519. Trump's NATO Threat & a Critical Election in Hungary (Question Time)

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0:13Dominic Sandbrook:Is NATO finished? I don't think it's necessarily finished, but I think it has never been more embattled. Trump is the first president to really call it into question. And the longer that the second term has gone on, the more dicey its future has looked. He was asked if he was reconsidering membership of NATO. He said, oh, yes, it's beyond reconsideration. I was never swayed by NATO. I always knew they were a paper tiger. And get this, Putin knows that too, by the way. I know. So unsettling. How do you answer the anxieties of people? Because they're not just economic anxieties, are they? They're cultural anxieties about people who are frightened by change.

0:48Dominic Sandbrook:Too often, we're liable to say, oh, because you're being exploited by populists, somehow your grievance isn't real. Whereas what we should be doing is your grievance is real and we have to do something about it. Welcome to the rest of this politics question time with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Dominic Sandbrook. Hello. Hello, Dominic. So stepping in for the absent Rory Stewart for the second time. Thank you very, very much indeed. Lots of questions and one of them relates to something we discussed on the podcast. We had a lot of questions on these lines. This is from Harper from Sandwell in the West Midlands.

1:21Is NATO finished? Wow.

1:24Dominic Sandbrook:I mean, I didn't think you had any listeners in the West Midlands, but I stand corrected. We've got listeners everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. I mean, we're like the history of history with your little sort of cultural cliques around university cities around the world. We spread far and wide. Yeah. Every time I go and do a show at the Sydney Opera House, I really lament the fact that our audience is so limited and the rest is history, as you can well imagine. I said, university cities around the world. Yeah. Carry on. Is NATO finished? NATO finished. Is NATO finished? I don't think it's necessarily finished, but I think it has never been more embattled.

1:56Dominic Sandbrook:From the 1940s when NATO began as an alliance, as an anti-communist alliance, to keep the Americans in Europe and to hold the line against Stalin's Soviet Union. NATO, ever since then, has actually been pretty solid, I would say, as military alliances go. Trump is the first president to really call it into question. I think he clearly has no emotional investment in NATO. and the longer that the second term has gone on, the more dicey its future has looked. Obviously, the stuff with Canada and Greenland could have been toxic, absolutely toxic for NATO. And his rage, his anger and resentment at what he sees as the lack of European support for his, to my mind, very misguided war in Iran.

2:42Dominic Sandbrook:I mean, I think that poses a real problem for NATO because it's pretty clear now that he wants revenge, that he wants revenge in some way on the European countries that he thinks have abandoned him. What do you think? This episode is brought to you by Fuse Energy. Energy policy rarely stays in Westminster for long, usually arrives for the bill. And from the 1st of April, 75 % of renewables obligation costs will come off electricity bills and move into general taxation. So if bills are meant to fall from April, why would anyone bother switching? Because policy sets the floor. The saving itself is automatic.

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3:54Dominic Sandbrook:Visit FuseEnergy.com for full details and terms and conditions. Let's just imagine that something happened to Estonia tomorrow. Now, when 9-11 happened, that's the only time ever that Article 5, an attack on one is an attack on all, was activated. It was activated for the United States, even though he's since then insulted all the British, Australian, Denmark and other troops who were involved by saying they stayed away from the front line. And he said something very interesting in all places this week in the Daily Telegraph. He was asked if he was reconsidering membership of NATO. He said, oh yes, it's beyond reconsideration.

4:33I was never swayed by NATO. I always knew they were paper tiger. And get this, Putin knows that too, by the way. I know.

4:40Dominic Sandbrook:So unsettling. Even there, he's speaking for the Putin worldview. And who has had, as a strategic objective, almost top of his list, Putin has been break up the European Union and get America out of NATO. And he's now doing that. It does sort of beg the question that Rory and I, and the Mooch especially, speculate a lot about, is what has Putin got on Trump? Because the worst thing in a way, because Trump has always been very skeptical about NATO, So is Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State who's always been very pro-NATO, he even got a thing passed in Congress that no president could unilaterally pull the US out of NATO, he now, as another mini-me, is kind of saying the same thing.

