339. Trump, the Middle East, and Ukraine

27:06And I wonder whether this is, you know, we'll move in the second half a little bit to talk about climate change and COP. Whether this bigger story of someone like Trump coming in and his very sort of grim rail politic view of the world, which isn't very interested in human rights or the rights of non -state actors, means that we're creating a world with a bigger and bigger gap between what young people and a great deal of social media wants and what the governments represent. And you know, for example, we'll see this also in the UAE in Saudi. So UAE has remained since the Abraham Cords in close diplomatic connection with Israel, but presumably, not presumably, we know that almost all Arabs are outraged by what's happening.

27:51And you can see the Saudi government now talking openly about genocide, but attention will emerge between the cliche of what used to be called the Arab street, but it's increasingly a kind of online Arab street of many, many people and the vast majority, I would say, of the people that I know in the Middle East who are violently appalled by genocide who are blaming what they see as Western hypocrisy and indulgence of what Israel's doing. I met wealthy couple yesterday at an event who said to me, we've just learned from this that one European life is clearly worth 500 Arab lives and we can see the hypocrisy, you know, you talk about international law when it comes to Ukraine, you don't care about international law when it comes to Gaza.

28:37What will that then mean for these regimes? How do the Saudis and the Emirati's balance their desire to be close to the US through Israel, their desire to find some sort of support or bouncing against Iran with the fact that their own populations are increasingly angry about the situation. Are we now under kind of fatal gap between populations and governments? And don't forget as well, there is a kind of bifurcation going on between the, you know, we talk about young people, there's an assumption, a lot of people, a lot of young people, more progressive, more radical, more concerned about the climate, et cetera.

29:14And yet on the other hand, a lot of young people are driven by andrutatism, by a belief that government doesn't work and that therefore we should move towards something more authoritarian. I think I've said to you before, every constant on the planet, the desal most attractive to, most attractive to authoritarian or even military rule is not the old, it's the young, and it's young men. So that this is why I think I think we're right, we've talked in a number in New York about this being potentially one of the most consequential elections of our lifetime because so many of these themes and so many of these policy issues are up for change.

29:56Just before we go to the bravery, we may be close on the election itself. You know, we talk about Trump getting a landslide, actually within the three, the blue wall, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, he wouldn't have taken that much of a swing towards Kamala Harris for one dose. I mean, I know that's all one iffy, but the second thing to point out, and this I think is really quite worrying, if you put together on the ballot, if you analysed the result, Harris, Trump, and did not vote, did not vote wins. Trump lost support, he actually had fewer votes this time, and she, he got 73 .6 as opposed to 74 .2 four years ago, and by the way, that's with a population that is grown by 8 million, and likewise, Joe Biden got 81 .3 four years ago, and Kamala Harris this time got 69 .3.

30:52So she lost, in fact, if you look at those numbers, by, by, didn't of people not voting, who had previously voted for Joe Biden. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, it's fascinating. I mean, it's also fascinating. I mean, we can share some stuff. MPR has done some very good days from this to people are into there. Geeky stuff, but you know, Trump won in Georgia and pushing it up above where he was before, that there was some very interesting demographics, which seemed to have switched in a way that people didn't anticipate from Biden to Trump, that assumption six months ago, when I went to all these kind of US polling companies, and Sepholicist was that people made up their minds.

31:32Everybody knew whether they were in support of Trump or Biden. Nobody was going to change their minds. It was a tiny number of swing voters that was going to hover around Pennsylvania. That isn't quite the picture. The picture, as you say, has been a distinct drop in the vote for Kamala Harris, but also a surprising at least in terms of what people were predicting, a number of people who would have voted for Biden last time, now voting for Trump changing their minds. Yeah. Okay, let's take a quick break and come back to COP and then the German upcoming election. Great. See you then.

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33:17Welcome back to The Rests as Politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell, and we're recording Tuesday morning, Rory, and Keir Starmer's about to speak at COP. Antonio Guterres, the head of the United Nations, has just talked about the last year being a masterclass in climate destruction. People may feel we've already talked enough about Trump, but this COP happening in Azerbaijan, that was a choice of any of the got criticism because of their oil and gas interests. In a sense, this underlines that yes, Donald Trump is the new president and it will lead to a lot of change. But at the same time, the world has got to carry on trying to limit global warming, climate change from some of the ever -growing catastrophes that we've seen, not least recently in the United States.

