510. How The Iran War Is Spiralling Into a Global Crisis

18:18Alastair Campbell:But I suspect they definitely had planned to have a continuity candidate. They definitely had planned to hit the Gulf as a way of driving up the oil price and trying to put pressure on the Gulf states to put pressure on Trump. And likewise, I think they've been planning, up to and including, by the way, I mean, you did your terrific series on AI. One of the things I've been following is their use of AI in their propaganda. They're pumping out all sorts of stuff to their own people, suggesting this is a huge success. Now, the Americans do that in a different sort of way. But my point is that you get the feeling that they are operating according to some kind of plan.

18:57Alastair Campbell:Now, we shouldn't overstate it because we don't know. We can't tell what's going on inside Iran.

19:01Rory Stewart:One bit of it we haven't covered much is that there are signs. I don't want to overdo this because I think what's happening for people in the Gulf and for people in Iran and for people in Israel and for people in Turkey and for people in the region is terrorism. terrifying, completely terrifying. If you're an ordinary civilian who is not one of the kind of people invasion, it's terrifying. But there's a part of the story that I don't think is being told very clearly and that for some reason the media maybe, I don't know, doesn't feel comfortable communicating and probably I'll get in trouble communicating it.

19:37Rory Stewart:But some of these Iranian strikes in some of the Gulf states have been more calibrated and limited than people are acknowledging. In other words, they've done a lot of damage, but they could have done much more. They could have announced, for example, with relation to UAE, that we're going to strike the Borg Khalifa, the biggest hotel in the central city. They wouldn't even need to strike it. The mere statement would have a catastrophic impact on Dubai. I mean, already Dubai, which has a lot of tourism income, is going to really struggle to get tourists in this year. And if Israel and the U.S.

20:13Rory Stewart:continue doing this, it's going to struggle getting tourists in for a long time to come. But at the moment, most of the Iranian strikes are Iran trying to do this very difficult balance, which is they're trying to say privately to the Gulf states, this isn't anything personal. We're doing this because you're hosting U.S. military bases. We're doing this so long as the U.S. and Israel continue to use you to strike us. A lot of the strikes have been against American embassies, Israeli representation, CIA bases, hotels with American citizens in them. And they're trying to say to the Gulf, don't get dragged into this.

20:52Rory Stewart:And the Gulf then is in an equally difficult situation, which is they're trying to say, look, our sovereignty is being attacked. This is terrifying. We're going to have to stand up and say something. But at the same time, we don't want to become dragged into this war and become an unwitting ally of Israel and the US in a fight with Iran. So this calibration point, how do you stay below the threshold?

21:14Alastair Campbell:Yeah, but also if you think about it, the Gulf states in a way have welcomed in Americans and American bases as a way of protecting them from attack. They have now been attacked. That changes their own assessment of that relationship too. Once they've decided, and I think you're right by the way, I think the Iranians could have done a lot more and could have gone a lot harder. I also think it was interesting that the national security guy came out yesterday and said, you know, it was basically Trump was taking it as a kind of, you know, they're almost apologizing for what they did. I don't think he was.

21:49Alastair Campbell:I think he was making the point that you're making. We can keep going. We have actually got a hell of a lot more of these drones than you realize. We've actually been stockpiling for an awful long time. We know that we can take out their air defenses far quicker than we could have done before we had this mass drone production. So I think there's something going on there that they are, I suspect they're feeling a lot stronger, a lot more resilient than the propaganda that is put out against them suggests. Now, it's very hard for us to know that because they are masters of their own propaganda. You can't get media inside there.

22:22Alastair Campbell:It's very, very hard to know what's going on. But I would not, if I was the Americans, I would not be happy with the way this thing is going right now.

22:29Rory Stewart:And just on your US point, you're completely right. One way of putting it is that those US bases were welcomed in. So Qatar has the largest US Air Force base in the world, and there are bases in all these countries, were welcomed in because the Gulf states thought that provided a US security umbrella to protect them. But what they discovered in 2019 when their oil fields were hit is that the US didn't protect them. When Qatar was struck by Israel, the US again didn't really protect them. Now, the US is now trying to provide some protection, but you've got to be asking yourself, I'm afraid, if you sit in the Gulf, are these bases now making you safer or are they putting you at more risk?

23:11Rory Stewart:Are they putting you at more danger? Are you being targeted because of these bases? And you're going to begin to think, wait a sec, we gave an enormous amount of money to Trump. We promised all these investments. We thought he was getting us on side. And he has now dragged us into chaos. I mean, there's rumors about, you know, whether particular Gulf states were secretly supporting this. If they were, they must be regretting it now because this is an unmitigated catastrophe for those economies.

