David

they don't anymore.

I also think American politicians have

in some cases willfully um downplayed or ignored the the benefits of these security relationships with allies um or are just ignorant of them themselves and so the american population broadly i think has been i think more and more convinced that we need to take a transactional approach to these relationships and we don't we don't see the longer term strategic value in having

A peaceful and largely friendly European continent is not something that the United States of America has tended to enjoy throughout much of its history.

And given that Europe is one of our borders, it's obviously hugely advantageous to us.

But because we're not in a hot war with China, because the type of Russian conflict we're discussing, I mean, what we're discussing today in the show is so hard to get your mind around.

I think that the value we place on those relationships has collectively diminished.

Isn't there also an unanswered question in Europe about whether this is structurally the new normal or whether this is the outgrowth of Donald Trump's personality in politics?

And even if you have a Trump, a Trumpian successor like Vance or Rubio, that it

you wouldn't have the same sort of highly volatile, aggressive transactional approach to US relationships with European states that you would under Trump, right?

So that's an unanswered question at this point as well, which maybe makes it more likely if you're running MI6 to just stick your head in the sand and say, in four years, two years, it'll be better.

All that juicy British targeting information from the Caribbean.

there would be more incentive now to not share that than there would have been in the past.

I think that the product is probably still being shared.

And I suppose if you're in MI6 and you're thinking about an area where the Americans bring something to the table that

you don't have and you want to work on something on russia you'd probably probably still do that because you you'd want the help and it also probably depends a lot on the nature of the interpersonal relationships between the two services uh russia components and whether there's ongoing trust there but yeah i think overall you'd have to say

if we put things into the American system that would allow people in the White House to know who, or frankly, even at upper echelons at CIA to know who our sources are, you'd probably give that a second thought in this environment in a way that you wouldn't have in years past.

I'm backing into that just by, you know,

sort of context clues and just thinking through the problem.

I don't know if we have any examples of that or any instances of that actually happening yet though.