Rory Stewart

We're recording it a little bit earlier than we normally would.

But I hope what you'll feel is it gives you a sense of the flavor of international diplomacy.

One of them is just a feeling of what these international conferences are like, what it's like to be here, the kind of things that people are talking about.

But then we're going to get, I think, into the big issues, which is, you know, what's going on in the world.

what is now happening in the big international relations, particularly between Europe and the US.

And we're going to focus on two big speeches.

We're going to focus on the speech by Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, which happened this morning.

And we're going to focus also on another speech this morning by Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister.

And I think Alistair and I are going to get into some slightly spicy disagreements

about this, about whether speeches matter and what kind of vision we need for the world.

But before that, let's just give you a bit of a feeling for the tone of the place and what's going on.

So to give a sense, we're sitting now in what basically in normal life is a shop of a hotel.

It's

the Bayerische München Hotel, and we are going in and out of weird bars and coffee shops of what was once a perfectly functioning central hotel and has now turned into a conference center.

With the sort of number of loos you'd expect in a hotel, not the number of loos you'd expect in a conference center, and the number of doors you'd expect in a hotel, not the number of doors you'd expect in a conference center.

Yeah, it's less corporate.

It's more defense and security.

Much more about defense and security.

And yet, at the same time, under the surface, this is a place to be reminded of how...

many other things are happening in the world which are not being properly reported.