Ben Hall
speaker
96 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 10 Jul
Ben Hall’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Taking Stock · Are weight loss drugs starting to have an economic impact on society? · 10 Jul 2026
podcast
So some of the big military powers are really not spending enough and their militaries have become heavily sort of depleted and can't meet their huge ambitions for a kind of global role, if you like.
Well, there is a certain amount of kind of flattery that is being directed at Donald Trump.
And we've certainly seen that from Mark Rutter, the NATO secretary general, a former Dutch prime minister.
But that's also Rutter's job.
Other NATO members are clearly anxious not to see America eliminated.
become angry with the alliance and pull back faster and more extensively than they've threatened to do so, so far.
But I do also think that what you're seeing in Europe is leaders beginning to sort of tire of trying to appease Trump because it actually makes no difference.
um and it doesn't necessarily cost them politically at home and you're seeing that certainly with spain with spain's left-wing prime minister pedro sanchez was one of the first to stand up to him over the iran war and now you're seeing georgia maloney um who in theory is ideologically aligned with trump but the the two have had a spectacular falling out and maloney shows no sign of trying to sort of patch things up or curry favor with him so
I think what leaders are trying to do is make sense of Trump of an erratic US president who can both berate them and kind of love bomb them in the same meeting.
And they're trying to fathom what they should be taking seriously and what they can ignore.
I think the danger is that they ignore the fact that this is a president who just doesn't see Russia seriously.
as a major threat to American security, let alone European security, and that they can no longer rely on him.
Well, this idea of NATO 3.0 is actually a sort of American expression.
And from an American point of view, from Trump administration's point of view, it is that the Europeans take primary responsibility for their collective defense.
So America would continue to provide the nuclear umbrella.
but that the Europeans now need to provide far more of the fighting forces and all of those kind of support functions that I mentioned before, like intelligence and reconnaissance and transport aircrafts and air defence.
If not everything, then at least a lot more than they're providing now.
And I think what the Europeans are beginning to realise is that just sort of spending more and buying more kit is
And that kind of rebalancing in NATO actually has to come with the Europeans taking more control of NATO and actually being able to decide themselves whether they are going to fight and not deferring always to America because America may not have Europe's interests at heart.
That's what's changed in recent months.
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