5:26And I think it's important that we understand. I had a spat this week with Ari Fleischer, who was my opposite number with George Bush when I was with Tony Blair during the Iraq War. I don't know whether he's desperate to get in with the MAGA crowd, but he did a really offensive to my mind tweet basically saying that England as he called it I pointed out that we are the UK Scotland Scottish Welsh and Northern Irish troops were also involved in the wars that we helped them with in Iraq and Afghanistan as Spain Italy above all France he said we're going to pay a big big price we've always been weak we've always relied on America it was a really kind of offensive sort of thing and I just reminded him of that that you know when the push came to shove in 9-11 at considerable political cost, which some would argue we still pay, Tony Blair and his reputation and how he's treated around the world.

6:17I get the same thing, get abuse about it every single day on social media. We stood by the United States. That was NATO, the only time Article 5. And then I was saying that because these countries, us, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Albania, all of them said, no, this is not what NATO is about. This is not a sensible thing to do, suddenly NATO itself is a threat. And America gets a huge amount out of NATO. Yes, they put in the most money. Yes, they put in something like four billion into European defence. But the fact is, the economic stability that we all want, a lot of that has been built on post-war safety and security in Europe, which is one of America's most important markets.

7:01Dominic Sandbrook:I agree completely, Alistair, but I think something that people don't appreciate as much as they should outside America, there's been a strain of American opinion that has always been extremely critical of any form of foreign entanglement. And that goes right back to, you know, the people who didn't want to join the First World War, people who didn't want to join the League of Nations after the Treaty of Assain in the early 1920s, people who didn't want to get involved with the Second World War in the 1930s and then right up to Pearl Harbor in 1941. And then actually all through, I mean, people don't notice it outside America because we tend to visit the coasts.

7:37Dominic Sandbrook:You go to California or you go to New York or something. You don't go to the heartland. You don't read the kind of Reader's Digest, National Review kind of publications that appeal to conservative Americans. But there has always been a strain of American, particularly on the right, American thinking, particularly on the right, but not just on the right. There's also a kind of isolationist left, which has been, why do we get involved in these things? America should be sovereign. We shouldn't be part of the United Nations. It's part of a drive to set up a world government and overthrow our freedoms and all of that kind of thing.

8:10Dominic Sandbrook:And I think we were lucky in the West in that between, let's say, the 1940s and the 2000s, we had a succession of American presidents who were committed to the kind of Atlantic alliance and to America's role in the world and to sort of responsibly upholding that and seeing America effectively as hand in glove with Europe. And that relationship is being central to American identity. And what's actually happened from Trump onwards is that we have a different and perhaps in some ways older American way of looking at the world, which is the rest of the world contaminates us. We want to be the shining city on a hill.

8:49Dominic Sandbrook:Why should we get involved? You know, basically, the point about Estonia, I think, is dead right. If I was Vladimir Putin, I have to say that's what I would do. not because I'd want to seize Estonia particularly although there are a lot of Russian speakers in in the east of Estonia but I would do it to break the alliance I would just you know you just go over the border take the first town or something and you would say what are you going to do about it and then you just watch as NATO tore itself apart and as Donald Trump said you can just see him and Hegseth and all these guys rants going on TV and saying why should people in Wisconsin in care about Estonia.

9:30Dominic Sandbrook:The Europeans should sort it out themselves. They've never been there for us and all of this kind of thing. That's what would happen. That's why last week, and I don't know whether you've had this on your book club yet, Dominic, but my book of the year last year was Carlo Masala, If Russia Wins, where it's a scenario, as he calls it, and that's what it's... The story is Putin takes a village in Estonia just to see if NATO and the Americans react and they don't. I think the other thing, I've spoken to two or three European leaders this week, and it's really been interesting talking to them. I think that the iron which started to enter the soul over Greenland has now solidified into iron in the soul.

10:17They now know. I think Mark Carney was the first really to understand this is not normal presidency. This is not a normal president. We are in a completely new age. We all have to deal with it as best we can. It's why I keep arguing with Rory that, you know, Keir Starmer can't say he's a blethering idiot, he's a liar, he's a crook. We can say that, but prime ministers and presidents can't. But it's why Sanchez feels so emboldened. It's why Macron this week, when Trump made that disgusting comment about, you know, Macron and his wife, and his wife gave him a... beats him up and all that stuff. And, you know, Macron just went back and says, this isn't unworthy of leadership.

