490. Trump’s Greenland Ultimatum: What Next?

19:33And you know what, I think you mentioned there about the kind of rules base. I wonder if we haven't kidded ourselves that this world order, liberal rules-based world order, that we've, because we felt that it's working for us, we haven't maybe, we've underestimated the extent that actually the America has worked best for the Americans. Okay. But that's not enough for Trump. That is not enough for Trump. So what he's doing now, I think this is going to backfire spectacularly because I actually think ultimately we're seeing it already. This is going to push people towards the one superpower that he identifies as America's genuine enemy.

20:11He's behaving like Europe is the enemy, okay? Europe is struggling. We'll talk about how Macron's responded, about Stalin's responded. They're struggling to know how to respond to this. But meanwhile, the Chinese are just sitting there watching it. And just one final point on that, the one thing that really brought that home to me this week was watching Mark Carney in Canada. So there's Mark Carney. Mark Carney was elected. He's a very, very clever guy. And he's emerging as a very effective politician. But let's be frank, he knows he was elected because of Donald Trump, because Pierre Poilierva was way ahead in the polls.

20:45Trump comes along with all his MAGA 51st state madness. And that absolutely destroyed Poilierva because he was too close to Trump. Carney becomes the prime minister, really clever guy, understands the way the world economy works, unlike Trump, who thinks it's just a real estate deal. And Carney, without saying Trump's lost the plot, without saying that America is becoming a kind of a hostile force, he just goes to China and has this amazing meeting with Xi Jinping, at the end of which they do all sorts of deals that are going to benefit the Canadian economy.

21:17Rory Stewart:So he's dropped, for example, tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, which were set at 100 % because that's what Biden requested. Biden wanted to make sure that Chinese electric vehicles didn't swamp the world, and he got all his allies to agree to put up tariffs, dropped it to 5%. So 44 ,000 Chinese electric vehicles will be arriving in Canada well under the price of Tesla or any comparable electric vehicle. And meanwhile, the canola oil thing that's very important to Chinese food, they're going to lift the levies on that. Right. So that's the sort of core of the deal. Then there have been trade deals, there have been deals on visas.

21:49Rory Stewart:Very, very quickly double trade between Canada and China. Yeah. Okay, so I wanted to develop one thing which I think is very important, which is the issue of performance. We were saying yesterday that in a sense, Trump, sometimes his people talk the old language of national security. They pretend that what they're doing makes logical sense. So you'll get Elbridge Colby, for example, in the Department of Defense trying to say all of this, and you'll hear this from American military officers, is about the fact that Europe didn't spend enough on defense and the United States needs to focus on China and we can't fight two theaters at once.

22:30Rory Stewart:And so this is a completely rational move where we're going to start refocusing on China and Europe is going to get a defense against Russia. But the gap between that story and what Trump is actually doing is so extreme. We're beginning to see that his objective is not actually to strengthen European defense against Russia. His objective is not to strengthen US security. His objective is not to control the Arctic. His objective in some sense is not even directly to find the easiest way of getting hold of Greenland. His objective is to make a huge performance of cruelty, humiliation, and bullying.

23:12Rory Stewart:What do I mean by that? Let's just take that idea of getting hold of Greenland. If what he had actually wanted to do was get hold of Greenland as easily and smoothly as possible, and he was actually thinking tactically, you could design a strategy for it, right? So let's say the US wanted to do that. They would use the option that they had to put troops in there. So they would have been slowly increasing the number of US troops in Greenland until they ended up with 25 ,000. They would be putting in US mining companies, and then those US mining companies would be paying huge amounts of community grants to the 50 ,000 local Greenlanders till you ended up with essentially every local Greenlander is getting$100 ,000 a year from a US mining company.

23:51Rory Stewart:And then the next thing you do traditionally is you start a separatist movement. You start financing separatist leaders. Maybe there's some strange Russian submarine appears as a bomb. And then the United States steps in as the peacekeeper who really needs to respect indigenous rights, protect the security. And now oh, you've got tens of billions of investment on the ground. You've got 25 ,000 soldiers on the ground. De facto, you've done it. Now, it's not going to be comfortable. There'll still be some protests. But my God, that's a smoother, smoother way of doing it. But he doesn't want to do that.

24:24Rory Stewart:He's not somebody who wants to go into the ring and defeat the other wrestler. He's somebody who wants to get up in a costume, stand on the edge, beat his chest, and trash talk him. No, because what you've outlined there is not just a couple of episodes of the reality TV show. It's like 10 series. Right. And he doesn't have the patience for that. And he genuinely believes. And look, his whole life and his survival, having failed as a first term president, is about showing that he can do things that nobody else has done. And he thinks that this, he thinks right now he is going to get Greenland.

