363. The Return of Donald J. Trump

26:42That's why he's talking about Canada is a 51st state. That's why he's talking about Panama Canal and to some extent why he's talking about Greenland. And what Michael reads in that is not not that America's necessarily going to invade Canada. It's more that Trump will do his best to make Canada even more economically dependent on the United States and impose ever more aggressive terms against his neighbors. And that the Trump doctrine feels like he's saying my sphere of influence is the Americas. China's sphere of influence can be its neighbors. Russia's sphere of influence can be Europe. And I'm going to give up on the idea, all the ideas that liberals really had since the Second World War that it makes sense to try to talk about any kind of global order.

27:30He's hunkering down. And he's saying we've got the oil, we've got the gas, we've got the rear minerals and resources, particularly if we bring in Canada and Greenland to help us. And really we just put up the walls and we don't need to worry about the rest of the world. We're sort of a planet apart. Given that have been all these fears about what his mindset is and his attitude towards NATO, I don't recall hearing him mention NATO. Now you could say that's a good thing in that he wants to say I'm coming out of NATO like he is with the WHO and the Paris Climate Agreement. I think my final point, Ruf, we'll go to a break and then come back and talk about Gaza and Southport.

28:07The Mooch, again to quote the Mooch, he said on a podcast a few weeks ago that he felt that there was the danger of the opening for what he called a golden era of corruption. And again you mentioned Lincoln's second and organ. Now I know we didn't have cryptocurrency in the time of Lincoln, but if we did, I cannot imagine either Lincoln or his wife would launch a meme coin which would immediately raise millions and millions and millions of dollars. This in a currency that Donald Trump used to say was basically no good for anything apart from fraud and deception. And the other thing that just final, you know, having taken the making out of the BBC fashion coverage, if I can close on Melania, Melania apparently is part of the deal with the oligarchs.

28:58There's done this 40 million pound TV deal with Bezos for a documentary. And I noticed that vote at the Arlington the Cemetery the day before and as she was walking towards the redundor. I don't know whether you've ever done a documentary so high budget that they have these cameras that they can sort of move around in the air as they're walking with them. They're like, they're like a way like a matchbook. And she had those following all around. And I noticed that this means she smiled more than she normally does. And essentially I saw a sort of a ste banding interview and he said, these guys are there and they think they're all powerful.

29:35They've got to understand they are there now because they are, he's got them. They are now his little toys and that's why he's making them look, you know, he's part of the scene. So we'll see, we'll see, but it was it was quite a day. It was quite a day. Well, time for break.

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31:36Welcome back to the resty's policies with me, Anastakamal. And with me, Rory Stewart. Rory, you've been deep in Middle East talking. Tell us about it. So I'm been in discussions with a lot of different places because it's a Chatham House rules conference. I can't go through the details, the individuals, but we've been right in the middle of talking to Israelis, Americans, Brits about the cease -fidel. And just a quick reminder on where we are. And maybe just before I get onto that, a quick encouragement to people to listen to the Tom Fletcher interview that we just did on our separate leading feed because Tom, amazing new appointment of a British diplomat as the UN humanitarian lead worldwide talking about his first few weeks touching on Gaza, yes, but particularly on Sudan, Ukraine and Syria.

32:32What was your sense to Tom Fletcher and then I'll come back to this? Well, I thoroughly enjoyed it and I thought he was extraordinary, interesting and bright and clever. I've got quite amazing story about Tom Fletcher as a result. Anissa Misagi who works for a company called Plattis takes to me yesterday to say, on my way to Davos, listening to Tom Fletcher on leading, really enjoying it. What an amazing job, really interesting, blah, blah, blah, blah. She then arrives at Davos and she's waiting for her bags to come off the carousel and she thinks it's her suitcase. She pulls her suitcase off the carousel, but it's sort of a bit scuzz -dun, a bit dirty, looks like a bit more traveled than her her suitcase, but she thinks it is my, that is the exact same suitcase, but is it my suitcase?