10:53This is not a reality. This is not a show. So I think Europe is getting, you know, somebody in the pool said to me this morning, starting to put up two fingers. But the truth is, we are still so reliant economically. In our case, the nukes, the intelligence, the air defences. And in Ukraine's case, my big, big worry is that the combination of Iran and Trump pissed off with Europe, he just in the end says, you know, fuck it. Out of Ukraine, including our intelligence and the rest of the stuff we give.

11:24Dominic Sandbrook:I totally agree with that. And if you remember when we did the election night broadcast in New York with Anthony Scaramucci and Marina Hyde and Rory, we were talking a lot in that broadcast about what this meant for Ukraine, about what Trump's victory would mean, about the threat. Because I'm still very much of the view that if Ukraine is allowed to fall or is dismembered in some way, that that would be a catastrophic moment for European security. because if you were Vladimir Putin or Viktor Orban, you would think, well, you know, these people are complete paper tigers. You cannot rely on them at all.

11:58Dominic Sandbrook:And Europe still, I think, partly because of our economic weakness as a continent. I mean, it's sad to say, but our lack of productivity and all this kind of thing, which is not generating enough money. And for that reason, we are not investing as much in our own defenses as we should be. And Trump in this case, I hate to say it, but he's not wrong. No, he's got a point. He's got a point that Europe has been too content to, I don't like using the words that he used, like freeload and all that kind of thing, but to coast. To coast thinking that the American shield would always be there. And that was great folly, I think.

12:33Dominic Sandbrook:So talking of Viktor Orban, I know you're a huge fan of his work, Alistair. We have a question from Lexi in Portsmouth. You'll be delighted by this question. After nearly two decades in power, Could Viktor Orban finally be unseated? And a really good point, even if he was, would he actually leave? So what do you think? Well, one of the reasons I'm not a fan of Viktor Orban is that I think he follows the far-right populist playbook pretty closely. It's why MAGA love him. It's why Putin backs him, and I think he follows Putin playbook as well. The day before we recorded this, there was what I imagine was a false flag exercise.

13:12They found an explosive device on a gas pipeline between Hungary and Serbia. Orban summoned his emergency defense counsel, etc., etc., etc. He controls most of the media, so this was big news. Alongside, if you go to Budapest at the moment, Dominic, you will see more posters of Vladimir Zelensky and Ursula von der Leyen than you will of Orban, because their message is, vote Magyar, the opposition guy, and your kids are going to fight for Ukraine, not for Hungary. So it's a very, it's a nationalist message, it's a populist message. I think he can lose, and I think if the election is free and fair, there was an amazing documentary that did the rounds last week, it's called The Price of a Vote, and it was exposing a lot of the buying of votes, mayors in villages who decide so much about who gets firewood who gets a parking place who gets medical appointments basically and the other thing we had all that nonsense with uh matt badloss the

14:16Dominic Sandbrook:gorton and denton loser nigel farage's mate is that what you call him is that his official name that proves you don't listen to the podcast i've done it for the last four weeks yeah so there's the whole thing there wasn't there people call him matt gpt because there was the claim that he used AI to write his book. Yeah, which he is denied in such a convincing way that the New World managed to cover it in three pages this week. But you remember all that stuff about so-called family voting, where people were, you know, taken into the booth and shown how to vote? In Hungary, there was quite liberal, I don't mean liberal, liberal, I mean, quite sort of relaxed rules if you are illiterate or if you have a health problem.

14:55So you just have to turn up and say, I can't read and write. And your mate from Fidesz can take you in to show you how to vote. But I'll tell you what I think is really, really interesting here. This is the dynamic that I hope is playing out, that I hope will follow around Europe. If you think of the way that populist leaders come to power, they present themselves as men of the people against a corrupt ruling elite. Okay. Yeah, of course. The corrupt ruling elite in Hungary is Orbán and the Fidesz party and especially the young i think they now see them as that so populism has always depended on the ability to of the leader to project the sense that they the people are the victims of the elite and i am one of you it's amazing that trump pulled it off but he did it's amazing that johnson pulled it off but he did and albert's pulled it off for 16 years i think this is his fifth election if he wins it it'll be his fifth election win and of course when you have trump and Putin backing you, when your best friend, a guy called Lorenz Mesharos, is a gas fitter who has become the richest man in Hungary, word gets around that maybe there's something a bit dodgy going on in the way that you rule this country.

