307. Starmer put to the test, Modi's visit to Ukraine, and tragedy unfolds in Sudan

24:18we did this amazing veteran campaign of Bob Mulholland. We also had a chat with this guy, David Urban, who's a big Trump supporter. I wasn't present and I'm suspicious of your use the word chat. Would you describe yourself as disagreeing agreeably? I think we just about managed to disagree agreeably, but we disagreed a lot. The idea of Alice the Campbell sitting down with the Donald Trump supporter without me present fills me with psych kind of horror. It was, and then the one that we're going to put out soon with Frank Luntz, the pollster. And it's very, very interesting though, both, if I've written my new European column about this, David Urban, the Trump guy, and Frank Luntz.

24:57And Frank said to me, and as you heard, Frank who thinks that New Labour's the greatest campaign ever, blah, blah, blah, but he said to me on air that he felt that I was making a big mistake because I have full on Trump derangement syndrome. And David Urban said something similar, he said that, you know, unless you understand why people are voting Trump. You're never gonna win those people back. And I've thought about that a lot. And David Urban said in the interview, he said, look, yeah, this conference is great. And the convention's great. And people love Cowell of it. Try and put yourself in the mind of a guy in Wisconsin who's got a crap job.

25:32These kids are going to a crap school. He's worried about his next paycheck and so forth. Try and be them watching this convention and see what you're hearing. And I did that the next day. I tried to force myself to do that and it was a very very different experience. So look the other lasting impression for me from the convention was just the scale of it. The I think I told you the night of Kamala Harris's speech, watching this guy go round with a knife cutting the bags that were holding up the balloons. He was sort of walking up right at the top of the stadium at a hundred thousand balloons.

26:06He was way up there, going around his choppy these things and they're coming down and then Stevie Wonder pops in for one song and John Legend pops in for a song and you know... Did you get Beyonce? No she didn't come in then Rory. She decided that if you weren't gonna be there she wasn't gonna be there. We should just while we're on the culture and I know you were talking earlier about Cool Britannia, you must be very excited about the Oasis reunion. Credit bit excited. Listen I've been doing a bit of reunions. I'm gonna most I'd slightly sort of grim and disturbing experience. I want to hear a Beach Boys concert in Cape Cod.

26:41Well, the Beach Boys, the real Beach Boys. The real Beach Boys, or at least the remaining still standing Beach Boy, which was really like watching Joe Biden trying to belt out songs about surfing. So I hope my racist is not going to be like that. I don't think they will be. I don't think they will be. I still would guarantee that it's going to happen. I think that's simply rivalry runs very, very deep. Anyway, on you, the Beach Boys and Joe Biden, let's take a break.

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28:48Welcome back to the rest of politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Aleister Campbell. And Aleister, you wanted to talk, I think, first about Indian foreign policy in a particular Modi's trip to Ukraine. So give us a sense of Modi's trip to Ukraine and then maybe we can expand it out. Well, so Nurendra Modi, long serving Prime Minister of India, just one another election, albeit with a very reduced mandate, has been under a lot of criticism over Ukraine from the West because he has not outright condemned the invasion. He's not been part of the sort of political alliance against Putin. His first big visit after winning his last election was to Moscow.

29:28On the day that, a hospital in Ukraine was being bombed and he was hugging Putin. We've talked before on the podcast about how I think that India still gets over 50 % of its arms from Russia. India is the biggest buyer of its energy, which she often refines and passes on there by helping people get around sanctions and so forth. So then he goes off, so he has his visit with Putin and the bear hugs and all that. Zelensky very, very angry about it and he goes and has a visit with Zelensky, which of course was seen in the context of Ukraine, but I think there is maybe a bigger thing going on here that this is partly about Modi signalling to Russia that he's not terribly happy about the way that Russia, Putin, is cuddling up so much to China.

30:17So on the one hand he's showing that yes, I do understand why Ukraine feels so strongly about this and I'm not kind of one side to about it, he's sort of facing both ways on that one. There's also the China element and I think the other thing to be absolutely frank and there's nothing wrong with this But I'm just making it as an observation is that there's an economic element to this too because at some point Ukraine is going to have to be rebuilt and I think Modi's putting himself into into that place as well when Tony Blair's Prime Minister and we you know we met several Indian Prime Ministers and I think there was a sense of India a bit like China in the past Sort of sitting out a lot of the big foreign policy situations.