34:05We talked in the first half about liberal global orders and ideas of human rights and the UN leading, but there's nowhere where that's more important than in the issue of climate because obviously there's no real enforcement mechanisms in the amazing Paris agreement. It was bringing together 170 odd countries to voluntarily sign up to keeping global warming under 1 .5 degrees. It was dependent on the sense that there was a common interest and that people were prepared to make sacrifices, individual nations, sacrifices for the common good. Britain, for example, as a result of it, actually, great deal of it under the Cameron government, given credit, did quite a lot to decarbonize, stocked coal, did a dash for gas, put a lot of cost on energy prices and as a result, dramatically reduced carbon production.

34:58Although, of course, we can talk a little bit about the fact that one of the consequences that is we still consume a lot of carbon. It's just produced in other people's countries. But core to this is the question of whether there really is a good relationship between the US, China, India and Russia, who are the really bigger mittens, those are the big four that really matter. And in almost every case, we're looking at a situation in which they continue to increase their emissions. This was meant to be the thing that we cared almost more about than anything else. And yet, Macron is not going to be there, Putin's not going to be there, Shultz is not going to be there.

35:33Ersylovan to Lyon's not going to be there, and even more astonishing, Brazilian President Lula, who's hosting it next year, sounds like he's not going to be there. And again, the American attitude. So the guy that Trump is picking for the job of running the Environmental Protection Agency, guy called Lee Zeldin, the former congressman, he is very much in the kind of America first approach to energy, said his big goal is to restore US energy dominance. And there's a body called the League of Conservation of Voters, which analyzes politicians around the world on their commitment to environmental protection, and gives them scores out of 100 based on what they've said and what they've done.

36:13And he is very, very low. He gets 14 out of 100. And that shouldn't surprise us because, you know, what did Trump say, his approach to the environment was drill baby drill, which I think that's lifted from Sarah Palette to return to her. I think she was the first great actor. Oh my god. Sarah Palette is still having a malign influence upon the world. The other thing that's interesting, just looking at some of the coverage this morning, is how few, again, this re -emphasizing some of the change that I think the nature of Trump's politics brings. There are so few women. When you see the family photo of all the leaders who've arrived there, I think you're in single figures for the women.

36:51I'm not saying that's, you know, that it's just an observation that I'm making about something else that we thought was maybe moving in a certain direction, more and more women leaders actually now appears to be going into reverse. We talked recently about Fuse and we talked about Ed Milavan. Both of us were saying, you know, he seems to really found his mechier in terms of his job. And we should maybe put it in the newsletter. He did a social media post from his department. And it was really upbeat. But like when we interviewed Bill Gates on leading, remember Bill Gates, you and I were both very down about climate.

37:28And he was sort of very, very positive. And Keir's time of speech is actually setting very, very ambitious goals. A lot of them will be dependent upon the private sector making change and making commitment as well. You and I were doing an event yesterday with some business people who I think is fair to say felt the budget was not really, didn't seem to go down terribly well with them, whether this will as well. But, you know, the fact is, on the climate with Trump coming in with a different position, the other leaders are really going to have to step up to keep this moving in the right direction.

38:00Just to remind people of the stakes. So Paris was about keeping global emissions down to a rise of 1 .5 degrees centigrade in global mean temperatures. And that was going to require a very dramatic reduction in emissions by 2030, which is not very long away now. And in fact, instead of a reduction global emissions, what we've seen is emissions continuing to increase. So we're going to miss that 1 .5 percent target moment by a very, very long way. Instead of a reduction of 37, 40 percent, which is what people were hoping for, we're going to see actually an increase. And this matters because the reason why they chose 1 .5 percent is 1 .5 percent is the point at which relatively linear, predictable climate change has a much higher likelihood of flipping into something much less linear and much less predictable.

38:50So that's the level at which people start worrying about. The green and the ice sheet, which is 7 meters worth of ice, that's when the borough forests or the Amazon rainforest could start suffering very, very badly with a huge effect on oxygen. That's the point at which the Gulf Stream could be affected. And that's before you get on to permafrost coral reefs, the West Antarctic. So it really, really, you know, it wasn't an arbitrary target. It was chosen because it had real world meaning and we're due to miss it. The decision made last year in UAE, was to insist that they were going to stick to the target.

