501. Is Starmer Too Soft on Trump? Inside the Munich Security Conference

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0:19Welcome to The Rest Is Politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Anastor Campbell. And we're doing something quite radical here, which is our main episode today is going to be located in a time and a place. We're going to bring you right into the heart of the Munich Security Conference. We're recording it a little bit earlier than we normally would, but I hope what you'll feel is it'll give you a sense of the flavour of international diplomacy. And then we'll do question time sometime early next week. Very good. We've also been really lucky to do some fantastic interviews and we are being spoilt for choice for leading in the coming weeks.

0:51So we have been talking here to Sarah McBride, this extraordinary transgender congresswoman from Delaware. where we've had a fantastic interview just now with Gavin Newsom, who I am strongly encouraging to run for it, to go for it and try and get to the White House. And also Alexander Stubb, the president of Finland. And we've also got in the can, as it were, coming up soon, Rob Malley, who was US administration's leading advisor on Iran and also the former German chancellor, Olof Schultz. So we've been spoilt for choice. Sadly, we have not been able to pin down Marco Rubio, but who knows, one day we will.

1:31So, this is an episode where we're really going to try to bring you into two things. One of them is just a feeling of what these international conferences are like, what it's like to be here, the kind of things that people are talking about. But then we're going to get, I think, into the big issues, which is what is now happening in the big international relations, particularly between Europe and the US. And we're going to focus on two big speeches. We're going to focus on the speech by Marco Rubio, the section of state, which happened this morning, and we're going to focus also on another speech this morning by Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister.

2:02And I think Alistair and I are going to get into some slightly spicy disagreements about this, about whether speeches matter and what kind of vision we need for the world. But before that, let's just give you a bit of a feeling for the tone of the place and what's going on. So to give a sense, we're sitting now in what basically in normal life is a shop of a hotel. It's the Bayerisch München Hotel. And we are going in and out of weird bars and coffee shops of what was once a perfectly functioning central hotel. It still is. Turned to a conference center. Yeah, yeah. With the sort of number of loos you'd expect in a hotel, not the number of loos you'd expect in a conference center, and the number of doors you'd expect in a hotel, not the number of doors you'd expect.

2:42And just relentlessly bumping into people. So the first person I met after coming through security was Maya Sandhu, president of Moldova. I then bumped into Priti Patel. I then bumped into, how do we describe this, somebody who works for British Intelligence, quite senior in British intelligence services. I saw her too. Yeah. And on it goes. I then, while we were waiting for Alexander Stubb, I chanced upon a presentation by the Ukrainian military about how they'd been developing their defense systems since the war started, which was absolutely fascinating. I had to leave that early. I like this much, much more than Davos.

3:26I think there are far fewer people just endlessly looking over your shoulder to see if any more importance comes in. Yeah, it's less corporate. It's more defense security. Much more about defence and security. And I think that there's something sort of quite old-fashioned about the setting, which I quite like as well. And I think speeches are still so important in history and in politics and in the day-to-day. A lot of the conversations this week were going around the place. In Davos, every single conversation was about Greenland, pretty much. This year, one year on, a lot of the conversations have still been about J.D.

4:02Vance's speech. That shows you how significant it was. And now Rubio's tried to sort of reset that a little bit, I say. And yet, at the same time, under the surface, this is a place to be reminded of how many other things are happening in the world which are not being properly reported. I went to an event with Reza Pahlavi, the crown prince of Persia, Iran, who has been very much one of the leading figures in driving the uprisings against the government in Iran. And then I saw him again later in the evening, and we had another little chat. Very interesting. So I mean, just because listeners probably would have heard our podcast on Iran.

4:42We were talking about Trump administration. He says the big fight now, and actually he's just met the Venezuelan Nobel Prize winner. And what she's talking about is Machado and Petalvi are worried that what Trump's trying to do is just get rid of Khamenei and leave the rest of the regime in place. Some sort of revolutionary guard, military government in place. And he's saying it's just not enough. The people won't put up with it. Tens of thousands of people have been killed in the streets. there needs to be a real change. But at the same time, the Gulf, who are also here, are terrified that what Trump will do is just enough to annoy the Iranians and provoke a response, but not enough actually to topple the regime again.

