237. Iran, Israel, and the Middle East: Stopping the slide into all-out war

28:09Now the Chinese Navy has grown hugely. Japanese Navy has always been very, very, very big. But one of the factors that's involved in this initiative that he's taking with the Philippines in Japan last week is the fact that China's been intercepting ships and aircraft belonging to the US in the South China Sea, just to sort of, you know, see how far they can, it's part of this kind of provocative action, see how far they can push it. So you're right that the American military remains this giant, but in comparative terms, it's not as big as it was. And it doesn't have the kind of bipartisan and popular political support that it had.

28:48That's the point I was making earlier. You meet so many Americans who really have bought into this idea that, you know, we're just sort of fueling these forever wars. And okay, and the, you know, the idea of the global policeman used to be kind of part of the strength of the American political identity, but that's being eroded. A lot of them don't want to be the world's policeman. And that's from both left and right. I mean, the US is spending over 80, pretty 85 billion dollars a year on its international deployments. And as you say from the left, there will be a sense that it's all our fault.

29:23And we don't want to make the world worse. And, you know, obviously, there's a strong drive towards peace. And from the right, there will be a strong sense of words. None of our business. Why do we care about these other people? So, both sides are driving American politics towards a more isolationist position. The final thing, though, which, you know, maybe just before we go into the break that you've pointed to is the way that what Biden is doing forms a pattern of making small temporary coalitions of support as opposed to leaning into the big international global system of the UN. So, you're going into Libya, you're relying on the UN.

30:07If you're doing climate stuff, you're relying on the UN. Biden seems to have got frustrated with the sort of big things, sort of UNWTO. And instead is making things. I mean, you talked when you were in Australia about Orcas, which is an example of one of those things where, you know, Australia, US, UK's come together. Then he's got something called the Quad where he's working with India. Now, as you say, he's got this agreement going with the Philippines. One of the things apparently that he talked to the Japanese about last week was the possibility of Japan being added to Orcas at some point.

30:41So, I don't know what they're going to call it. But, no, so they're building these different alliances. But is that also a reflection of the weakening, not least by Trump, of some of these other military institutions that we've depended on? Exactly. So, the positive spin made by the Biden administration is they call it creating a lattice work and improvising and getting around these cumbersome setups. But of course, it's driven by the fact that they're struggling to get the support in the bigger international agreement. So, you've just come back from Singapore. And I think one of the things you probably would have picked up there is that Singapore is an example of a place which, you know, 99 % of ways is pro -West and pro -American, but is very, very reluctant to sign up to a US confrontation with China.

31:24Oh, yeah, absolutely. So, these things give the impression of a massive coalition of the willing. But the reality is that in lining up against China, they've got South Korea, they've got Japan, they've got the Philippines. That's about it. They're really struggling to get full -throated support from the other major players in the Asia and Southeast Asia. Even India is pretty unbifluent. Oh, yeah. I thought it was interesting though about the Philippines because the Philippines, when Markos Jr. came to power, he was seen very much as being, you know, looking favorably upon China. But all this stuff within the South China Sea has, it seems to have pushed him far closer to the American side of things.

32:09I was really report that the, from the American Defense Department. So, in the last two years, Chinese ships and planes of these incidents of sort of provoking American ships or aircraft, there'd been almost 300 in the last two years. And that is more than the total of the entire previous decade. And if you throw in the similar things against Philippine vessels, if you get the Mee's vessels, there's something going on there that I think we need to keep our eyes on. Right. Let's take a break. Let's take a break.

32:48This isn't ad from BetterHelp. At the moment, we're getting advice from everywhere. You just have to go on TikTok. Could be Alice's cold plunges. Could be my attempts to meditate or the digital detox that I'm doing in Colombia. But of course, one of the things that we know is that it can be incredibly valuable to talk to another human being, somebody who's actually been trained as a object of the, and professionally. And as the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a very diverse variety of expertise. They've got over 5 ,000 therapists in the UK.

