the World Trade Organization in 2001. It becomes larger than the French economy 2005, larger than the British economy 2006, larger than the German economy 2007, larger than the Japanese economy 2008. And Obama comes in and he really focuses on what he calls the tilts towards Asia Pacific. And really that means the tilts towards China. And this is created because particularly from 2012 onwards, which is when Xi Jinping comes in, you get yourself into a situation in which China is beginning to do more aggressive naval exercises, beginning to claim that straits of international water actually belong to China, begin to occupy disputed islands and the straits, so taking on the Philippines, challenging Japan, and to the fury of President Obama lying directly to him.

36:32Yeah. So he he he negotiates this standoff where he manages to get he thinks China and the other party to agree to withdraw from this island and of course the Chinese don't withdraw and end up just building permanent features on this island to claim it. So out of all of this comes this idea that China has the capacity to be the major adversary to the United States. And that's one of the reasons why if you look at the British defense strategy, if you look at US spending, they were so quick to want to get out of Africa the Middle East and Europe. They thought those were yesterday's conflicts, they shouldn't have big presences there, they should be thinking about Pacific.

37:08And maybe the most dramatic example of this was getting this submarine agreement going with Australia, which really made the French angry, but giving the Australians new clear submarines with the support of Britain and the United States. And all of this, including putting more American troops into the Philippines, beefing up, Japan's spend on defense going up to 2%, so Japan, as I said, is going on course to have the second largest military in the world by spend. All of this stuff is about trying to reassure Americans' allies in the Pacific that they're going to have some protection against China.

37:46Now the question I guess over to you is, is it too late? Is China basically too big? did America start too late on this and actually it's no longer possible to contain China? Is that a gas cylinder? Yeah, it's the fuel truck, the musical gas truck. I do think psychologically one of the biggest things that has happened in the world recently is this sense that the American feeling that they are the most powerful country in the world, which they've enjoyed for most of the life that we can remember, that is no longer a given. and I think that explains in part why there was this attempt to build better relations.

38:27And the guy, you talked about the pivot, the pivot to Asia, and there's actually a very, very good book of that name. It's called the pivot by my name, say, no relation, Campbell, who's a big cheese in American foreign policy. And he's currently, I think his job at the moment is the main coordinator for Indo -Pacific Affairs for President Biden. And he, I think, is the guy who was doing the pre -briefing for the media on this trip. So he's somebody really, really worth listening to. The pivot he explains in the book, but what's happening now, I think, is the feeling that things have gone very, very badly wrong and they've got to get them on a better, on a better kill.

39:08I think with some of you mentioned, some of these kind of military situations that these incursions that have sometimes been going wrong. If you remember, the reason that Blinkins' visit was delayed was because of the Chinese balloon that was spotted in Montana and the Americans shot it down. So Kerr Campbell's basic line is that there are these disagreements, they're real, they're dividing them, but there are so many global priorities that America and China have to work on together. So they have got to get relations on a better kill. And is it too late for that? I don't think it is. There's also massive economic interest in this because and again on both sides because the the the Chinese economy is not in In this great shape as they would like it to be they've got big problems with user employee We've talked before about their housing the housing crisis and of course if you're if you set set of some kind of trade war between the two biggest economies in the world then That is going to hurt everybody is going to hurt them more than most well suggest to develop that I mean, the statistics are completely staggering.

40:11So China's second largest economy in the world, largest now in purchasing power parity. Yeah. Quickly on PPP, I'm being challenged by the producers. Purchasing power parity basically means taking into account what you can buy with your money and dollars are a bit misleading. So in dollars terms, China looks like it's the second largest economy in the world, but that's a lot dependent on currency exchange. But if you look at what you can buy with your money, China has been the largest economy in the world for some time. The largest exporter in the world, second largest importer in the world. And China is on track to have a middle class, sort of upper middle class, with a purchasing power equivalent to the Europe and the US, with a larger population of an upper middle class buying group than the US and the EU by 2030.

41:04And this means that so many bits, I mean we think a lot about the things that we import from China. So textiles, manufacturing, consumer electronics. But it's also the other way around. So many British European American companies are dependent on exporting to China because of course there are over a billion increasingly wealthy customers there. There's a huge chunk. China alone accounts for maybe 16, 17 % of global imports and exports. You remove that from the world system. I mean, it's beyond imagining. And in certain areas, China has an almost death group on the world. I mean, China is the fastest growing place in the world.

41:43They have 40 % growth in electric vehicles, credible growth in electric vehicles. And it's producing something like 90 % of the world's turbines 80 % of the world's solar panels. So we've talked in the past about Taiwan producing 50 % of the world's semiconductors, 90 % of the world's advanced semiconductors. But there are so many other things. And that's why I think the European Union has moved away from this phrase of decoupling, which was this idea that you could somehow create an economy completely separate from China towards this idea of de -risking, which I think is both about a little bit of resilience, but it's also about trying to reduce the chance for confrontation.

