532. The Trump-Xi Showdown and Putin’s Conscription Con

24:34Rory Stewart:But put those two things together, you've got a really difficult situation. And yet, Trump, by returning to just worrying about trade, seems to have sidelined the China Hawks, sidelined figures who we've talked about, like Elbridge Colby, who has been running policy in the Department of Defense. Elbridge Colby, who's the grandson of the CIA director, who wrote this book called Strategy of Denial, who was the big driver of America shouldn't be doing stuff in Europe or the Middle East, all its resources should be about denying China's opportunity to take Taiwan. We've barely heard from him for the last few weeks or months.

25:10Rory Stewart:And certainly what Trump is doing in Iran isn't an Elbridge Colby, let's just focus on China policy. Yeah. And I mean, it's hard to, look, we read and hear so much more about Trump than we do about Xi Jinping. But it's hard to look at this without thinking that Xi Jinping will be, I think, be feeling a lot stronger and a lot more confident about this encounter than he would have done, certainly in Trump one, and possibly even when he met Biden in the margins of a previous APEC. And one of the reasons for that is that there has been this wave of visits. The Chinese talk about this wave. So in recent, you know, not that distant past, you've had prime ministers or presidents of Australia, Canada, France, the UK, as I mentioned, Germany, Spain, Finland, Ireland, Uruguay, South Korea, Georgia, New Zealand, Slovakia, the European Union, our friend, Mr.

26:12Vucic. He's been there several times and actually talked. People should listen to what he was saying about it because he was very much coming from the perspective of people do not fully understand just how good these people aren't what they're trying to do. And of course, they both also give a sense. I mean, look, Xi Jinping is not as voluble as Trump, because in a dictatorship, you know, he'd need to be. But my God, does he emanate strength everywhere he goes. And I think that what's so fascinating about this, Trump even talks about the G2. You know, you've got a G20 and a G7 and a G8. This is the G2.

26:51It's almost as if Xi Jinping's the only one that he thinks even gets close to him in terms of power. And I think wheeling around that very discreet looking mind that doesn't say much, I think Xi Jinping will be looking at this. He wants at the end of this, he wants people to say, he's more scared of me than I'm scared of him.

27:11Rory Stewart:Final thing before we go to the break. In the photographs that you see, Xi Jinping seems to always face the camera and barely smile and stick his hand out to the side, making everybody from Biden to Vucic to Stama to Trump look slightly weird because they've always got a big grin on their face and they're sort of shaking hands. And he looks like he's sort of slightly casually and slightly sarcastically handing his hand over to the other leader. Is that right? Or am I being unfair? No, you're not being unfair. It's very clever. It's very clever. It relates exactly to what I've just said. He's always got the same facial expression in those photos.

27:47You'll never see him looking different. And I don't know if I think we've mentioned this before. If you go on to any of the on the internet in China, and you put in the phrase Winnie the Pooh, you'll find that it doesn't exist. Because he really, really, really hates this sort of cartoon image of him as Winnie the Pooh. Another interesting thing somebody was telling me about the trade and AI stuff is that you're a big fan of deep seek aren't you yeah because this guy was saying to you that deep seek is very much part of the it's for example if you go and try to find out about the history of the ukraine war on deep seek you're getting a very very different version to the truth so it's very much a kind of it is part of their propaganda outfit it's amazing one of the things that deep

28:34Rory Stewart:seek does which is really weird unless you can screenshot it is you can see it thinking through the answer and then suddenly it refuses to give you the answer. So, it'll say, the listener is asking me to compare Winnie the Pooh to Xi Jinping and I must do some searches and find this out. Reuters does it and then suddenly it'll be like, I cannot answer this question. Exactly. Exactly. But the reason it's relevant though is that China is increasingly going open source on AI. So, again, as a plug for the interview with Will McGaskill on leading, which I think people will enjoy when they listen to it, a lot of which is about AI and AI safety.

29:10Rory Stewart:If you want to listen, of course, to Wilma Gaskell, just go ahead and search for the rest of this politics leading wherever you get your podcasts, and you'll find so many other great interviews. I'm still trying to plug Naz Shah, who's a mesmerizing Labour MP who I think you'd enjoy listening to. But the big difference between what China is doing is they are gambling on providing cheap access to open source models. So you can basically, if you're a European company building an AI platform, you can essentially take over this whole Chinese model and build your system on it, rather than having to endlessly license access to a server in the United States.