33:19She looks at the name and it's Mr. Tom Fletcher and it turns out Tom Fletcher, as she said to me, she said, he may be bloody clever and he may be really smart, he may have an amazing job, but he's got great tasted suitcases, but he's also a thief. He nicked that suitcase. He too went off with her suitcase, yeah, anyways, he managed to track him down and they've no a suitcase swap. There we are. There's a horrible 1970s joke that my father likes about the brains of the world, stealing someone's sandwich box instead of the parachute for jumping out of an airplane. It's the same same story, really.

33:53There you go. So, Garo, let's get back to Garza. So, to remind people of what the deal was, in essence, it's a three phase deal. Phase one, which started on Sunday, is supposed to be the release of 33 Israeli hostages, a release of a number of Palestinians in exchange, humanitarian access and a ceasefire. Phase two is then meant to involve the release of all the remaining life hostages, more returns of Palestinians and opponents ceasefire. And then phase three is supposed to be the return of deceased hostages and the blockade lifted. So, this has begun. And on Sunday, there were these very dramatic scenes of the return amongst others of Emily, who's a British hostage, who returned with two of her fingers, cut off.

34:43It was a very dramatic scene partly because the three hostages were delivered surrounded by 300 Hamas fighters, very much publicly demonstrating to the world that Hamas still existed and that they were right out there on television, showing that whatever had happened over the last months of bombing, more than the year of bombing, they were still there. And the question now is, what is the end case? And I guess there are three scenarios. One of them is that it returns to chaos and conflict. So, ceasefire deal breaks down, fighting continues, almost indefinitely. Second scenario is an Israeli occupation of Gaza, Israel taking responsibility for security, putting IDF troops permanently in on the ground and trying to run and occupy Gaza.

35:39And the third scenario, which is the optimistic but probably unlikely scenario, but it's the one that everybody, of course, is trying to push for, is a permanent ceasefire and the reconstruction of Gaza. And there the devil is in the detail on whether you can possibly imagine what that would look like in a way that works for both Israelis and Palestinians. And the problem in a nutshell is that Netanyahu's government certainly would have two demands, which would be unacceptable in reality. The first demand is that Israel would have total security control of what was happening in Gaza. They want a hundred percent security, they want an absolute guarantee that can be no return to October 7th.

36:21And that means that they want to be able to continue military operations and are going to delegate it to anyone else. And that would not be acceptable on the Palestinian side because there's no way that the Palestinians or the Arab states that are often being talked about as coming in, doing the reconstruction could be Jordan, Emirates, Egypt are going to want to be on the ground if Israelis continuing to conduct military operations. And it's going to be very difficult to raise money to reconstruct buildings in Gaza if people think Israel is going to come in and blow them up again. The second condition is the Netanyahu government will demand that there can be zero participation of Hamas.

37:02And probably no participation of the PLA. We can get on to that later, but that's partly because they don't trust the PLA and the Israeli public. I think the PLA will either fail because there will be corrupt and useless or they'll succeed in which case there will be a stronger Palestinian state, which is something they don't want either. Whereas on the other side, international observers looking at it think it's almost impossible to imagine anything happening in Gaza without at least some level of consent from Hamas. Hamas may not want to be the government, but Hamas is still an incredibly powerful force on the ground.

37:33So if Israel says reconstruction can go ahead, but reconstruction involves continued Israeli military operations and no possible participation of Hamas, then it's almost impossible to imagine anybody Arab Palestinian taking responsibility. When the deal was announced, although it unleashed an awful lot of joy and hope and expectation, I think a lot of people who are maybe close to it and are close to these sorts of situations were not hopeful that we get to the end of phase three without an awful lot of hiccups along the way. And I think it was during that bizarre executive order signing press in for a bit of it session where I think Trump was saying he's not quite sure whether this thing will hold through the three phases.

38:22I didn't see that bit. I just read something in one of the papers about that. So I think this is going to be very, very difficult and I think that we are the rest as politics. I think the politics of this are a lot tougher for Netanyahu than he is projecting. One of the other orders by the way is reversing the sanctions against settlers was that part of the deal. Don't know, but I think you've got to worry that the politics that made him so dependent on the hard right in the first place to get into power to build a coalition to get through his legal reforms and so forth that whether he can hold on as long as he seems to think he can without those people being inside the tent rather than outside because their basic line is okay.

