434. Why the West is Finally Recognising Palestine

26:53This isn't ad from BetterHelp. At the moment, we're getting advice from everywhere. You just have to go on TikTok. Could be Alice's cold plunges. Could be my attempts to meditate or the digital detox that I'm doing in Colombia. But of course, one of the things that we know is that it can be incredibly valuable to talk to another human being, somebody who's actually been trained as a therapist, to work through these ideas calmly, objectively and professionally. And as the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a very diverse variety of expertise.

27:29They've got over 5 ,000 therapists in the UK. They've helped more than 5 million people globally and you can join a session literally at the click of a button.

27:39Change hearing yourself clearly, maybe for the first time. So talk it out with BetterHelp. Our listeners get 10 % off their first month at BetterHelp .com slash rest politics. That's better HELP .com slash rest politics.

28:01Welcome back to the rest of politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me as the camera, and Rory before we head on to the subs, you get dropping, dropping information about different interviews that we've been doing while we've been in different places. So let just bring people absolutely up to date. Leading as a separate podcast channel, the Wheat Roy and I do, where we interview somebody every week, we've mentioned Jeremy Hunt and the current episode now is Jeremy Hunt. Part two of that interview is out this coming Monday. But if you can't wait, you can become a member of the rest of politics plus and you do that by going to therestespolitics .com.

28:41So we go Hunt, Hunt, Nicholas Sturgeon, Nicholas Sturgeon, then the Prime Minister of Norway, my friend Jonas Gashtora, and then we might have a little bonus episode with the President of Guyana as well. So we get loads and loads of really great interviews and we hope that you enjoy them. I mean, I think as a huge thank you actually for getting some of these big names. They're great A -listers and I think it's lovely to have current heads of state and current heads of state who are talking much more openly than I sometimes fear serving politicians do. Yeah, I think the King Harold might be upset that you just refer to Jonas Gashtora as the head of state, or you as a sort of out and out.

29:22There we are. I would say as well, I enjoyed Jeremy Hunt a lot more than I thought I would. I thought he was, and he goes, he's still a politician, he's still an MP, but it does I think go to your theory, he's no longer in the cabinet. He was very loyal to Kenny Badek, up to a point, but he was very much more reflective than most frontline politicians are. So I think he's got that balance right, still in politics, but being interesting. And of course, for me, I think it's a really example of what the Conservatives could be doing and it's so sad. They're not, I think there is a huge appetite still for the centre, for the left wing, the Conservative Party, for a Conservative Party that doesn't get caught up in culture wars, that emphasizes pragmatism, thoughtful approach to staff is open about mistakes and failures.

30:22And I think there's huge opportunities actually for if the Conservatives wanted to, for taking on labour because I think there are real communications problems. Keir Starmer's net popularity rating is catastrophic. And a good Conservative Party speaking in the way that Jeremy Hunt was speaking, I think could have a real future and I think it's very, very sad that where they're likely to go is, is to lurch towards Robert Generator and an attempt to chase for Arge on the right. Yeah, the point I wanted to highlight from Jeremy Hunt's interview because he said to me really interesting, when he said it, I thought this is nuts, but he basically said, Keir Starmer should take a leaf out of Donald Trump's book and communicate more, talk more to the public.

31:06Now I said earlier, I don't think there's anybody in the world like Trump in the way you know, those 75 minute rambles he did at Turnbury and you know, he's communicates four, anyway, which maybe doesn't lend itself to the same sort of communication. But the more I've thought about it, the more I think, you know, we might have a point. We don't see enough of the Labour government talking about what the Labour government is doing other than when they're on the defensive. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think definitely this is part of the trick of Zora and Mum Darni, the New York mayoral candidate too.

31:45And it was actually something that even back in the day, David Cameron did a lot more of, if you remember his foreign secretary, there were often videos of him going down the steps or when he was running to be prime minister, he'd have people on the train with him chatting and doing. Also, when when when David Cameron was prime minister, I would reckon David Cameron was on the main news bulletins pretty much every day of his prebureship, not far off it. I've seen, I remember that. I exactly remember, I remember someone observing that somebody who really didn't like Cameron saying, okay, I mean, there's a lot of things wrong with this guy, but one thing you can say for him is that you basically turn on the main news every evening and there is David Cameron.

32:25It was right now you turn on the main news and you've got Nigel Farage sort of trying to stir up hatred and violence. And obviously you'd have to find a way of doing it, wouldn't you, where to follow your friend and Norwegian prime minister, who's very much about authenticity and being yourself, it would have to very much be, starmer being starmer. But yeah, it would be lovely to see that the question is, could he do it? Because what of course, um, Mamdani and Trump are able to do is respond very, very fluently without too much nervousness to whatever's going on in the world. They're partly being commentators, something that traditionally, Linton Crossby, I remember saying to us, the Australian election advice, the conservatives used to always say, don't be a commentator, your job isn't to be a commentator, your job is to repeat the government line.