42:24Yeah, there was a piece on the Asia Business Correspondent at the BBC, Surinjana Chawari, had a very, very interesting piece suggesting actually that in this war, war or struggle or race to dominate the chip market globally, that America actually is nosing ahead, and that there is another reason why China wants to improve relations because ultimately for them they have got to get their economy back on track And I don't think President Xi would have seen Blinken without Him that was I think their way of settling that this visit really really mattered and that they are saying we do want to get things back on and even kill It'll be very we're we're recording this as their blinkin is still there but it'll be very interesting to see how both sides project the visit once it's over.

43:19My senses, I think the mood music thus far has been pretty positive. Well, finally, maybe just before we move off China, if people are really geekily interested in what Chinese policy really is towards the world, Xi Jinping in the 20th National Party Congress, so that was October last year, laid out a pretty clear statement of what he sees China's strategic objectives to be. And oddly, China in some ways is a very secretive state, but in another way, can't afford to be because it's dependent on 93 million communist party members who they have to keep communicating with. And if you want to really find out what the leadership thinks, look at their communication to those party members and certain things are clear in that.

44:04One is China clearly wants to be self -sufficient in technology, get ahead in AI and quantum, be self -sufficient in food. He talks a lot about Taiwan, how Taiwan is part of China. But he also talks about a country run by big powers. And that's basically a way of saying, China rejects the idea of a world being run by the United States. He thinks that the US should see itself as one of a number of big powers of which China would be one. And that those are the countries that are going to matter in the world and they're going to have to cooperate together. Yeah. Taiwan does seem to come up a fair amount and I suspect they'll both have just stuck to their kind of very traditional speaking lines.

44:47But I think that is the thing that is maybe making the Americans more or less concerned. We've talked before about the sense of a sort of self -fulfilling prophecy that there's so much talk of military action in Taiwan that therefore eventually it will happen. So again, whether part of the purpose of the as it is to try to sort of calm that down. Interestingly, Blinken, you know, this is simply a restatement of policy, but him sort of making a point of saying at his press conference that the Americans do not support Taiwan's independence, and do not wish to change his status quo. Also fairly socho, Voccio and human rights, I would say, probably not nearly as valuable as some would have liked.

45:30While we're here, Rory, and talking about China, You remember when I did an interview with Rahima Mahmoud the leader of the the Wiga community in the UK From from Singyang talking about the concentration camps And and she sent me rather Moving and sad email because remember you know remember she's talked about how she'd had no connection with her With her family at all She told that chilling story about when she phone she finally got through to her brother and said and he just basically said look you know, if you love us, you won't phone us and put the phone down. And she, anyway, she's since received news that her eldest sister, Rahila, died in March and Rahima is a very, very good musician and she's asked us to advertise for her two concerts, one on the June 27th and another on July the 14th.

46:23The one on July the 14th is for her sister, in memory of her sister. So we will put those into the show notes, but that was a very, very sad, misive from Rahim, that the sister that she's not spoken to or seen for a long time passed away. I'm really, really sorry to hear that. Yeah. Really, really sorry to hear that. Well, I think that the last thing we were going to touch on, which she suggested, which I think is a great subject, is Russia in Africa or Africans in Russia or Africans in Russia. So people want more details. One of the things I've been reading this week is, again, this great newsletter by Guy called Joshua Not, who last week put out a fantastic summary of Russia in Africa with incredible graphs.

47:08So showing, for example, just how many arms Russia's selling into Africa. Russia's kind of producing two or three times the number of arms sales at any other country. The activities, the Waikna Group that we've talked about, Marley Central African Republic Sudan, the way that Russia has been deliberately benefiting from stolen illegal gold from Sudan to shore up its effort, the way in which it's strong -armed South Africa, interline, and in fact a Russian warship has just turned up on the South African coast this week, which has been a real indication of that close cooperation. And the way finally, just before I hand back to you, that many, many of the countries that abstained about the Russian Ukraine war were Africans.

47:54Some of them, you know, big, big economies, Angola, South Africa. Some of them anglophone countries that you would have expected to be in the past maybe on the US -British side on this, Uganda, Tanzania. And some of them countries which are just now proxies for the Wagon Group and Russian military action, Central African Republic, Marley Sudan. Anyway, over to you. Well, you know, I've talked before about Jacob Rees -Mog's dad, William Rees -Mog in the book, he wrote the sovereign individual. I remember part of it, which I remember thinking at the time, this is a bit far fetched, but he had this whole thing about how wars in the end would be fought, less by nation states than by private, effectively private, sexual, mercenary organizations.

48:34And it is incredible how often the Wagner group keep popping up in these situations. You say, in Marley, they're right at the heart of it. But I thought this was the visit by these six African leaders to Ukraine and then to Russia to see President Zelensky and then Putin was really interesting. And if you go back to our previous discussion when you were talking about how the Chinese vision of the world is that there will become more big players. And in a sense, you've got the Africans there making a pitch to be, this is the role that the Erdoan, I think, was trying to play at a certain point, but essentially they were inserting themselves into this war, giving the reasons why they were so concerned, and all of which was to do with the grain issue that you mentioned.