39:06Let's get the let's get the hostages back. We've got three so far. We've got another 30. They're going to come through hopefully in this first phase. But then we've got to go back to war. Why? Because they say the war aim was to destroy Hamas and as you say it was perfectly obvious and it was deliberate. There's no doubt about that. Hamas and they could have decided, well, to what we'll do, we won't have any of the media involved until we get to the bit where we hand them over to the Red Cross. And you could have driven a nice car up and they could have stepped out the car and walked in. Instead of what she was very deliberate that they showed these Hamas fighters opening the doors, jumping on the car, showing they're very, very visible, very, very present.

39:45So I think that was deliberate. The rest of it looked like it. I mean, it was joyous. It was amazing to see those three young women come back. We'll find out as time goes on, the extent of the trauma, physical and mental that they've suffered. But at the same time, you then had alongside it, the pictures of Palestinians going quotes back to their homes, which was heartbreaking. Because they were going back to places which frankly didn't exist anymore. It just literally sort of masses of rubble. And I think that reconstruction plan for Gaza, how much is that going to cost? Where's that going to come from?

40:23Is that all going to be about these kind of geopolitical and business deals that get done? So I think phase one, let's see if that gets through six weeks, phase two, they then have to work out the time of that. But I think there's a long way to go before we can be confident this is the end of the world. So I guess you've put your finger on three things. One of them is the politics around Netanyahu. The second is the question of what Hamas is up to and the third is this question of reconstruction. I mean, on the first, it's very striking how similar Netanyahu is to Trump. Firstly, in his complete illusion of the difference between truth, post truth, non truth.

41:00Secondly, obviously, these corruption allegations. Thirdly, his voter base, he's got this very, very strong voter base, which is strangely often composed of younger poorer Israelis from non -European backgrounds who see the old European -Israeli elite as traitors and corrupt, but who are voting for Netanyahu, who is of course a representation of that. I mean, it's another sort of Trump hacker. And his allies, of course, Smotrich and Ben Gavir, and Ben Gavir has resigned, but they will come back in again. Very difficult to put a cigarette paper. It seems between them in terms of their ideology.

41:39I mean, Hamas, of course, and many Palestinians talk about, you know, Palestine must be free from the river to the sea. Smotrich has written a book saying Israel basically should occupy an enormous amount of Palestinian territory, and it's very clear about the fact that he sees Palestinians effectively as the second class human beings. And Smotrich and Ben Gavir's deal has been, will give you a coalition if you give us war. And their mindset, and I guess this is the really difficult thing here, to get to peace, the Netanyahu government, and in fact the Israeli public, and part of the question is, would any Prime Minister make any differences, or is the Israeli public in a state where actually any Israeli Prime Minister would feel that they had to do this?

42:24But anyway, the Netanyahu government, with the support of a lot of the Israeli public, has got to the world view now that Hamas and many, many Palestinians are completely irreconcidable. There's no possibility of peace, there's no possibility of change. You get senior Israelis saying that this is Arab culture, this is their religion. There's no way of negotiating with them. They're saying that this conflict is not like any other conflict in the world. You know, if you raise an island or Cyprus, they say, no, no, no, no, those things could be resolved by interest. This is purely values based. And the only way this is going to end is with us killing them.

43:06But the problem is that Israel has so far killed perhaps 19 ,000 Hamas fighters on their own count, out of the nearly 50 ,000 that are being killed, and who knows how that counting works, right? But there are about 300 ,000 I think Palestinian males under 18, part of a conveyor belt that will come through presumably, and many of whom will feel that they need to get involved in resistance. What is the end game, and the end game for Smotritch and Ben Gavir feels at the moment like perpetual war. Yeah. No interest in reconstruction. Becky, I saw David Miliband at the weekend who, as you know, runs the International Rescue Committee.