30:54But I think Modi has tried over the last decade to turn India into something of a big player in foreign policy. Yeah, well just to, so I guess, begin with a sort of big context here. India is now one of the very, very largest economies in the world. On many ranks, it's now pulled ahead of the United Kingdom. So it's now the fifth largest economy in the world behind the US, China, Japan, and Germany. But it's still an economy roughly the size of the UK. And And the Chinese economy is still a good 5 or 6 times larger than the Indian economy. And I guess the challenge for the West, the US and its allies is the question of where the partnership is, both in Asia and with this phrase, the global South, which I guess we'll get to in a bit.

31:43So we know about Chinese foreign policy. We've talked quite a lot about Chinese foreign policy in the way in which China operates. India is an aside different position. China obviously has a seat on the UN Security Council. India would like one. India would like one, but doesn't have one yet. China is the world's largest manufacturer, the world's largest exporter, and has put the most incredible amounts of its 17 trillion dollar economy into things like the Dalton Road Initiative, which has absorbed literally trillions of dollars. And Modi, by the way, was one of the few leaders to quite aggressively criticize China for the scale of the Baltimore initiative.

32:20Right. And China, of course, very, very major player in Africa. And we'll come to that in a second, India, India much smaller. But India's got a different history. It, of course, was right at the heart of the non -aligned movement, which was this movement really got going in the 60s, which was about a separate vision from either the US or the Soviet Union. So neither capitalism nor communism was much more about decolonization, about challenging capitalism. And out of that, all these countries formed into groups, non -lined countries, something called the G77. And so India, which has also had some very, very impressive diplomats for a long time, inherited quite a lot of that mantle.

33:03But it's a little unclear where Modi has been taking this. And I suppose he's got three different possibilities. One of them is he really tries to become Chinese competitor as the champion of the global south of Pora developing countries. Or he allies himself strongly with the west and tries to reform institutions, gets onto the security council and just becomes a big player like a bigger version of Germany or something. Or the third is a regional player doing the politics of Bangladesh, Myanmar. Anyway, so what's your sense of where he's going on all this? Well, I sent you a, and we'll put in the newsletter a very interesting kind of, quite promodied, but it was a very long analysis of Indian foreign policy.

33:49The official title that they gave it in the early days was Neighborhood First, so that speaks to the third leg of what you were talking about. But I wonder like a lot of politicians who've been in power for a long time. There's a tendency to get a little bit bored with your own country, a little bit bored with your own region, at least sort of, you stretch out. So, for example, I read that he's visited the UAE seven times. His relations with China are very, very tense. His relations with Russia have got closer and closer. And because America, I think, has a view of India as being something of a counterweight to China, I think he knows he can probably get away with more.

34:28So for example, this stuff, you think about what they've done in relation to Ukraine and energy, where this energy that, you know, through sanctions is no longer able to go to lots of the Russian markets. He's getting crude oil, getting shipped to India, getting refined there so it suddenly becomes Indian oil. I think any sort of said different parts of the world. I mean, I think if that was pretty much any other country involved in that, I suspect that the West would be calling that out much more vigorously than they are. So he isn't quite a strong position. And the human rights and democracy staff, I mean, Indian critics point out that the United States talks a good game about human rights and democracy and anti -populism when they're complaining about Hungary, but they don't when they're complaining about India because they think they need India as an ally against China.

35:14Yeah, exactly. When he was in, seeing Zelensky, the bean this first peace summit in Switzerland where of course Russia not taking part, India were present but did not join in with the communique that talked about Ukraine's territorial integrity. Zelensky when he was there was saying that we need to have another one of these. And there was almost a sense of Modi kind of offering himself as a bit of a mediator. He was almost trying to say, well, because I haven't condemned that, and I haven't done this, and he was saying, hey, he was just a friend who was trying to push for peace, and this has got to be done through dialogue and diplomacy, and we should sit together and try and find a way out of this crisis.