33:27They've helped more than 5 million people globally. And you can join a session literally at the click of a button. Change therapists anytime. So, obviously not about fixing you, but it's about hearing yourself clearly, maybe for the first time. So, talk it out with BetterHelp. Our listeners get 10 % off their first month. at BetterHelp .com slash rest politics. That's better H -E -L -P .com slash rest politics.

33:57Welcome back to the Rests As Politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alice Campbell. And in this election year, Rory, well, now we don't know whether it was a surprise, but I think the scale of the defeat for the president's party, the PPP, in South Korea was a surprise. The Democratic Party, which alongside this little satellite party it works with, has got 175 seats in the 300 seat parliament. And the PPP has just got 109. Now, the only sort of shaft of light for president Un is that they didn't get a two -thirds majority, which would have meant they could have overridden his veto, changed the constitution.

34:38They could even have impeached him. So, he stopped short of that, but it's a pretty devastating result for him. His party leaders had to resign, the Prime Minister and others have offered to. And it means he will be the first, I think the first South Korean president ever who will go through his entire term without ever having control of the parliament. And this is important because South Korea is facing a lot of simultaneous crises. I mean, one of them is having been the great economic miracle. I mean, as people remember, South Korea and North Korea, of course, were occupied by Japan before Second World War, went through the Korean War in the early 50s in which three million Koreans were killed, country were then divided.

35:19And South Korea then went through a series of dictatorships, particularly under a couple of generals from the early 60s to the late 80s, where it became this incredible economic miracle. And again, in the news that a week and direct people towards a wonderful book by a Korean British economist called Ha Jung Chang arguing that actually Korea is a really exciting model, because it wasn't a model of sort of that right, deregulated free market development. It was a model of quite directed government investment development that created these enormous things like Samsung and Hyundai. Become incredibly impressive country.

35:55I mean, you've just come back from Singapore and you can feel the weight of South Korea throughout Asia now with culturally with kind of K -pop. Okay, K -pop is unbelievable. I mean, it was the third biggest export. I don't know if that's right, but I'd read that when I was in Singapore. It's that the third biggest export. And even the UK now, Roy, I mean, I'm sure you follow K -pop very, very closely, but definitely not as closely as you. These big bands now when they come over here, I mean, here we are tried to sell the O2 and hopefully we'll get there by October. They can do it 20 times over in five minutes just by doing a couple of tweets.

36:31It's amazing. And lots of things to admire about South Korea. I mean, it's got people live to be kind of 83. It's got a very impressive stats around its health service, but it's also facing real problems. And one of them is it's had a big doctors. I mean, some of it's brilliant. It's dealing with longstanding doctors strike, huge challenge and trying to produce affordable housing. Young people feeling completely locked out of the market and feeling that life. A very aging population. Very aging. So fertility rate down at 0 .85 per couple. So it's population dropped. It's one of these countries now like China and Japan, which is facing unfortunately pretty bleak economic future in a sense because it's population that's going to contract.

37:16And like those countries too, not a big one on taking an immigrant. So it's 93 % ethnic Korean. So he's struggling with that. And of course, he's struggling with what we've been talking about a month ago, which is North Korea. And as you've pointed out, I mean, I think you struck the alarm on this and I think people have slightly taken their eyes off it. North Korea is in a very, very dangerous state. It's getting a little support because it's supplying arms to Russia and Russia in return vetoed the UN inspectors going into spectacity, the weapons. I'm picking up from people who are in touch with the Chinese government that the Chinese government is now very worried about North Korea.

37:57And it's beginning to signal that it's not in control and what North Korea does isn't really its responsibility. So that's the background. And then as you've said, this election, which is part of a pattern again in Korea, which we've seen across so many countries, particularly in Latin America, which is the use of law fair, attacking the previous president, trying to put them in jail. It's got a Korean politics since the 80s, it's just got flips back and forth and every time somebody steps down as president, the other party tries to go after them for corruption or abuse of power. And we can see this now.