33:19Well, I say, do you remember when we interviewed that milliband? He said, that's why I used to say to him, stop being a commentator, don't commentate. Well, maybe, maybe cross people are probably going to mix it from you. Anyway, but Trump and Mamdani and these people have to slightly be commentators, they have to be a little bit more like that because if they're going to be talking two, three times a day, a lot of the time, they're just speculating, reacting, holding forth. And Trump presumably does quite a lot of stuff, which isn't really much to do with global politics at all. It's just, yeah, not as often he was talking about some woman he makes jeans and he confused the country with a company in one of his sort of mad rambles.

33:58He talks about golf a lot. I think the, I look, it is not Kier's style. And also something I'd say about Kier is that I think sometimes he's the way he projects himself in public. Isn't the same as he speaks in private. And I think when people see the interview, for example, with Jonas Gastora, the prime prime's annoy, his speaking style is almost identical, regardless of what he's doing. And I do think that's the most effective form of communication. Yes, when you get up on the platform, in a rally in front of 5 ,000 people, you do a bit more of the kind of boom and boom and boom. But actually, it should be a recognizable form of communication to how you talk to your mates.

34:42It's one of the great tricks of modern politics, which isn't quite being met by most people, because we see it, don't we? When we interviewed such a javid, people like, my goodness, have any been like that when he was a cabinet and people I think will feel that when they watch the necklace, sturgeon interview. My goodness, if only, if only if only she'd been quite as open and reflective and thoughtful. So somehow, it's just, and I feel that was Kier's summer, when I meet him one -on -one, there's actually quite a lot of kind of charisma and energy and humor to him, which isn't coming across in his.

35:18So it's about getting very, very controlled, cautious, slightly more introverted politicians to learn to speak in public a little bit more, like the way they speak in private. And I don't know how you get them to do that. Yeah, well, I think a lot of it comes with practice and just doing it. I mean, the one thing I'll say about Kier's summer, I think he's got a lot better at primalist's questions than when he started, which shows that he can improve and does improve. And I think on this communications point, I mean, again, you know, Nicholas Sturgeon made the point that she said, you know, we're not just Kier, but she had a lot of the labor ministers when they come up, they come on, they speak.

35:55And then when they finish speaking, you think, what do they say? Right. Because they're just something a little bit robotic about it all. Well, also, also from your point of view, and I think the other thing that of course makes people nervous is that talking that way, you're going to take risk. If you're going to be talking two, three times the day about whatever things will go wrong, headlines will be generated. And so you need politicians who are a little bit more like I guess, Trump or Mamdani or Farazhar, who when their comms team come in and say, what the f of you done, you've just generated another mad headline.

36:32Just shrug and say, don't worry, I know my people. I know my face. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I actually think of Faraz's communications is, I'm not sure he's as effective right now as he thinks he is. I know they're doing well because they're getting this whole sort of focus on migrant hotels. And that's where he wants in, you know, crime or have you. But I think the thin skin is getting to be a bit of a problem with them. The more I've thought about what Jeremy Hunt said, though, I hope the Labour people, I hope Labour people listen to it and listen to it, not thinking of his attorney, what does he know.

37:02I actually think there's something in this. There's Labour's communications needs to change from what it currently is. Because, you know, even I as a political obsessive, quite often if I'm sort of going scrolling through social media, looking for interesting things, I'm not hanging around law when I see most of the Labour ministers pop up on my feet. And I am an obsessive pro -labor tribalist, id politics. So there we are. Listen, let's get to a man who definitely can communicate it and interested you do you do it way less. That's Donald Trump. You talk about flood the zone. So just to go through the last few days, we've had this massive spat with Medvedev, quickly accelerated to moving nuclear weapons.

37:44We've had the tariff mayhem, we've had him sacking, and this is real Putin stuff now, North Korean stuff, sacking the head of the government's statistical service, wonderful name, Erica McIntyrefer. I mean, she's got to get a job just for having that name. So I hope she won't be out of work for too long. Another Fox News host getting a big job, the new US attorney. We've also had, maybe we should have covered this in part one, the $60 million that he wanted thanks for from the starving in Gaza turns out it was only three million. But he has found 200, he is finding 200 million to buy to build a new ballroom.

