535. The Ebola Outbreak and the British Far-Right’s Next Move

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0:13Rory Stewart:How serious is the new Ebola outbreak? The answer is very. And the cuts to US global health funding are probably part of the reason why this is happening now. Elon Musk is worth hundreds of billions. I mean, he could feed all the hungry people in the world. Yeah, especially as he was the one who cut USAID in the first place. One of my favourite quotes of the whole thing, he's trying to flatter him, but he's basically just abusing the country. Trump said he's very, very tall, especially for this country, because they tend to be a little shorter. As we speak, Putin is on his way to Beijing. Yeah.

0:43Rory Stewart:For his 40th meeting. And that'll be very interesting. 40th meeting. Very interesting watching that. This episode is brought to you by Fuse Energy. Fuse has introduced the tracker tariff designed to give customers what matters most from their energy supplier. Savings, clarity, and a bit more control. And it guarantees that your rates stay below the off-gem price gap, which saves you up to£200. And the tariff updates automatically every quarter. Energy prices don't move in straight lines. Global events and market pressures you can't predict, and certainly can't control, still find their way onto your bill.

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2:02Rory Stewart:Welcome to Rest Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. Now, Rory, we managed to get through the whole of the main episode without mentioning DJ Trump, but we're not going to succeed this time. No, we're not. So we're going to do US-China to follow up on the episode we did. What actually happened in that summit? What came out of it? What does it mean about the new world? We're going to look at the Ebola outbreak and what that means for the world. We're going to look at the question of the far right in Britain. And we've got a rather interesting question about communities.

2:35Rory Stewart:So a lot of things to get through. So, Alice, starting on this, and I'd be also interested whether you think we got what we got right, what we got wrong. But Evie's asked, are Xi and Putin playing Trump? And Roy, not Rory, has said, has Trump's visit to China shown that China has trumped the USA and that USA is now subordinate to China on the world stage? It's interesting how those questions, I think, reflect most of the questions that came in about this, which suggests that most of our listeners and viewers do think that if there was a winner or loser, then Xi was the winner and Trump was the loser.

3:11Look, I thought it was fascinating to watch. I really did. And I've got to obviously try to park my Trump derangement syndrome.

3:18Rory Stewart:And before the TDS, give us a sense of what it looked like and felt like. come there what stood out to me was to go to evie's point i did feel that he was being played because he loves all that stuff he loves all the children waving their flags as he came off the plane the maga crowd was saying this is a bigger reception than obama got when he went there i'll tell you what i found the most interesting thing was that right at the top president xi said something really tough about Taiwan. He basically said, if we get this right, that would be great for relations. If we mishandle this issue, it will affect American-Chinese relations at every level.

3:58And then the other thing I thought was stunning was when he basically said, it was this one phrase, I mean, in English on the translation, it came over in five words. And it said, century-long transformation is accelerating. And what that said to me, I'm not a China expert, but what it said to me was this was him to Donald Trump's face saying, we are overtaking you.

4:25Rory Stewart:It's an amazing moment. I was struck by the fact that there's this famous story and detective story, to remember, the dog that didn't bark. So the coverage has been about what didn't happen. But I think that's very significant. So we go back. The last 20 years has really been about America and China pumping up for a new Cold War. Started with Obama, talking about pivot towards Asia. During Trump one, we had his sexual estate who we've interviewed, Mike Pompeo, lacerating China as a dictatorship. And then actually even - Marco Rubio does the same. Marco Rubio did the same. And even Biden. You'll remember when we were recording podcasts, some of the very tense meetings that Jake Sullivan was holding with his Chinese counterpart and Biden not visiting China and skirting around the edge of each other at Bali and trying to read this.

5:14Rory Stewart:So you would have expected until this year one of two things, right? Either that narrative, which is the narrative that Rubio was pushing, Elbridge Colby was pushing, who's the deputy secretary of defense. And he's written a whole book about this, which is how is this used to really put China back in its box? So their dream would be, number one, you reinforce deterrence on Taiwan. You really signal to China, we've got Taiwan's back. We've got the back of Japan and South Korea and all of the US military is concentrating there, not in the Gulf, not in the Middle East, not in Europe. It's all that.