29:46Rory Stewart:So they're a few months behind. I mean, these models are not as good as the frontier US models, but probably only five, six months behind. But they're gambling that by going open source and cheaper, they'll be able to dominate European markets in a way that the Americans can't. My final point, just to scare our listeners and viewers even more, the nuclear issue is going to be quite important because they are developing advanced arsenal of roughly 1500 nuclear warheads by 2035. Huge buildup. And at a time, you know, historically, when we thought of nuclear, the nuclear powers, we've thought mainly of the Americans and the Russians.

30:25And that's why we had the START Treaty. which that's and one of the reasons why trump has refused to recommit to that is because it only really affects america and russia as opposed to any arms control on china so whether we'll see anything on that front as well so i think this is one of those summits where we really really have to watch it closely and analyze every analyze it from every which angle because you've got two these two superpowers, very different characters, but both all about power and all about winning. And they're coming together at a time when they probably could sort Iran between them.

31:02They probably could sort AI between them. They probably could sort some of the big economic and security issues that we face. They probably could start to think about a new world global architecture. And it'll be fascinating to see just how far they go in any of those things or not.

31:18Rory Stewart:Well, Alistair, thank you. Well, let's take a quick break. And when we come back, I know you wanted to talk a little bit about Russia, Ukraine, and maybe that's partly out of your Ukraine visit and your conversation with Zelensky. This episode is brought to you by Lloyd's Business and Commercial Banking. We hear a lot of talk in politics about stability, as Gordon Brown used to call it. But I think that word means different things to different people. To me, it does mean new labour. For me, I might be tempted to say Theresa May, but it doesn't matter whether you're a business, small business owner, or a government, Stability is never about avoiding change.

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33:30Rory Stewart:Welcome back to the Rest of This Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Anastasia Campbell. Question from Harry. Is Putin making noises about the Ukraine war coming to an end? Just him buying time for Iran to stuff his coffers again, Alistair? Well, I said to you on the main episode that I'm in Germany at the moment and the papers, you know, the main newspaper I got developed today, which is a huge broadsheet with these sort of 5 ,000 word articles about all sorts of things. There was nothing about the UK, literally not a word about Keir Starmer's travails. It was a little piece yesterday.

34:06Rory Stewart:Well, that's extraordinary. Wait, can I just pause on that? That is absolutely extraordinary. I mean, if you go back five years, certainly 10 years, the idea that the Prime Minister of the UK is about to be toppled would have been absolutely front and centre. I was so struck by this because, you know, we'll get on to Ukraine just in a second, but I was in the States at another one of these meetings. And I offered to talk about British politics and people just didn't want to hear, literally didn't want to hear. Listen, there's a lot going on here. Friedrich Merz has just had a bit of a defeat in the parliament where he tried to get through this thing where employers would help out paying, reducing the energy bills of their employees, and that's been defeated.

34:49But the front page is absolutely covered with stuff about Ukraine, and including Putin suggesting that Gerhard Schröder is the man to be the negotiator between Russia and Ukraine.

35:03Rory Stewart:Just remind people a little bit about the disgrace there and how controversial that is and why most people would raise their eyebrows at that. Well, Kaya Kalas, the European diplomatic chief, she has raised her eyebrows as high as it is possible for them to go and said this is completely unacceptable. So have the Ukrainians, basically because Gerhard Schröder, when he was chancellor of Germany, and he's also now 82, which I think could be a factor. But he basically got very, very close to Putin, including after leaving office to becoming, you know, how can we put this, a Russian lobbyist who made a lot of money doing so.

35:36So in answer to Harry's question, does it signal that he's just trying to buy a bit more time? The answer to that is probably because Ukraine do seem to be on the up at the moment. There was a piece I saw in one of the papers about how the Russians are actually losing territory at the moment, which is, you know, this is not exactly going according to plan. There has been huge debate about anybody you talk to in the military says what the Ukrainians have done in terms of their drone technology and their use of drones has been huge. They are losing somewhere between 25 ,000 and 30 ,000 troops pretty much every month.

