216. King Charles, Sunak’s £1000 bet, and the future of North Korea

24:27He's sort of coming over us as kind of big guy, kind of pushing him and pushing him, trying to make him look ridiculous. And the question is, how do you as a prime minister avoid that? Whether clips were Tony Blair, where people put him under really awkward pressure and there were moments where you thought watching it, gosh, it's going to be difficult. And then he came through any glimpses of things where people did weird things and interviews. There was the show where David Frost, who was brilliant interviewer, but David Frost just sort of did one of his long pauses and you thought you're going to get one of his long questions with lots of different sub clauses and so forth.

25:03And he just sort of, you just said, prime minister, do you and president Bush pray together? Right. And Tony just sort of, he just looked very, very startled and he recovered. It was fine. I'll tell you what Tony Blair said with that Pierce Morgan thing. He just said, oh, Pierce, for heaven's sake, I'm not going to bet with you about anything like a loan, something as serious as this. Right. I need to move it on. And then Pierce, Pierce would have looked ridiculous saying, well, I think you should take a bet. It shows you don't believe in the policy. And he wouldn't, he, but anyway, so that was one thing, Roy.

25:31The second thing, the second thing is that he said to him, he basically gave him what we call in the trade a full toss outside the, or a half volley outside the off stump, where he basically was asking him to, getting him to criticize Pierce Starma as a lawyer for having defended people who were involved in an organization, which is now prescribed as a terrorist organization. Right now, I actually think that what Rishi Sunak should have done was to do what John McCain did. You remember that famous time when John McCain, a woman said to John McCain, I don't trust a Barack Obama. He's not even an American, he's Arab.

26:09And John McCain said, no, I'm not having that. Barack Obama is a good American. He's a family man. He believes what he believes very strongly. It's just that he and I have different views. That's, I think, what Sunak should have said. He should have said, look, Pierce Starma wasn't a lawyer. He was entitled to take up the cases that he did that is very different to being a politician. And I don't think we should play that game instead of which he played the game. And I think that I think his problem, Rishi Sunak, when he's doing these interviews, he's always trying to please all the time, he's trying to, he's thinking, what do they want out of this interview?

26:41It was actually what he should be thinking, he's what do I want out of this interview? And then the third thing that made news was where he admitted that he'd failed on his pledge on the National Health Service, which obviously is very, very significant. So all round, it was a total car crash, I would say. I was just finished the first half. So good news had an all -night and some of that credit to Rishi Sunak who's stuck with it and kept the team together and made that happen. But at the same time, a reminder of one of the things that is leading up to his loss in the election, and one of those is exemplified in that, I guess, is not quite managing to get the tone right, not quite managing to come across as the kind of serious person with a plan and a bad misjudgment.

27:24And I guess one of the questions that you might ask, because if you were the communications director and you knew that you knew what Rishi Sunak's strength and weaknesses were, you probably would advise him not to do the interview in the first place, right? I think so, I think so. And I think he's doing too much of this stuff. He's out to the about every day. And I think the trouble is, down, I think people sense he's trying to be something that he's not. And we go back to the point we've made endlessly on this podcast, is that it's going against the change that he promised to be. You could imagine Boris Johnson doing that bit.

27:56You could imagine Liz Truss sort of, you know, ballsing up an interview. But if he's meant to be Mr. Integrity, Mr. Professional, Mr. Accountable, Mr. Honest and Straight Forward, don't do that stuff and stop being a kind of showbiz prime minister, because I think that's the stuff that people absolutely sick of. Yeah. And of course, if Boris Johnson had taken the bed, it would have felt very different, wouldn't it? And also, you can guarantee that you would never have paid it, how he lost his right. Absolutely. But he also would have sort of turned it into a joke, and it would have been a very different thing.

28:27Okay, well, thank you. Now, we've got some very serious stuff to get on with when we come back from the break. We have indeed. Sending all, El Salvador and North Korea.

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30:36Welcome back to the rest of politics with me, Roy Stewart. And me, Aster Campbell. So we've often talked about this as everybody does, I think, increasingly as a year of elections. And there've been two very interesting events around elections. So on Sunday, there were the elections in El Salvador, and then the supposed to be elections just coming up in Senegal, although the president has now announced that he's delaying those elections. So let's just get into those two things quickly. El Salvador, again for for listeners who are maybe concentrating all the time on these kind of things, El Salvador is a country about the size of Wales, population about six and a half million people on that isthmus of Central America that connects North America to South America.