5:27And so there's a very complicated thing going on with the Turks, the Qataris, the Egyptians, and others to try to get some sort of agreement. And nobody knows what Trump will do. We talked about this with Rob Malley, what he'll declare a success. This episode is powered by Fuse Energy. Most of us are buying energy in the dark, not knowing what it costs. You wouldn't do that with your weekly food shop, but with energy, you're often charged first and only find out the number later. When you don't have that clarity, you usually end up paying more than you should, which is what Fuse Energy is working to change about how energy works.

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6:43and personal support checken. Elektromobilität für alle. Der EC3 schon ab 16.990 Euro. Citroën. The other thing that I picked up, which we haven't discussed much for some time, is a reminder that the Saudi-UAE relationship is disintegrating very, very fast. UAE being Dubai, Abu Dhabi against Saudi. That matters because those are the two really most flamboyantly wealthy, powerful figures. Qatar is influential, but those are the two that have really been driving from. policy and these two figures, Mohammed bin Salman and Mohammed bin Zayed in UAE, who were in lockstep. They went together to war in Yemen.

7:22They were very close to Trump. And now a division has emerged. The other thing that happens, people who have followed this on TV will have probably seen the big speeches on the news. So there's Rubio, there's Merz, there's Macron, there's Keir Star, there's von der Leyen, whatever. But there's also all these kind of really interesting kind of panels and workshops. I mentioned the one about Ukrainian military. But it was very interesting to watch the Saudi, was it defense or foreign minister? Foreign minister on one of the panels yesterday with a Colombian Kayakalas from the European Union and also Mike Waltz, the new American ambassador to the UN.

8:00Who managed to put out a tweet where his major demonstration of his skills. Yeah, it was 30 press-ups as his marine bodyguard. It was impressive. It was impressive, but on the other hand, is that really what we need from our senior diplomats? Was Talleyron famous for his... Probably not, but Talleyron... Was Ernie Bevan known for his ability to do press-ups? Is the whole skill of an ambassador being able to do 30 press-ups with your security team? It's not, but... So why the hell is he dedicating his big launch to the social media team, watching him do press-ups? Two reasons, rory one because dare i say he might be a bit of a show-off and secondly he might be thinking that's the sort of thing that trump's like because he likes when we're fit and strong anyway if i can go to my panel the saudi minister was saying almost in terms look i'm feeling all this angst i'm really paraphrasing now and i'm sort of adding a bit of my own interpretation conversation i'm feeling all this angst amongst you europeans about the global world order is sort of vanishing in front of your eyes but where we've been it's kind of not really been there for quite a long time and what you haven't yet fully caught up with is that we're emerging in a very different way as well the other thing that was fascinating on that panel was i mean georgia maloney the italian prime minister is one of the best eye rollers on the planet i mean she's just absolute facial expressions are ironic kaya callas ran her close yesterday when mike waltz was talking about all the wars that uh trump has stopped and when he was echoing the lines from rubio about basically nothing happens in this world with the united without the united states she was doing very good eye roll on uae sadly we'll return to that but you can see in yemen you can see in sudan you can see in somaliland and you can see on policy to israel they're knocking bits off each other and there's a social media war going on that's very destabilizing before we move on to the big substance of our thing which is to talk about the big speeches rubio starmer etc i was at a late night event with google last night which i'm afraid i didn't leave till almost midnight so i'm feeling pretty rubbish this morning and it was striking how much of that was about Europe now really worried about its tech sovereignty and Google having to try to reassure Europeans, and Microsoft will be doing the same and other American companies the same, that they can let you use their products without the American government either being able to spy on the contents or have a kill switch.

10:39And the kill switch point is that the head of the International Criminal Court was sanctioned by Trump, basically accused of being a terrorist, and Google and Microsoft effectively felt they were forced to completely disable all his accounts and all his access to everything, leaving Europeans thinking, well, could this happen to us? And there's some really interesting questions about whether you can set up legal structures, subsidiaries to actually give Europe sovereignty on this, and how you balance that against the other brutal point, which Google would never make openly, but that France is spending 20 billion on tech.

11:17And that sounds like a lot, but Google and the other tech companies will be spending over 300 billion next year alone on the next stage of their tech investment in AI. So the Munich Security Conference is chiefly known, I think, for many listeners, because this This is where J.D. Vance, very radically in February last year, a year ago, made a speech to Munich to a horrified European crowd, which you watched, I think, live. Tell us a little bit about it. Well, I said at the time, it was like you had the audience of European politicians, diplomats, security experts, and it sounded like it felt like he sort of turned up with a bucket of vomit and was just sort of throwing it across everybody.