35:55Now, you could argue, well, eventually, that's what is going to have to happen in some shape or form. But I guess he was using the criticisms that he's faced over Ukraine from the West, which have been quite sort of watching for the reason that you say in relation to the sort of, you know, ally against China. But I think he's conscious, even with his weakened mandate that we talked about a few weeks ago, he's conscious of just how much power he does have in foreign policy. Well, there's a very striking statistic I came across. So obviously after Russia invaded Ukraine in February of 2022, there were these enormous blanket sanctions imposed, including trying to exclude Russia from the global payment systems.

36:35Russian trade with Europe and the US collapsed. But since 2022, Turkey's trade with Russia has gone up by 87%. The UAE, so Dubai Abu Dhabi's trade with Russia has gone up by 67%. India's trade with Russia has gone up by 205 % since 2022. As you say, the US has been very relaxed and to impose secondary sanctions. So they've not been prepared to sanction these countries that are trading with Russia. And then they have these embarrassments. So that, as you say, maybe we'll hug Putin, he'll do stuff at the G20, which will kind of embarrass the US. India in some ways is sitting pretty because they're also an economic beneficiary of the trade war between China and the US.

37:18If you're an American company or big international European company looking to make investments now and you're trying to de -risk or decouple from China, India is more and more attractive. It's attractive because you've got a lot of very, very smart people there. It's attractive because Modi's tried to make a better business environment and it's attractive because it's got an enormous internal market. I'm in pushing towards a billion people who could buy your goods. No, it's not not easy, it's a sort of corruption and regulations and protection for Modi's businesses, but my goodness India's sitting pretty and their economic growth and stuff.

37:55All of that, and do you imagine how infuriating that is for Indian saying Modi is pursuing a popular tendu nationalist agenda. He's been brutal to his political opponents. He's taking a very unpleasant and dangerous attitude towards Muslims in India. And in the neighbourhood as you've talked about. He actually basically has been propping up pretty authoritarian governments. He was very close to Shaker Senor and Bangladesh. He's been toppled. I think she's still in. He pretty much cosied up to the Hunta in Myanmar, the military government that took over there. They've been not very condomatory if the Taliban and Afghanistan.

38:32So there's a sense that he's playing a bit of kind of strong man authoritarian politics and not awfully interested in supporting democracy worldwide either. And of course the other thing because of the size of the engine diaspora around the world. He also has this, it even though he didn't do as well in the election as a lot of this, he thought he wouldn't as a lot of other people. When he travels around the world and reading this document I send you, which sort of details all the sort of different visits he's made here there, he can pull in these vast crowds into sort of huge sports stadiums around the world of local Indian people in London, in Boston, in wherever it might be around the world, in Sydney, and give this sense of India as a real global power.

39:18And what I think his approach has been is try to strengthen India's position in the world, but do it whilst maintaining the sense of strategic autonomy, not being trapped into any particular camp, other than India's position. So they got to hand it to my map level. And I guess this brings us sort of the last bit of our chat today to the question of what this means for the way the world is run. So if broadly speaking in the 80s, we saw a world largely divided between kind of communist bloc and western liberal democracies and then maybe in the 90s and early 2000s, kind of US dominated world. We're now into a world which sometimes feels like it's a cold war between US and China, although I think that's overplayed, but much more feels like a world with many, many more players of which India is one of the most powerful and prominent.

40:09Yeah, and Modi talks about this now being a multipolar world. And he would argue that India is becoming one of those polls. A lot of this, you know, and I'm going to talk about Sudan in a minute, an Africa. I mean, the United Nations Security Council, you know, with the permanent five of America, China, Britain, France, and Russia, Africa thinks it should be on their India thinks it should be on their Germany, either as Germany or through the European Union, thinks it should be on there. It's hard to see how there won't be some sort of reform of that over time. And I think Guterius has said, hasn't the Antonia Guterius ahead of the U .S.

40:42has said that it's kind of absurd that Africa is not represented on that. And I suspect that one of the things that may be a game -changer is if a U .S. administration decides that the way to balance China is to strengthen its relationships with India, for example. and they really got behind this and said they think the Security Council just to disgrace then I think Countryside Britain and France that are slightly clinging on by their fingernails will find themselves un -sistered and will runnously boot it off. I mean I guess Kamala Harris administration coming and might be pretty tempted to think okay the Indian economy is big in the British and French economies now why don't we make the big bet and push for Security Council within you there.