43:43I think one of one of the things maybe you could add to your connection of Trump and Netanyahu is this sense of of impunity that, you know, you can get away with a lot more in the modern world. And the IRC have produced this really interesting report, which is their emergency watch list. It's the countries that they feel are most in need currently of humanitarian support. To go back to Tom Fletcher, Tom made the point in our interview that it is harder than ever to be working for a humanitarian organization. And the report that I mentioned in terms of the numbers that need of humanitarian support are now off the scale.

44:22Sudan is the country deemed to be most in need, followed by the occupied Palestinian territories. But interesting, this report builds itself around four themes, which I think maybe we should come back to them another time. We have more conflict, but we have less diplomacy. We have far more attacks on civilians, including aid workers than ever before, but we have fewer consequences for that. We have more carbon emissions affecting these poorer countries disproportionately, but we have less climate crisis action, and we have more wealth accumulation, but we have less poverty alleviation. And I read the report over the weekends, reading that in the context of then Trump coming in with the agenda that he sets out, which was basically sodden more diplomacy.

45:08Don't worry about law and so forth. Climate crisis is a myth, and as for poverty, drill baby drill, get richer, get richer, get richer, get more powerful, get more powerful, get more powerful. So it is a tough time, as Tom said, to be humanitarian. On this question of whether a deal is possible, and I think one has to keep hoping, and I guess this is presumably the situation that people would have felt that they were in in Northern Ireland or South Africa in the 80s. You have to keep hoping and trying to imagine what piece to be. But at the moment, it feels like a zero sum game because the Israeli government is basically saying, I think almost explicitly that Israeli security is more important than the rights and the dignity of the Palestinian people.

45:53And this push for 100 % security effectively leaves no room for risk, no room for autonomy, no room for letting staff happen in Gaza. And when we think about reconstruction, usually think about three things, when we think about governance, economic development, security. So from the Israeli point of view, security must be done by the IDF. Economic development, they will probably choke off an enormous amount of the border and the imports because they'll be worried that some of the things imported into Gaza could be reused to dig tunnels or fire rockets. And on the governance side, they're very unlikely to support any form of Palestinian authority, partly because if they had elections, they'd worry that Hamas could win the elections.

46:36But even if Hamas didn't win the elections, the whole idea of Palestine, the whole idea of a two -state solution now seems impossible to many Israelis because they see it as a threat to their security. And the threat to the security is an interesting one. I was trying to get my head around this because of course what happened on October 7th was brutal and horrifying. And of course, Hamas has documents committed to the elimination of the state of Israel. But the question I've been trying to focus on is what kind of threat really does Hamas actually pose to the continued existence of Israel. So if Israel improved its borders, it had a very, very bad border security with Gaza.

47:17The Israelis that you've been talking to, what are they saying on such a question? So what does everybody say? The threat is real and existential and we people who live here, we underestimate what it's like living there. Yeah, there's a lot of that. There's a lot of you don't know what it's like having people just 15 kilometers from your border who want to wipe you out. I think there's a middle ground which is people saying, okay, it's probably true that we've discovered that Iran and his Bala and who's the a less of a threat than we thought. And it's probably true that Hamas isn't actually in any position to conquer Israel.

47:50But even if they're able to do these terrorist attacks again, this is completely unacceptable. That both because it's an unbelievably traumatic to the Israeli people and also because of what it means for the Israeli economy and stability. But Israel's response to it or Netanyahu's response to it is creating a really toxic political atmosphere where the few remaining Israeli liberal critics of what Netanyahu is doing, the few remaining people still talking about the recognition of a Palestinian state, still trying to acknowledge that you probably do ultimately have to work with some parts of Hamas and that there are more moderate parts of Hamas to work with civil servants, for example.

48:31Now for the first time, I'm beginning to feel that they're under pressure to leave Israel. It used to be a great sort of shame to leave Israel. Now there's a sense around Netanyahu and Smotrich and Ben Gavir and their supporters that they don't want these levels around a sort of sense of, well, if you're not prepared to get involved in this perpetual war, you can you can leave and you see this is the first year where the number of people leaving Israel exceeded the number of people moving to it, 85 ,000 net external migration and many of those people that Israel doesn't, doesn't want to be losing.