36:15We're up to 1.2 million casualties on the Russian side, probably half a million on the Ukrainian side. Very interesting was to watch the parade, the annual military parade that they do for their victory over the Nazis, which Putin has turned in recent years into one of the most gigantic shows of military strength. And it was minuscule, added to which he was filmed sort of being scuttled into a biosecurity out of the way. They were worried about Ukrainian drones hitting it. they had to get trump to ask zelensky to promise not to try and drop drones on it so that suggests he's in a pretty weak position but i think the ukrainians will be saying hold on a minute he's

37:00Rory Stewart:just trying to buy time it's so interesting this i i was trying to remind myself about this narrative so the honest truth is there's been a lot of crying wolf on both sides um going back from uh february 22 which is when so it's been the war has now been going on for over four years Yeah. There's been a number of occasions where the commentators have convinced themselves either that Russia is on its last legs and it's about to collapse or Ukraine is on its last legs and about to collapse. And so far for the last four years, neither has really proved true. So you'll remember probably the most desperate moment for Putin last time round.

37:40Rory Stewart:Firstly, was his failure to take Kiev. And then in the year later was the year in which there was a real expectation there was going to be Ukrainian counteroffensive. And Prigozhin, who led the Wagner group and had done all the fighting around Bakhmut, effectively tried to march on Moscow and stage a coup. And people really thought, you know, this is real trouble. but the Russian economy proved much more resilient than people predicted they found workarounds they sold oil to China they had shadow fleets they were doing funny stuff with Iran their economy grew surprisingly strongly they massively increased expenditure on defense they started pouring out munitions and so the story if we go back 12 months was Russia really had the initiative.

38:27Rory Stewart:Trump was coming in. He seemed to be very much on the Russian side. Ukraine was struggling to recruit, whereas Russia was paying bigger and bigger bounties, getting lots of people in. Russia was slowly grinding forward. People pointing out it's pretty slow, but it was advancing. And if you fast forward to where we were even two months ago with the Iran war, Again, basically what Trump did would seem to strengthen Russia because he's been firing a lot of the missiles which could have been sold to the Ukrainians at the Iranians, and he allowed the oil price to go up. So oil revenue has been going up for Putin, and Ukraine continues to struggle to recruit.

39:09Rory Stewart:They have a real problem replacing manpower up at the front line. A lot of those units are only 46 % to 60 % full. Some of them are only 25 % staffed. Yeah, there's been quite a lot of desertion as well. I think there's quite a lot of desertion on both sides. And when I was in Ukraine fairly recently, one of the things I kept hearing was that the length of time which troops were being expected to serve without a break becoming a real problem for Zelensky. But it's very, you know, Putin's definitely, he's always up to something and he's definitely up to something on this because he, you know, essentially there's of the many kind of several thousand word articles course, that have been written about analysing this, him saying that, you know, we're nearing the end of the war, we're heading towards the end of the war.

39:53Somebody's written a column pointing out how he talked about the Ukrainians four years ago, compared to how he's talking about them now. He never calls Zelensky generally by name. He's never, ever referred to him as president and probably never will. But he called him Mr. Zelensky, whereas he used to be talk about you know the nazi the military operation for the denazification the kiev regime so he's definitely softening his talk i think what the schroeder thing does i think it's a classic putin divide and rule it's like i saw one columnist today saying well what's wrong with girl schroeder he's very serious he's very experienced you know he knows putin well in as long as he's not unkind to the ukrainians so it's a classic where most of the establishment come out and say this a stupid idea, but then he gets a few going the other way.