24:53He absolutely thinks that. And what's more, I don't want to sort of upset people, but I was talking to somebody last night who's, okay, I know Sweden and Denmark have a bit of a kind of issue between themselves. I was talking to a Swede yesterday who said, my big worry right now is Denmark will ultimately cave because the pressure will become absolutely unbearable. Now, we would hope that won't happen, but he thinks right now he is applying pressure in all the right places and getting the right responses. So maybe this is the time to talk about the way that Europe and other leaders around the world are responding to this.

25:26So Macron comes straight out and starts talking about bringing this so-called Coercion Act, the trade bazooka. Tell us a bit about that. Well, that's basically, I think this was designed in the first instance, if there was ever a problem with China and the way that it operates. And it was designed by the European Union.

25:42Rory Stewart:By the Commission and then supported by the Union. And it's called anti-coercion. Anti-coercion. The idea is somebody else is using economic levers to force you against your sovereignty. Exactly, exactly. So Macron raised that on Sunday as a possibility. If you actually look into it, and I know you will come on to, you thought Keir Starmer's response was terrible, and we can discuss that. But Macron, if you actually did what Macron suggested, or this economic coercion thing, the trade bazooka, you'd essentially be saying to massive companies who are huge in Europe, JP Morgan, Microsoft, Facebook, whatever, Google, go, bye-bye, you can't operate here.

26:23Rory Stewart:Okay, that's putting it as very simple. And the impact of that is you're really running the risk of cutting your nose off to spite your face. Absolutely. And you're also going to hit your own consumer prices, the Germans, for example, and that's one of the reasons they're so cautious about this. So that basically, that is Macron doing what Trump wanted him to do, in a way, which is why he's come back today with his 200 % tariffs, because you don't want to be on my board of peace. The one that's even more kind of alarming, particularly from a British perspective, so Keir Starmer, he comes out with a pretty strong statement day one.

26:53This is completely wrong and this is not the way to resolve it. He does a press conference yesterday with a speech where he's still operating, I think, through the old paradigm. I can work with Trump. I can get Trump into a better place.

27:03Rory Stewart:And we'll come up with this. It's a paradigm which I would suggest is called appeasement. There's a good word for it. Okay, that's your view. But what's happened today is he's come out and basically said that Britain is utterly stupid, is the word he used, to have done this deal with Mauritius on the Chagor silence. And that is in direct contradiction to what he said when the deal was done. Well, just to explain that again for the audience, because it's one of the great, great ironies of all time. So Keir Starmer comes in, and he and Jonathan Powell and many people in the Foreign Office concluded that because Britain was deeply respectful of international law, and principles, the UN and self -determination, it was necessary for Britain to give up the Chagos Islands, which it had acquired during its complicated colonial history to Mauritius.

27:54Rory Stewart:not only give it up, but actually sign up to pay every year money to keep retaining a base. Exactly. In part to keep an American air base. At the time, I remember speaking to a very, very senior figure in Whitehall, who at the National Security Council had said, why don't we just sell it to the United States? If America wants this thing so much, why don't we sell it? They'll give us$100,$200 billion for the Chagos Islands. We'll get that for the NHS. They can have the Chagos Islands. And the response from the British establishment was, no, no, no, possibly consider doing that. What we'll actually do is we'll give it away for free and we'll pay for the privilege of continuing to use it in order to be nice to the United States.

28:35Rory Stewart:And it now looks as though that guy who said, if the Americans wanted so much, why are we paying the Americans to be there? Why don't we just flog it to them? May have been onto something. Anyway, that aside, and I can see why we resisted that because it sounds pretty brutal. We're now in this situation in which Trump needs to be responded to. And this is where I come to this word, appeasement. Appeasement is not an irrational view. I was talking to the great guru of all time, my mother, yesterday on the phone. And she said to me, it's all very well, this story about standing up to bullies. That assumes the bullies are a coward and they back down and you're going to be able to beat them.

29:08Rory Stewart:That's usually what happens in the children's story. What happens if the bully actually provides 70 % of your defense? Has all the cloud computing of the world controlled? In the playground, there are higher forces. There is a teacher. There is a head teacher. There are parents outside. There are other kids who may or may not be stronger. With Trump, he is now creating this new world order where the bodies that he thought might have been above him, domestically the Supreme Court, Congress, gone, authority shattered, spineless politicians who've just caved in, spineless judges who are caving in.

29:41And then beyond that, the United Nations for which he has complete and total contempt. So your mum's got a point.