38:31The current president's wife is under investigation for taking a deal handbag. So that's corruption. The leader of the opposition is under investigation for corruption for allocating a corrupt contract on a land deal when he was mayor. The handbag incident was unfortunate to say the least because it was one of those greatly secretly filmed things. But it's quite interesting. She has literally vanished from the scene. She didn't even go, you know, normally you will have the party leaders of film going to vote and the wives or husbands will be there alongside them. And she, I don't think she's been seen since December in terms of sort of out and about publicly.

39:10But the point you made about North Korea is interesting because of course, his predecessor was quite emolience the wrong word, but he was trying to calm things. Whereas you has been much more outspoken, much more aggressive. And that seems to have backfired. And I think, you know, we talk a little about the personalities of these of these political leaders. And here's a guy who's actually, I'm not going to compare to Gears Starbeaver. His background is a prosecutor. And it seems that he's not really adapted his style to politics. I think he has adapted his style quite well to politics. But both of them, I mean, somebody said in the last presidential race, which was incredibly close, think he won by, you know, 0 .0 % percent.

39:50Or 0 .7, I think it was, yeah. It was an unlikeability contest that both these people are lawyers. You know, one of them is you say a prosecutor, the other one, a bit like his times the human rights lawyer. And that it's like kind of in one sense that people talk about the kind of gladiatorial contest where they're always trying to put each other in jail. But another sense, these are not figures who are really big on, big on charisma. He also, he said that he did this terrible. It's, it's just amazing how seemingly little things can catch on. So one of the turning points in the election is, he was, there was a big fancy department store where a single apple suddenly cost seven dollars, okay, about five pounds.

40:31So five pounds for an apple. So that became like quite a big story. And President Yuen thought, I need to do something about this. So he went out to a market. And he basically said that the spring onions there were very, very cheap. Now several points about this. The first is it was one of those subsidized markets. So actually, yes, they were quite cheap with us because they were subsidized. But also, what do you say that rather than eat apples, we should eat spring onions? And so during the campaign, the opposition just went to round the place, waving spring onions everywhere. It's a fun amount of problem that British politicians do sometimes, isn't it?

41:10The stupidity of a politician going out and saying, oh, actually, things are quite affordable. Tory politicians are getting trouble for this. This will go around the supermarket saying, if you buy own brand products, you don't have to pay very much. I think, well, Lee Anderson became 30 p .o. Lee by talking about, you know, you can, you can, was he, he said, you can sort of get a decent meal for 30 p. But, Miller, you know, you've never had it so good. Yeah, it's always a dangerous thing. But this is quite sad in a way because he's more sad, maybe the wrong word to use. But he got attacked over a lot of the things that as president, he doesn't have much control over.

41:42And it means now that he probably will be able to do next to nothing on the domestic front. Parliament's going to be gridlocked. He's lost control of parliament. And that means he will focus much more on foreign policy. Now, he actually, I don't think got enough credit for what he did in relation to the, the thing with Japan and, and buy. And I think that was quite a brave thing to do. And that's a big, big deal and very brave and very unpopular because Japan was a very brutal colonial occupier of Korea. You know, enslaved Korean women as sex slaves killed in the normal smell of Koreans, destroyed Korean culture.

42:15So, quite brutal and recent. And so, although, reproachement, which Japan makes a lot of strategic sense, it's very unpopular with a lot of people in Korea. Yeah. And he also, he, he, he is a little bit of a gaff pro, I think. He had a bit of a Gordon Brown big at moment when he was after a meeting with Joe Biden and realized the microphone was on and he was swearing. He did then sort of endear himself to the Americans. Remember, he, I think we talked about this at the time when he sang Don McLean sang American pie. He sang American pie to, to Biden. But he's very, very, very confrontational. And who does this make you think of, Rory?

42:51He was described as a leader who is stubborn, doesn't listen to anyone, doesn't believe in compromise. Now, which recent British Prime minister does that bring to mind? Oh, goodness. Because I don't, I don't know. It's almost certainly one of my heroes. It's not or is it one of my, well, let's trust. Well, I think, I think the same, you know, I'm a Mara of Gordon Brown trees and me, both of whom have been accused of being pretty stubborn. Let's, let's bring in the list, trust. I mean, she's produced this book, which was called, is it, it's 42 days to destroy Britain or something? No, it's 10 years.