49:07And of course, another point that an Arab friend of mine made is that the risk is that Israel is going to turn from being a liberal democracy into something that will feel more like a Arab state in which four tribes, the ultra -orthodox, the religious Zionists, the liberals and the Arabs within Israel live in completely separate silos, reading different media with totally different politics, totally different obsessions and the country becomes increasingly religious nationalistic and nuclear -armed. Before we turn to Southport, a couple of sentences, between 2013 and 2023, the number of countries facing attacks on civilians increased by 42 % from 33 to 47.

49:52Number of countries' single attacks on hospitals and healthcare workers increased by 57 .5 % from 40 to 63, between 2016 and 2023. And the number of countries seeing attacks on humanitarian aid workers more than doubled, 136 % up. Can I just finish before we get to Southport with a brief idea of what optimism could look like because we're often being criticized for not being optimistic. So the very best case scenario, which the world needs to try to move towards if there's any hope of a lasting ceasefire, is a technocratic administration led by Palestinians, the recognition of a Palestinian state.

50:32Let me jump in. What do Israelis you talking to say about that? Well, for the people who are close to Netanyahu's government and sympathetic towards it, total rejection. So to get there, you would have to have either a new Israeli president or some people being optimistic say, maybe what you get is Trump saying, I can deliver a Saudi Israeli deal. I can guarantee a lot of money and security guarantees for Saudi and Israel. And in return, you will recognize a Palestinian state. So there's two ideas. Either Netanyahu goes or Trump somehow gets into a very transactional conversation with Netanyahu in that if and it's a really big if you then would try to build an administration which was Palestinian led with Hamas not in the government, but consenting to what was happening and money coming in potentially from Saudi and the US and potentially Egypt, Jordan, UAE involved in some of the resistance into full reconstruction.

51:37Now, I'm only say it's because I owe it to the people who are desperately trying to get there. And I think the British government and others would desperately like to get there. Biden and Blinken desperately wanted to go there. Blinken had a whole detailed plan around how this is going to happen. But I'm saying it, of course, sadly, very, very doubtful because I just can't see how that's going to happen. How Hamas is going to allow that happen. How Israel is going to allow that to happen. Or why internationals would want to get involved when either Hamas or Israel can disrupt and upturn the apple card at any moment and destroy all the investment they've put in.

52:16Yeah. So you said you were going to be optimistic and ended up being pessimistic about your optimism, which is kind of sums it up. Now, look, finally, let's just talk a little bit about about Southport. So Axel Radikabana, the young man who's now pleaded guilty to the murder of these three young girls, Eliza, Alice and Bebe in the Southport. He ended a not guilty plea first time around. Yesterday, I think a lot of people were taken by surprise. He entered a guilty plea. He'll be sentenced on Thursday and Keir Starmer has immediately announced a full public inquiry. The reasons I think driving that other than the absolute horror and that led to the riots that we talked about a lot at the time is the fact that I think we're looking at yet another of these failures of the state situations.

53:10In that, this young man was known to virtually every aspect of the services of the state that relate to young people and the problems that they might be causing to themselves and more importantly to others. So kicked out a school for possession of a knife, mental health services, aware of his obsession with violence, police aware, social services aware, and three times reported to prevent the counterterrorism body. Now, Keir Starmer was given a pretty hard time. I caught the end of his part of his press conference after he made this very long statement about why he felt this was a need for an inquiry.

53:52He continued to say they didn't need the similar national inquiry in relation to the the rape gangs and the grooming gangs that we talked about before because he thought that we'd done locally. But there was such an interest in what led to this or if you like what led to this not being prevented. And I think a lot of it in the end is it reminded me a little bit of I don't if you remember one of the things that sort of shocked Caterpillar to Tony Blair to political fame for one to the better word was his response to Shadow Home Secretary to the murder of James Bulger, a young boy who was murdered by two kids in Liverpool and in Merseyside.

