375. Germany's Fight Against the Far Right

24:06Because actually in the United States and Israel, big defense spending has actually been completely central in terms of innovation tech developments. It's then called DARPA that the Gasi Dominic Cummings is obsessed with in which US defense spending basically contributed to the development of everything from GPS satellites to the internet. So I think there could be a possibility of saying, look, Germany has exceptional engineers. Yes, the car industry has been in a bit of trouble, but it could be repurposed and start thinking much more about military production. And it could also be a way of rebuilding those bridges, rebuilding those roads, really thinking about how to get the German economy off the ground.

24:43Now, think about that for Britain. Think about that for France. Think about defense spending as an enormous industrial opportunity. Before we go back to that, Roy, did you put the adjective ghastly in front of Dominic Cummings? Because he appeared to be calling for you to be killed on social media this week. Did I read that correctly? It's a reminder of being realistic about who people like Dominic Cummings and Musk and Vance and the far right are. Because it's very easy to sage yourself and lots of my friends here in the US, I'm talking the US at the moment, will say, well, they have a point about this and a point about that.

25:19And you begin to treat them as their reasonable people. So, you know, I knew Dominic Cummings and I would have a meal with him and he would talk to me about civil service reform and inefficiencies. And I think, oh, you know, we've got a lot in common. You know, we both want to improve efficiency, make government more serious, make it more agile. And I deluded myself into thinking that he was somebody in good faith who you could have a reasonable conversation with. And then, as you say, he's literally just put out a tweet in which he's accused me of conspiring with, and this goes to a boy back to Brexit, accused me of conspiring with Dominic Grieve to flout the biggest electoral event in world history.

25:54And I quote, I should face the penalty that used to be given to trade his, in other words, I should be executed, should be put to death. Now, there's a lot of things wrong with it, including the fact that actually, yes, I was strongly in favor of remain, I voted for remain, but I also tried very hard to get a moderate self -Brexit deal through. Yeah, I would have called you a traitor because you were in the anti -Brexit course. But I would have killed you. Exactly. So, yes, does that, that he's completely rewriting history, but it's also the astonishing idea that, I mean, it's not a safe world out, that this is a world in which in the United States, there are a lot of people with weapons with crazy conspiracy theories.

26:31There are politicians getting death threats, and it's not very helpful for him to have 1 .2 million of his followers and 6 ,000 likes saying that Rory Stewart should be killed. We should put in the newsletter if somebody wants to see an absolutely brilliant, positive use of Twitter. Ben Wallace did a thread about Dominic Covings, which is really, really worth reading. Basically, you get to the end of Ben Wallace essentially says, I mean, the problem with Dominic is that he thinks he's a guru, but nobody treats him as a guru. All he's ever done really is come up with quite a good slogan, which I don't think Dominic Covings would like very much to talk.

27:06Back to the more serious matter of the new German chancellor. There's another point Rory, which I wanted to draw to your attention that came from this book. He wrote a book when he was in exile called What Now Germany 2 .0, with a former social Democrat minister by the name of Wolfgang Clemmar. So, Rory, part of his political rehabilitation was to do a political media project with somebody from the other side and look where he is now. So, in 15 years time, maybe, I can have a comeback. I like the vision. It's great. One of the things I wanted to tell you from this very interesting book is that it's very good on why Metson Merkel didn't get on.

27:45It's more, I think, than just they were both ambitious for the same job, which she talked about in her own book. He was one of the first kind of culture warriors, and he used to talk about this thing called, talked about German culture, and she felt he was pushing the wrong buttons at the wrong time. And then once she became chancellor, he then started to really become almost like a bit of a renter quote, critic of everything that she did. And so, there's a wonderful quote from where he was going for the leadership to become the chancellor, and she had this quote, the basically said, well, he must have qualities to God as far as he has, which is one of the best sort of dabbing with fake praises.