31:24And it sits there in a group of countries along with Guatemala and Nicaragua and it's gone through very, very difficult times. I mean, huge range of coups, countercoups, putches through the early 20th century and then found itself caught up in the horrors of the Cold War in particular, standoffs between leftist guerrillas and rightist forces right the way through the 1980s. And you know, the parallel, I guess, maybe for listeners that they might remember is the contrast and the Nista struggles in Nicaragua, which had some echoes with that. That ended in the early 90s, but it then inherited a horrendous crime rate.

32:03So Shoshana, my wife, who lived in in Honduras and traveled to El Salvador back in the day. If you spoke to her about her basic memory of it, her number one defining thing is is crime. It was just so much homicide, so much kidnapping, these horrifying criminal groups. From the 90s onwards, it had a governments which were actually from pretty much from the far right and the far left in some ways had an interesting domination of some very, very powerful Palestinian political leaders, including one of the presidents, one of the opposition leaders. And most recently now, the current president also comes from a Palestinian Arab background.

32:45And on that, I'm going to hand over to you about the current president and what's going on. Well, his name is Naib Bukheli. We used to enjoy the label Cool Britannia. He enjoys going by the Monica of the cool dictator. He's in his early 40s. He has had a fairly colorful past. Even in becoming the second term president, he has kind of defied all odds and ripped up the Constitutional. Got the Constitution changed partly because of that historical troubles that you talked about. The rule was one term only for the president. He got the Constitution changed. He's now into second term. And we're recording this on Tuesday.

33:24By the time this is out, we may know the full score, not just of his presidential election where he is one with the biggest majority ever and taken more than eight out of ten of every vote. But it's possible he will have almost total control of the legislative assembly as well. And he has done it in large part by openly avowedly saying that his prime job has been to put an end to this dominance of the gang warfare within El Salvadorian life and culture. It's now estimated that one in 45, one out of every 45 adult males is now in prison. We should maybe put in in the newsletter for those who haven't seen some of the film footage of the prisons where you see just endless rows of young men mostly covered in tattoos, crouched down, shaven headed, feet clamped, hands clamped together, been marched around by guys with kind of their faces covered.

34:32And the message is very, very clear. And he put out a video of some of the most brutal sort of pictures of these inside these prisons and said every parent should watch this and understand that if their sons go down this road they end up either dead or in prison. And it's made him hugely popular. There has been an opposition on human rights grounds. But his answer to that has been every time the international community, every time the international courts, every time people try and told us what to do and came in with their fancy liberal ideas, none of it worked, this is working, bugger off, that's his basic message.

35:04And it's a really interesting thing isn't it? Because we've actually had similar conversations around many issues. In this case, I guess if you were one of his supporters from El Salvador, you would say it's all very well for people at you and me, or present Biden incidentally who refused to meet him, both because of the human rights that abuses and corruption to sit and say how terribly is. But we didn't experience the violence and the homicide and the kidnapping and the horror and that El Salvador has basically been ruined for nearly 30 years by violence which is beyond imagining. I mean, the homicide rate I think something like 50 times higher than in Britain or in a normal Western European country.

35:48And he's reduced the homicide rate by 70 % through these extraordinary measures. And it's interesting isn't it? Because of course, with a smaller country like that, sometimes these sort of autocratic rulers can turn things around. Now we don't know what's going to happen with the economy, but people who support this kind of authoritarianism will say that we're being naive and they will point to places like Singapore, which of course, were turned around by pretty authoritarian methods. And many other countries in Latin America, particularly Central America, looking to what's happened there and wondering whether there's a playbook that they can follow.

36:22There's no doubt about it, and as you say, it is a relatively small country. But in that region and in other parts of the world, people will be watching and we've taught endlessly about how this sort of dividing line between, well, is democracy, all it's cracked up to be against, you know, watch these authoritarian sort things out. So actually, you can see this guy building a profile with the hard right in across Europe and so forth, and that's part of what he's doing. And he's done some of the things that the kind of extreme populist always do. He fired all the judges who were over 60. Now he didn't do that because he was necessarily ages.

36:55He did it so that he could bring in new judges. At one point three, four years ago, he stormed Congress with the military. He sent the military in to get people to vote in a different way. He's on record as saying, as you said, you know, to people like us, he says, our country has changed in large part because we haven't paid any attention to these human rights organizations and the so -called international community. Now, of course, to a nationalist populist audience, that is like Goldust. And he was, there was a very good report, I think, on the, on the BBC website, where the BBC correspondent caught up with him at one of his events and he asked him about these people who, you know, surely amongst these tens of thousands of people in jail, there are going to be people there who don't, who aren't affiliated to gangs at all.