41:20That would be a tough move against the special relationship wouldn't it? Now let's just, shall we talk about Sudan? Sudan actually did get into the new a little bit this week in the West. Do you know why Rory? Why? Because somebody by the name of Macklemore, who is a famous American rapper, cancelled his show in Dubai because of the role of the UAE in the Sudan War. And the Sudan War is, I think we're now up to 12 million people that have been displaced. We're up to 2 million, over 2 million that are actually displaced outside the country, and 10 million that it displaced internally. Lots of efforts to try and bring the thing to an end, including new peace talks in Switzerland, but the Armichei, who's essentially ruling Sudan at the moment, or trying to rule Sudan at the moment, said he wouldn't be joining the peace talks and said that the military will quote, fight for a hundred years to defeat the RSF, which is the Rappis support forces with whom they're engaged in this war.

42:22And they've now got the highest level of hunger that has ever been recorded. We're talking about half the population now in a state of chronic hunger. So, sit down, 48 million people. It's big chunk of territory below Egypt and the sort of upper Nile and it's surrounded by Eritrea, Ethiopia, Chad, Central African Republic, Libya. It's a country where this fight partly has its roots and other things. So people remember that The southern part of Sudan, South Sudan, became independent, and that was a huge change because that took away about three quarters of their oil revenue, had a huge economic impact on Sudan itself.

43:05People remember also Darfur and the horrible civil wars that were happening in West Sudan, out of which this thing called the RSF emerged because that was the Janger -Weed militia again that people may have heard of that were fighting in Darfur. Their dictator toppled in 2019, a civilian government in for a couple of years. Not really, I would argue, getting the support it should have done from the US, Europe and others to really help it. So it was toppled in the military coup. And then the two big military haunches, the commander of the army and the leader of the RSF, then broke up with each other.

43:39And have basically demolished Cartouin. And Cartouin looks horrifying. I mean, looks like sort of dressed them. I mean, it's an uninhabitable city now. That was the capital city. And everything else that comes out of that, you gave some of the statistics, but that also means that almost nobody's in school. Universities and hospitals are now occupied by armed groups, so people are not getting treatment or education. And the thing I think that connects the whole thing together to this guy that's refused to perform in Dubai and to this story about a multipolar world is that Sudan is a really striking example of how what we would call smaller or middle powers, much more than the kind of big traditional powers are stirring this up by funding other sides.

44:20So the UAE has been providing support to the RSF and this links back to gold and Yemen and amazing operations and Chad where they're pretending that they've got humanitarian facilities that are actually being used to bring in missiles and drones to help the RSF. And then on the other side you've got Egypt, Turkey and to some extent Qatar more on the side of the military. And this, again is a story that we've seen in Libya. It's a story we can see in Somalia. So I mean, I guess I suppose you just sort of throw that back to you. I mean, you know, we began by talking about how this isn't just about US China.

44:55This is about the rise of countries like India, but it's also about a world where much smaller countries, but with a lot of spare cash, are increasingly throwing their weight around the Africa. Yeah. And when, you know, when you're like us against you, you're like us against you, because I don't know if you saw it at the weekend, a dam collapsed in the Sudan. So leading to massive flooding, heaven knows how many deaths, how many injuries. And of course, one of the reasons we keep coming back to this is because it just doesn't get attention. So when I talked about the hunger, so this thing is, you know, United Nations run that have this thing called the IPC, the integrated food security phase classification.

45:36So more than 25 million people in Sudan now facing acute hunger and they say that's that the highest level of hunger that they've ever monitored within an individual country. We hear a lot about Egypt in relation to bordering the Israel -Garza Walters going on, but of those two million refugees who've actually left the country, they're in, you know, yes Egypt, but also Chad and South Sudan. So you're talking about the people fleeing poor countries to get to very poor countries to remind people where we were again With these coups that happened Sudan is the eastern edge of this huge belt across the Sahel where Democratic civilian governments have collapsed all the way now from coast to coast and been replaced with military dictatorships Which in the case of many of these countries certainly you know particularly Marley a Niger, Bikina Faso have been expelling French US troops and teaming up with the Russians and have actually cut ties to Ukraine because they're accusing Ukraine of attacking Russian back vagnomersenries.