28:27And there's a wonderful encounter when they met. She was invited to her 70th birthday, and there was this very, I'm sure you've seen lots of this conservative party of people that you know to be sworn enemies, you know, oh dear Angela, oh dear Flanery, I love it. See you. Click, click, click, click, click. So, anyway, I think he's going to be a very interesting chancellor, and I think how he builds the power, that's partly about the coalition and then how he does with the public, but also how he uses that power, he's going to be fascinating. Let's take a short break, and then let's come back and maybe integrate all these really interesting questions about European defence into what's now going on with Trump, NATO and Ukraine.

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30:47Welcome back to the rest of politics with me, Roris Judd. I would be honest to countable. And of course, the reason I think that we're many reasons, but one of the major reasons we're focusing so much on Germany now is that this is the hinge moment in which Europe now feels completely different to what it felt like four weeks ago. And feels completely different because as I think we've said on this podcast, we're suddenly realizing that we have spent 80 years creating an entire system that totally depends on the United States. We're vulnerable to the US in every way. We've built our complete security and defense infrastructure in a little American cocoon.

31:27We buy American planes. We rely on American tech. The seven largest tech companies in the world are American. And at no point in the last 70 80 years, certainly has the British foreign policy elite, or at least since Suez really questioned whether America isn't its ally. And we can get into that a little bit because of course that's central to the way that you and Tony Blair thought about George W. Bush and it's central to the wars that I fought in in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of American coalitions. And suddenly now we have entered a world in which as you've pointed out, Friedrich Mertz is saying that America may be indifferent to us.

32:05What's that German phrase again? Like a good to hear. Right. So now that is a really interesting word because if America shifts from being the unquestionable ally to something that is even neutral towards us. And in relation to Ukraine, and this is what's really brought it to the fore, potentially even slightly allying with Russia against Europe over Ukraine, then everything is suddenly turned on its head. I don't think it feels slight Roy. I don't think it's slightly. I think it feels. I mean, maybe this is a good point to just say a bit about Emmanuel Macon's yesterday because on the one hand, they did the whole bon army and the touchy feeling and the headline in their spiegel this morning was lots of shoulder slapping but not much agreement.

32:55Let's just take a couple of things. He was asked directly, you know, I've been in these White House situations with presidents and visiting foreign leaders both when I was a journalist and when I was with a foreign leader. And what normally happens is you get greeted, Tony Blair, Macron yesterday, you get greeted, you get taken through. There were some very nice footage actually behind the scenes of Macron being introduced to Trump's team, including some of the backroom team of my view. And you go in and then they bring in what they call this pool spray, which is dozens of sort of guys with big sticks and it's very chaotic and badly organized.

33:29And normally you have like a couple of questions. And Trump just turned into one of these kind of long rambles. Let's talk that a second because I think it's really important. So I'll do a little bit of explainer on background and then we'll get into the texture of the thing. So just to remind people on the basic background, we're now at the third anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Last week, we reminded people of the fundamentals, which is that Russia feels that it's been making progress on the front line. And it's found that easier to mobilize troops, partly with the help of North Korea.

34:06And Ukraine has struggled to mobilize troops. And Ukraine has been kept alive with about $120 billion worth of US funding and about $140 billion. Or $350 billion if you're Donald Trump. A hundred and forty billion worth of European commitments have kept this thing going. So Europe committed about 20 billion more than the US, but between the two of them, and almost about a commodity crime. Trump, of course, said he was going to fix it when he came in. There was a meeting in Saudi Arabia, which we were just leading into in the last pod. And an astonishing flurry of statements came out of that in which Trump said that Zelensky was a dictator that he had a net popularity rating of 4%.

34:50He implied that Ukraine was responsible for starting the war. And essentially no demands, no serious demands were made against Russia. And no security guarantees were offered for Ukraine. And Marco Rubio, who was a real Russia hawk, in fact, famously embarrassed Rex Tillerson, who was the first sector state by asking repeatedly, is Putin a dictator. And it's been on the record again and again saying, you can't trust with Putin without a thing. Putin doesn't want to make a deal with the United States. He just wants to make the United States weaker. Has flipped around along with all of Trump's teams into a position of deference and trust towards Putin.

