Rory Stewart

Well, Wag the Dog was a film...

starring Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, I think.

And basically what happened was the American president was caught up in a big sex scandal, I think just getting up to the election.

And his kind of Alastair Campbell figure, a guy called Conrad, he somehow constructed a fake war, would you believe, against Albania.

So America went to war with Albania to stop this.

So wag the dog basically means where bad things are happening, you create something far bigger so that the world stops talking about the bad thing and they start talking about the thing you want to.

Now, in that, I don't minimise, by the way, how awful the Iranian regime is and how Iran has been seen as a threat by all sorts of countries for a long, long time.

But it does seem sort of the timing, you know, he's...

We've had Trump just on his State of the Union address, longest in history, and didn't go down terribly well.

His ratings are really poor right now.

And there's a couple of historic tweets, Rory.

October the 9th, 2012.

from Donald Trump.

Now that President Obama's poll numbers are in tailspin, watch for him to launch a strike on Libya or Iran.

He's desperate.

Now you can often work, I've said this before, you can often work someone out best by how they attack their opponents.

And then this one, a year later, November 2013.

Remember, I predicted a long time ago, President Obama will attack Iran because of his inability to negotiate properly, not skilled.

So, you know, I think that given what we know about Trump, what we saw in Venezuela, what we've seen in some of the other operations he's done, there will be a pretty powerful political motivation.

And what that leads me to worry, in fact, it puts people like you in a tricky spot.