49:19But if you think about it, it's quite a big deal that six African presidents have got together and have gone to these countries and essentially said to both sides, you guys have got to end this war, and if there's anything that we can do to help you get there, then we're here to do it. Zelensky was very, very clear that he's not going to negotiate with Putin until Putin, as it were, gets off his land, and also it was very, very, it was quite cleverly put together. So if you think of the group together, so you had representatives from South Africa and Uganda and they I think are probably seen as more pro -Russian.

49:55Yeah. Pretty much pro -Russian. Yeah. You then had Zambia and the Comoros who are much more aligned with the West and you had Egypt, Senegal and Congo, Brazaville who are, you know, I think will be described as somewhere between the two. So it wasn't as if they went with with A -View. They went with an understanding that there are different views. And that led Putin almost to co -opt them as being supporters of the quote, special military operation. He was able to point to the ones who had not supported the United Nations resolutions, condemning the attack. He was able to do his kind of his divide and rule, but they were clever and quite an important Visit there was one another fascinating moment where they were essentially they were pressing very very hard on Issues that to do with prisoners that really suppressors of war and also of children and You could see Putin getting very very defensive because of course is one of the reasons that he's up before the war crimes tribunal is because of this, essentially the kidnapping of Ukrainian children.

51:06And he went straight into this sort of defensive posture. And they said that, you know, he was basically, they were, they were protecting the children. Fascinating also, I mean, one of the things which is going on is that the Russians have been trying to whip up anti -imperialist rhetoric. They're trying to get sympathy. I mean, And it's kind of ironic, given that they basically invaded and occupied another country. But their whole sales pitch in Africa is we were never a colonizing power. We were on your side. We backed Patrice Lamumba and all these people through the Cold War. We were on the side of the liberation movements.

51:41We backed the ANC. You've got the President of Uganda saying the Russians have been with us for a hundred years. How can we criticize them? But I'd also like to pay tribute to the Kenyans. So Martin Khmani, who's the Kenyan ambassador at the UN, made a passionate, bun -storming speech attacking Russia's invasion of Ukraine at the UN, which anybody wants to watch an African diplomat on fire watch Martin Khmani's speech, and shows that some African countries have been completely unapologetic about calling out the horror of this because they feel so strongly that their borders are artificial. that places like the DRC have been torn apart by different countries invading, in fact many, many other African countries have suffered different forms of proxy war and invasion over the years, and that they need to be clear that it is not acceptable to break borders and invade another country and try to occupy it.

52:36Yeah. I mean, the Russian official line was dismissive the wrong word. I think perhaps one mistake they made was to take too much into the into the meetings. They listed these 10 principles, de -escalation recognition of sovereignty, security guarantees, the grain issue, prisoners of war children. And the thing I think you got to recognize with Putin is he will take the bits that suit his narrative and reject the bits that don't. And so their official line was that Kepeskov, who I know a little bit, he was my opposite number and he's still doing the same job now. And he just said, any initiative like this is very difficult to implement, but President Putin has shown interest in considering it.

53:17And then the last thing that they did, of course, was to say that it's very difficult to get any sort of agreement going because they'd been to see Zelensky beforehand and Zelensky had been essentially a set up. You can't deal with this guy. This is something a lot of people here in Jordan have been talking about. And seen from here, they see it very much. I think this is something we talked about with Fiona Hill, that it feels like the Iran -eraq war. It feels to people here as though this is a war that's going to go on forever. And they feel that the major players have no incentive in ending it, that unfortunately, in the end, it's costing horrible, unspeakable kind of loss of life to Ukrainians and Russians, civilians and soldiers on the front line.

53:59but that many of the major global powers are not actually shedding blood on the ground. And in some ways, they don't have a direct incentive to end this war. And that's one of the reasons I think that many people, particularly in the global south, are desperately trying to get involved in finding some kind of solution. But finding that solution is almost impossible. I mean, I think even if Putin is driven back by the Ukrainian counteroffensive, it doesn't end. At the moment, it would feel as though the Russians would just buy their time and try to come back in again. I mean, it's horrifying. They also, the counteroffensive, as you may have been, made much more difficult because of this wretched dam attack, which, and it does now seem, of course, that it was the Russians.

54:40It was a single explosive thing that they timed, and it would not have been done by Ukraine. I wish people would stop sort of doing on the one hand on the other hand about that one. But it's very hard to find out what's going on. And the other thing, there's been some very interesting, very old -fashioned propaganda exercises being run inside Ukraine. Pretty a bit like the stuff during the Second World War and the Blitz about walls have ears and you never know who's listening. They are desperately trying to keep the details of the counteroffensive quiet. So what you're hearing is both sides claiming that it's going well for them, but very hard to know.

55:17Well, we hear a little plug for our sister pod, Battleground Ukraine. If you want the real granular day -to -day information on what's going on the ground. And I think Alice, a little bit of encouragement for both of us, maybe towards the end of the year, if we can do so in a way that doesn't completely disrupt people's lives, visit Ukraine and maybe see if we can get some interviews on the ground. That'd be great. That'd be very good. Maybe a final lighter point on which to end. I went to see the new spitting image show and President Xi features in that. He's just sort of sitting get a royal box watching it all.

55:52This is a very large, he's just watching. That's what I've observed. I like that. Right, on that answer, thank you very much. I'll see you soon. See you soon. Bye -bye.