23:38Alastair Campbell:I also wonder when you say whether they would admit it, their stated position. I mentioned how in relation to Ukraine, Putin was being told what he wanted to hear, and that's what he then believed. And we see the same with Trump. So those world leaders, so for example, when Chancellor Merz was alongside Trump in the White House, you could see on Merz's face that he was not agreeing with an awful lot that Trump was saying, but he wasn't saying it. I suspect that these Gulf leaders, when they're phoning up Trump at the moment, they may be pointing out that the oil price going through the roof is not a great thing, that they're having to cut back on oil production, that that's going to have, you know, the potential for a global recession and all the other sort of consequences there might be.

24:19Alastair Campbell:But has anybody actually said to him, Mr. President, you are making a catastrophic error here? Because I think it's hard to escape that view that he is making a catastrophic error. And of course, because if you just look at what he is trying to achieve from this, and they weren't clear about the objectives, but so far as we could work out from him, one of them was regime change. now they've toppled they've topped the head of the regime but they've now got the same they've got the same regime um another one the the rubio had one different set of arguments vance had a different set of arguments but what there isn't what we haven't seen is a clear set of objectives that is that is we are able to say well that's what he's doing that's what's being met and i'll tell you the other thing that i found i find incredible about this i mean really just gobsmacking.

25:09Alastair Campbell:Until recently, Russia was selling its oil at a loss, okay? Because of what's gone on now, we've seen the Americans lift sanctions on Russian oil. They're now able to sell more of their oil. And what's more, they are feeding the Iranians' intelligence about where American troop movements are. And both Hexeth and Leavitt and others in the administration have said they don't care that i just i cannot put a lie for me to get my head around well this partly goes to the

25:40Rory Stewart:the weird sense that um by going into this war the trump administration shows how what a nonsense their national security strategy was and what a complete nonsense it was right the whole thing was meant to be about rethinking america first the trump corollary to the monroe doctrine which basically said, we're going to stay in the Americas. There's another story which has been coming out of the Department of Defense, which they've been selling us for years, which is we can't afford to fight on two fronts. We need to concentrate on China. So, you know, of course, we agree Russia is an enemy. Of course we do.

26:19Rory Stewart:But, you know, you and Europe are going to have to cover more of the cost of that. Then there were all the people, you know, I had friends last week saying to me, well, you know, got to say this for Trump. His great thing is that he put sanctions on Russia and the oil price has come down. So the Russian economy is hurting and that's done more to help Ukraine than anything you can imagine. And now he shows where his priorities are. By doing this, oil price going up through the roof, Russia is going to get richer, sanctions have been dropped, all the Patriot missiles, which might potentially have been put into supporting Ukraine, are now being blown up the wall, fighting Shahid missiles out of the way.

26:54Rory Stewart:Ukraine is, I mean, you're very worried if you're Zelensky. And fundamentally, just step back for a moment, what is Trump doing? Again, weakening his allies, strengthening his adversaries. He's going to make Ukraine weaker, he's going to make the European economies weaker, and he's going to strengthen China, Russia, and everybody who is going to benefit from a world in which America is now seen as an unpredictable, unprotectable, savage, unreliable ally. And that's before we get on to what I'd love to get on to at some point, which is the new alliances that will emerge and the fact that people are going to start investing in nuclear weapons to protect themselves against an increasingly erratic Israel and United States.

27:38Alastair Campbell:Well, before we do that, as you know, I was in Dublin and Belfast Thursday, Friday with Anthony Scaramucci. And that question that you and I have done with audiences before, which is the greatest threat to global stability, USA or China? In both Belfast than Dublin. It was 92 % to 8 % America. 80 % thought that the war was a deliberate distraction from Epstein. And I remember how very well you got on with Gerry Adams when we interviewed him in Belfast, Rory. You'll be pleased to hear that the question, who deserves a Nobel Peace Prize more, Trump or Gerry Adams? Gerry Adams won by 83 % to 17%.

28:19Alastair Campbell:So the general view of America was unbelievably negative. And even when I put, as I did, all the reasons why actually you might argue China, there were people saying, no, no, no, no, America is the real problem. And I'll tell you something else which I found fascinating. There's a piece in the New York Times this morning. Analyzing the language that Trump and Hexoth have been using and comparing it with the language that Putin used four years ago in relation to Ukraine. Hexoth, we didn't start this war, but under President Trump, we're finishing it. Putin, we didn't start this so-called war, we're trying to finish it.