39:27And I guess I wanted to get you on this because I can see the argument for why you stick to a target, even if you think you're going to miss it. But I can also imagine that in doing so, you seem increasingly unrealistic. And just to get to the number of what I'm talking about, I worried in Afghanistan that the more unrealistic we were in our language saying we were going to turn Afghanistan to a gender -sensitive multi -ethnic centralized state based on democracy, human rights and rule of law, the more we deepen cynicism and increase the pressure for a total withdrawal. And if we'd been able to find the language, which was more realistic, saying, okay, we're not going to be able to make it into Denmark, but we can make a better Afghanistan.

40:06We would have been able to sustain it more. So the analogy here is how do you get the judgment call right on saying, you know, what are the risks of saying, okay, listen, we're not going to make 1 .5%, but that doesn't mean we should give up on everything. Let's instead have a real effort at 2%, or do you agree with Sultan who says that if you give an inch the whole thing over? So it's interesting. You and I were having a chat about some yesterday and you were saying that one of the reasons you were a bit disappointed with the labor government so far, was that you felt that the sense of forward vision wasn't clear, wasn't strong, you know, where's the utopia that lies ahead?

40:42And I was making the point that there isn't a utopia ahead, but there is change and there is challenging Kierstamer is very much more of that sort of politician that wants to focus on the scale of the challenge. And yet there is in Baku now saying that he's going to set out a goal of reducing emissions by 81 % compared to 1990 levels by 2035, which is a very, very big ambition. Can I just clarify that that is a bit of a slip in it because originally the idea was net zero electricity by 2030, which we're hearing less about now, is that right? Exactly. And this is also not quite as easy to understand, but my point is that I think you do need big ambitious targets and the downside obviously is that you failed to meet them.

41:25But if I when you were talking, I was dropped into my head was all the times in the Northern Ireland peace process when we were setting goals and setting targets and laying down deadlines and they weren't met. But then as you pass them, you have to use them to kind of emphasize, to redouble, to step up again. What I really worry about in relation to climate debate, you just think about recent weeks we have those hurricanes in America. We had those incredible scenes in Spain and near Valencia where you know I couldn't help thinking that there we are, we're sending people to jail in the UK because they stop cars from being able to move freely around motorways.

42:06And yet if you want to see the worst traffic jam in history, it was the one that you saw in Spain with those cars piled on top of each other after that torrential rain. I mean, it was a years worth of rain in a few hours. So I think we're having these events, but when they come along, the discussion tends to be about about weather and about the cleanup operation and about the drama of the whole thing. It seems to me that we've lost that leadership that people like Al Gore were giving for quite a long time, that this is actually not about weather, not about terrible things happening, terrible though they are.

42:44It is about climate and is about climate change and the threat that's posing to the world. And I think that, you know, COP, we're going to see lots of the usual stuff of people making big speeches. As Guterres has just done, as Guest Almer is going to be doing, we'll be seeing lots of all the sort of late night negotiations and all that sort of stuff. But ultimately, in the end, and if Trump is going to vacate this field, others have to step up on this global leadership about this being, it remains the most, I think, the most serious existential threat. And then the question is where the undercurrents go, because clearly the number one is to for far -right populists in Europe has been immigration.

43:23I mean, we get criticized for using the phrase far -right, but the AFD or far -right, kicklin' Austria's far -right, hateful, the Safari, these are proper far -right people. And it's some of them are campaigning with posters referring to the third Reich. But along with their statements about immigration, are a lot of statements attacking policies on climate change. And the reason for that, of course, is, as we've said before, the most sensible way of reducing people's carbon energy use is by taxing it. But because energy use is a much bigger proportion of the budget as someone on a low income, it's regressive the way the governments have tended to do it, a very regressive.

43:58So there will be increasing pressure. And I think within the European Union, there's a real risk that as right -wing parties get more and more power and they shift the political conversation further right. And then your point that you made before the break becomes important, we've tended to imagine that young people, other great supporters of climate change, and that therefore politicians will appeal to young people by putting climate change front and center. But if you end up with a lot of young people, particularly young men, increasingly skeptical about climate change, or election, do anything about it, then where is the constituency?

44:33Who are you relying on? Are you relying on a bunch of middle -aged, progressive liberal greens, which doesn't sound like it's a big electoral base enough to really make the sacrifices? And the reason the sacrifice is matter is that we now have all these charts coming out in the UK pointing out that because of our climate policies, our industrial energy costs are about twice those of competitor nations. And that's one of the reasons our manufacturing industry is collapsing. Yeah, to go about to the American position and project 2025. And by the way, when you see the sorts of things that Trump is saying and doing since the election, when you see the sort of appointments that he's making, I don't think we should kid ourselves that when he said that project 2025 didn't know what it was, didn't know what we're talking about, this is very much we are seeing a lot of the project 2025 stuff.