16:10So, look, I think if it's free and fair, he's lost. The question then does become, how big does that win have to be for him not to play the game that Trump played with Joe Biden when he lost in 2020 that this has been stolen.

16:24Dominic Sandbrook:So I was thinking about precedence for this, and I think there's a good one in the neighbour of Hungary's, which is Serbia. So Serbia and Hungary are not so different in this regard. In both cases, you had Slobland Milosevic in Serbia in the 1990s. And in both cases, you have a country with a profound sense of kind of historic victimhood, a country that thinks it is surrounded by enemies. And Hungary, you know, they will circulate maps showing how Hungary was reduced and dismembered in the course of the 20th century. And they were felt very hard done by. They once owned Transylvania and Croatia and whatnot.

16:59Dominic Sandbrook:And they'd lost it so much. And Hungary is smaller than it's ever been and all of this kind of thing. Of course, they speak Magyar. They're surrounded by, you know, people who speak Slavic languages. So they feel isolated. There's a kind of isolationism to the Hungarian mentality, which explains why Orban has been able to appeal to it, much as Slobodan Milosevic appealed to Serbs in the 1990s. Slobodan Milosevic was a populist leader, nationalist leader, who became the embodiment of a corrupt establishment and then was beaten narrowly in an election by Vyoslav Kostunica, who was another nationalist, but an independent one and an outsider in 2000.

17:40Dominic Sandbrook:and the Milosevic people who were controlling the election apparatus basically lied about the result. They tried to claim that he hadn't been beaten and that he would have to go to a second round where they were clearly going to rig it. And at that point, young people in Serbia said enough. They went out on the streets and Milosevic fell. And I just wonder whether that could be the answer to Lex's question. You know, that's what Orbán would presumably try to do if it was a very close race, he would say, well, actually, we've narrowly won. You know, Magyar hasn't won. I've won. And at that point, what do all the students and whatnot in Budapest do?

18:17Dominic Sandbrook:Do they go on the streets as their counterparts did in Belgrade in 2000? And that, I mean, that would be a really, really interesting scenario because then, of course, we know what Orbán would do. Orbán would say, George Soros has paid them to go on the streets. The usual thing is you blame the CIA and whatnot. He would probably blame Brussels, wouldn't he? He would say, they're all working for the EU and these people all want your children to become transgender soldiers fighting for Ukraine and whatnot. But would that work? I don't know. I think there's a point where people see through you, don't you?

18:46Dominic Sandbrook:Where people get sick of it. I think the other thing that's fascinating about this, so we're recording at a time where J.D. Vance is on his way to Budapest to campaign for Orban. Now, one, that shows the extent to which Orban is completely plugged into this international far-right populism. I have a hunch, even with the war going on, that if they thought Orban was nailed on to win, Trump would go so that he could claim that he swung it in the last few days. But Vance is going to go. Rubio's already been. The idea that, now the European Union leaders, all of whom, frankly, want Orban to lose, pretty much, apart from the Slovakian probably, maybe one or two others, but they basically all want him to lose.

19:29But none of them are getting involved in the election. the americans are openly interfering in this election the other point that i think i'd like to make is about polarization we talk a lot about polarization the way that populace use it and i was just looking at a a poll you have fidesz supporters on one side and tisha magia's party supporters on the other on the question do hungarians have a lot of freedom fidesz 88 48%. Magyar's people, 17. Do Hungarians believe that our elections are honest? 84 v 12. Are you optimistic about economic conditions? 52 versus 18. Do you approve of Brussels? 74 against 13.