5:55Rory Stewart:Second thing, you'd probably lean very, very hard into unequal balance on trade. So let's say you really felt, as many, many people do, and particularly Republican voters, China's hollowed out American industry, cost millions of American jobs because they've unfairly manipulated their currency, subsidized their industries, stolen our intellectual property. This is a summit in which you really stick it to China on that. Or you do something else, which is you do the G2 model. The G2 model says the rest of the world doesn't really matter now. We're 50 % of the world economy. China, which was smaller, smaller than the British economy in 2004, right?

6:35Rory Stewart:It's about seven times larger than us. So it is a G2 setup in this world. So you might say, okay, let's sort out the world's issues. We're going to sort out AI safety. We're going to come up with agreements on global development, global trade. That's all the stuff we said they might do. Environment, climate, whatever you might do. None of that happened. But what's interesting for me is that it could have been worse, right? Trump, I mean, I don't know whether he gets a cookie for this, but he didn't really say very much about Taiwan, which was a turn up for the books because pretty much anything he said about Taiwan would have gone wrong.

7:08Rory Stewart:And the summit ended really with these two big superpowers circling around each other a bit suspicious, but they haven't upped the ante either in trade wars or Cold War. Yeah. You should tell listeners we've interviewed this week, Rahm Emanuel, who was Barack Obama's chief of staff. And he's now putting his toe pretty deep into the water to try and become the next American president. He's still very hard over on China. We've also had quite a lot of feedback that we weren't hard over enough. Very, very interesting how we sort of quite liked him, but our team really, really didn't. So I'd be fascinated what listeners and viewers think.

7:46When you said what was it like to sort of watch them, They're two such different people, but actually they've got similarities. One of my favourite quotes of the whole thing was Trump said this, he said, he's very, very tall, especially for this country. He's standing there. He's very, very tall, especially for this country, because they tend to be a little shorter, which is kind of, he's trying to flatter him, but he's basically just abusing the country in his own sort of, his own pretty racist way.

8:14Rory Stewart:Do you know that the height of Chinese teenagers has increased something like five inches. And a lot of this is to do, you know, I don't want to turn this even more into a health podcast, but it's almost entirely about protein. The same happened in Japan after the war. Incredible expansion. I was born in Hong Kong and my parents lived in Hong Kong until 1997. And when my mother started teaching at Hong Kong University, my mother's very short, about five foot, two, three. She was taller than a lot of her students. By the time she left, she was dwarfed by her students. Incredible what protein does.

8:45Well, anyways, He's very, very tall. I was also struck by how absolutely exquisite President Xi's suits were. Is that what he noticed? Oh, I mean, they cost a fortune. They were really, really smart. Trump's, because their styles are so different, Trump goes in.

9:04Rory Stewart:If you remember the last summit when they first met, he said, I'd give the meeting 12 out of 10. We know he struggles with maths, right? But 12 out of 10 isn't a thing, really. This one, he went in saying the first thing that's going to happen is going to give me a big hug. Well, he didn't give him – it was pretty cold. And so you have the situation, particularly after the summit ended. Trump gets on the headquarters. You remember that famous fraternal embrace that Brezhnev used to give these German leaders? Yeah, where they'd kiss them on the lips. There's nothing like that. There was nothing like that.

9:33But Trump kept saying the whole time, he's a great friend. He's become a great friend. I get a lot of trouble for saying he's a great friend. He said all this stuff. He was really trying to lay it on. And Xi was having none of it. And then when they got to the briefings after the whole thing, one of the Chinese foreign ministry guys was asked whether they were friends, as Trump kept saying. And his reply was, the two sides exchange views are major issues. So Trump gets on the plane and they were all saying, well, that was all a bit disappointing, wasn't it, Mr. President? It was amazing. We did the deals on this.

10:06Boeing shares fell, by the way, because the expectations were not there.

10:09Rory Stewart:Incidentally, just a footnote here, Trump has just disclosed his financial investments. Oh, I know. He's a big investor in Boeing. You hear people in the newspapers speaking on behalf of Boeing saying, if you want to make President Trump happy, buy Boeing. He's a big shareholder in Boeing. He goes around the world selling Boeing airplanes, and he's a big shareholder in Boeing. He's also done more trades since becoming president than every president in history. Anyway, so there he was. Anyway, so he went off, bought lots of Boeing shares. I'm going to sell lots of Boeings, and the Boeing share price will go up, and I'll make lots of money.