29:46Rory Stewart:She's absolutely got a point. And of course, in a sense, what Trump has inherited is this wonderful long con, an 80-year con, whereby the United States posing as the champion of the rules-based international order, liberal democracy, NATO and the rest, succeeded in making Western Europe entirely dependent on the United States for every aspect of their lives. so that when China 20 years ago started really focusing on how to deleverage, de-risk, and make absolutely certain that the United States couldn't extort, people rejected the Chinese model. When de Gaulle said after Suez, we cannot become so dependent on the United States, we got closer and closer to them.

30:27Rory Stewart:And now it's all coming home to roots. Now, appeasement can make sense, but only, this is my international relations theory here, only if what's being demanded is limited, bounded, reflects genuine grievance, and you can give it to them in a rules-based system and they stop. So the question with Greenland is, is what is happening is that, and this is where I disagree with Starmer, right? So I think what Starmer is tempted to think, And part of the problem is that our entire establishment in Britain cannot contemplate. They might be an enemy. Yeah, because it would be so expensive, so damaging, so inconceivable.

31:10Rory Stewart:And the same is actually true in the whole of NATO in Europe. I was asking NATO officials nine months ago, have you done any contingency planning for the United States seizing Greenland? And they look at me like, I'm completely mad. What the hell are we supposed to do? We don't teach that in staff college. I mean, if you look at GCHQ, which is the British signals intelligence, it's all backhauled off the NSA. There are Americans all over it. We don't really have independent systems. All our military rely on American satellite, American intelligence, American heavy lift, etc. Same in Ukraine. Our Trident nuclear missile, which we're about to buy in hundreds of billions.

31:46Rory Stewart:Yeah, it's an independent nuclear deterrent, but it wouldn't last very long without American support and supply. Remind us what J.D. Vance has just been saying and why that might be relevant to how much we can rely on this being an independent nuclear terrorist. So what J.D. Vance said last week, I'm amazed he didn't get huge coverage. He essentially said that one of the worries they had and one of the reasons, one of the many reasons they've suddenly found why they need Greenland is that both the UK and France are at risk, essentially, of falling into the hands of what they called Islam adjacent leadership.

32:19leadership and people in office. Mr. Jason, yeah. A general sense of a sort of terrorist state. Essentially, people who look a bit like Sadiq Khan, I think was kind of what he had in mind. So he basically gave him the sense that it's not impossible that governments hostile to the United States take power in the UK. With nuclear weapons.

32:37Rory Stewart:With nuclear weapons, which could be turned against them. Which has an implication then. If J.D. Vance and President Trump are selling us Trident, and they think that we could become a hostile Islamist power, what real genuine guarantees do we have that we're going to be able to easily operate an independent nuclear deterrent if the person who's selling it to us thinks that we're a threat? And as you know, because we talked about this law yesterday, I can't pretend that I was 100 % happy with the way that Keir Starmer presented. But what I do want to say is, because in essentially this goes to the Hugh Grant Love Actually moment where Hugh Grant in Love Actually stands, a British prime minister, stands alongside the American president and says, basically, you know, we're fed up with you, get stuffed, okay.

33:18And since bullies only respond to strength, now onward, I will be prepared to be much stronger. And the president should be prepared for that. And he gets a massive boost in the polls and the public loving for it, etc, etc. Now, what you don't see, because it's the movie, is what happens then. And what we've seen today, even on the basis of what you call appeasement, and I would say was maybe a bit more realpolitik, even that has provoked Donald Trump into doing this complete U-turn for him on the Chaco silence. You imagine what Trump could do if he were determined to inflict the kind of damage that he might do if he felt that we weren't actually cooperating with him.

34:00Now, I'm not pretending, I'm not saying, by the way, that that means we should just do whatever he says, au contraire. I'm saying why it's so difficult for Keir Starmer to stand there, represent the national interest, and if you like, get the balance between what the public want him to say, which is, you know, fuck off, you're a bully, and what he thinks we need

34:19Rory Stewart:to do to try to prevent the worst happening. Maybe let's develop that a little bit after break. And I just wanted to finish, though, my slightly long, pompous point on appeasement, because I think the big question when you're appeasing somebody, when you're appeasing the US or you're appeasing Mussolini or appeasing Hitler or appeasing anyone really, is what they're demanding, limited, grievance-based with a technocratic solution, which is what Starmer hopes. So Starmer hopes that what Trump really is interested in is maritime security. And therefore, if we come up with a good deal, whether they're going to be American bases and a little bit more British-French thing, and maybe some mining concessions, Trump will go.

34:59Rory Stewart:Where appeasement does not work, though, is if the person making the demands actually is making demands which are open-ended, right? It's just the beginning. Precedent setting, unbounded, I'm going to get some ridiculous adjectives, performative, right? Because if that's the case, and if it's that, then making concessions to him is a disastrous thing to do because every concession you make weakens your hand for the future and encourages him to do more. In other words, if this guy is going to continue giving him Greenland, just gives him 98 % of Danish territory even more control even more resources so that when he asks for the next thing, you're in an even weaker position than you were before, which is why I'm afraid there is no way that you can appease this guy.