45:22And their approach on climate, they are in the hoax end of the market. They talk endlessly about the climate alarm industry. They talk about the so -called climate crisis. So, you know, all the big battles, they always have to be re -fort. And this is one that I think really has to be re -fort. So I'm glad that Keir Starmer seems to be taking out a pretty strong and clear position. Ed Millibund, as I say, he was very, very, very full on in terms of the direction of travel. Now, it is going to be difficult and it is going to be controversial because there are costs attached to it. You know, we're already seeing people are saying, well, hold on, my taxes, you said, taxes weren't going to go up, but actually national insurance, I see that as a tax on me.

46:05We hear that a lot. We've seen the Winterfuel payment and so forth. So it won't be difficult for the forages of this world or can be bad enough to weaponize any attempt to go down a route that says you and I end up paying more to tackle climate change. But if we don't, you know, we always talk about thinking about our children and grandchildren, or this is the big one on that. And I think their first routine will be to send this is where we have to be very careful. People like us who want to keep this thing going and on the agenda progressing. Is the first routine of the critics is to say your targets are obviously not realistic.

46:43They're obvious total fantasies and try to use that as an argument to throw the baby out of the bath water. Okay. Now, when I was with you recently, you got a text from a manual macro. I hope I'm not being in discreet there. And that got me thinking about you, macro. Kirstarmers visit to France. What's going on in Germany? As our local French German ex -Five, it's very impressed you that you are not in French. Tell us a little bit about what's going on in France, what's going on in Germany. There are similarities. Both have been forced into whole elections earlier than they were scheduled to be held.

47:20Macron had the election that led to now Michel Barnier being the prime minister. And actually, Barnier doing a pretty good job. He has to be said, he's calmed things down, day to day, the French government seems to be functioning pretty well. But the truth is, back to the question, the far right, Le Pen is sort of hovering. She can bring this government down whenever she wants. We'll come back to the Macron's Starmor visit, which I thought was interesting. And meanwhile, in Germany, the ample coalition, ample is German for traffic lights. So you've got the red, the STP, the free democrats, yellow and the greens, obviously green.

47:57And what's happened is the Schultz, who gets a reputation for being a bit dull and a bit robot -ed. If you want to see him when he's not being dull and robotic, see his reaction and the interviews he was giving after he sacked. Christian Lindner, who was the finance minister and who is part of the free democrat party, this had been coming for a while because they weren't getting on. If you listen to Robert Harbeck, who's the vice chancellor and the economy minister and a green, and he's going to be the green chancellor candidate in the upcoming election, he admitted recently that they've been fighting the whole time at this coalition as being up and running.

48:37So what's happened is that I actually did an event at the German Embassy the other day and I was very proud, Roy, I did my first full speech off -doich since my latest Gertensdjut course. This is going to be very important because we're going to put you on your toes because if we manage to get Angela Merkel on, we have to make a big decision on whether you're going to try to do that in German for us. Das kann ich schaffen. Wir schaffen es, Michael once said about him in Christian. So what's been going on is this sort of fighting that's been going on behind the scenes is now kind of exploded into the open and is wrong to say the government has collapsed.

49:12The coalition has broken and Shultz is now currently running a minority government, but he accepts there has to be a vote of confidence in the government, everybody expects him to lose that vote of confidence and then there will be election. The question then is the timing. Now the timing thus far has been a disaster. He sacked Lindner on the day that Trump won the election and his original plan was to have the vote of confidence in the German parliament in the week that Trump took office. Now if ever you wanted a message to say to the Americans the Trump that Europe's in a complete mess that would do it.

49:50So he's now under huge pressure to bring it forward preferably before the Christmas break and then the election will be sometime early in the new year. And I think Friedrich Merz the leader of the Christian Democrats is nailed on. My predictions to what happens is that they're going to go back after the next election to a grand coalition between the Christian Democrats with Merz as chancellor and probably Boris Pastoria, who's the most popular politician in Germany at the moment, he's a defense minister. I think he'll be the pick of whether it's finance minister or possibly foreign minister. I don't know.

50:25Well, just to go back to the kind of basics for listeners who aren't quite as much into the details of German politics as you are, the AFD, this far right party in Germany, is consistently second now in the opinion polls. Right. I mean, that would be like, I mean, it's a much more right wing party than the reform party in Britain and often getting 19 % in the opinion polls. CDU is that about 32 % and they are the center right party are the big, big guarantee really that is controlling and keeping back the AFD. But that means that a colossal more than 50 % of the German population is either going for the moderate rights or the far right.