37:39They just happened to be caught up in being swept up in old areas. And I'll just read you what Bakedi said to him. I find it amusing when people say, oh, in El Salvador, they arrest people and some of the arrested innocent. I'm baffled because I wonder if in the UK, all of the arrests are guilty people or if sometimes your police actually arrest innocent ones. So what he's doing is sort of seeding the idea that, you know, I'm just, I'm honest about this. This is, you know, I've decided, this is my big priority. This is what I'm going to do. But your point, I think, is the thing for the second term.

38:09The economy isn't in a good state. And eventually, you know, that is where he has to start to deliver. But honestly, you see some of the interviews online with the people who are there who never used to support him. And they were waxing lyrical about this guy. There's also, I think, the other thing which often happens in these kind of regimes is, of course, corruption and his family. So his brothers are quite prominent. His cousins are quite prominent. There's a real sense that he's running a kind of clan based government. Also, also, Roy, one of the first big things he did was, I think he's the first country in the world to make Bitcoin an official currency along with which has also made him a weird sort of celebrity in the Bitcoin world.

38:47Absolutely. So cryptocurrency people, and I know some cryptocurrency people who are actually quite authoritarian and both like the fact that he's embraced cryptocurrency, which incidentally is a very, very unstable thing to start issuing bonds and death in them. It lost, I think, 50 % of its value in about the first three months after he announced this. He also apparently is in, he owns a fair bit of it as well as he has said. Senegal. Senegal, okay. So Senegal, we're now jumping to coast West Africa. And of course, one of the most important countries of Francophone West Africa, it connects to Marley and Sahel, which is this region of the Sahara between North African and Sub -Saharan Africa, where this chain of military coups has happened.

39:32And so it's a place which has some of those structural features, climate, some of the ethnic dynamics, but was always perceived as being the stable democratic exception. Senegal is the only country in fact in Maine, the West Africa, which has never experienced Sub -Saharan -Cou, had a series of peaceful transitions of power. It's particularly celebrated, I think, in the the anti -colonial liberation movement because its first president was an extraordinary man called Leopold Senghor, who is a poet, a writer, a member of the Academy Fossez, and it's a classic French intellectual. And unfortunately, it's followed a trend that we've tracked around the world.

40:13We've often talked about the fact that 2014 is a tipping point in the world, in terms of relation towards democracies. In 2014, two -thirds of the population of Senegal were satisfied with democracy by 2022 less than 50 % were. And it's in this context that things are happening every year. So this is President Sally, he sounds like a sort of Scottish football manager, he's called Mackie Sal. And first you should have got the Aberdeed job instead of who got the Aberdeed job, Roy? I'm afraid I haven't been following that. Mr Neil Warlock. That is the first and last time Mr Neil Warlock will be on this podcast.

40:50So he has literally with weeks to go, the election was due to him February the 25th, he has postponed the election. Now we can think of all sorts of reasons why subdued right, what was both election, but what would we put at the top of the list, Roy? A fear that perhaps your chosen successor, your party might not win the next election. Correct. Because this is another one where he has done his two terms, and that was the limit that he can stand. But he's obviously trying to get in place a successor. The courts have banned from running some of the people, confusingly one of them also call Sal, who might be expected to give them a run for their money.

41:33They've had to legislate to postpone the election. There was violence in the chamber. The security forces went in and took out some of the opponents to this move. It has now passed. He has given no clear date as to when the election will be. And as you say, this is a country that has never had a coup, has managed to have peaceful transfers of power between different parties and has never until now delayed an election. So it is quite tense. And even though this isn't maybe as bad as some of the things that have happened in other countries in that region, it's sort of is part of the same pattern.

42:09Yeah. Very worrying. Very worrying because I think experts on that region really thought Senegal was was the exception, the place which he wouldn't be worried about. Senegal that actually led the intervention in the Gambia when there was a military coup there to restore democracy. So worrying. But not as worrying as the sort of thing that we wanted to cover last, which is North Korea. And then we're moving into a very, very different world. So we've talked about countries about the size of Wales, El Salvador, countries like Senegal populations, kind of 19 million. When you move into Korea, you're looking at a country, North and South Korea combined, it's about the same size as the United Kingdom, same length and breadth, similar sort of combined population, sort of up in the 70 million region, although two thirds of that is down in South Korea.