43:2510 years to save the West. And it was 49 days, wasn't it? But I'll tell you what, I'm, I just, I find the whole thing mesmerizingly mind blowing. She's done a deal with Elon Musk because every time I look at Twitter, the first thing that comes up is Liz Truss talking to somebody about her book, I'm blaming everybody, apart from herself, for the absolute chaos in Mayhem that she, that she presided over. And so I mean, she's got thick skin, doesn't even come into it. This is, this is on a level that I've never witnessed before. It is excellent. Well, I, I've of course worked for Liz Truss because she was the sexiest state for environment food and rural affairs when I was the Minister of the Environment and we had offices down the corridor from each other.

44:12I used to sit in her office for hours every day. I'm not going to repeat on the podcast because I've done it already and put a lot of my books, some of the horrifying encounters that we had about funding for national parks or press releases or 25 years of environment plans. But she is a very, very strange person to work with. I mean, as you say, she comes from a left -wing background. I remember going to her house and meeting her mother who was on CND marches very much part of the nuclear disarmament drive in the 1980s, left -wing maths professor father and getting increasingly right -wing. But the thing I took most from it is her style of not caring about management.

44:54I mean, she just wasn't interested in the normal business of leading a team managing civil servants. What she thought she was the business of was throwing out radical ideas. She wanted to be radical all the time. And the quality of those ideas I felt didn't really matter. I mean, it was all her saying to me, we're going to be the most amazing data department in the government. Hashtag, OpenDeferr and or suddenly announcing some, she also had this idea when she was in Mr. Justice that the way to stop drones coming into prisons was to fly Eagles at them. The Eagles were somehow going to deter the drones.

45:38It was just a little attempt for Deferr to take over prisons. Oh, this is when she was the minister of justice. But it was also a little bit like a sort of slightly reminiscent, I think. Do you remember Queen Elizabeth I in Black Adder? She had that sort of sense of sort of energy and people moving behind her, but also sights her petulence. And occasionally quite sort of childlike quality of you can imagine her sort of saying off of her head. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's something very childlike about the way she speaks. And she's got this thing with her hand that she does in sort of like every point she makes.

46:13It's almost like she's talking to a child. It's exacerbated over time. She used to speak like quite a normal human being and she's now developed this very weird style of speaking. There's a lot about her that's likable, but the one thing she should not be is a minister of sexist state or a prime minister. And actually in some ways, you know, David Cameron should take responsibility for that. He fast -tracked her through to make her a cabinet minister when she'd been in parliament only four years and adored her. You know, oddly, she was traditionally very good at pleasing her bosses because they thought that she was sort of feisty and quirky and they even produced this word phrase that they thought she was a good media performer.

46:53And Mike's meant she's actually not good at all on television or in speeches, but somehow David Cameron, you know, she really caught David Cameron's eye, George Osborne's eye, and I'd be interested in knowing how they now reflect on that, that they made the career of somebody who wasn't ultimately any good at the job. When you go through her, her sort of progression as a politician, so the first time I think she was ever on television was at the Liberal Democrat conference calling for the abolition of the monarchy. And then she's gone through even as a conservative. Even since becoming prime minister, she seems to be more and more radicalized.

47:27I do think she's been captured intellectually by these very, very right -wing ultra -libertarians. I mean, I watched a clip from an interview that she did yesterday where she was sort of, she was almost talking like she was still the prime minister. You know, we must have abolished the Supreme Court. We must withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights. We must do this. We must do that. And now, I don't know whether she's still considered herself to be a player. I don't know whether she's trying to influence the direction of current political thinking or the current conservative party or what happens after the election.

48:02I noticed that her latest poll ratings, we didn't, I don't think we polled her in our poll last week. We should have done. We should have polled. The poll that I saw for this morning, she had 8 % of people viewed her favorably. She was actually lower than every other politician that was and yet she swung around as though she's the Queen of Sheba. And I think is trying to present herself as a potential sort of king or queenmaker for the next Tory election. I've been quite struck with the fact there's now a campaign against her where a pretty traditional conservative is running as an independent in her seat.

