Rory Stewart

prosperity was going to come from America, yes, slightly pooling its sovereignty, accepting rules that apply to America as much as to other people.

That's the problem with international institutions.

The rules apply to you as well as to other people, right?

And what America got from that is incredible influence, power, and parallel prosperity because it was able to use that system

to build coalitions and allies and broadly push the world in its direction.

But if you go for a purist view, and of course Brexit's partly about this too, where you say we're not going to make any compromises at all on our ability to do whatever we want, whenever we want, anywhere in the world, then logically, of course, you do end up where Rubio is, just to go on from that.

So we outsourced our sovereignty to international institutions, invested too much in massive welfare states at the cost of defending ourselves, imposed energy policies on ourselves that are impoverishing our people,

oil and coal and natural gas, and let in an unprecedented wave of mass migration.

Civilization, the balance of history,

led to the shutting of our plants.

So he's going on essentially his story, and he uses the Fukuyama world, the end of history, that basically everything that's wrong in the world came from the liberal global order.

Globalization destroyed jobs, made us weaker, welfare states impoverished us, the UN... Which, by the way, until he became Secretary of State to Donald Trump, he did not believe.

And why do you think the Europeans were so cheered up by it?

And just to sort of footnote on this, because I'm not sure we've talked about this enough on the podcast, American public diplomacy is...

is now increasingly aligned with the national security strategy, which is a pompous way of saying- Has to be.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

It's a pompous way of saying words matter.

This story that, you know, what Trump says or what's in the strategy doesn't really matter.

The whole bureaucracy is now behind the idea that you're meant to be behind parties like Orban, populists in Europe, and you're meant to be pushing back against liberal democracy and immigration, etc.,

Let me do my attempt to sort of do a minute summary of my census speech, then you can correct me because you had a much closer thoughtful engagement with it.