43:03And this extraordinary geographic position, again, just to remind people, Korea sticks off the Etch and Manchuria. It's this huge, long peninsula stretching down with Japan on one side and and China on the other. And a country that is one of the most unified, homogenous countries on earth, there's almost no country that you can think of in the world, which can be compared to Korea in terms of fact that it has basically one ethnicity, one language in North and South, and developed it very, very early on. It unlike so much of the rest of Asia, it isn't a place defined by numerous different identities languages.

43:44So very homogenous and then was split because the Cold War, totally artificially like the splitting of eastern West Germany, but even more so because it was a much more unified place than eastern West Germany. And since then, this incredible divergence. So Korea started at the end of the Second World War as a very poor country. It's GDP per capita would have been comparable to Senegal, what we've just been talking about. Fast forward to today, the GDP per capita of North Korea is now lower than Senegal. The GDP per capita of South Korea is now greater than that of the United Kingdom. So it's sort of shot.

44:17So the average South Korean is now 25, 30 times wealthier than the average person in North Korea. Over the year. But the average North Korean, of course, doesn't necessarily know that because they have complete control over everything that they hear, see and read. The reason why I thought this was particularly important moment to which to discuss this is partly because there has been something of a rapprochement between North Korea and Russia up to and including the provision of arms in relation to Ukraine. And there's been something of a rapprochement with China as well. And I think sometimes we look at Kim Jong Un, who is the third family member.

44:58Since 1948, they've only had three leaders, Kim Il Sung, then his son Kim Jong Il, and now his grandson Kim Jong Un. And what's been really interesting about recent developments is that in a speech, I think it was last month, Kim Jong Un has broken with the commitment that his predecessors had, which essentially was the the pursuit of Korean unification. And he now is talking very, very clearly about the idea that the goal is no longer unity. Essentially, it's subjugation through war and he talks about being at war. Now, it's possible to just say, well, this is just part of the sort of, you know, belligerence that we're used to seeing.

45:37But you have to put it alongside other things that are happening, such as the continuing development of weapons that do have a far greater reach than the ones that he had before. Now, it could be he's just doing this to kind of strengthen himself domestically. It could be that he's just doing this to kind of get himself noticed. I think he's another leader who is a bit like Xi and a bit like Putin is sort of waiting for Trump, hoping that Trump comes along because of course, famously, Trump flattered him and had a meeting with him and eventually he turned against him because he didn't sort of do everything that he told him to.

46:12But he knows he must surely know that if he does go to war and all out war, that if America's dragged into that, then North Korea is facing an existential threat. But he does have nuclear weapon development going on. And I think you've put your finger on it. And I think that one of the things we'll see is that deep, deep experts on North Korea are completely divided about which one of those two scenarios is right. So as you say, one version is yes, of course, he's being belligerent, but don't worry about it too much. The North Koreans are often belligerent. There's a strong pattern over many, many decades they're making aggressive comments.

46:48And in the end, they do it in the run up to US elections so that they did nuclear tests in 2016 and 2012. They fired long range missiles. And that it's designed just to try to drive the US and South Korea to the negotiating table and get the concessions that he wants, which is the lifting of sanctions. And in his dreams, there was draw a US military from Korea, there's still 25 ,000 American soldiers in Korea. But the other view which is coming from some other very serious scholars of North Korea is no, no, this time it's very different. And we haven't heard this type of language before and it's much, much more dangerous.

47:26There's a big paper written by two of these experts, Karlin and Hecker saying this is the most dangerous that they've really seen it since the 1950s. Is this the one of those guys works for or worked for the state department and they are both clear that they're both clear that they think he has made a strategic decision that he will end up at war with South Korea. Exactly, that's right. One of them is a former state department official. And their story is that he's absolutely lost it with any belief that there's any possibility of concessions that Trump was his last spin of the dice didn't work out.

48:02He doesn't believe any longer that he's going to be able to get sanctions lifted. He lives in a very isolated paranoid world. I mean, this was one of the things that was of course very important about Putin and that weird COVID isolation over two years where his nationalism kind of deepened and became more and more mad and that we should be very worried and that actually we've been too complacent about the idea that he's so frightened of an American retaliation he'd never do anything. That sort of sustained us for a long time but he may be losing his patience now. And I think the final thing is that we've been wrong about North Korea so often.