20:16So, you know, I think that's the other way around. So Fidesz supporters, obviously. thing. Do you think that Fidesz supporters, do they see the government as corruption? 94 % of Magyar's people, 38 % of Fidesz. Now, anybody who lives there knows it's corrupt. You've actually have to take part in the corruption to get through your daily life. Good point here before we go to the next question, maybe to plug our mini-series. This is a series I've done with Liam Byrne, the Labour MP, and we've had a really extraordinary feedback on this because I think that we talk a lot about populism but i think what liam done is he's really gone into in depth and uh i don't know if you've listened to it dominic but it's one of the most intelligent analysis of populism that i've ever heard we've had lots and lots of people on right and the left who are

21:04Dominic Sandbrook:who are saying that so that sounds good okay so just to go into this film the price of a vote i mean lots and lots of kind of different examples people are saying how it works how the you know that different people get given money when we were in moldova interviewing president sandhu we were told that putin would literally order one oligarch we were given the name but given i know how litigious he is i think i might might just leave the name leave the name in the intro for now but a very well-known oligarchs put it that way yeah and they basically have to hand over the money and then the mayors essentially worked out how it goes and so and you're talking you know you're talking between 110 130 150 pounds per vote and this is in this is in places where child benefits about 26 43 quid per child per month and the other thing that happens is that the the film claimed that they were using drugs they were giving people you know this cheap very addictive synthetic drug which is widespread this in a country with some of the toughest anti-drug laws in the world but they're using drugs to sort of say here you go you vote the right way and we will look after you in this way as well foreign interference off the scale um the washington post ran a story recently that we're going to do a false flag assassination attempt putin's money all over the place that's why you see these massive post campaigns massive online campaigns.

22:38So I don't know whether this film has been subtitled or whether it's just in Hungarian. And of course, because he controls the media, you only know about this stuff if you're following Magyar's campaign online.

22:49Dominic Sandbrook:But just a question for you, Alistair. So these are often people in kind of rural areas who feel alienated from change. They're very anxious about Brussels, for example. I mean, Orban hasn't... Orban is tapping these feelings and he's amplifying them, but he hasn't created them, right? They are there for a reason. And I wonder whether what you and maybe what Liam Byrne would think about, how do you answer the anxieties of people? Because they're not just economic anxieties, are they? They're cultural anxieties about people who are frightened by change. And I was talking to, you know, the pollster, Sir John Curtis.

23:26Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah. And he, a couple of weeks ago, and he said he still thinks the biggest issue in Britain, in British politics, the dividing line, is cultural and educational. So it's whether you went to university or not, and it's how you feel about cultural issues, like the flag and all that kind, and statues and that. And he said they're still the best determinants of how people vote. And populist politicians, or politicians of any kind, they exploit those issues, but they don't necessarily create them. Those issues would exist anyway. I think Liam Burma here, he would agree with the premise, and he would say that the first step is actually to understand that that too often we're liable to say oh because you're being exploited by populists which you are somehow your grievance isn't real whereas what we should be doing is your grievance is real and we have to do something about it and that's why of course at a time when you know the global economy is in trouble when europe has been stagnating economically when kids are feeling that their opportunities are being taken away from them denied, can't get to university, can't afford a house, can't afford university, whatever it might be, can't get a job, then wide open to a Trump or a Farage to come in and say, come to me, I'm a strong man, I can sort all this out for you.

24:42But I think then what Liam goes on to say is that we have to understand the grievances are real, we have to understand where they're coming from, but we also have to understand that within that, what we call a populist population, there are gradations there are people who are angry for different reasons there are people who are culturally offended economically weakened and some of them he says are just they're as it were gone they're gone yeah the center right the center left are never going to get them back but he actually thinks a good 40 for example of people who are currently saying they're going to vote for reform he thinks they are they can be brought back but only if we understand why they got there in the first place.

25:24Dominic Sandbrook:That makes total sense to me. I think you have to, my view has always been on these things, that people, these are not contrived grievances necessarily. So when people say, you know, I don't like people slagging off our history, I don't like people slagging Britain off, I don't like people, you know, I don't like Jeremy Corbyn saying we're always in the wrong in every conceivable historical issue or whatever. These are not contrived or confected grievances from these people. They are genuine in what they feel. But you can't, but you don't necessarily need to reduce people to that so that people might have think people think lots of different contradictory things at once i think you have to you listen to people you respect them you don't pander to them you don't have to agree with everything they're saying to you but you treat their right you make them feel heard and often that's the mistake that politicians make because they don't make people feel heard that's a very interesting way to set up a question that we're going to take in the second half about who uses history better the right or the left and i say that you mentioned the statues at a week where Donald Trump has chosen to resurrect the big Christopher Columbus statue that was taken down.