10:40Well, in fact, it went down because he oversold how many he was going to sell, and they didn't buy quite as many. He gets on the plane and says they've done all these amazing deals. So then Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, is asked about all these amazing deals, and his answer is this. We're continuing to implement all the consensus reached in earlier consultations, agreeing to establish a board of trade and a board of investment, addressing each other's concerns over market access and advancing the expansion of two-way trade under a reciprocal tariff reduction framework.

11:08Rory Stewart:Blimey, so in an age of kind of authenticity, populism and soundbites, basically every quote you're giving me from the Chinese government sounds like some 1990s policy paper. Yeah, but they're both saying... No. Bullshit. Yeah. They're both saying bullshit. And here's the other thing. Evie's question, are Xi and Putin playing Trump? As we speak, Putin is on his way to Beijing. Yeah. His 40th meeting. And that'll be very interesting. 40th meeting. Very interesting watching that. I thought the other really interesting thing about, and it was so deliberate, he was doing it so deliberately, was when he talked about all the differences between them.

11:47But he then said, you know, the key question is, can we, China and US, can we overcome the so-called Thucydides trap? trap. And this, again, I think was a way of saying, we're overtaking you. Because Thucydides trap, which was made famous by a book by a guy called Graham Allison, whose book was called Destined for War. And his thesis is that whenever there has been a rising power approaching an established power, a hegemony, that inevitably ends in war. He studied 16 situations like that, 12 of them ended in war.

12:23Rory Stewart:So Graham Allison actually was a colleague of mine at Harvard. I know him quite well. And he is pretty amazing because he defines these ideas. And one of the great tricks actually in being somebody working on government is he came up with the phrase, he said it is trap. And now you can see Xi Jinping using it. And his great friend and colleague, Joe Nye, came up with the phrase, soft power. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's a great trick. And you've got to get there with Percivillians. it's not getting there very quickly is it three years old i've been banging on that person but i shall remain hasn't done it yet i mean he's using ping he's percivilian yeah i mean he just he's just you keep going so i think that was him saying as he was saying with the transformation by the way which he said first time he said that concept of the acceleration was in a meeting in moscow two years ago with putin so i think what he's saying and i actually think the timing of Putin's visit is deliberate.

13:15It's basically saying, the state media today in China is saying, this shows that we are now the center of global power. We had Trump last week, we've got Putin this week, we've had all those leaders I mentioned last week going. So I think they would have felt they got a lot more out of this.

13:32Rory Stewart:Than America did. Okay. Well, look, we talked about the fact that they didn't talk about the big global issues, global development, Africa, climate, AI safety. And one issue they didn't talk about was global public health. So we've had a question from Ezra Helen. And this relates exactly to this. How serious is the new Ebola outbreak? Should we be worried about it spreading beyond Africa, especially with the cuts to US global health funding? Very good question. The answer is very. And yes, and the cuts to US global health funding are probably part of the reason why this is happening now. Big plug, as always for leading and people who aren't listening to the back catalogue of leading.

14:12Rory Stewart:Atul Gawande has done some wonderful stuff in this recently. He was the USAID deputy administrator who led on global health. This is something that means a lot to me because I was the minister during the last big Ebola outbreak about 10 years ago. David, David. Yeah. And when that happened 10 years ago, I got together in Paris immediately with Mark Green, who was the head of USAID. We went for a walk over that bridge with all the padlocks on it in the margins of a, I think it was a G7 development ministers meeting. And we worked out funding. And I think we put in an extra 100 million, USAID put in an extra 100 million.

14:51Rory Stewart:Why does it matter? It matters because that allowed us to fund protective equipment, getting the nurses to the frontline, doing the testing, developing the vaccination. I then went out to Eastern DRC. I went into these Ebola centers. I sat with a nurse who very sadly contracted Ebola and was dying in front of me. I saw children whose parents were in the center dying. We were washing ourselves in this very, very intense way to try to make sure there was no fluids of any sort. Is it through fluid that you get it? Yeah. And once you've contracted it, your mortality rate at the moment is about 50%.