51:07Mimo Schultz has collapsed to about 15 % and the Greens are at about 11%. So it looks like the CDU are the great guarantee to stop the far right taking out from Germany. But again, if things went wrong, you could imagine in four, five years time. Germany too, ending up in a position where Alice from the AFD could be en route to the chance to ship. I think we're quite away from that, but you know, you're right. They were living very volatile times and who knows. But it's interesting how Mertz is quite interesting character. He's been around for a long time. He and Angela Merkel did not get on. He felt that Angela Merkel wasn't conservative enough.

51:40He's a very conservative conservative. So he went off into the wilderness for a while. And as soon as she went, he came back and has risen to be pretty much as guaranteed as you're going to get is likely to come top in the next election and try to form a coalition. He's somebody who at the moment, he's putting pressure on Schultz to call this confidence vote, but he's not doing it in conjunction with the AFD or the hard leftist side of Argonneck party. Because he knows that to do that, any sort of cooperation with the AFD or something like this, he would pay a price for that. So Schultz actually is able to call the shots in terms of when this is going to be.

52:23And Schultz is using this into regnum to do a couple of very interesting things. The first is he's using it to say not least because of Trump, we're going to have to commit more to Ukraine. So he wants to have a vote in the parliament before the vote of confidence about getting more money to Ukraine, which the far right and the far left are very much against, which the far right and the far left are against. And so therefore that is basically saying to Merz, if you're a serious leader of a serious country, you know what you're going to do. And then the second issue that he wants to do, he wants to this is being called AFD proofing the appointment of judges.

52:59The system of appointing of judges in Germany involves the parliament. They basically want to make it easier for the parliament to appoint judges. And this is based partly on how all ban got away with the politicization of the judicial system. If the AFD and Zara Vagenkneck between them got more than a third of the parliament, it would allow them then to have much greater say over the appointment of judges. So that's the other change. Because if you get more than a third, you can block constitutional and changes. You can have a say in appointing the judges. So that's something else that he's trying to get through.

53:34So he's basically, I think one he's doing out of genuine national interest, but also it's a bit of a trap for Merz. A lot of the SPD think basically, look, Shultz, you've not been that great. Maybe you should think about sort of lagging it before the election. He's not going to do that. He's going to fight the election. He thinks he can close the gap, but I think they're heading to a Merz, Pistorius led coalition after the election. And the big story behind this is that the German economy is in bits. I mean, Europe's largest economy, the great powerhouse that when I was in Cameron or Theresa May governments, we looked out with envy is going to struggle to avoid a 0 .1 % recession this year.

54:16And so there'll be a lot of pressure on the CDU coming in to do much more radically economic policies because there are governments in the CDU who basically saw Angela Merkel, who was a right wing politician, as a closet socialist, and believed that all the kind of social democratic policies which we used to admire have gone wrong. But there's too much subsidy, there's too much red tape, they've got their skill strategy wrong, they're overaligned on expensive energy, and that Germany needs a real shake -up. So part of the question is, will CDU try to come in on the back of a kind of big radical economic reform message, and will it be able to deliver it?

54:47The other thing about Mertz, which is worth knowing, is that when Angela Merkel did her famous severe chaffiness, you know, when there was the kind of immigration crisis and a lot went to Germany, Mertz was very, very opposed to that. So he's got a kind of record on immigration that probably will help him vis -a -vis the AFD, but he may be tempted to go down the kind of pretty patell, Suella Bravaman, Rwanda, close the borders, that type of route. And just as you and I've always thought you can't out forage, forage, I think there's a real danger if they try to out AFD, the FD, on the rhetoric.

55:24We should talk more about this, because I think this is something where we could have an agreeable disagreement, maybe over the next couple of weeks, because I think that moderate parties need to have much clearer policies on immigration, and it's the only way they're going to survive. Well, the question is whether you can have a clear policy, unclear rhetoric, the two different things. Well, let's get into that in the future. So, Rory, we said in the top we're going to talk about macro on the Starmer and the Visitor Paras. Let's do that in question time, because we do get questions about that.

55:52And encourage people to listen to David Patress on leading about which a little bit more in the question time. Thanks again. Bye -bye. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business, from designing a website, to marketing, to selling, and beyond. Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Hines, and Allbirds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your site, turn your big business idea into... Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify .com slash special offer.