35:46Rory Stewart:The logic of appeasement doesn't work. Right. So then you have to work out what in active terms, in action, you are going to do to get him to the right place. And we can talk about that after the break, but it's bloody hard. Very good.

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37:02Hi everybody, it is Dominic Sandbrook here from The Rest is History. Now you have probably been watching the scenes on the streets of Iran. You may be wondering where all this comes from. So on The Rest is History, we have just recorded a four-part series on recent Iranian history. So it kicks off with the Iranian revolution that brought down the Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in 1978-1979. And it's actually his son who is now leading opposition to the Ayatollahs from exile in the United States. So in this series, we explore the history behind the Islamic Revolution in Iran at the end of the 70s. Where did people like Ayatollah Khomeini come from?

37:43Where did their ideas come from? Why did they have so much support? Why was the Shah driven out of Iran in the first place? And what did it have to do with American intervention and indeed British intervention in the 1950s? And we look at the unfolding story of the revolution and then the amazing story of the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, the taking of initially 66 hostages by the Iranians. This is probably the story that I most enjoyed researching and writing. So please, if you're interested in Iranian history and what's going on, check it out. And if you want a taster, we have a clip for you at the end of this episode.

38:28Rory Stewart:Welcome back to The Restless Politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. And I'm going to start then, and you can attack me while I try to talk through what options you might have. So you were completely right to point out that America has an unbelievably strong hand. But one very strong hand, of course, is as you've pointed out, our economic dependence on the United States is actually much greater than the United States' economic dependence on Europe. And it's not just trade. We saw this with the fact that the United States can basically disable our access to Google and Microsoft whenever they want.

39:05Rory Stewart:They just did it, in fact, to the head of the International Criminal Court, a judge who took a case against Israel, and Trump has instructed US tech companies to disable his access to his internet. All our cloud computing depends on these US companies. And Trump has shown that he can just tell these US companies to switch this stuff up. I've talked a lot about the fact that all our AI in the future is going to depend on the US. The dollar is the center of the world's financial system. 70 % of the world's stock market is American. 60 % of all the defense equipment we buy, we buy from the United States.

39:37Rory Stewart:But the second thing isn't just their economic dominance, it's that the person attacking us, challenging our sovereignty, is our security umbrella. Our entire Britain and Europe's entire defense strategy against Russia and ultimately China depends on the United States. NATO is completely underpinned by the United States. So our ability to turn around and have a fight with the United States risks not just our economic life, the complete operations of our technology, but also our entire security umbrella protects against Russia and China. You said you were going to tell me what we could and should be doing.

40:14And what you're saying is militarily, there's not much we can do at all. I've explained that in relation to trade and economic retaliation, I think there is as much a risk to Europe in terms of the backlash on that. So in a totally abnormal diplomatic world, I think what you're seeing is the politicians behaving in normal, rational ways that they think can persuade Trump to get to a different position. I think they should by now be disabused of that.

40:41Rory Stewart:So I'm going to argue in a very weird way. So all that's true. But for the reasons before the break, appeasement cannot be the strategy. Okay. Because appeasement just – Okay, that's right. Let's say appeasement. We hand him Greenland, which is what people will eventually be tempted to do. There's nothing we can do about it. He's got his throat on our juggler. Let's give him Greenland and he'll go away. What then happens to ISIS? I mean, once Trump has begun to get the appetite for this thing, once he begins to feel, I'd like a few hundred billion dollars of minerals, thank you very much. I'm going to put the tariffs up.

41:11Rory Stewart:I'm going to put the tariffs down. And he starts to say, my mom was born in Scotland. Should be mine. There is literally no limit. If we actually say we're not sovereign, we can't defend our sovereign territory. We are so much a vassal of the United States that America can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants. And we have no options to respond. Roy, you keep giving me the problem. Let me throw in one possible. I think what this points to is that it's going to be very, very hard for Europe to do hard power things. That's essentially what you're saying. So maybe we have to start looking at soft power things.

41:47I'm going to throw this one out. I'm going to an event later on at which the ghastly Infantino is going to be present. The boss of FIFA. Johnny, yeah, yeah.

41:57Rory Stewart:Who I know a little bit. And who is Donald Trump's NBF, new best friend. We can't be that far off a situation if this does come to Europe saying no, no, no, no. America's saying yes, yes, yes, yes. And if it means sending in the troops into there, we're going to do it. Then I'm sorry. I think the European countries have got to instruct their football associations. No, sorry. You can't do the World Cup in these circumstances. 100%. Is Keir Starmer going to go along with that? or are we going to end up with a normal sort of shabby impression that I'm getting at the moment, which is that if you look at Keir Starmer's speech, this is one of the things I wanted to get to, right?