40:41Rory, one other thing I wanted to raise in relation to Russia. Now, you know, you and I read an awful lot of different things. I've been reading the annual report of the Estonian equivalent at MI6, which is about the extent to which Russia is deceiving people from Africa to go to Russia and then go and fight on the front line and we're talking about hundreds and hundreds who are dead and of course you've now got quite a large number of african countries who are under pressure to bring people back which are kenya we're talking around about a thousand just a little

41:20Rory Stewart:explainer on that what seems to be happening is that russians are signing up kenyans giving them the impression they're going to get a nice job in Russia. And they arrive in Russia, get their passports taken away, they get told that they're not going to have their travel back to Kenya paid for, and they're sent within three or four days to the front line without their passports. And the overwhelming majority of them are being killed. So it's completely morally abhorrent. The Kenyan intelligence service reckons of a thousand that have gone to Russia, 30 have come back alive are you talking kenya tanzania zambia south africa nigeria ghana togo botswana mali guinea cameroon eritrea and you can see you know because we talk a lot about demographic change and africa has got this extraordinary kind of growth of young people so young but with economies that aren't necessarily geared up for that so people who are being offered jobs as cooks, as drivers, as builders, whatever it might be, getting their flight paid to go to Moscow, then getting there and finding that they're sent straight off to the front line.

42:33Because they've been made to sign a contract in Russian, which they can't read. A lot of them, yeah. Yeah, they just sign it and say, this is going to be great. And then we talked a lot about how China and Russia have been investing a lot in diplomatic power within Russia. This cannot be sustainable. These countries must be trying to get something done to stop their own people getting sent off there to the front line.

42:55Rory Stewart:Yeah, it's horrifying. It's horrifying. And again, we don't know because both Russia and Ukraine are so weakened. I mean, both of them have taken such unbelievable economic damage, have suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties, are locked in this horrifying drone war at the frontline. And if either of them were to collapse, we would be able to provide a very convincing reason why, because there's so much economic and personal damage right. And yet, more than four years on, they're both continuing. And I think you'd be brave person to guess which one is going to fold first. There's a whole industry, as you can imagine, of very smart people in ministries of defense and intelligence agencies around the world trying to come up with objective indicators on who's doing better.

43:46Rory Stewart:And in the end, the problem comes down to is it comes down to what you can count. And the thing that you can't count is morale, nationalism, political endurance. So there are 10 indicators that somebody sent me that they're monitoring at the moment. Net territorial change per month, Russian casualty to recruitment ratio, AWOL desertion rates, Russian sign-on bonuses, drone missile production and launch rates on both sides, air defence interceptor stocks, Russian oil export volumes and revenues, not just oil price, Russian inflation, labour shortages, regional budget stress, I'm about to finish, Ukraine's domestic arms output, drones, missiles, artillery shells, and finally, Western aid reliability, air defence, ammunition, finance.

44:31Rory Stewart:So they try to take these 10 different questions, run them through all these models, but they have consistently been wrong over the last four years on predicting which one's going to fold first, because in the end, it seems as though there are things you can't count in the question of whether Putin and Zelensky keep going. Yeah. Right, Rory, a couple of lighter things to finish off on. Somebody just wants to know, what is my obsession with trees all about? You're mildly obsessed with trees as well, aren't you? I am. I plant a lot of trees. I might even be better than you at the names of trees and tree species.

45:06Rory Stewart:I think you're more of a fleet on trees. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, no, absolutely. Because I love trees, but I deliberately don't want to be an expert on trees. Because I think if that happens, you can spend all your time thinking what they are rather than the effect that they're having on you. So tell us about trees and your life. When did you start with your tree of the day? Is this a late, late development? Have you always been obsessed with trees? I've never been obsessed. I've always loved trees. I think there's something about trees I've always loved. But I started posting a tree of the day quite a long time ago.

45:35Now, if you go through my pictures on my phone, it's mainly trees, to be honest. And I got an absolute beauty this morning, which may well be today's winner. But Rory, I don't know where it comes from. I just love, and even sort of ugly trees, I quite like looking at them to think, you know, you're quite interesting.

45:53Rory Stewart:The Japanese particularly love what you might call an ugly tree. I mean, a lot of the Japanese wabi-sabi aesthetic, a lot of what you put around a tea room in Japan, if you were going in for your tea ceremony, are trees which are warped pine trees that are stunted or head off in odd directions or losing bits. And actually, I've been trying to do a bit of this planting myself because I've been trying to do a mini Japanese garden in Scotland. And you can actually try to plant the tree at an angle. You can do a very careful bit of Japanese pruning where you take off the leader in order to create this distorted look.