48:39A self -described, a rory steward conservative, I'll have you. That's right. Man called James Bag running in her seat in Norfolk. And I think it's worth watching quite closely because this is really a battle about what is the identity of the conservative party. And it's interesting that a lot of conservatives are really horrified by her. I mean, I'm finding this in Parliament. She's very in a strange way, very likable on a one -on -one basis. And I always feel a bit guilty raging against her because she's always been very polite to me and she's very courteous when I meet her. And that's true for a lot of my colleagues.

49:15They think she's friendly and nice. But people are just so horrified by what she did as Prime Minister. Because if you're obviously not a Tory, you don't really care about this, but for the point of view of the Torys, the one thing they thought they had was some credibility around the economy. The story was supposed to be that, you know, labour were compassionate and progressive, but the Tories were meant to be the people who were careful with your money. Always a bit of a myth, but anyway, yeah, except the premise. Void did she blow it. I mean, she managed in 49 days to do as much damage to the conservative party's economic credibility as Boris Johnson did to their moral credibility.

49:57But she's done it, and now, as come out, organ's blazing, essentially saying it was everybody's fault apart from mine, and it was an establishment stitch up. I have just been listening to plug another sister podcast. I listened to the rest of his money who've done this three -part mini -series on Liz Truss and on the mini budget. And whilst Robert Pesta and the Steffan government are rightly very, very critical of Truss as a politician and Quarting as Chancellor, they also do talk a lot about the, a lot of mistakes that Robert thinks were made at the Bank of England. It was a financial regulatory issue, which Truss and Quarting had no knowledge of whatsoever and weren't alerted to until I think the Monday after the mini budget by which time the whole thing had gone to its up anyway.

50:40But I went to a meeting with you, in fact, with people in this industry about three weeks ago. And in the sort of drink softwoods, I was talking to someone and they said they could not believe that Quarting, who'd been a banker, didn't understand what he was doing. I mean, from their point of view, these are people in this particular bit, the industry. But for them, it was incredibly obvious what would happen if Quarting and Liz Truss planned the markets in this way and what the consequences were would be for these financial instruments of the Bank of England, of the financial health of the system.

51:12And they just couldn't believe that Quarting, who was supposed to get this stuff, did something that they thought was quite as reckless. And of course, the other thing is that they did it was so little. I mean, it's just all part of their new populist mindset. They basically couldn't be bothered to consult with anyone. They signaled they were going to fire the permanent section, the treasury, they bothered to talk to the OBR, they bothered to talk to the Bank of England. So part of the thing that made the markets even more panicked was not just what they were doing, but the way in which they were doing it.

51:43I also worry that the... I mean, here we are. We're talking about Liz Truss. I don't know if I'll bother reading this book or not. I've sort of probably have heard enough of it. I also worry you as a monarchist, right? I mean, I'm not the world's greatest monarchist, as you know, but I mean, if you had been Prime Minister and you get the message that the Queen has died, would your reaction have been why me, why now? I mean, that was of a narcissistic self -obsession, again, on a level that I don't think I've ever contemplated. This is why it's become quite existential for the Conservative Party because she represents really incompetent economic management.

52:26But the thing I think that really means that people like me are likely to support Independence like James Bagg in Norfolk against her and other Conservatives will too, is this flirting with Trump and Maga and the appearance on these stages now in the US where she's essentially leaning into these very dangerous fringe American conspiracy theories. It's totally, it's completely undignified for a former UK Prime Minister to do it, but it's also dangerous because she's giving space to people that should never be given space. But she's also, she's getting, she's being given that space because she, okay, she's a former Prime Minister, but we all know she was the worst prime, one of the two worst prime ministers of all time.