28:55Alastair Campbell:Speaker Johnson, I think you'd call this an operation. The Russian Speaker, this is a special military operation. Putin, July 2022, we haven't started anything in earnest yet. Trump, last Monday, we haven't even started hitting them hard. Both said we have no choice but to attack. Both said to the Ukrainians in Putin's case and to the Iranians in Trump's case, lay down your arms and go home or face certain death. So you even get the feeling that they're sort of, you know, that he's kind of cribbing from Putin's playbook in how he communicates this. And as for Hegseth, I saw some of your tweets about Hegseth.

29:35Alastair Campbell:It strikes me that you were a little bit shocked by his conduct.

29:40Rory Stewart:I don't know whether people, I mean, I know how many people, enough on social media to follow this, but Hegseth's speeches in the White House channel has been putting out these horrendous videos which are cutting scenes from hollywood action movies so uh weirdly one of them turns out to be braveheart so scott's fighting his english but also with with the saltar on his face tropic thunder which is a comedy about vietnamese yeah yeah um and and all of it and then cut with video games and iron man and you know marvel book comic superheroes and all of them essentially turning the whole thing into a game.

30:19Rory Stewart:Yeah. Yeah. A sort of sadistic game.

30:21Alastair Campbell:Yeah. No, that's exactly how he's projecting it. But no, because I get the feeling with Hexer that Trump is deliberately putting him out there. I mean, Trump can decide, the White House can decide who's out there. We've barely seen J.D. Vance. We've barely seen Rubio. Hexer has been the main guy. And that guy, Cain, the head of the defense staff, I mean, And he looks kind of suitably embarrassed, but he just has to stand there and listen to this kind of macho, macho bullshit. OK, well, next things just to maybe we'll take, as it were, a virtual break, quick break back for more.

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33:48Rory Stewart:so as we as we come back i think the one question i really wanted to look at was that we're assuming that the only real actors here are the us and israel and everybody else is passive but actually iran of course is a huge actor here and a lot depends on whether the Iranian regime holds together or fragments into civil war, whether they decide to mount cyber attacks, terrorist attacks or not. The Gulf countries, they're all to play for. At the moment, they're trying to stay out of this war. What happens if they're dragged further into the war? What happens if ultimately the Iranian attacks cross the threshold and they feel that they need to respond and then Iran feels they need to respond to them?

34:32Rory Stewart:China, Russia. So you've talked about Russia. Russia is clearly providing covert support to Iran. China has now parked a massive electronic warfare vessel providing information on targeting. So the Iranians are able to target precise bases. They just blown up a$1.2 billion US radar station, which will take five to seven years to replace almost certainly with Chinese intel. Over to you. I think the other country

35:00Alastair Campbell:that is worth keeping an eye on is Turkey. I think they're going to play, I think they do play and will continue to play quite a significant role. I think they're always the slightly understated power in some of this. But look, I think that when you're looking at the, I know you've got this thing, the sort of middle powers. When Mark Carney made his Davos speech about the middle powers coming together and projecting something very, very different, that maybe because of the missteps in the very, very first hours of this, that didn't happen. I think it's beginning to happen. I sent you yesterday, I don't know if you had time to look at it, an absolutely extraordinary communique co-authored by Carney and Modi about the visit that Mark Carney made to India.

35:46Alastair Campbell:It read to me like the shaping of a new trade partnership economic order without even mentioning the United States of America. It was really, really, really interesting. And I thought that was a fascinating thing. I've just read this extraordinary German book called Das Erwachsener Land, The Grown-Up Country. And it's a guy from Die Zeit who is basically speculating that Germany decoupling from the United States is now a huge opportunity on a par with the second, like another Berlin Wall falling. And he gives a very, very, very compelling argument. I'm not sure many German politicians are in that place.

36:24Alastair Campbell:But so I think we are going to be seeing that kind of thing. I think these are because let's be honest, Trump will say he has won whatever happens and however it transpires. OK, but I think most people are looking at this and thinking Trump is not handling this well. This is not going according to whatever plan he had in his mind. and therefore these other countries will I think start to get together. I think you're right that Iran will be closer to some of these Gulf allies than anybody likes to think in that they know they're going to have to have some kind of relationship going forward. I think Israel is going to be even more unpopular in many, many parts of the world than it already started out.

37:06Alastair Campbell:And meanwhile, America is not projecting itself as a reliable ally. Therefore, other allies of America will start to kind of, you know, play around with each other.

