General Sir Patrick Sanders

speaker

1,311 appearances 12 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 2 Sep

General Sir Patrick Sanders’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 12 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 4.

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The General & The Journalist · The new Middle East: Can a ‘NATO of the East’ work? · 2 Sep 2026 podcast

I mean, there's always some debate between the South and the North, but broadly speaking, NATO recognises that the threat to the North Atlantic area comes from Russia.

And there's a quote from Glenn Snyder that says, alliances have no meaning apart from the adversary threat to which they are a response.

So if these three countries can't agree on the threat or the adversary, then it's hard to see it being a really substantive alliance.

The other question mark that we should pose at this point is how much do we believe in their willingness to bear costs for one another?

I mean, it's totally untested clearly at this stage, but it's also unknowable.

There's also this notion that...

You know, NATO relies on not just on countries fulfilling Article 3, their ability to defend themselves, having resilience, but also to come to the aid of other countries.

And that requires an expeditionary culture.

Now, the Turks clearly have got expeditionary capabilities and the Pakistanis have to an extent.

But but if you know, I mean, I've spent a lot of time in Pakistan.

Pakistan are very, very clear on where they see the threat coming from.

So their ability to release forces for some sort of major threat outside of the domestic theatre is probably going to be quite limited.

Arguably, the most contested space in the Gulf is the Strait of Hormuz.

The choke point is the ability to secure maritime freedom of navigation in that region requires you to have expeditionary blue water navies, and none of these countries really have to any great extent.

It doesn't feel to me at this stage like NATO is a fair comparison.

Likewise.

And thank you so much, Simon.

I always enjoy being schooled by you.

Well, that's all from us this week.

Thank you for listening.

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