46:30Rory Stewart:The most extreme, obviously, is bonsai where you're doing this in a tiny pot. But Japanese will do this at huge scale. If you go to the great Japanese gardens, you can see trees which are 300, 400 years old, where every year there are teams of people out there carefully making it look as though it's a wind warped tree on a Scottish cliff. And in fact, it's sitting in the middle of Kyoto. You're right, by the way. You definitely, I've been to your garden up in Scotland. I'd say you're more of a tree expert than I am. I'm a kind of very, I'm a tree amateur who just loves to look at them and sort of bathe in them.

47:05And I want to plug something called TreeLine. If people go to treeline.org.uk, this brings two of my passions together, trees and music. And this is a composer called Graham Fitkin, who's going to be cycling from Romania to the UK and on the way doing 20 concerts in and around trees and forests. And he's using, including playing inside trees, by the way, and the sounds of trees, using music, recordings, concert performances. It's all about just sort of, you know, he obviously loved trees even more than you and I do. So I think it might be the sort of thing if people have been reading and enjoying the interviews in our newsletter, I think it might be one for Izzy, our newsletter interviewer.

47:54I think Graham would be a great interviewee.

47:57Rory Stewart:I can't resist sort of my two normal plugs. One is you and I both are great fans of the Woodland Trust, which continue to do lovely stuff. Secondly, I'm continuing to push for the new Labour leaders as they emerge, she or he, please think about turning the green belt into the largest forest in England. And I'm obsessed with this idea to remind listeners, you could put hundreds of millions of trees and it would transform a green belt, which people don't want to develop, but which really isn't a very beautiful place into if you plant those trees, you would have something that would be there for hundreds of years.

48:29Rory Stewart:It would improve air quality in London. It would drop temperatures in London, be great for climate change. But most importantly of all, because it's close to our largest population center. It would allow 10, 12 million people, including young people from inner city areas, to get out into nature and bathe in those trees. So if you're really looking for an exciting big legacy project, planting the green belt. And final thing, I had a – because now that we've become like podcast bros, we need to become wellness influencers. That's our next stage, Alistair, in our development. So this is my new thought.

49:05Rory Stewart:Yesterday I went for a run. Yeah. Yeah. And my friend Felix has been trying to convince me I need to run at zone two, which means that you need to run at a kind of pace at which you can have a conversation. Okay. Keep your heart rate really low. So you're slightly plodding. And the way in which I suddenly managed to achieve it running through the park is by looking at trees. If you're able to run at a pace where you can really absorb the canopy and the trees and look in detail at the leaves, I find you naturally adjust your pace down to zone two. okay i used to when i was when i was running doing marathons and stuff i used to use trees as rather than thinking i've got 10 miles to go i think i've got to get to that next tree and then i've got to get the next tree so they you know i use them in in different ways by the way we literally while i've been speaking somebody's pinged me a video which i actually did see last night from talking of uh trees and changing the world for the better which sadiq khan after 10 years of mayor of london put out a video sort of all the sort of stuff he's been involved in but there's one very very good example he set out early to tackle the idea of you know air quality in london and asthma and remember all the fuss about ulez and he was going to lose labor all these by-elections all that stuff and he just stuck to his guns stick to your guns is always a good policy wonderful final question for you alistair from cameron you're always recommending books on the show.

50:32Rory Stewart:How do you find time to read all of these books? Good question. I think you look at more books than I do, I think. Well, partly because I've got a Kindle. So, you know, if I'm thinking yesterday, I'm about to do a show with Alistair on China, and I spent a lot of time talking about Elbridge Colby and I've never read his book, I can literally in the bath in 30 seconds, download Elbridge Colby's book and start reading it. And how much of it would you read? I would probably read the first 40, 50 pages, partly because those American geopolitics books are slightly set up like an article in Foreign Affairs with the Atlantic, where they basically set out their argument in the introduction of the first chapter.

51:14Rory Stewart:So you can be pretty confident that you've got a sense of where they're going. I wonder whether that isn't actually part of the problem with the loss of those kind of American policy books. We interviewed Ezra Klein, who was talking about his book Abundance. And again, I wonder how many people make it to the end of the book and how many like me just kind of get the framing at the beginning and then go around talking about Ezra Klein's Bonds. But you like to finish books, right? Well, I don't mind throwing a book away if I, I don't mean literally throw it away, but putting it down if I'm not enjoying it.