35:29And you can see the Russian media absolutely celebrating. Love you. Yeah, Russian media saying we won. Well, yesterday in the pool spray at the top, as they call it, one of the questions that got through was asking Trump whether he'd called Zelensky a dictator. Did he think that Putin was a dictator? And he just wouldn't answer. And Rubio, Roy, as you know, I'm a big fan of Foreign Affairs magazine, 2016, Rubio wrote a piece about his fundamental foreign policy beliefs and the big pillars for foreign policy. Military strength, well, they're cutting the military right now, protecting free trade.

36:12Well, they're not doing that. A moral clarity in defending freedom. This is the other one, he said. Russian's aggression in Ukraine is an historic affront to the post -World War II global order on which the entire global economy depends. And I actually felt looking at them yesterday. I don't know if you, they had, so you had Trump and Macron there, you had JD then Rubio. And I think it was Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, and Heska with his ridiculous stars and stripes, Hanke chief was in the in the back with all the hacks. But Rubio genuinely looked uncomfortable to me because they're having to sit there and they then had to sit through the press conference where Trump just comes up with the most extraordinary nonsense.

36:53So this was also the day in which the US decided astonishing not to abstain and a vote with the United Nations. But to vote with North Korea, Russia, and Hungary in the United Nations on Russia's side against Ukraine. You forgot Belarus and Eritrea. Fantastic. Fantastic. So I mean, I'm really but so Macron then gets on a plane. And of course what he's doing is he's setting off to save the world. So he's he's he's jumping on a plane and he's going to go and convince Donald Trump that he should provide above all security guarantees. Macron keeps coming back and back saying there's going to be security guarantees.

37:34US deterrence is going to behind us. You know, we're going to get a piece of it. And there wasn't a really great article in the New York Times will share for subscribers and others in our newsletter in which they interviewed various former British ambassadors to the US talking about what a strategy might be in that very strange fantasy world that we all live in that we can actually change Trump's mind on something. You know, so they had lots of ideas about, you know, don't don't get into a discussion on what Zelensky's like because that's you know, going down a rabbit hole and we're just a noise Trump.

38:04Don't contradict him when he says 300 billion and try to just get him to vote and play to an idea of strength. Anyway, enough. So Macron arrives. He goes in to see Trump. There's a thing before this thing afterwards. How do you then read what results actually Macron gets out of this charm offensive? It's really hard to know. I like you watch the whole thing. I watched his arrival. I watched the pool spray at the top. During which you say that you, you know, these ambassadors all say don't correct him. Macron did correct him because Trump was going off on one about we spent 350 billion dollars, which isn't true.

38:42And Europe has just done all this stuff. But they're going to get it all back because it was all done in loans. And Macron put his hand on his arm and said, no, no, that's not right. Let me tell you in fact. And you could see Trump almost like shrinking in because his instinct will be to say don't dare talk to me like that. You know who I am. But he kind of knew he couldn't quite go that far. And then in the later press conference, there were several moments where I saw Trump while Macron was speaking, particularly when he was speaking of French and Trump's having to get his earpiece in where he started tapping his index fingers against against the side of the lectern.

39:18And I think that was a bit of sort of, you know, I'm the main act here. This is going on too long. So I think when you say what was the outcome, it depends on what he said afterwards. But what I think Macron did very, very effectively. He got the balance right between the sort of puke making ego stroking that you have to do, which cares start. And then people are going to hate it when he does it. Okay, you just wait. Here's Donald Trump's arrived in the White House has changed the game. There's now a new opportunity. We've got to work together to seize it. He's going to say that. And he's going to say just get ready for it.

39:48He will say, you know, we have to risk that the leadership that he's showing on this issue and other issues. He's going to say all that. But what Trump, what Macron also did, and I hope that he had something similar, when talking without saying, no, he's not a dictator, what Macron did, he talked about the courage and resilience of the Ukrainian people. Well, I think we know what he meant. Three or four times, he said, you know, this, this Russian aggression. And one of the most powerful moments for me was when they were talking about, Trump was droning on about, he's going to get his deal and the minerals and the rare earths and all that stuff.