42:33Rory Stewart:The absolute necessary before you get into anything else is that the alliance of the UK, Europe, Norway, Canada needs to stick together. It needs to be completely in lockstep. The only hope, in the end, in the end, Europe has 450 million people. It is an enormous economy. It has huge support, actually, with many American voters, with the American Congress. The American military is very reluctant to do this. They fought alongside the Danes. They are totally horrified about the idea that they're going to launch troops to try to seize part of a NATO country. Well, you're right that only America and Britain lost more troops per capita in Iraq than Denmark.

43:19That is why the Danes, I was with this event last night, the one that we did, there's a Danish guy there, I don't think he spoke to. And he said when Trump's here tomorrow, he says he will not be able to go in the room because he will not be able to stop himself doing something really, really crazy.

43:33Rory Stewart:Okay, so the lockstep thing, right? Canada, as you said, Carney, who's again here, has just done this huge thing with China. You've got Macron starting to talk about responses. You've got actually some quite brave statements from van der Leyen, from the Commission. They've actually stepped up more than other people. But in Starmer's speech, what you're not hearing is absolute solidarity with Europe, absolute solidarity with Denmark, absolute assertion. And what you're hearing is this isn't a way to behave. There's tariffs that are outrageous. What you're not seeing is we are democracies. This is about staying together.

44:10Rory Stewart:This is fundamental. So my anxiety is that he will think, Stalin's thinking, well, maybe if I'm nice to Trump, maybe he won't put the tariffs on Britain and he'll just put the tariffs on the rest of these guys. Well, okay. I get what you're saying. You see, I think that message that you just said was in that speech, okay? But it was not strong and clear enough so that that is the message that was heard. My worry about the Americans watching Keir Starmer yesterday, which they will have done, not necessarily Trump, but some people will have watched it. My worry is that the message they took out of that is Starmer's not a problem.

44:43Absolutely. Yeah. And where I agree with you, I think that's not necessarily the right place to be. In the Mafio boss mind, you're thinking, OK, here's the problem here.

44:52Rory Stewart:Starmer's just caved. It's fine. I don't worry about the rest. Whereas Keir, who is operating in the rules-based international cooperation, which is the right thing to do in principle, but what I would have liked to have heard more of is a defense of those principles in absolutely clear, unequivocal terms. And of an alliance. And I'd like to hear much more reference to Europe, much more reference to Canada, and joint statements by all these people together saying the same thing. Well, by the way, can I tell you where I think this may head? for all that we're talking about increased defense spending.

45:22And as you said last night, a lot of that's going to go in the nukes anyway. We are going to have to revisit that again. The defense expenditure argument is going to have to be met again. And that is going to require some very, very painful political decisions to be made.

45:34Rory Stewart:On welfare, unfortunately. On lots of things. On lots of things, because we are not remotely, if you go back to when we were in Poland with Sikorsky, when we were with Moldova, with Maya Sandu, the president, their mindset is already in a place that says, we are entering an era in which war is more likely than not, and a war in which Europe is going to get involved in all sorts of different ways. We are not remotely ready for that psychologically or militarily. Part of what Trump is doing is actually is a form of psychological warfare. And he is basically saying that militarily now, it genuinely is America first.

46:10I think the consequences for America are terrible, but he doesn't think that. So we're going to have to shape up to a completely new mindset and standpoint, including the spending, including the policies that we're going to pursue. And the quicker we get there, the better.

46:24Rory Stewart:Okay, I'm going to try to get to what I think the possible solutions are. And actually, I was listening to a great Australian analyst called Darren Lim, who people may want to listen to. He's got his own podcast on Australia and the world. But one strategy is what I call the weighted out strategy. and the second strategy is what I'd call the Gulf Saudi strategy, right? The weighted out strategy essentially says, listen, Congress was horrified by the fact that he went into Venezuela without approval. Five Republican senators defected. All of whom are leaving. And then at the very last moment, J.D.

46:56Rory Stewart:Vance talked a couple back and they managed to get a Senate vote through by one vote. So one possibility is, I mean, incidentally, it's horrifying that it isn't just Trump, But the vast majority of Republican senators seem to be okay with this Greenland adventure. It's not that they're okay with this. They think if they don't go along with it, he's going to get them deselected before the election. So it's just possible that Congress might send up. On tariffs, the Supreme Court is about to have a hearing on whether Trump actually has the emergency powers to impose these tariffs. So there will be people in European capitals saying, if we can play this out and buy some time, Congress could stop him going after Greenland.