37:16Rory Stewart:Well, Germany's really interesting because Germany traditionally has been a very, very strong ally of the US and because of the Holocaust, a very strong ally of Israel and has tended to support them pretty uncritically. and therefore the instinct I guess for Germany and a lot of European countries would have been strongly to come in on the US side on this and it's quite an achievement for Trump to have done this with so little consultation so little preparation that he's actually managed to alienate these people who might have been potential allies for him

37:50Alastair Campbell:yeah yeah and the other thing I mentioned in the speech that I'd like Ed Miliband to make I don't know who the I guess Nick Thomas Simmons is the closest that the Labour government has to a historian. I'd like to see a speech about Churchill and Trump based on Trump had this insult of Keir Starmer, well, we're not dealing with Winston Churchill. I went back and read Churchill's Fulton, Missouri speech, the famous speech, the Iron Curtain, special relationship. So it's become known in a way as the Iron Curtain speech and the special relationship speech. the actual title that Churchill gave that speech was the sinews of peace and it was a lot more subtle than Trump or the headline writers of the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph might think for one he was calling for more power not less for the United Nations well Trump's not saying that he had a very interesting passage on the importance of always trying to understand your enemies again not something that Trump specializes and his strongest message of all was the best way for The world to stay peaceful was the Western allies to stay strong together.

38:57Alastair Campbell:And you even had on the radio this morning a friend and ally of Trump's on the Today programme saying that, you know, that the Americans didn't take Britain into consideration before they sort of went down this route. So I think there's something in the idea that Churchill actually would not have been as gung-ho as Trump might think in terms of supporting this particular adventure.

39:22Rory Stewart:Well, there's a sense, isn't it, that Israel sees this as their last opportunity. paradoxically because American political opinion is turning against Israel in quite a significant way. And they probably think that after a Trump administration, they wouldn't be supported in doing this. So I think what they probably want to do is do the maximum damage they can. And that will probably mean not just hitting Iran once. They will try to make Iran, Netanyahu, I think, will try to approach Iran in the way that he approaches Lebanon or Syria or the West Bank. In other words, he will set up a new normal where Iran becomes the target almost whenever Israel decides it's a threat.

40:08Rory Stewart:And they will just go in and they will bomb it again and again and again. And they will try to get it into a situation where Israel will no longer have to depend on the U.S. because they'll think they can't. And what are the signs that Israel may not be able to depend on the US in the future. Well, one of them is that actually in the Democratic Party, it's now becoming very difficult for some of them to even take APAC funding. So the pro-Asraeli group, which provide a lot of supporting for US senators, congresspeople, cross-party, is now becoming something that's becoming more toxic in the Democratic Party.

40:41Rory Stewart:You can see Tucker Carlson and bits of the Republican movement beginning to say, wait a second, this is not anything to do with the US national interests. This may or may not be in the Israeli national interest, but the Israeli national interest is not identical with the US or the Western national interest. And the assumption that Israel somehow knows what it's doing, well, what is it that Israel is trying to do here? I don't think they're probably trying to do regime change. In fact, one question is, do all the planners and the IDF really even want regime change. I mean, let's imagine you had a more American-friendly nationalist regime in Iran that began to rebuild its military arsenal, but with more American support and more American backing for rebuilding its arsenal.

41:26Rory Stewart:Would that be in Israel's interest, or would Israel actually, in some ways, rather continue to have a very weak, marginalized regime, which is perceived by the US and others as an evil terrorist threat so that Israel can continue to weaken it in support of its own national security.

41:45Alastair Campbell:Yeah, well, because I mean, the sense you get at the moment is that Israel is seeing itself as having the right and the impunity, if you like, to kind of go into the whole region wherever it wants. I mean, what's happening in Lebanon right now on a normal kind a week would be like massive news around the world it's a kind of fifth order situation the continuing sort of you know moves into the west bank that are going on when was the last time that we actually heard anybody uh across the sort of you know the main media in the world talking about what's going on inside gaza it's almost like well they've done that and now they're onto the onto the next thing and i do think that that creates a problem for the united states because I think opinion there is shifting.

42:29Alastair Campbell:But I'll tell you the other thing, really, I think maybe just, if you could move on to something else. I'm really interested in this whole, you mentioned it briefly earlier, but the nature of warfare and how it's changing and how this is going to impact upon Ukraine and the importance of drones and the work that drones are doing. It is, what's happened here, it seems to me, is that the Iranians, there was a very interesting tweet put out by CENTCOM the Central Command of the United States, and they're basically saying, CENTCOM's task force Scorpion Strike for the first time in history is using one-way attack drones in combat during Operation Epic Fury.

43:09Alastair Campbell:These low-cost drones, modelled after Iran's Shahid drones, are now delivering American-made retribution. So the Iranians develop these drones. They start to use these drones. The Americans get hold of them. They work out how to develop them. and now they're using them against them. Meanwhile, Ukraine has become expert at defending against drones, and despite all the abuse that's been poured upon his head by Vance and by Trump and by the American administration, Zelensky is now helping the Gulf states have the Ukrainian expertise in how to deal with this stuff. But I just wondered, this relates to your series on AI.

