Rory Stewart

speaker

24,987 appearances 93 recordings 4 series first heard Nov 2025 last heard 4d ago

Rory Stewart’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 93 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 16.

Appearances

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The Rest Is Politics · 561. How Trump’s Chaos Keeps Splintering the World Order · 11 Aug 2026 podcast

And this is the story they would spin at you. voice-verified

They would say, Well, look, turned out that when we withdrew our support from Ukraine and saved ourselves a hundred billion dollars, Ukraine didn't collapse. voice-verified

Instead voice-verified

Said Europe stepped up, footed the bill, and Ukraine is still surviving. voice-verified

They would say we had great success in Venezuela, amazing special forces operation, no soldiers killed, Cuba is now about to collapse, and that will be a US foreign policy objective they've had for decades, that they have hit Iran with incredible precision weapons and that they have massively degraded their economy and their strike capacity. voice-verified

They will say that their ally Israel has never been stronger. voice-verified

It's now a regional hegemon. voice-verified

That Syria is now an American ally. voice-verified

That Hamas and Hezbollah are a shadow of their former selves. voice-verified

And that the US is about to spend a trillion dollars a year on its defense. voice-verified

And it's going to become more and more war-ready, warrior culture, promoting uh tough guys like Heggsith. voice-verified

more and more kill ready to operate. voice-verified

And that Russia didn't manage to defend its allies in Venezuela and in Iran and Syria in the way that people uh expected, that China has found itself in an awkward position because it's been unable to get its fuel supplies through and also wasn't relabled to support Venezuela or Iran. voice-verified

Wait. voice-verified

So the paradox is this, given all of that, what they seem to have done is two things that they went wrong voice-verified

in ways they didn't anticipate. voice-verified

The first is that by saving money, they actually weakened themselves for the reasons we were talking about earlier, because they ended up instead of having reliable allies, they changed it from them being a deterrent of last resort able to use helpful allies into a world in which they became an exploitative force, weaponizing dependency and just driving their allies away. voice-verified

But the second odd thing is with their enemies. voice-verified

Because the actual truth is that they haven't created a more peaceful world. voice-verified

Iran, which they've hit hard, is more dangerous than it was before. voice-verified

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