Laurence Norman
speaker
77 appearances
6 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 22 Jul
Laurence Norman’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 — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
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WSJ What’s News · Gasoline Prices Drive Inflation to Highest Level in Two Years · 10 Apr 2026
podcast
What I would say, based on covering this for a very long time, is when you can kick issues down the road, you do.
And I think the most likely is to come up with some kind of temporary arrangement that gets you through the two-week period, that makes this brief ceasefire into a longer-term ceasefire, an open space for a real negotiation in the coming weeks, months.
potentially years, because the only two alternatives are one, you can resolve all of these issues in two weeks, which is really impossible.
And the second is that the Zorks fail and they go back to war, which is plausible, but it's fairly clear that both sides don't want to do it.
Thanks a lot.
So I think the first thing to say is that this change so far is incremental. There is not a sudden race to nuclear arms taking place across the world. What we've heard in Europe is in Germany, a country that has never really considered nuclear weapons. There is some talk on the margins of do we need to do this?
Significantly, we've heard France talk about extending its nuclear umbrella, using the nuclear weapons that it has to defend its European allies. And there is some interest and there are some conversations around how that would work.
This obviously comes at a time when there is a great deal of concern that the Trump administration is less interested in NATO and less interested in defending Europe's security.
If there is a single country that is at this stage most likely to go for a nuclear weapon because of its concerns about U.S. support... it is probably South Korea. They've talked about it over the last couple of years. They also had a program in the past that was dabbling in nuclear weapons.
There are US officials who are expected to be quite high up in the Trump administration who have encouraged South Korea to think about the nuclear option because the US doesn't want to have a large defense commitment and tens of thousands of troops bogged down in South Korea in the future if it's going to face off with China.
Iran. They are very, very close. Some people think that they could put together some kind of crude missile in a matter of two, three months. They could easily choose to develop a nuclear weapon. And as Marion said, if the Iranians do, the Saudis have said they will. The one that we should really worry about is the one we've been worrying about for 20 years, which is Iran.
So the UK and France are working on plans that would put a force of thousands of Europeans into Ukraine under a peace deal. It wouldn't sit on the border, it would be placed elsewhere in Ukraine. Sie hatten zwei andere Aufgaben in London. Eine war, den Rauch zwischen Trump und Zelenskyj zu patchen. and to get the Ukrainians and the Americans to agree on a deal for minerals in Ukraine.
It's not clear that that move forward. And secondly, is that even the Brits, who are very clear that they are willing to put troops in Ukraine under a peace deal, say they need Washington to provide some kind of protection for those European forces if they come under attack from Russia. And Donald Trump has been anything but clear about whether he's willing to commit.
There is clearly going to be a lot less money coming from Congress for Ukraine. Can Europe replace the amount of money and in particular the amount of military equipment that was coming from the U.S.? Probably not entirely, and that is a problem.
Time is not on Ukraine's side. They're not winning this war. In recent times, they've been losing this war.
I think we should be frank here. A lot of European governments were absolutely dreading the prospect of Trump coming back to the White House, given the kind of things he was saying about Ukraine and Russia. He's talked repeatedly about his friendship with Putin. He gave the impression that he wasn't greatly concerned about Ukraine's future. He was pretty negative about Zelensky himself.
So they were very, very fearful that he would come back, force Ukraine to the negotiating table again, and cut a deal with Putin at Ukraine's expense.
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