51:42Fiona, the number of times she'll sort of sit up in bed saying, God, I really hate this book. This book is so boring. This book is so crap. This person can't write. Why are you reading it? It's because I've started. I've got to go to the dead. Whereas if I don't like a book early on, and it's partly because one of the best feelings in the world is when you pick up a book, usually a book you weren't even aware of because you're in a bookshop or a library or something, and you pick up a book and you know within a few pages that you're really going to like that book. I love that feeling. So if you spend all your time reading books that you're actually not enjoying reading, you minimize the number of times you have that great feeling.

52:21I go through phases.

52:22Rory Stewart:Your serendipity points, sorry, just quickly, because this will be my last introduction, but your point about serendipity is important. The problem with Kindle, I'm not browsing, I'm downloading a book that I already know I want. I'm not looking at a bookshelf and finding things. I just, by serendipity, found a book by Henry Power, who's an academic at Exeter, called Homer Haunted, which is about his own personal relationship with Homer and the Iliad. And it's rich and beautiful and strange and quite emotional. And again, it wouldn't be like Elbridge Colby. I wouldn't be downloading it from Kindle.

52:57Rory Stewart:I came across it because I met his sister in the street. Then she handed it over. Fiona and I have been listening on drives. If we're in the car, we've been listening to Andrew Lowney's book about the Duke and Duchess of York. And my God, Roy, I don't know if you had anything to do with them. They are awful people. I'm sorry. And if the guy's research is even 60 % right, they are truly, truly, truly awful. But Fiona's loving it. I'm tolerating it because I just think why are we spending so much time listening about these two clearly awful people? But it's a brilliantly – I mean, the research, the depth of research is extraordinary.

53:37Here's one you'll like, Rory. Gabrielle Rifkind. You may have come across Gabrielle Rifkind because she works in sort of conflict resolution. she's written a book the subtitle is turning conflict into connection but you love the title how to agree to disagree so it's a message for the for the podcast i think gabrielle spotted

53:56Rory Stewart:something because she keeps sending me little links to it and i i've also been looking at the book a bit yeah so well done gabrielle for picking out this yeah it's a book that i'll dip in and out of i won't read the whole thing because it's actually not about conflict resolution that you and I are very interested in. It's about marriage and it's about sex and it's about, you know, getting on with your friends and school bullying and all that. But it's interesting how she's taken her kind of adult professional life and turned it into a book. And then the other one is by, I mentioned a few weeks ago, Florence Gaupp, who's a German, wrote a book about where we're going in the future.

54:31And I said, this book should be translated to English, as a result of which she sent me her previous book, which had been translated into English. It's called The Future, A User's Guide. And again, it's kind of how to take what we know about now and the past and use it as a sort of active tool to navigate the future. But I'll read both of those. I'll probably dip in and out of... Fiona will make me listen to the end of the Andrew book. God, they are awful rory did you have anything to do with them i'm not gonna get drawn into i mean

55:06Rory Stewart:i didn't i didn't i really didn't i didn't i didn't i didn't i didn't i think i've met uh prince andrew twice in my life for five minutes at a party i mean i know know very little about i love the way you deflate anything to do with the royals that was really lovely yeah i did totally deflecting that my a serious recommendation for people who want a big book to get into which is geopolitics which i think i've talked about a little bit but i think is amazing is Edward Fishman's choke points, how economic warfare is changing the world. And that's basically about how Trump is now using all America's handle on choke points around the world.

55:44Rory Stewart:Of course, Strait of Hormuz is one big example. But how they developed a lot of that after 9-11, originally going after terrorists. And then it began to be something that you could use to put pressure on Europe over Greenland. But anyway, Edward Fishman choke points. very good well there we are we've talked about trump and g that will we'll probably talk about that again next week i imagine uh we've talked about russia ukraine and the luring of african men to the front line which is pretty horrible we talked about our love for trees i'm looking at some beautiful trees out the window now and um and our books there we are lovely to talk to you as always lovely talk to you have a great week and i'm let's talk soon bye-bye