53:11And yet, because she's sort of a bit weird and a bit wacky, we're back to this sort of politics as performative politics as being about, you know, who's a bit weird, who's a bit wacky. She's actually starting to begin to remind me of that American woman, Marjorie Taylor Green, who gets all that coverage in America because the media know that she'll say really crazy wacky things. And therefore she's interesting. Well, Liz Trust has become interesting in the same way, but it's, it's just desperate for our politics. It's a sort of reality TV take care of politics, I'm totally, I got a bit of criticism, I'm sure you didn't, but I did from last week for not being more critical of Angela Rainer.

53:53So I had some quite thoughtful, moderate, conservative saying, listen, the question around Angela Rainer and the mortgages is the question around whether she lied or not that it's fine by doing an explainer explaining that these are complicated tax things, and that the question of whether it was her main home or not, whether she should have paid tax on it, but that the big question is, has, has she lied about this? Did she really receive legal advice? Was she really confident? And, and of course, the reason this matters, well, it goes to your Nolan Principle's point and it goes back to the expensive scandal that, of course, what she did is something that I guess is very, would be tempting for, for many members of public to do, to think, oh gosh, I can save some capital gains tax.

54:37If this is my prime residence, not my second residence, can I make it look like my prime residence? But I guess the question is, firstly, holding politicians to high standards and secondly, this question of lying. Yeah, but I think that I was actually with Kierstharman, I snore at this event that I did, and remember when he was questioned by the police over the beer nonsense in Durham, and he said, if I'm found to, you know, broken the law, I would resign as a lady, she said the same about this, I don't think he would have said that without total confidence, and I don't think he would have allowed her to say the same thing without confidence that actually this will in the end be fine for her.

55:14But I don't know if you've seen the times today, Roy, Nick Bowles, your former colleague in the Conservative Parliamentary Party, he's got, I'll just read his very short letter in the times today, having surfed nine years as an MP, I know how low politicians can stoop when they're backstreet against the wall, but the Conservative tackle and Angela Reiner is one of the most grotesque spectacles of hypocrisy I've witnessed. On one side is a billionaire Tory peer, Lord Ashcroft, and a multi -millionaire Tory Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, whose families have all avoided paying millions of pounds in UK taxes, beneficiaries of non -dom status, and who live in luxury.

55:45On the other is a woman who grew up in poverty, caring for her illiterate mother, who is now mother to a child who's registered blind, and who through her own guts and character has risen to be deputed of the Labour Party. Even Reiner's accuses accept that the most she might have benefited from the error that they are led, in which she denies, is less than £3 ,000. I suppose that her attackers cannot bear the idea that they're about to lose to a woman who pulled herself up by her bootstraps and was going to wipe the floor with the Nick Bowles.

56:14There we are. So I dare to appear to people who want more of the same with the Jonathan the Harmsworth, a Vi -Count Rodermer, and his property portfolio. And Paul Daker's property portfolio, I recommend you get this week's the new European. Well, Alissa, thank you. We covered a lot of ground, just to sort of wrap it up. I think, setting UK politics aside, I think the question that we kept coming back to is whether you're talking about China and the US. How do you deal with Chinese attacks on shipping, or whether you're talking about Israel and Iran? Is how in a world you respond firmly enough to keep the world peaceful without responding so firmly that you create a spiral of increasing conflict?

56:57I don't know. I guess it's the same with Ukraine Russia. And that is the thing to look at over the next few months. It'll be the same with North Korea, actually. We touch on four things like this. Are we smart enough? And I guess that comes down to the military force being surrounded by the diplomatic connections, the economic sanctions, and the sense that people are being proportional and realistic and reliable. Are these different players, China, US, Iran, Israel, Russia, Ukraine, able to restrain themselves and not overreact in a way that spills into it in a much bigger global conflict? Yeah, absolutely.

57:33And on that subject, I recommend if you haven't listened to it, listen, go back a couple of weeks to our interview with John Swars and Eliza Manning and Bullo who were very, very interesting on that sort of balance between having to do something and sometimes kind of not doing very much being the right response. And that's on leading for on our separate feed for people who want to feed it. Thank you, Edith.