43:54Alastair Campbell:If you've now got these drones that are costing roughly$30 ,000,$35 ,000, the cost of taking them down is way above that. And they can now, I was reading that the ones that they're using, they can fly more than 1 ,000 miles at 150 miles an hour. They can circle for up to six hours. They've got a 50-horsepower little engine that just sounds like a little kind of moped going on. And they can be phenomenally accurate. I read to the end of this piece and it said this, as yet, the US lacks the technology, public appetite and legal framework to introduce this on an AI powered basis. But it may be here before long.

44:38Alastair Campbell:I mean, how quickly is the nature of warfare changing and how worried should we be that that's the next step?

44:46Rory Stewart:Well, very worried. Right. I mean, one way of putting it is that the frozen front lines in Russia, Ukraine, this famous story that Russia has only been advancing by a few hundred meters a day, is effectively because for the last couple of years, if you've popped out of your bunker for a moment, you get hit by a drone. And most of the innovation, most of what defines that landscape is all about these unmanned vehicles. So instead of a plane that could cost tens of millions of dollars or a hundred million dollars, and which has a human in it, and where American pilots can be killed and blown up, this is the thing which, as you say, costs a few tens of thousands of dollars, about the size of a car.

45:29Rory Stewart:And it doesn't involve any human getting killed if it gets struck. Now, the problem that they faced in Ukraine is that electronic warfare means that the signal station that connects your drone operator to the drone. These things are like, I mean, you may have played with radio-controlled drones. They're a fancy version of a radio-controlled drone. Began to get knocked out by jamming the signal. So they then started flying them with fiber-optic cables trailing behind them, which is why if you go to Ukraine at the front line, anyway, there are all these pictures of glass cables all over trees. The next stage, obviously, is to release these things and have them controlled autonomously by the machine itself.

46:13Rory Stewart:So it's no longer relying on a base station. This is where artificial intelligence comes in. And this is what Anthropic is refusing to do. Anthropic is saying, an extension, I suppose, of saying, listen, if I can't even trust ChatGPT to get the sugar quantity right in my brownie baking, the idea that I'm going to release these things to fly around making their own decision on what target to engage with and who to kill is for the birds. But the pressure will be moving this direction. And this is a war. And this is what I suppose we're waking up to, which isn't actually. And it's terrifying for conventional militaries.

46:48It's not really a war about soldiers

46:51Rory Stewart:on the ground. It's not really increasingly a war about pilots, because you don't want to risk American pilots and planes in the air. It's not a war about navies. They've sunk the whole Iranian Navy. And if you look at Britain, you know, it's extraordinary. We have these incredibly expensive vessels. And the reason they're so expensive is they're all about electronic warfare equipment and shooting missiles out of the sky. And almost none of them are operating. I mean, it is like five out of six of them are currently in one type of repair. Our aircraft carrier is sustaining another repair. And nobody can contemplate sending our aircraft carrier off because they're worried that someone's just going to fly a$50 ,000 drone off and blow up this$2 billion aircraft carrier because we don't have enough destroyers and frigates to protect it.

47:36Rory Stewart:So we've entered a universe now, thanks to Ukraine and now thanks to Iran, where everything that we assumed about the military is essentially being replaced by swarms of cheap drones and more and more pressure on those things becoming autonomous, independent, making their own decisions. And now you've entered science fiction. Now you've entered a world where you're wandering around, hopefully only on the front line of a battlefield, but actually if you're in Tehran, you're seeing this in real time. Or if you're in Dubai, you're seeing this in real time. And certainly you're seeing it in Ukraine, where suddenly the sky is full of these weird devices flying around, somehow making their own decisions on whether or not they want to kill you.

48:17Alastair Campbell:75 % of casualties in Ukraine, we were told when I was there last week, week before last, were from drones um so it's totally changing the nature of warfare you probably are going to get to a place where governments start to say well we don't need we don't need all these sort of huge great ships and planes and the rest of it we just sort of fight drone to drone but i'll tell you the thing that i thought was really interesting rory um well you mentioned fertilizer earlier and there's going to be this sort of fertilizer crisis because the straits of hormones the other thing that happened was a drone hit a desalination plant um so this is this is the other thing i mean i've often thought that water would be the next sort of you know source of war and there are now 400 desalination plants across the the gulf region which turns because there's no fresh water they have to turn sea water into into drinking water and eight of the top eight of the ten biggest in the world are in the Arabian Peninsula, and the other two are in Israel.