15:26Rory Stewart:Half a chance. Very different to COVID. So when you were with the nurse who had it, what was the - There was a plastic sheet between me and him. We were talking through a plastic sheet. He was very, very courageously talking to me. And he probably had two days to live. So, it's something where, and people will hear this paradoxically, because it's so lethal, it doesn't spread quite as easily as things like COVID, because so many of the carriers are killed before they can pass it on. But the bigger issue is that global pandemics are, along with AI, probably the biggest threat for the next 20, 30 years that we need to worry about.

16:01Rory Stewart:And dismantling all the money in the global health architecture that stops, not just this outbreak of Ebola, but other forms of pandemic coming out of poor developing countries, overwhelming their health systems, overwhelming their borders, and ultimately getting to Britain. But if you go back to our previous discussion about the summit, Trump and Xi, given that it's not that long ago since COVID, and given Trump at the time was obsessed with the China element of COVID, you'd have thought that might have been part of the discussion. What have you learned? Have you studied it? What more can we say?

16:35But they're just, because it's not serious.

16:38Rory Stewart:It's so weird because even for Britain or Germany, if you're looking for a type of investment in international development where you can prove that there's a national interest, you're not just, in inverted commas, wasting money giving to people in another country, but you're actually protecting yourself. Global health is the key example. You spend on the border between Uganda and Eastern DRC, and you're less likely to end up with Ebola in Britain. I don't understand why people are not making these arguments. I don't understand why we're cutting our global health funding. I had a meeting this morning with a Swedish guy called Carl Skow, who is the COO of the World Food Programme.

17:16And this doesn't relate specifically to Ebola, but he was explaining what he has already seen about the consequences of USAID, UK DFID, German, other countries that have cut their defense spending. He literally got back yesterday from Afghanistan. He was saying they've had an earthquake, they've had two floods. They've got 2.5 million refugees that have come back from Pakistan and Iran. USAID has cut all, every single penny of funding to Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Okay. He was talking about Gaza. He said, basically in Gaza, they are now managing, World Food Programme is managing to get food in, but that is all that's going in.

18:06Rory Stewart:Okay. Can I just interrupt then? Because just to make the problem worse, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Gaza, when USAID and DFID took its money out, The only people really who stepped up in significant amounts for that were the Gulf, Qatar, Saudi, UAE. And their economies are now being crippled by the Iran blockade and this war that Trump and Israel have launched on Iran and Iran's response, which has been attacking them and closing their exports and destroying their economies. So the backup, the plan B, which was to get wealthy Gulf countries to step up and handle these problems, that's foreign side because those wealthy Gulf countries are now freezing their funding and are struggling to make their payments because they're not getting the income in.

18:53That's absolutely right. He said there are four key areas, themes, that are directly related to making their life much more difficult as a result, specifically, we'll come back to the cuts, but the Iran war. The first is they're having to step up their operations in Lebanon and to some extent Gaza as well. The second is the cost of operations have gone up 25 % because of the rise in the oil price. There are currently 300 million acutely hungry in the world. And he said if the oil price stays above$100 for any considerable period of time, they've calculated another 45 million will be pushed into acute hunger.

19:36And his final point is fertilizer. All of Africa's fertilizer comes through the Straits of Hormuz. So that's going to put prices up and supply down.

19:44Rory Stewart:I think huge credit to the people who are desperately trying to fill some of these gaps when these governments are falling aside and when this chaos is happening. Huge credit to governments like Qatar, which is still trying to support communities in these places. Huge credit also to the private philanthropists. I mean, I think it's wonderful that you do have private individuals being unbelievably generous, stepping in where governments are falling aside, but it can't carry it. You can't deal with Ebola on this basis. You can't deal with vaccinating people. You can't deal with malaria bed nets.

20:19Rory Stewart:You can't deal with a really big multi-billion dollar thing. Well, hold on. Some of these guys, the guys you talk about in your AI series, they could. I mean, Carl said it would take$13 billion to feed the hungry of the world today. And the war in Iran is costing$2 billion a day. So stop the war in Iran, and Elon Musk is worth hundreds of billions. I mean, he could feed all the hungry people in the world, and it would be a rounding error, and it would be nice to see him do it. So Elon, if you're listening - Especially as he was the one who cut US ID in the first place. Absolutely. If you're listening, step up.