40:22And Macron literally on back of that saying, if this compensation, then the people have to be compensated by Ukrainians because, of course, it was the Russians that started this war. And you can see Trump sitting there thinking, do I contradict this? I noticed Vant sort of shuffling his seat at that point. I mean, so it's a very interesting what having forced myself to watch Trump that long. Firstly, he was more courteous towards Macron and more sort of charming than I was expecting. So he did do a lot of praising him about Notre Dame and talking about D -Day. And there was a lot of that back and forth, as you remember.

40:59There was, of course, an enormous amount of the trademark. Let's use this opportunity to attack Biden and talk about how Biden let all these very dangerous millions of illegal immigrants in the United States. And move off the subject, you're trying to just boast about what an amazing President he's been and how well he's done. He managed to get a journalist asking him, are you pleased about the fact that you're doing really well on the polls? I'm going to jump in there. Somebody who I've read on social media, who I've followed and who actually I think is usually accurate, said the journalist who asked that question, who would call that journalist first?

41:35Brian, I think you have a question. And the question was, you must be very pleased with this poll that says that you are the most popular President's George Washington. Right. According to this guy on Twitter, that guy is the boyfriend of Marjorie Taylor Grick. Mega, mega, mega, that's it, right? So if that is wrong, I'm happy to apologise to Brian. But in any event, you talk about a plenty of questions. So you've got the President of France there effectively representing the whole of Europe. And your first question is a planted question to say how amazingly popular you are when the real polls are actually showing anything.

42:11But that says to me, that's strange. That says, we had all that. But there was another thing going on all the way through, which is Macron kept saying, it's been a great meeting. And we've agreed in this meeting that there's going to be security guarantees from the United States. Haven't we Mr. President? And Trump scrupulously never said that. Engage. Absolutely. And in fact, actually in the pre -meeting, Trump said, yeah, he's a great guy. But you know, I remember when we had dinner on the Eiffel Tower and he came out and he gave us great speech in French. And I can't understand anything French.

42:49But afterwards, I discovered that he'd said that we'd agreed all these things. We never agreed. He's a cheeky guy. Right. So basically what Trump is signaling is that he thinks that Macron's technique is to come out of these meetings saying, we've got all these agreements on all these wonderful things. And that that will be the fact. And actually Trump isn't even pretending. He refuses to use any of Macron's language. He's refusing to say there will be American security guarantees. There'll be American deterrence or anything of that sort. When Macron challenged him over the facts on the European spending and the facts are clear, you know, Europe has spent more than America.

43:28And he sort of just looked at the President. You can believe that if you want. It was totally in his alternative facts mode or the disinformation of space as Zelensky calls it. I don't know if you had time to read it, but I sent you a report by the Institute for the Study of War. Now this is not a liberal pink organization. I think your friend David Petraeus is on the board. This is like these are serious military people. They're close to the military. And they put out a report this week very factual. But it essentially was debunking all of the claims that Trump has been making. One, Zelensky is not a risk of losing Ukraine right now.

44:05They have this extraordinary stat. At the current rate of advance it would take Russian forces 83 years to capture the remaining 80 % of Ukraine. So they've got 20%. And then they're not risking most Ukrainian citizens still standing. They're very clear. This point that Trump keeps making in these many me forage in the UK as we say. Why doesn't Zelensky hold elections? Answer because they're prohibited to hold elections under the Ukrainian Constitution when they're at war. On the losses pointing out that the numbers Trump keeps talking about millions, not true. Stasis effect, Europe provides as much direct aid as the US.

44:46Ukraine did not misuse half of it. They had these reports from people who'd been monitoring the aid that it has not been misused. And if it has been misused, most of that money stayed in America anyway. And also debunking the fact that Ukraine had been trying to avoid negotiations with Putin. And I think it's going to be very hard for Kierstahn. My macro thought did it well in terms of don't, you know, the France Timmerman who said that thing don't get in the fight with the pig. Because the pig loves rolling around in mud. I think here we'll have to sit there when Trump comes out with lots of this nonsense.