54:30And what Keir Starmer essentially was saying is this is about more than this case. This is about what we expect from the state. This is about young people now they develop. It is about community and integration and so but also if you remember that the hate that Elon Musk has towards Keir Starmer seemed really to be fired by what happened in the Southport. He was also very clear that he felt that a lot of this was about what young people are consuming on social media. He talked about the the access to videos of violence that you get again and again and again many of which should never get taken down.

55:04So he basically was saying this is a failure of the state is we've got to look at every aspect of what went wrong and he was essentially saying you know as often as said when these inquiries are set up they've got to look everywhere and whatever they come up with provided it's not crazy we've got to do it. Is this a sort of UK equivalent to these American school shootings? I mean when you describe him you know he's consuming sort of weird propaganda and violent stuff and he's into Hitler and Genghis Khan and he threatens people I mean it feels like the sort of these horrible cases that happened so much in the US I mean you know hundreds of them of young men of about that age going in and and pulling out their guns and just shooting lots of people.

55:49Well of course he'd been expelled from school and it turned out that prior to this he had been one of his previous thoughts was that he was going to go and do this at his old school. So I guess there will be those kinds of comparisons. I think it's very hard to talk about this without knowing all of the kind of facts and that presumably will now emerge. People are expecting it all to emerge during the trial but of course now the trial is going to go straight to to sentencing. But from a public policy point of view I'm just sort of trying to think about this as somebody who was the minister responsible for not just prison but sort of probation and trying to manage these kinds of risks.

56:27I guess that in the US the the conclusion for many people has been that it's very very difficult to fully anticipate and stop these things and the biggest problem in the US is people have access to guns and that if they didn't have guns they wouldn't be able to kill so many people. I mean I agree it sounds like a lot of things got dropped in this case but I guess in the US examples often you don't really find out until after the event that's when you get onto their hard drives and into their libraries and the stories start emerging and I suppose another problem for the state maybe that I don't know where this is true but what if there were thousands of young men who have extremely unpleasant violent fantasies and get into Hitler and Genghis Khan and how does one deal with them and what sort of protections are people suggesting could have been put around him.

57:17Are they suggesting he should have been arrested, tailed? I mean what practically do you do to stop this? And of course what will happen particularly now in the context of a public inquiry is that how this situation has ended is what will then cast a light on everything that happened before that and as you say are we saying that every time we think somebody might be becoming obsessed with violence might be have harmful designs upon other people that somehow they have to be locked up, they have to be hospitalized, they have to be given and then you're into the capacity of the state to do that kind of thing anyway.

57:52So I think this is going to be a really big moment obviously there's a politics attached to this as well because if you remember at the time Nigel Farage was saying there's a cover up that they know more than they're saying well of course they probably did however they were being governed by laws of contempt and and I think this is this is where the sort of pace and modern media and the pace and modern change does make life so much much more difficult for people who are actually tackling law enforcement at the front line. And it also connects to something which is very much about our politics which is we want to be in a 100 % security zero risk environment and of course in practice government is because of limited resources because of many things are perpetually making decisions you know when I was president minister we were perpetually releasing people from jail who'd done horrendous offenses and taking the risk that they might offend again you couldn't keep them you didn't keep them locked up for our lives and if we're moving into an environment in which the public really wants a 100 % security no risk at all that has huge impacts on many many things on the basic idea of liberty freedoms the amount of surveillance the state puts around you the way that prison works the way that sentences work I mean everything becomes challenging actually that you know that there is a sort of site echo of that isn't there in the in the conversation about whether one's going to try to take the risk of allowing a Palestinian's administration to re -emerge again in Gaza yeah so that was a fairly gloomy episode Roy I'm afraid it was a pretty gloomy episode but I'd also want to pay tribute to just how impressive the people are who are still trying to push for peace oh yeah in Gaza and I think they're completely right to do so it's all very well for people I need to set their own points out that it's all impossible on the room 58 problems are their response that is what we've got to do something and at least they're still pushing yeah we're going to keep that up see you soon bye bye