11:57He basically said that Putin is not your big problem, your lack of commitment to free speeches. He started the arguments that we then saw develop in the national security strategy about what they then defined as civilizational erasure. It really felt like it was signaling, to quote Mark Carney at Davos, that there was a rupture rather than a transition. And of course, what this Munich conference will be most remembered for in terms of the American transatlantic alliance is Marco Rubio, whose Secretary of State, whose speech today, I think, was, it doesn't move that much from the substance of what Vance was saying, but he was perhaps much, much more diplomatic about how he put it.

12:39The other thing that was happening a year ago is that this was the moment when Germany was about to go into an election, when the AFD, the alternative for Deutschland, the far right, was on the rise. And, of course, Elon Musk was still very much part of the Trump administration. Musk was openly campaigning for the AFD. Vance, the vice president, took time out of his schedule to meet the leader of the AFD. And it was the first time that we began to see something that's in the national security strategy, which is about the US using its influence in order to support what they seem to see as the kind of patriotic real parties against the sort of liberals who are wiping out European civilization.

13:21In other words, a moment where it felt as though the US was, and the administration, particularly people like Musk, putting their emphasis on trying to almost campaign for the FD and hoping they were going to win the election. Well, not almost trying to, they effectively were. You know, part of the rules-based international order about which Vance very dramatically last year was condemnatory, and Rubio, in a more emollient way, was saying pretty much the same thing, is that you don't interfere in other countries' elections, but they very directly have been interfering. interestingly yesterday the the whole conference here was opened by fridrich merz the german chancellor and in the q a he was coming as close as german chancellors come to to say please vote peter magia in the hungarian election but of course you know trump is just out there vote orban um and so i look i think this is i was a bit troubled by the response in the hall for rubio because I was watching it and I was, and maybe I'm, you know, we've just introduced Gavin Newsom, who basically said, I probably do have a little bit of Trump derangement syndrome, and there may be something in that.

14:30But I was watching Rubio and I was feeling this is the same message, but much more nicely packaged. I picked up a few sentences from it that I thought were quite striking. We've increasingly outsourced our sovereignty to international institutions. So that's one big important American claim, which is an idea in the MAGA movement of the Republicans that the things that America created since 1945, the UN, NATO, are actually impacts on US sovereignty. They don't give it its full freedom. But what is he saying? What is he saying the world should have done at that point? Well, so this is exactly the fight, right?

15:08The agreement after the Second World War was that peace, prosperity was going to come from America, yes, slightly pooling its sovereignty, accepting rules that apply to America as much as to other people. That's the problem with international institutions, the rules apply to you as well as to other people, right? And what America got from that is incredible influence, power, and parallel prosperity, because it was able to use that system to build coalitions and allies and broadly push the world in its direction. But if you go for a purist view, and of course, Brexit's partly about this too, where you say, we're not going to make any compromises at all on our ability to do whatever we want, whenever we want, anywhere in the world, then logically, of course, you do end up where Rubio is, just to go on from that.

15:51So we outsourced our sovereignty to international institutions, invested too much in massive welfare states at the cost of defending ourselves, imposed energy policies on ourselves that are impoverishing our people, oil and coal and natural gas, and let in an unprecedented wave of mass migration. Civilization, the balance of history led to the shutting of our plants. So he's going on essentially his story, and he uses the Fukuyama world, the end of history, that basically everything that's wrong in the world came from the liberal global order. Globalization destroyed jobs, made us weaker, welfare states impoverished us, the UN...

16:30Which by the way, until he became Secretary of State to Donald Trump, he did not believe. This is what I find so appalling about these people. And actually, one of the things I was alarmed by, he almost got a complete standing ovation. And why do you think the Europeans were so cheered up by it? But because he talked about Leonardo da Vinci and said how lovely... And the Beakles and Shakespeare and the Sistine Chapel and Christopher Columbus, and we got our laws from Britain and all this stuff. So what he did was essentially say, look, we all know, and this is something that Gavin Newsom was saying to us just now, they all basically exist to imagine that Donald Trump is watching them on television.