45:18But like Macron did, find one or two points that you are going to be very, very clear about making. And I've been thinking a lot of this. I don't know how you make this argument to his face. But I actually think that somehow Macron, Kierstahn, Mao Tsui, he gets there and the rest of them. They've got to get inside Trump's head that people who are using PING and Putin, when they look at Trump surrendering so much and boasting about what a great dealmaker he is, he's actually coming over to them as unbelievably weak. He gave Trump so much, he gave Putin so much with getting nothing in return. And Xi Jinping thinks that this guy's weak.

45:59That's right. And I think that's what they're gambling on. They're gambling that they can appeal to Trump's vanity and that they can say you're being ripped off by Putin. He's going to betray you. The problem is that that weighs against another instinct, which is Trump basically, doesn't want to have anything to do with the rest of the world. He's not interested. And you can explain to him that Putin is a threat to Moldova or that Putin is going to go into Lithuania, which is a NATO country. And if he gets into Lithuania, that's the end of NATO. There's no common defense. And Trump doesn't care.

46:35Because I think we keep misunderstanding him. I mean, we've got this story that keeps being produced that he's transactional, pragmatic and transactually, not pragmatic and transactional. There's nothing pragmatic about the idea of turning Gaza into a beach resort on the Mediterranean. It's not practical. And there's nothing transactional about what he's doing with Ukraine. I mean, remember, a transaction implies there's two sides. You're doing a deal, the art of the deal, but it's not the art of the deal. What he said to Ukraine is give me $500 billion worth of your minerals. Now, the US at most has spent $120, $130 billion.

47:14And when Ukraine says, why? The answer is give it to me. And when they say, and what do we get in return? And we're going to get security guarantees in return. He just says, no, give it to me. In other words, it's not actually transactional, it's not a deal at all. It's it's robbery. It's extortion. He's just saying, give me stuff. So with Denmark. Same with Denmark and Greenland. So, okay, let's say we've got that kind of personality. Obviously, deterrence, NATO is psychological. It's not down to exactly how many troops the US has. It's down to Russia's calculation that when push comes to shove, the US will launch nuclear missiles ultimately to defend NATO.

47:59And again, what's what's defending Taiwan against China? It's psychological. It's just the belief that the US might do something. And God knows one doesn't want anyone to test that belief, right? You test that belief, then the nukes have to start flying. So the whole point about deterrence is this belief, the confidence. So at the very least, we're in a situation in which Trump just doesn't care. At the worst, in relation to the Panama Canal, Greenland, potentially, this guy is becoming a strategic adversary in which he's going to leverage his money and troops to actually go after us. Now, the problem with that is we don't have any doctrine to deal with that.

48:37We have no way of thinking about the United States as a strategic adversary. We don't even plan for it. There's no war college in Europe that's thought about what would be involved in fighting the United States. There's nobody alive who actually has ever envisioned that this might happen. That's what so extraordinary about it. No, but as you know, the question I get asked more than any other going around the place and it was the same in Germany, but also to literally it's a very small sample to people that's very important today. This question, you must get this a whole time as well. What has Putin got on Trump?

49:10As the tech bros get involved, there's a combination of Trump trying to run America like one of his property companies. In other words, treating the Europeans in the way that he treats his suppliers, which famously in New York means he doesn't pay his suppliers and they'll get bankrupt. But Mike Brock has written quite a good sub -stack piece that I shared with you. Terrify. Yeah, which is it follows on the stuff that you're talking about with the sovereign individual. In that case, it's this intellectual dark where bits Curtis Yavin, it's Peter Teal. Peter Teal being the person who financed JD Vance for whom JD Vance worked.

49:46The way that Musk Teal and others like Mark Anderson, who also talks about this, basically don't believe in democracy. They think that we're in a new world, fast -moving world, and the US government needs to be run in the way that they think they run their tech companies. A lot follows on from that. They're very authoritarian in the way they run these companies. They're very much moved fast and break things. They're not about checks and balances. They don't believe, of course, some data privacy, which is why we've got all this stuff going on an AI. So, put all those things going on. Now, you then said nobody's thought about how we think about a world in which the US could be our strategic adversary.