49:20Alastair Campbell:You know, and sometimes when you see how on earth do they manage to build golf courses and ski slopes and all those football stadiums for the World Cup, the answer is desalination. And it's very easy to imagine that hitting these desalination plants would almost certainly be a war crime. But are we not in that era now where people worry less about whether there's any kind of, you know, there is a sense of impunity you take that out and and it wouldn't be the first time because if we go back to the first gulf war i don't know if you remember this but saddam hussein released a lot of oil um and the thinking was that he was actually trying to destroy one of the desalination plants then so trying to destroy these things would actually have a massive impact upon human life and that again was any of that discussed in the planning of this and of course the iranian

50:11Rory Stewart:explanation for why they hit the Bahraini desalination plant is that they claim that Israel and the US hit one of their desalination plants first. We'll get on tomorrow to talk about what's happening internally in Iran and in the region. Because I think one of the problems with talking big geopolitics is you're not talking about columns of noxious poisonous smoke rising up from oil refineries being struck. You're not talking about schools being struck. And you're not talking about people being killed in retaliation. But you're absolutely right desalination now just before we go to the comments um i guess my sort of stepping back for a moment to try to think about this the final thing we haven't talked about if i wanted to be really gloomy is we don't talk enough about non-linear effects the problem about predicting these kind of things is we assume that everything goes in a relatively straightforward as it is today so it will be tomorrow one thing that often isn't like that is global financial crises, because a lot of them are about trust and confidence.

51:16Rory Stewart:And there are some worrying signals. We've talked about oil. We've talked about problems around the private credit markets before, which is this very strange, slightly murky, less transparent than the banking sector, and the way in which this could all trigger global recessions. We don't know whether it will or won't. But certainly the chance of that happening is higher than it was two weeks ago. And it's one of the problems with going to war without bothering to work out why you're doing it. And one of the reasons you don't need to work out why you're doing it is you don't have to explain what you're doing to Congress.

51:52Rory Stewart:You don't have to tell your allies. You don't have to tell the UN. So you don't even bother to go through the business of trying to work out what your priorities are. Is that all these consequences from, you know, suddenly finding out you don't have any patriot missiles to defend Taiwan against China, or a global financial crisis, or the changing of global norms. You know, suddenly China and Russia saying, okay, a new argument's been put up. You don't need legal stuff. You don't need the UN. You don't need to consult your own parliament. Israel and the US have demonstrated whenever you want, you can do this stuff.

52:26Rory Stewart:Or nuclear proliferation, you know, states, Saudi getting a nuclear weapon, middle powers getting nuclear weapons to stop this happening to them. None of this is thought through because you don't need to justify yourself.

52:37Alastair Campbell:Just when we did a little polling question, Rory, while we were talking, who was more prepared for the conflict, Iran or USA? And our listeners and viewers have gone 79 % Iran, 21 % USA. Whether that was influenced by our discussion on it, I don't know. But I think I do have that sense that they've been thinking about this for a very long time. Somebody's just said in the comments they've been thinking about it since 1979. There may be something in that. And there's a lot of comments coming through about this Russian oil point. Lorna McKay, this war is a gift to Russia. Russia had sanctions of oil sales to India lifted on Friday during high prices.

53:17Alastair Campbell:King Jeppi, can you discuss the stock market crisis around the world, particularly South Korea and Japan, opened several points lower than they closed. And again, was that, was there scenario planning? Did the Americans sit down and say, now, what if? You get the feeling that Trump's entire style, and you even had, you know, his press secretary said that, you know, he had a feeling. He had a feeling that there was going to be this attack, the Israelis are going to attack, therefore they had to be part of it. So I think we are seeing the limits of this sort of personalised, narcissistic approach to really serious policy.

53:55Rory Stewart:Isn't part of the point that he and Boris Johnson and his other cheerleaders and Farage and the others, and sometimes I'm afraid it looks as though Tony Blair seems to be supporting him, but we'll get onto that tomorrow. That's not today's conversation. But anyway, isn't part of the problem for Trump and the rest of them is that they feel that a bunch of lefty bedwetters like me were stroking our chins and saying, oh, it's all very difficult. There's a rules-based order. You've got to follow the law. You've got to consult with the UN and said it was going to be dangerous to intervene in Iran. And they feel they got away with it in Venezuela and they whacked Hezbollah and they hit Iran twice.

54:33Rory Stewart:And Iran apparently didn't do very much in return. And therefore, all these people in which they would class European leaders, diplomats, etc. And American State Department officials like Rob Malley, who would have been saying, be very careful what you're doing here in Iran. They would have concluded, well, these guys kept telling us it would be difficult. we've got away with it again and again, we'll get away with it again.