48:39I mean, we've been predicting its collapse since the 1980s and understandably, I mean, it's so poor, so brutal. There are huge problems within the regime. There are even more rounding up of political enemies and killing them happening now than they have been for the last few years. There seems to be a much more serious famine on its way, you know, the sort of famine they haven't seen for 20 years. So all of that makes you think that if you're betting on the long term, you'd think that North Korea is going to collapse but that hasn't happened. And again and again, people have been proved wrong.

49:10And so I think that the risk is that the sort of crying wolf risk that we've become so exhausted by his threats and talks about nuclear weapons that people just ignore him. Whereas this time it might be for real. Yeah, and you said that the population of the two Koreas combined is roughly the that of the UK and North Korea is a third. And yet they have the fourth biggest army in the world. You have America, China, and India. And then North Korea, over a million soldiers. We said last week, we can fit the UK army now into one of our bigger football stadiums. And the other big change that he made in his recent speech was the fact of saying that he no longer accepted the maritime border between North and South.

49:54Now that was drawn up by the United Nations at the end of the Korean War. And he has now said that is not a legal border and that he asserts all territorial claims in the area. Now if you go for the Saberattling assessment, then South Korean ships think, oh well that's just him sort of soundly off. We'll just carry on as normal. But if you go for the he's actually into a different stage and a different strategy, then who knows what happens. And if he if he'd were to attack ships, who knows where that would lead to. So I agree with you, I think it's without wanting to make people even more paranoid about the state of the world right now.

50:35I think we should stop thinking about Kim Jong Un as that sort of big fat jolly chap that we see coming on the tele everyone again, usually sitting in a big black armchair in what looks like a desert watching missiles fire off into the sky. All these amazing parades where children come out and women are weeping at the sight of him and all that stuff here. It's easiest to look at him as a bit of a joke figure, but I would say he's right up there now as one of the key members of the global dictators club. And China of course is the key to this. I mean China's what keeps North Korea alive. If anybody has leveraged in North Korea, it's China.

51:12We've talked about this in relation to Myanmar as well. I mean it reminds you of just how much even this brief conversation we've had today, how much is on the desk of somebody like Biden trying to do the world and sort of bandwidth you need to try to, there will be people in his Africa section saying we've got to get on the pass, Manchester, to Senegal, there will be people worried about the sedative of up to Central America, there will be people worried about new weapons in North Korea. We haven't even talked about them at least. We haven't talked about Ukraine where you now have this incredible situation where the Republican Party directed by Trump essentially are putting Biden's entire Ukraine strategy at risk because they want him to fail in it.

51:56And that's before we, you know, this is obviously called the rest as politics and that's before you get onto the domestic politics and the way that affects the stuff. I was reading the Wall Street Journal this morning and all the comment pages, the op -eds are making the argument that Biden is weak on Iran, you know, because these three American soldiers were killed, there are these big op -eds saying he's going to be brought down like Jimmy Carter by inflation in Iran, it's going to be just the same and and the story is all about presidential weakness and that's very dangerous because that of course is one of the things that drove LBJ to lean into the Vietnam War is the sense that his domestic program was going to unravel because the Republicans were accusing him of being soft.

52:35So that's very dangerous. I mean, I think almost more than the calculations and you know, since we spoke last the US has done I think 82 strikes against Iranian -backed militia groups, but there's now been another attack, another drone attack. Yesterday against US bases, which will encourage more responses and more dangerous than the facts on the ground is going to be this question of US politics getting into an election. Well, there we are. We started off on a reasonably upbeat note in Northern Ireland. We've ended up in a fairly damn beat note in North Korea. Well, let me take up your invitation to finish us on an upbeat note.

53:07So Northern Ireland is remarkable because there were so many reasons to be glimmy. So many reasons to think that the big political leaders would never sign up. So many reasons to think the British government would be too distracted and not serious enough to focus. And instead, what we found is actually the British government has done a pretty good job that all Northern secretaries start with it. But more than that, much more important, much more exciting is a new leadership from Sinn Fein and the DUP showing their prepared to work together a much more positive creative language. It's not the kind of populism that we've been worrying about on this show so far.

53:42It's the sign of leadership going in a positive optimistic direction. So there's still hope for the world. Excellent. If I can add to this sense of uplifting mood music around politics, my favourite event of the week has been the revelation that Donald Trump is terrified of Taylor Swift. Very good. Well done, Taylor Swift. And a goodbye for me. Bye -bye.