50:25Well, of course, the last person famously to be interested in this idea and really develop was of course, Charles de Gaulle, the French president. France had a shattering experience in Suez and in Algeria, where they realized that the United States could pull the rug out from one of the stops, which is why France, unlike Britain, developed a completely independent nuclear deterrent that did not have force. Yeah, they didn't have US components in it. And this is why we get mocked by the French for the idea that maybe we can't even use our tried nuclear missiles because we're reliant on the US for the whole thing.

51:02And they withdrew from NATO and tried to develop a vision of France and even of Europe, which was more dependent to the United States. And we for nearly 50 years slightly mocked them for that. Sort it was unnecessary, expensive, absurd. And I honestly, if I talk about it myself, I actually remember back in the day, people like me 10 years ago thinking, well, maybe the British military should become like the US Marine Corridor should become just an expeditionary force that bolts on to a whole US system to go around the world. And now we all have to become Gaulists. And becoming Gaulists is a massive shift.

51:43Yeah. Because I think I cannot begin to explain the many ways in which it would take 15 years, at least and probably 5 % of our GDP by the end of that 15 years of the whole of Europe. Before we began to have the kind of military forces that could provide a genuine independent force from the United States. And that was the other word that that Males used, an upheag independent of the United States. And Mates also said, by the way, he floated this idea. Germany, for obvious reasons, has no nuclear weapons, right? Germany, he is saying is going to have to build up his own defenses. But he's already talking about whether it's possible to get Germany and other European countries under the Anglo -French nuclear umbrella.

52:28But of course, there isn't an Anglo -French nuclear umbrella. There's a French nuclear umbrella, ish, but as you say, we are so tied in to the American systems that that is going to have to be looked at. And of course, the other thing that's fascinating in this, you know, we probably were going to run out of time and maybe do this something on the S &Q now, and you want to talk about the way the defense itself was changing. And I was looking at some of the numbers of drone use in Ukraine. I mean, you're talking about in the near future, the potential for millions of drones to be used. It's gone from thousands to hundreds of thousands and it's growing exponentially.

53:03But if you think this goes back to your point about the tech pros who think the democracies had its day and they should be in charge, the influence that Elon Musk, remember we talked to Ian Bremer? He said that you could make the case that Musk has done more for Ukraine than anyone because of when he did give the Matt Says to to Starlink. But Musk is now just echoing the Trump idea that Zelensky is a gangster and, you know, you can't be trusted and everybody hates him and all the sort of non -sense that he says. But the fact is Starlink owned by SpaceX is now fundamental to some of these military battles.

53:40Now, that is why I guess we're leaders are a bit wary about taking this guy off. But if Europe is serious about getting its act together and you and I've been saying for some time, it needs to get its defense act together, then we are talking about sums of money and Keir Starmer's maybe started a process today. I thought one of the most moving things this week, Roy, I don't know if you caught sight of any of the Zelensky event with all those Trudeau was there, Vondalheim was there, Costa was there, Janskara's store was there from Norway. Two of the best speeches were his primaries of Norway and Metafreverickson who we spoke to recently, Prime Minister of Denmark, and stubbed the Prime Minister of their President of Poland of Finland.

54:23They made absolutely brilliant speeches about why they feel this threat and why Europe has got to get its act together, together on defense. And this by the way is that this is what's so important about Keir Starmer's visit on Thursday. This is a massive challenge and opportunity for Keir Starmer's leadership, because I've always felt the root back to some sort of proper grown up relationship with Europe for Britain is through defence and security and that's what Keir is going to take to Washington on Thursday. Well let's make that I think the opening theme of tomorrow's podcast, let's begin with that and get into some of the defence stuff, get into some of the European stuff and maybe talk about where Europe could find new allies as the US falls away.

55:15Anyway thank you very much, that was a really good episode. So you said goodbye.