54:55Alastair Campbell:That is certainly how they think. But then even I would say that you'd be ill-advised based upon Iraq and Afghanistan to say that another Middle East venture right now with the geostrategic position as it is was entirely sensible. And you're right, we should talk about tomorrow, we'll talk about Keir Starmer and Trump and Tony Blair, the speech that Tony Blair made that got leaked out. But I sort of feel with this that we're seeing, I mean, the Americans really, truly believe in this American exceptionalism. He thinks he is an exceptional person. He thinks he's the only leader in the world who understands the state of the world.

55:34Alastair Campbell:He thinks he is bigger and better than everybody else. And I think what we're seeing is other people, other leaders, sort of waking up to the fact that, you know what, there may not be that big a prize to say, no, you're not. Now, they're not doing it in a very rude way. There's still nobody sort of, you know, saying to him the sort of things that he says to other people. I mean, it would have been quite easy.

55:57Rory Stewart:But I just just sorry on that one. I mean, I still think the best way of doing that is if is with values and vision. I mean, just as you probably would say in a political campaign, you need to know what people stand for. So if you're going to put these middle powers together, going to put Europe, Canada, India, Middle East together. be great to have some sense of why you're doing it what you stand for what your values are now then there's a very difficult question of how you begin to spend the next five ten years moving away from the u.s you know we talked about in this the ai series how bloody difficult it

56:34Alastair Campbell:would be to actually and the u.n i mean how do you move away from the u.n as the sort of global body very difficult.

56:43Rory Stewart:Interesting here, people saying, you know, why is it, given that the British public's against it, and, you know, Foreign Policy magazine did a poll of international relations experts and almost university, they think it's a massive mistake. Why is it that the Boris Johnson's and Farage's and a lot of the right wing media, and indeed, I'm afraid, the Conservative Party and others seem to be championing? Why are they so out of step with the public, with international relations experts. And let me try to put it in the most brutal terms. Look, Iraq and Afghanistan were very risky and were misses, but Iran has a population four times larger than either Iraq or Afghanistan.

57:26Rory Stewart:Iran can throttle the Straits of Hormuz and stop 25 % of global oil. That wasn't true of Iraq or Afghanistan. Iran has the Revolutionary Guard. It's got Hezbollah and terrorist networks all over the world. I mean, why did they think this was going to be a good idea?

57:42Alastair Campbell:I think the answer is because they are utterly trapped in very old-fashioned lines, which are right v. left and America v. Europe. So Trump is a right-wing American. And if you're a Brexit-supporting Faragist, you are a right-wing Trump-supporting Brit. I think Farage is making a terrible mistake, by the way. And I think I think Kemi Badenot made a terrible mistake in that interview she did where she said, you know, what the hell's going on? Our planes are just that our pilots just hanging around like they should, you know, they should be up there in the air now bombing anything that Trump tells them to.

58:22Alastair Campbell:Trump is, as we saw in Belfast and Dublin, right across Europe, I would argue, Trump is very, very unpopular. He's not trusted, he's not respected, and he's not liked. So when, and here's the other thing, I've written my column about this, when Obama came out during the Brexit referendum, do you remember? He came out and said, no, on balance, I think it'd be a very bad thing if you left, and I think you've got a much better chance of getting a trade deal if you stay in the European Union. And the Farages and the Johnsons, they all went absolutely insane. how dare an American president tell us what to do and what to think.

58:55Alastair Campbell:Those same people today are basically saying, whatever Trump says is what we should do. And at least with Obama, you knew the guy had a brain. He had an intellect worth respecting and worth admiring. And he wasn't kind of crazy. This guy is doing crazy stuff. And, you know, Keir Starmer, we'll talk about it tomorrow, he's in a very difficult position. I actually think he's ended up handling it pretty well. But he has, Trump basically wanted to, he wants a position where when he says to Keir Starmer, when I say jump, you say how high? And Keir Starmer's basically said, no, no, no, that's not going to happen.

59:34Alastair Campbell:I'll work out our national interest, you work out yours. Sometimes they'll coincide and other times they won't. So I think with the bad knocks and the farages and these people and the right wing papers, they're totally locked in this view of America good, Europe bad, right-wing good, anything to do with the Labour government bad.

59:53Rory Stewart:Yeah, well, I'll leave the discussion around Starmer's policy till tomorrow, where avid listeners will realise we have a slight disagreement of you.

1:00:05Alastair Campbell:Well, the Dubliners were on my side, Roy.

1:00:08Rory Stewart:Very good, I'm glad that Dublin's on your side. I'm glad about that. Well, we'll reopen that a little bit tomorrow. But just to finish, I think the thing that's, strikes me most looking at this is the way in which this has wrecked confidence and trust for a very, very long time. The way I'm thinking about it is that Trump's re-election wrecked American confidence in liberal democracy. That was populism. And then maybe Vance's first Munich speech wrecked their connection with Western values. And then Trump, Greenland and Davos, which you and I sat through, was the moment where they basically broke the Western alliance.

