Rory Stewart

critical minerals, and independence, right?

Independent sovereign control of critical minerals, quantum, AI, cloud computing, satellite, ISR, ballistic missiles, financial payment systems, debt, right?

How would we do that architecture?

What kind of leadership would we be looking for?

It's a huge shift.

I keep coming back to this very, very weird moment where

Europe and the UK didn't manage to get their defense agreement together.

So a lot of Starmer's speeches about it.

It came down to the fact that Europe wanted the UK to pay a few billion and the UK thought it was too much.

But what you expect at a moment of crisis is political leaders not to get caught up in that sort of stuff, to see the big picture, not to get dragged down into a few billion here, a few billion there, some rules here, but really think we've got to make this work.

But it doesn't feel like he's got it yet.

I don't think he sees how serious it is.

I don't think he sees how radical the rupture is.

I think he's just caught up.

This is a speech, a lot of this is about Russian threats to Europe and they need to defend ourselves.

And he's worried about Farage.

I don't think he's actually really thinking about how the US has completely shifted the entire global architecture.

for Trumpism.

This is no longer a world that you need to be coded.

Possibly.