38:27Meanwhile, Gelaing Maxwell's being moved to a low security prison. Oh, just after the deputy attorney general went to have a chat about Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump. And to add to it, Columbia University has signed a very, very controversial deal where they've, you remember their federal funds were suspended by Trump. He's now releasing money to Columbia University in return, essentially, for Columbia signing up to what come in as an academic at Columbia University. Effectively means that when he teaches his Middle East course, he can criticize pretty much every country in the Middle East.

39:06But he cannot make points about Israel. He doesn't feel that he'd be able to and there's an extraordinary sort of academic policing outfit that has been agreed as part of this deal to monitor courses, provosts, etc. Just on tariffs. So I mean, the thing caught my attention particularly because I'd been in Latin America was what's happening in Brazil. But as you've pointed out, there's much more than that. But just let's just start with Brazil as an example of what's going on. Trump has imposed 50 % tariffs on Brazil. Now we're we're so deep into this Trump world. It's any August that 50 % tariffs doesn't start for people anymore.

39:50But it's an incredible level. I mean, these are levels. This is essentially economic sanctions. This is the sort of thing that people used to do against Russia or South Africa and he's doing it against Brazil. And why is he doing it against Brazil? He's doing it against Brazil not because Brazil has a trade surplus with the United States. He's doing it against Brazil because Brazil and its Supreme Court justice are prosecuting Herbal Sonara, the previous president, who did his own mini January the 6th. So they're pursuing him for essentially insurrection and a coup. Both of our son has been hanging out in DC presumably going to the new members only club set up by Trump's kids and Wiccoff's kids and has somehow convinced the Trump family that they need to get his dad out of jail.

40:40So 50 % tariffs are now sanctions against the Brazilian Supreme Court justice and travel ban. And Lula, who's a leftist leader, now has his own cap which looks like a sort of pseudo -magic cap, a certain Brazilian independence. But he's in a very, very difficult situation. Same situation Canada is in Mexico, and we'll get onto Colombia tomorrow. How on earth do you keep a sense of national sovereignty, national pride? You can't say, listen, it's fine, interferon my judicial processes will sack the head of the Supreme Court, will drop the entire legal processes of Brazil, please dear America drop the 50 % tariffs.

41:24Anyway, over to you. No, he's quite incredible. And it's a sort of form of strategic mayhem, the whole thing. I mean, the other two that really I found fascinating. One was, first was India because Trump has always talked about this great relationship with Modi and Modi has always talked about this great relation with Trump. And whenever they visit each other's countries, they have these 80 ,000 people rallies and massive cricket stadiums tell each unposts of each other all over the place. But India's been very badly here, but the one that really shocked you was Switzerland. So they're Switzerland.

41:57And we talked earlier about what is a country. Switzerland didn't become a member of the United Nations to very late on because it's always precious, preciously guarded, it's sense of neutrality. But the president, Karen Keller Sutter, she did something very, very clever, I thought at the time, and she thought at the time, the talks between America and China, she organized for them to be held in Geneva. And at the time, she managed to get a meeting with Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary. She came out of that meeting and the interviews for the Swiss media, where she basically, and this must have been based upon something the Besant said to her, basically said that they were going to be hovering between the UK 10 % and the standard 15 down from the 31 % that Trump had announced on Liberation Day with his game show board.

42:48He comes out a few days ago, 39%. So it's gone up, gone up from his game. From beyond 31, they've gone to 39. And this is led to an emergency cabinet meeting, is led to furlough schemes for some sectors of the economy that are going to be particularly hard hit. And the other thing that's really gotten scratching their heads, because Trump, of course, says it's all about the size of the trade deficit. Switzerland says two thirds of their recent exports are gold, bullion, and bars that should be refined in Switzerland. And gold is supposed to be exempt from tariffs. Yeah. And this, so this is, they just don't know what to do.

43:29The India thing is, as you say, a similar story, because I remember when this was all beginning in January, people I knew who were very close to the Modi government saying India is very convinced that they're going to be front row. In fact, they were hoping they'd be the first to get a deal. And we're a bit disappointed that Britain got there ahead of them. And Modi was very much communicating for all the reasons that you've said that India is going to be in a very special position. And of course, part of the reason for that is not just their friendship. It was about China. So the story was basically that the US needed allies against China, geopolitical competition.

44:06And the biggest potential ally in Asia was India. You know, India is on track to become one of the very largest economies in the world. It's growing very fast. Population of over a billion. And many companies were being encouraged to relocate their manufacturing away from China to India. So Apple, for example, move its manufacturing from China to India. So India thought it was sitting very pretty that it had very cleverly positioned itself as the alternative to China, the big, rapidly growing investment location and the US's greatest ally in the region with its own navy, which could help. So for all those reasons, both the personal connection and the geostrategic they thought they'd be fine.