47:35Rory Stewart:the Supreme Court could stop him going after tariffs against us. And then all our allies and supporters in the United States might stop. So that's the weighted out strategy. Okay. The second strategy is the Gulf strategy. And this is the planes investment. This strategy basically says what you need to understand about Trump is that he is like a mad medieval king. Actually, he's worse than medieval king. You're going to introduce the idea of economic appeasement. Well, the idea here is that he basically is all about performance, status, swagger, family, money. And so if you are Saudi or Qatar and you look at this man, you think, OK, my best option is I build a massive gold statue to Trump in Greenland.

48:20Rory Stewart:I rename all the bases in Greenland, the Trump Arctic bases. I hand over mineral concessions and I announced to him that we're going to put some totally made up number that we're never going to deliver a trillion dollars of investment into the US economy over the next five years and hope that you can limp through to the midterms and something will be all right in the next session. So you're actually arguing for a combination of weighted out and the gold strategy? Well, no, I would actually, those I think are the two things that will draw Europe. I think actually we should instead take the pain and we should play chicken on this.

48:54So I would like to see us say, no, we're holding together Canada, Europe, UK, and hopefully

49:00Rory Stewart:Japan, South Korea. We do not accept this. This is sovereign territory. I'm so sorry, President Trump. We can say polite things, but this is not happening. And just sit there and endure the sanctions, endure the tariffs. I don't think he's going to ultimately conclude that he wants to cripple the European economies. I don't think that the United States will conclude that when push comes to shove, that their decision on whether to dismantle all American security guarantees for Europe is going to depend on what we do or don't do on Greenland. So that is a strategy that says, you're not doing this.

49:33And then he says, yes, I am. And then the next thing is, well, if you do do it, we're doing this. You're saying you're not doing it, but we're not going to do anything to stop you.

49:42Rory Stewart:We're going to put more troops into Greenland now. Now, we're not going to be able to fight you on the beaches, but you are going to have all over international television, the site of American troops arresting and detaining Danish, British, Norwegian troops on Greenland territory. We are going to use the entire United Nations with the support of China and Russia and the entire Security Council to condemn the American annexation of Greenland. We're going to have the General Assembly on our side, and this will be at best an equivalent of the Turkish occupation or Cyprus or the Russian occupation in Donbass.

50:20Rory Stewart:We refuse to recognize, we sit. But I don't think that by doing that, the fundamental calculations that Elbridge Colby or the Department of Defense make on whether or not to continue to provide a nuclear American deterrent against Russia in the Baltic will change. At which point, the point about United Nations, at which point he basically says, I've always thought the United Nations was a joke. I think it's completely ridiculous that has to be in New York because we're the only country who knows this damn thing. If you want your own organization, take it somewhere else. You lot in New York, your visas are revoked.

50:54Take it to Geneva. Take it all to Geneva. The United States isn't part of it?

50:58Rory Stewart:We step up now. We step up and we say that in the end, I mean, one of the reasons I was reluctant to say medieval king, I mean, of course, in a way, what he's doing is not very different to what Edward I did when he invaded Scotland or what Henry V did when he invaded France. This is sort of medieval, well, I have a bit of that territory. And every child maybe feels like that. You know, every child maybe thinks, wouldn't it be jolly to be the leader of a country and just help myself to a bit of a chunk of neighboring territory? But the difference actually is so dramatic because it's this postmodern wrestling performance.

51:32Rory Stewart:Those medieval kings went to so much trouble to invent these legal arguments. Edward I sat there for 150 days with lawyers trying to concoct some reason why the English had a claim to the Scottish throne. Henry V, you remember the beginning of the Shakespeare play, it's all about these sort of Salic law. This is the first time since Genghis Khan that somebody has said, I have no legal claim to this. There are no indigenous people being persecuted. I'm making up a few reasons. But I'm just going to have it. I'm not even really going to bother to make up a few reasons. I think even Hitler, when he went into Poland, staged a fake border incident to justify Genghis Khan.

52:08Rory Stewart:Trump doesn't even, because he wants to humiliate so much, he likes the fact that he has no reason. He can't even be bothered to stage some indigenous uprising, which he has to protect. Can't even send him the little green men. Can't even be bothered because it wouldn't make the humiliation so complete. The humiliation point is really interesting. Remember when we talked to Moises Naim, the three Ps guy, populism, polarization, post-truth. They need his three Cs, crime to get elected, play hard on crime, corruption, just run the whole thing like your own business. And his third C was cruelty. And there is a real element of cruelty to what's going on now.