17:07Now, the reason why the Europeans were quite cheered up is because it was not as appalling as Vance. But the message was pretty much the same. So he said all the things that you're saying, which is what Vance said. And the national security strategy says that Europe, because of immigration and because of all the other stuff that they're saying, only we do. And just a sort of footnote on this, because I'm not sure we've talked about this enough on the podcast. American public diplomacy is now increasingly aligned with the national security strategy, which is a pompous way of saying - Has to be.

17:37Yeah, exactly. It's a pompous way of saying words matter. This story that what Trump says or what's in the strategy doesn't really matter. The whole bureaucracy is now behind the idea that you're meant to be behind parties like Orban, populists in Europe, and you're meant to be pushing back against liberal democracy and immigration, etc. And what I found a little bit alarming about the response was there was something really needy about it. And the reason was he said the right things. He said, look, he did. It was quite moving when he talked about the history and the role of Europe in giving birth to America.

18:09And he talked about, you know, we'll always be partners and we are your children and all this sort of stuff. He had lots of moving lines. but it was i i think and maybe i'm being harsh on him i think it was a very effective political cover of a substantial strategy that is not remotely changed so i think you know this is where we should talk about keir starmer's speech as well because in a way um the parts of keir starmer's speech i really liked like for example the fact he's basically saying you know brexit he's not quite speaking about brexit in the way that i would but he's basically saying we have no security without Europe.

18:45And that is more so the case now. But I think there was also an element of a rebuttal of Mark Carney in there. Well, let me do my attempt to sort of do a minute summary of my census speech, then you can correct me because you had a much closer thoughtful engagement with it. So he begins by saying, we need to understand that the UK needs to be much closer to Europe. And he talks very explicitly about the fact that Europe's got far too many different national defense systems when the US has one frigate, one advanced fighter jet, et cetera. And that needs to be sorted out. But he then says, some people talk about rupture.

19:25The person who talked about rupture is, of course, Mark Carney. And that was Mark Carney in Davos a few weeks ago. And I disagree. And I think we need... And he then explicitly says, we cannot break the transatlantic relationship. We need to remain very, very close to the United States. And that is why the audience for Rubio so welcomed him saying something similar. So there was a sort of complementarity between Rubio's, if you strip out the kind of, the really kind of negative stuff about Europe and immigration, you strip that out, it's a very kind of Vancean, MAGA speech. But the mood music was very, very different, and that is what pleased the audience.

20:03What I think will also please the European audience is that there's Keir Starmer essentially saying, This is the bit that maybe he went down particularly well was, we are very much part of you. We have to reform our defense systems. We have to be much closer. But at the same time, he's saying we have to do our level best to keep this transatlantic relationship with the United States very, very strong. And I don't think many people will disagree with that. But what was interesting is that he didn't in a way that Merz did, Stubb is now doing the president of Finland, and certainly Carney. He doesn't at any point in the speech really call out the US.

20:41He doesn't say, as everybody is here, still, Greenland is the game changer. I mean, one of the interesting things I feel with European colleagues when I've been talking to them both in meetings and outside meetings and late at night is their take on Metz's speech is he needs to buy time. He needs to get an EU-US trade deal across the line. So he doesn't want to unnecessarily offend Trump until that's done. But they are in absolutely no doubt that the world changed with Greenland. And you get that sense with Stobb 2. the point at which the United States signaled in the lead up to Davos that it was prepared to annex somebody else's sovereign territory.

21:23It was a game changer. Yeah. And I think Keir Starmer's speech is clear about that. I mean, he says in terms, we recognize things are changing. The US national security strategy spells out that Europe must take quote, primary responsibility for its own defense. That is the new normal. No, no, no, no. Can I interrupt and be mean to him? Yeah. You've just told us what actually is interesting about the US national security strategy, not that it's saying that Europe needs to take responsibility for its defense. That was a line from the first Trump administration. That was a line from Biden. That was a line from Obama.

21:52And that's what Elbridge Colby was selling yesterday in his deputy secretary defense. As you pointed out, the key point of the US National Security Security is it's talking about civilizational erasure in Europe. It's talking about putting its energy behind the populist far right in Europe. It's talking about us not being democracies. So what actually Starmer is doing, if I'm going to criticize him, is he is still buying into the Department of Defense rhetoric, which has been running for 10 years, which is that it's Europe's fault, we didn't spend enough on defense, and that the US criticism of Europe is perfectly legitimate.