44:45And they have been hit unbelievably hard. Now, that means that if you are an international manufacturer trying to manufacture goods, you picked up that China wasn't going to work. You were thinking maybe I moved to India. Maybe I moved to Vietnam, but all of them have now been hit with tariffs. And that means that the basic goods that were all dependent on, if you're an American consumer, and everything from T -shirts to Apple, you're basically hit with a very, very high VAT. It's like a sales tax. So it would be like putting up VAT by 25 % or in the case of China, you know, 40 % on key products.

45:22And this is bringing revenue and Trump's making a lot of money on this, you may well make hundreds of billions of dollars off this. But he's doing it by cutting taxes on the rich and then putting what's basically a VAT on the poor. Yeah, absolutely. And he's also scondering lots of goodwill. I mean, say with Modi, he spent so much time and effort building good relations with Modi. And now comes along and does this. And of course, the other thing that the Swiss are sort of really baffled about, because it's quite hard. And you know, Switzerland, they basically say they're already the world's six largest investors in the US.

45:58They're the biggest per capita. Right. And there's even talk now. I mean, I can't see the Swiss doing this, but actually they've got a big order for F -35 fighter jets from the States. Yeah, that's right. About saying, well, maybe we don't take their fighter jets. But so they've Swiss sort of, they've got the, they've now got the highest tariffs in Europe. And globally, there's only Brazil, Syria, Laos and Myanmar that are higher than them. Fiona and I are actually going to Switzerland in a couple of weeks. So we'll be able to check it out. But I was reading one of their newspapers, Blick, and it said that this is the country's biggest defeat since the French victory in the Battle of Marignano in 1515.

46:44What'd you do? Come on, Roy, let's imagine you are the president of Switzerland. What do you do? Right. It's impossible, isn't it? Because we know that one thing that Trump really likes and has worked for some countries is announcing a massive package of investment in the US. So when Europe announced, I think it was $600 billion worth investment, he cited that as a reason to bring the tariffs down to 15%. Even though it's meaningless. Even though it's meaningless, right. But as you say, the problem for the Swiss is they've already got a huge amount of investment. And of course, as we found with Norway, when we were talking to the Norwegian Prime Minister, indeed, when we talked to the Danish Prime Minister, smaller countries in Europe like Switzerland, Denmark on Norway are very, very vulnerable to the US.

47:32They're very open economies. They're very much dependent on global trade. And they're frankly very weak. They don't have much leverage. It's the first time I think that Switzerland has really experienced the pain of not being in the European Union and customs union. Because the trick that Trump didn't do that people were afraid he might do is to try to do divide and rule within Europe. Now, I know how an earth Europe would have responded. But there was a fear for a moment that you remember that he might think, well, actually, you know, I don't really like what Spain's doing on recognition of Gaza will go finally.

48:04Suddenly, now, Switzerland, which seemed to have this very complicated but fruitful relationship, the European Union is in real trouble because it didn't manage to get in on that 15 % tariff negotiation. I don't know what you do. And I God forbid you think that you can go down the mark, Rutta Routes, which is that if you just totally humiliate yourselves, say Trump should get the Nobel Peace Prize, call him daddy, call him Mr. Bigley, wonderful president, you get out of this hole. The other thing I think that's interesting is that we used to say in talking about Trump's tariff policies that there were four basic agendas which contradict each other.

48:41Number one, he wants to move manufacturing back to the US. So leave China back to the US or leave Switzerland back to the US. Number two, he's trying to make money in which case, the manufacturing stays outside the US and he makes money. It comes at number three, he's trying to chase fentanyl number four, he's trying to punish China. But it's clear, I think now that it's quite different that yes, he is going to continue to make revenue from it and he likes his 10 % because it'll bring money in at expense of poor Americans. But it's now become a general purpose tool. If you're doing stuff we don't like with Russia, which is the story with India, if you're prosecuting Bolsonaro, if in the case of Colombia, you're refusing to take people back on a plane, we're just going to use this.

49:23And Syria, I guess, I mean, presumably Syria doesn't have a big trade surplus with the US. So those tariffs are just there. I don't know what has leveraged over the Syrian present. They're sanctions, aren't they? They're basically forced to economic sanctions. Yeah. Having just lifted other sanctions. And I mean, that's what I say. It's going to strategic mayhem. Maybe just for we clothes, Rory, what did you think of the, I mean, I was sort of maybe a bit too light -hearted about it because of a wonderful name, Erica McIntyrefer. But what are we to think about the president of United States, still the biggest economy in the world, firing the head of the statistical service because he said she was coming up with phony job figures.