52:43it's really interesting every i've i've met i think i've met four danes while i've been here and they're in agony they're in agony you can you can see it talking to them and you know you imagine being a green lunder right now was 89 of them are indigenous uh 85 have said they have no interest whatsoever in this happening they just kind of want to be left alone and get on with their lives and embrace their culture and all the other stuff that they do and they've suddenly become the most talked about 55 ,000 people in the world. And because of one man, and this goes back to the point I made at the end, I think we, you talked about Genghis Khan, because of the way that the world has developed, because of technology, because now the power of these American tech companies, he can spread it.

53:30Genghis Khan couldn't sort of put out a tweet and say, I'm going to do this and you lot are going to listen and every broadcaster in the world is now going to be talking about me for the next 24 hours. And when you get bored with that, I'll give you something else to do. He has, his genius, I'm afraid to say, Trump's genius is that he has better than anybody understood the way that technological change and media change has completely changed the rules of politics and diplomacy. And too many of the others are absolutely still caught up in the old ways of doing things. They're now going to have to use the new ways of doing things to push back, not by being a bully, not by being a liar, not by sort of saying corruption is the way to go, but they've got to understand this, and this is what pains me about watching Europe.

54:19I mean, Ursula von der Leyen is going to be speaking here today and Macron's coming a bit later and they'll make big speeches.

54:25Rory Stewart:Where is Starmer? Well, he's not here. I don't know what he's doing. Yeah, but why is he not coming? Macron's here. Trump's here. The guy's just fucking invading Greenland. Why is Starmer not here? Carney's here. I think, well, no, Macron and Carney were always going to be here. This is a big deal event where you can meet lots of people. At the same time, you could make the case it would be dancing to Trump's tune to do that. What happened if Keir came and actually Trump decided not to see him? Anyway, I don't know. Trump might quite enjoy that, might he? He would enjoy that, right? Because having done the Chagos, the Chagos, I don't think it's humiliation.

54:59Rory Stewart:That's humiliation. Just to reinforce your point about performative cruelty. And Trump finding new opportunities. What Trump spotted as an entrepreneur is a really radical idea. He said to himself, it's not that nobody's ever behaved like this before. Putin basically behaves like this. But his brilliant insight is, what if the President of the United States started behaving like President Putin? Imagine how much more latitude I would have because I underwrite the entire UN system. I control all of European security. I run all of NATO. So my capacity to do this stuff is far greater than what's available to Putin.

55:42Rory Stewart:And actually, at the moment, far greater than anything that's available to Xi Jinping, particularly when it comes to stealing Greenland, right? So I want to also say as my kind of final point that this should be the moment where the defenders of Trump, you know, and I don't want to raise all the people in the British right wing media that were laying into me over the last two weeks for attacking US, need to accept that they've got him wrong. that all their temptations to support him and say, well, he said some of the right things about migration, or he says, Kamala Harris is no good. Now is the moment to recognize that you cannot any longer believe in the US national security strategy.

56:18Rory Stewart:You can't believe the sort of stories the Department of Defense is sending. US national security strategy, I've just reread it this morning. Its whole paragraph on Europe is the problem with Europe is that it's ceding political sovereignty. We're heading to civilizational erasure. Absolutely. But the whole point is Europe needs to be sovereign. What is sovereignty? Sovereignty in the end is control of your territory. What is he actually doing? He's not supporting European sovereignty. He is destroying European sovereignty by taking 98 % of the landmass of Denmark. Secondly, the Department of Defense story, which they've been selling very, very well, I was talking to a very senior British military officer.

56:50Rory Stewart:And of course, he was quite tempted by this American mind, oh, Europe hasn't invested enough in defense, we need to focus on China. If that really had been their view, they wouldn't be doing this, right? If what they really want to do was focus on China, and make Europe able to stand on its own two feet and take on Russia, we would have seen continued American absolute assurance that they were going to provide security guarantees for Europe. American loans, ability for the Europeans to spend their own money buying American equipment to supply Ukraine. Why wouldn't they do that? But they're not doing it.

57:23Rory Stewart:But above all, they would never, ever go into Greenland. Going into Greenland is the single most destructive thing you could possibly do to NATO, to Europe, to its ability to stand up against Russia. And what he's showing is his entrepreneurial genius is to discover that you can torment and abuse your allies far more effectively than you can your enemies. Which is a horrible thought, but I think it is what we're seeing. We've seen, you know, right back, you said way back that, you know, maybe we have to just accept that he's on Putin's side. I've said way back, I think that the real, the reason for this kind of obsession with Putin is jealousy.