46:38So it's astonishing how right the way across places like Marley and Niger, you can feel the repercussions of these much bigger global politics coming into this very fragile region. Just finally, Roy, on the point about this rapper, Maclomore, he did quite a long statement explaining why he wasn't going to go there, he couldn't support it. He also did said that it was partly inspired by what was happening in Gaza because he saw how the world had woken up to a particular issue and he's sort of saying that the world needs to wake up to this issue as well. When we were at the convention in Chicago, there was this rumor going around that Beyoncé was going to turn up, Taylor Swift was going to turn up and there was sort of massive of excitement about that.

47:19But what's your view about people in different walks of life who sort of, sort of, he's essentially boycotting a country over its foreign policy? Well, the question has it changed. I mean, someday maybe we should check to Bob Gilder for that. I mean, he very much thinks that the power of musicians and celebrities over things like global hunger and humanitarian disaster was much more powerful when they were doing the live aid conference and when they were getting ready for the Glen Eagles, which in 2000s. And I don't know whether he's right, but there's no doubt at all that there's something very shocking here.

47:52If this thing had been happening, if something like Sudan had been happening in the 90s or early 2000s, there would have been much, much more global attention on it. There would have been much more money going in. You know, the U .N .s barely got a third of the money that it needs. And there would have been talks about international intervention. None of that talk anymore. U .S. has lost its power. I mean, they basically completely humiliated the U .S. negotiators and lied to them. the Geneva talks, one side doesn't even bother to turn up to. So why is that happened? Well, definitely something odd has happened because if you go back to Darfur and South Sudan, you had a coalition of George Clooney, who really, really mattered in this.

48:31This is back in the early 2000s. You had Christian churches who really mattered, who were really important in the US for mobilizing Congress, human rights organizations, all coming together making this massive coalition, where you had people like John Kerry making almost daily calls to leaders on the ground when he was the section state. And now we're in a world where, as you say, obviously in the entire Democratic National Convention, I don't think anybody mentioned Sudan, they mentioned Gaza, and they mentioned Ukraine, but they didn't mention Sudan at all. So the world's changing, I think the trade union movements changed, I think, that musicians and celebrities have less power, I think, Christian churches, which used to contribute to international violence change.

49:10but also with generally in a much more isolation as well. Well, you know, we talked about Modi -Nabalhood first. You got, if you got Trump America first and then Joe Biden with a much more kind of America -focused attitude to foreign policy, you've got nationalism sort of developing around the world. People just seem to be caring less about other countries. And you saw that Kirstaama hasn't talked much about foreign policy. I haven't heard him talk much about Sudan or Britain showing leadership there or wanting to lean in. He had his first call with Xi Jinping last week and he's off to see Macron and Shultz today or tomorrow, I think.

49:45I listen, he's going to find, as every leader does, that foreign policy takes a big part of your chunk of your life, whether you like it or not. Maybe my final point, as you mentioned, these youngsters who were doing these speeches yesterday, there was a young girl called Daisy, who made a wonderful speech. basically saying, why can't we be nice to refugees? And there is something vile about the way that they're all kind of put in the same category, the same boat. But when you just think of that, one country, 12 million people have been displaced because essentially two leaders of warring factions have decided that they can't settle their differences.

50:21And we've also got to get the narrative back on being much more positive about the potential of Sub -Saharan Africa. It's got an incredible population. You know, as we often say, one in ten, the babies born in the world, we've born in Nigeria. There's so much talent there. Credible entrepreneurs, incredible potential businesses. It's going to be the supply for a loss of the critical minerals and rare earths that we need to drive the energy revolution. It's got the sunshine for solar. It's got the wind for wind generation. I mean, so we've got to find a way of harnessing the incredible potential of Africa, not just talking about it as a victim.

50:59And that I'd like to see maybe Britain working with France and Germany putting the EU back in that conversation that the EU used to be very central in, rather than us just sort of giving up on what's going to end up being almost half the population of the world. Well, that's an unusually gloomy note on which to end, or maybe let's come back tomorrow. Great. Look forward to it. Thanks again. Bye -bye.