Alastair Campbell

What's going on here?

And I think overall, that is the policy we should follow with regard to China as well.

can suddenly trigger us into these horrible global conflicts, which you can't really see coming.

And there was some strange resonances.

One of them is you point out in your book that people really struggle to get Austria-Hungary to define what its strategic objectives are in Serbia, right?

And that, of course, echoes with, you know, what on earth is the US strategic objective supposed to be in Iran?

I mean, it keeps shifting around, right?

Then the second one, which is this strange sense that Kaiser Wilhelm, the German Kaiser, alternates a bit like Donald Trump between sometimes sounding like he's on the side of peace and isolation and then sounding like he's on the side of reckless intervention.

And one of the very odd things in those few days that you describe is that his position seems to shift around in 12, 24 hours between, it's all going to be fine, no need to do anything, to we're going to push forward and stuff like that.

Maybe just finish by developing some of these questions, because I do think the oddity of the inability of policy elites to define what their strategic objectives are, and yet nevertheless go to war.

The sense that people who we trusted to be on one side suddenly end up being on another.

And that actually their ability to read each other is so bad because part of the reason they all go to war is that they all assume that they can get away with it and the other one isn't going to respond.

And finally, that it's their last chance.

I mean, this is something we hear a lot from Israel.

We've got to go into Iran now because we don't go in now.

This is our only opportunity.

They're going to get stronger.

They're going to get a new one.

One of the things that I was just thinking right at the very end that he was saying there is he was talking about compromise, not always getting everything that you want, not always getting the absolute security.

And that really resonated with me when I'm thinking about Netanyahu in Israel.