50:05She inflated the good job figures for Kamala, bad job figures for him, everybody in that world, including people who have worked under Trump before has come out and said this is ridiculous. If you look through some of the history New York Times, that are very interesting piece about the history of countries where they've tried to figure a little bit fiddle -based statistics. I mean, there's the old joke about the Soviet Union, the tractor production, the potato production. But Greece, they go into a real mess by faking their deficit numbers. China constantly manipulating their growth figures. And you know, Argentina, I forgot about this until I read it, Argentina in the early and the centuries systematically, understating inflation figures.

50:48So eventually, the international community is no longer bothered to read Argentinian government data. So this is a bad, bad move, isn't it? It's a very bad move. And it's also, again, creating this strange sort of Bulgarian Communist Party thing, which is that all the Republicans loved citing her. Yeah. That she was their go -to person, and now they've had to flip to say, oh, this person I was quoting, and the state, two weeks ago, is now a villain. So there's a bit of the kind of show trials going on. We don't know, I think to finish on a sort of bigger note, one of the things you're reminding me of is that there's no real historical precedent for an economy, the size of the United States, in a world this globalized doing these kinds of things.

51:37Because the things that you're citing are, you know, Argentina, or even China, when it was a growing, closed communist country, but there's something we don't know what to deal with, which, and the Switzerland story is part of the story. The US is so powerful, so big, so impossible to ignore, so entwined in the global economy, so powerful, partly because actually they export much less than they import, partly because they're the world's reserve currency. We don't really know what happens with this experiment as it goes on. Normal economics tells you all those things that you've said. If you start screwing around with your tariff policy, you end up with expensive domestic goods, non -competitive domestic industries, you're shredding all your international alliances because you're alienating not just Switzerland and Western Europe, you're alienating Japan, India, South Korea, Canada, Mexico, and then you start destroying your statistics agency, you start going after your central bank, so we've got J -PAL having to take a very firm line saying, I'm not going to be driven to bring down history.

52:48So at some point you assume that investors are going to say America is ceasing to be a reliable, predictable investment location, but the global economy is in such trouble. Where else do they put their money? I mean the US is now 70 % of the world stock market if you go into a tracker fund, and this is and the US treasuries the way you put your money. So Trump is there so much in the bank, there's so much economic power that he can do these things that nobody else has ever done, and we don't quite know how long he can get away with it from and at what point the catastrophe happens and the is of course eventually people selling off US treasuries, leaving the US stock market and giving up on this project.

53:30Or the American economy declines and drags the world into some kind of you know some sort of recession, and of course don't forget he's got a lot of forwardness going back to his very very first days president term one. If you remember the big row day one of his first term was him claiming there were more people at his inauguration than there had been Obama's when clearly there weren't. So he's you know if the facts don't fit his narrative he changes the facts and I should say that, bro if you ever heard of a guy called Olympic Avikin, no Olympic Avikin was a Soviet Union census director who made the mistake of producing a population count that was lower than Stalin had already announced and for his troubles I'm afraid he was arrested and executed.

54:23So we're not quite there yet but we're we're some of the way there. It's not great it's not great and of course it is it's a fascinating is it just final thing that remember that what undid Liz Truss was her attempts to attack the Treasury the Bank of England and the analysis of the ignore our end statistical predictions and our own agencies. But in a small economy like Britain that that was kind of the end for her but in America as you say this was exactly a fortune -teller done it the moment of which is a massive yeah the currency collapses the stock collapses the debt goes crazy but in the US who's such a huge okay well let's see some more open to talk about Columbia we're going to talk about a couple of aspects of France and Germany not going to well we're going to talk about changes at the Samaritans which I know quite a lot of people worried about so we'll see you then.

55:12Very good and if I could answer this there's a very cheeky but I just wanted to plug. Two days ago was the first episode of my BBC series which has partly inspired by a conversation I have with you on the idea of the hero so it's a program called the idea of the hero from Achilles to Zelensky. So at nine o 'clock in the morning on BBC Radio 4 and a Monday if listeners want to listen a Johnny romp through different heroes from the classical world a through to some painful discussions about Musk Trump and Zelensky at the end. I think you should also probably mention BBC sounds you know BBC sounds that's right they will go on there eventually they'll go.

55:47I'll show it out if I may Roy we've just had I know you don't really follow sport the most exciting test match series probably in my lifetime certainly since Ian Boatham's ashes I think England and India has been absolutely amazing and I want to give a shout out to test match special when you when you're riding around the French countryside on a bicycle there is no better thing to listen to than test match special so Aga's and Co thank you so much. Oh beautiful great. All right well a happy note. See you soon. Bye bye.