58:01jealousy that you can do within your sphere of influence, whatever you want, and nobody's going to take you on because basically you're going to drop them off balconies if they do. Now, Trump has not yet got to the dropping off balconies. But if you just think about another thing that's happened recently that we're no longer talking about, because we're now all talking about this, the violence in Minnesota, the killing by those ice thugs. Now, America's leadership of the the rules-based liberal order was essentially that they believed in the rule of law. Well, he's just pardoned somebody, by the way, for the second time.

58:37Somebody who he pardoned, then got involved in crime again, got convicted, he's pardoned them for the second time. So rule of law, less important than it was, international law, he has no respect for it. Even the Maduro thing, okay, there were Republicans saying, okay, it might be the right thing to do, but is this legal? Not so sure. And then free trade, which he's decided because through his tariff strategy. So all the things that we gave them the leadership for, he is basically pulling the plug off.

59:06Rory Stewart:And then the problem is that we are, unfortunately, Trump is playing to all the worst views of the United States that critics of the US, particularly in the developing world, and in Eastern Europe had for 50, 60 years, because it's a side of America, which is terrifying. What you're seeing from Vance, from Stephen Miller, from Trump is an America that seems to be saying, we literally don't care about the rest of the world. We are totally exceptional. America is the only thing that matters. By the way, there is a deep element of racism, right? This is a white America. The problem with Europe is that it's becoming non-European.

59:44Rory Stewart:And we will do whatever we want to whoever we want, and they're just going to suck it up. And one of the reasons why, in the end, Canada, Britain, and Europe can't appease is we cannot allow ourselves in the end to be in the position of America saying, Europe's too weak, it's too pathetic, it's too dependent on us. We can do whatever we want to them, and there's going to be no consequences whatsoever. My final point on the politics back home. So Kay Bainock, who actually has been, I think I saw in one of the polls this morning, that she's overtaken Farage for the first time on some metric or other because of the way she handled the Robert Jenrick defection.

1:00:21and she was supportive of Keir Starmer's stance and even Farage put out a sort of, well, I'm not quite sure I agree with this. And then he pulled out of a BBC programme, I think claiming illness. But anyway, so he's been very, very quiet about this. But now, because of Trump and the Chagos Islands, Kemi Badenok and Farage and lots of others have come out and said, this isn't just an act of stupidity, it's an act of sabotage and Keir Starmer's got to unpick it. So Trump has already, whether deliberately or because he knew this was a sort of dividing line in our politics he's already come out and separated that sort of sense of the country coming together behind Greenland behind Denmark behind Europe's approach so just reminds me that we are we are much more on our own than we were I wonder if this isn't also the point at which we actually say to the public, this is yet another reason why we have to revisit the whole European Union issue.

1:01:21Because Europe has got to be strengthened and Europe has been fundamentally weakened by our departure. And we've got to be part of its restrainment.

1:01:27Rory Stewart:And because Britain is in the worst possible situation. Totally. You do not want to be in a world where you are outside Europe, confronting the United States and facing China and Russia. Britain can't be in this position. Okay, well, there we are. We've got question time tomorrow. We're going to talk about, actually, we had a massive response to the poll that we put out about whether I should or shouldn't go to the World Cup. It's helped cement my decision, I would say. And we're also going to talk about this seismic split in the UK Conservative Party where Robert Jenrick, who was seen as the kind of heir apparent, the person who's going to take over the Conservative Party, instead of waiting to take over the Conservative Party, has defected to Nigel Farage's further right party reform.

1:02:08Rory Stewart:And we're also going to talk about Syria. I've just returned from Aleppo and Damascus. And there's been some extraordinary things happening in Syria. Excellent. See you then. See you then. Bye bye.

1:02:24Hi there, it's Dominic Sandbrook again from The Rest is History. Now, I mentioned during the break that we have a new series on recent Iranian history. So here is a short extract for you. If you want to hear the whole series, then search for Revolution in Iran on The Rest is History, wherever you get your podcasts or search for us on YouTube.

1:02:56There are crowds in the streets every day. There are attacks on banks and restaurants every day. And already in some towns in Iran, power has been taken from the legitimate authorities and it's been taken over by revolutionary strike committees. Now, if you're with the revolution, this is very exciting. If you're not with the revolution, it is terrifying. and in his memoirs ambassador William Sullivan describes standing at the US Embassy and looking out through an upstairs window and he sees in the distance troops holding back demonstrators he sees cars burning in the middle of the road he sees smoke rising from burning buildings and he thinks something has to change you know we have to do something so on the 9th of November he sends a secret cable to Washington with the title thinking the unthinkable.

1:03:44And he says, the Shah is finished. It's over. And if we don't act now, Iran, which is so vital to us, will slip out of our hands forever. He says we should ditch the Shah right now. And it may well be time to do a deal with the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. If you enjoyed that clip, then please search for The Rest is History wherever you get your podcasts.