1:00:56Rory Stewart:But I think this Iran engagement will prove to be more significant than any of it. I think this is the moment where the post-war security architecture really crumbs crumbling down. This is the moment where all the norms and all the rules are finally exposed. This is the moment where America's power in the world is revealed as being a danger, not just to its traditional enemies, but also to its allies in Western Europe and the Gulf. It's the moment where I think people will start reorganizing the whole world. and China, if it's nimble, will be able to benefit from this a lot. The world will become more dangerous, more nuclear weapons will take place.

1:01:42Rory Stewart:But it's also this confidence point, which is that whatever happens with a new US administration, whatever president comes in, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. You can no longer recreate a world where people will say, oh, that was just a small aberration with Trump. And now you can trust us again. You can buy our tech. You can rely on us for our defense and security. You can buy into our missiles. You can come into our coalitions. Nobody will buy into that. And the second thing is that I'm very sorry to say, but the Middle East is now permanently, trust has been wrecked. I mean, this is going to be the problem for UAE and Dubai.

1:02:25Rory Stewart:That once you've seen it, once you've seen what Iran can do to the Straits of Hormuz, you can't unsee it. And the insurance costs of moving oil through there are not going to come down for a very long time. Once you've seen what they might be able to do to Dubai, your tourism sector is shattered because it's about confidence and trust. Your financial sector is under real strain. What Trump has done is by blowing up all our confidence in open sea lanes, all our confidence in America being a predictable, careful power, blown up the idea that having American bases makes you safer and made them instead seems more dangerous.

1:03:06Rory Stewart:He's done so much in two weeks, which will take many, many years to unravel.

1:03:12Alastair Campbell:Well, listen, we'll talk about this more tomorrow. We are going to revisit our little spatette about Keir Starmer's handling of this and Tony Blair's interesting intervention. I also think we should maybe dig a bit deeper into this whole thing about, you know, the way these other countries are forming different sorts of alliances now. But look, I sort of feel that this is in a really bad place. And I think it's likely to get worse before it gets better. I think it's not impossible this is going to be the spark of a global recession and that would be pretty grim all around and this is the other thing that I talked about is kind of narcissistic leadership if you if you literally only care about America first and you only care about what you think and what you're trying to do what you're trying to achieve without the consequences of the rest of the world then don't be surprised if the rest of the world starts to think you know we can't trust you in the way that we thought we would and we could and that is when these different alliances are going to start to form.

1:04:15Alastair Campbell:A couple of plugs, Rory. Alexander Stubb, president of Finland, he is the current leading. And also, we seem to be getting a lot of feedback for our Sunday long reads in the newsletter. One this week on Iran. I've got one next week on Ireland, following the trip there with the Mooch. So people seem to be enjoying those. But anyway, thank you for the thousands of questions. I'm sorry we got through so few. There are literally thousands of them coming in. I think it's fair to say that most of them are expressing quite a lot of alarm about what's going on in the world.

1:04:49Rory Stewart:And a lot of pushes to talk about what's actually happening on the ground in Iran. I mean, I feel one of the dangers is that, you know, we talk at 10 ,000 feet about the world. But the Iranians are in this horrendous situation, which we'll talk about tomorrow, which is they have this incredibly unpleasant, unpopular regime that they would be desperate to see the back of. But at the same time, they're beginning to really feel that allying themselves with Israel and Trump in this bombing campaign is a completely different sort of horror. And it's impossible. I mean, in essence, what Trump's done here is put the Gulf in an impossible situation, Europe in an impossible situation, but above all, Iranian people who just want to get rid of this regime and live a peaceful life where they're not having people blowing up their oil refineries on the edge of Tehran and spewing noxious gas and hitting schools.

1:05:44Rory Stewart:And, you know, and that's so many things to talk about what's happening there. Refugees, civil war, potentially, the regime itself, will it hold or fall? And what on earth is happening with the man that we both met in Munich, Pallavi, who seemed to say, but I'm sure I'll be told this wasn't quite what he said, but there was a slight implication. He said he'd quite like to be the Shah of Iran, but he couldn't do it full time because he had family commitments that he needed to worry about in the United States.

1:06:12Alastair Campbell:He did. I'm sure he didn't say that. I'm sure he did say that. He said to me that he'd like to put himself forward as a transitional figure who could lead to a different sort of regime. I think for now, that ship has sailed. And we have the son of, they don't even have to change the slogans and the T-shirts and the flags. They're just, you know, Khamenei. He's still there. All right, Roy, I'll see you tomorrow. See you soon. Thanks again. Speak to me. Bye-bye. Bye.

1:06:42So