22:24If only we'd spent more on defense, we'd be able to stand on our own two feet. But that isn't really what Trump's policy is about. Trump's policy, that's now just, it's increasingly clear, that's just a mask. This is what the DOD says. And we parrot that line and Starmus parroting that line. They're much more radical than that. They're not serious about the NATO alliance. They're not serious about helping us against Russia. They're not serious about helping us rearm. America isn't serious about getting European defense industries off the ground. They're not serious about helping us with satellite Ukraine.

22:54It's bullshit. This is a spin from the DOD to justify Greenland, cuts, aid cuts, betrayal to Putin, betrayal on Ukraine. No, listen, I get that. But I think that's easy for us to say. Okay. He's the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. How come Carney can say it and Mertz can say it? I think Carney – no, I don't think Mertz did say that. He's much, much closer to it than Starmer. Well, let me just say this. I said to you at the start, there are bits about this speech I like, and there are bits of speech I like less. Did you write this speech? Is that why you're defending it? No, I didn't write the speech.

23:29No, I did not. He said, there have been a series of thoughtful interventions, including the argument that we're at a moment of rupture. That was Carney's great speech. And that was Carney's speech. So this is basically where he's saying, Mark, love you lots, think you're really smart, thought the speech was amazing, but this is the but. He goes, I agree the world has changed fundamentally and that we must find new ways to uphold our values and the rule of law. Now, Carney was big about saying, we can't pretend that we have the same values. Okay. He's saying that very sotto voce there. But in responding to that change, we must not disregard everything that has sustained us for the last 80 years.

24:09This could prove to be a moment of destruction, which is the theme of this conference. Serstern is the German word for destruction. And the conference is arguing the world order has been destroyed. But instead, he says, I believe we must make this a moment of creation instead of a moment of rupture, one of radical renewal. And I think the substance of the speech then is actually, you're now putting your head in your hands, Rory, which is making me think I'm making you ill. But I think the substance of the speech is actually saying, I've said this so many times, Merz, Macron, all of them, Keir Starmer, they're trying to buy time.

24:46This speech is about building up our defences in incredibly difficult political circumstances. Because what he's saying there probably means at some point in the near future, we're going to have to increase defense spending massively. We are going to have to do some of the things you've talked about, about rebuilding our diplomacy, investing more in intelligence. But at the moment, particularly in regards to Ukraine, we are having to rely on the United States of America. So he's saying it's not that sensible for us to come around and be like Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart and just say, these people are truly terrible.

25:17No, I agree with you. He should not be talking like a podcaster. He shouldn't be doing his love actually moment. But I think that Carney and Macron certainly, and even Metz have demonstrated and Stubb was demonstrating how you can do this without blowing up the translation. And you need to because there's a big strategic call that Starmer needs to make now, which I'm afraid he's fluffing. If he's not able to be clear about it in a speech at Munich, I don't think he can be clear about it in the cabinet table or the NSC. What is his view? What is he telling the British? What's he telling us about the future of our intelligence relationship with the US?

25:59What's he telling British industry about how much we should be creating an economy built on American cloud computing, American AI? What's he saying about how much American defense equipment we should be buying? What's he saying about how command and control in NATO works? What's he saying about what kind of deals we should have with China? What's the big view? We know what Carney's view is. We can see what Macron's view is, even if he's struggling to deliver it. And above all, the only hope for the middle powers is if they get together. They begin to develop and share a joint philosophy. nothing is less useful than the middle powers sniping at each other and saying oh i slightly disagree with your speech and i don't think it's quite like this and i mean it's a real civil servant speech it's well you know on the one hand on the other and you know yes some things are changing but we still want to renew and yeah i think i think i do think you're being harsh because i think there's a part of this speech you say what's his message to the british people part of his message to the british people is that we might have to prepare ourselves to to be at war and as a result of that have to change our defense industries.

27:05And I think he is answering some but not all of those questions. And okay, when you say it's a civil servant speech, he is sort of saying on the one hand on the other in a way that, I mean, what Mark Carney did and the reason why you and I liked that speech so much was because it met a moment where the American president was basically saying, you know, you lot don't matter nearly as much as you did. And Mark Carney's response is, well, you might say that, But actually, if we get together, we matter an awful lot. What I think a lot of Keir Starmer's speech about is actually in relation to what he's done with the French, the Germans, the Poles, and the others in relation to Ukraine.