Rory Stewart

But you can see in Yemen, you can see in Sudan, you can see in Somaliland, and you can see on policy to Israel.

They're knocking bits off each other, and there's a social media war going on that's very destabilizing.

Before we move on to the big substance of our thing, which is to talk about the big speeches, Rubio, Starmer, etc., I was at a late-night event with Google last night, which I'm afraid I didn't leave until almost midnight, so I'm feeling pretty rubbish this morning.

It was striking how much of that

was about Europe now really worried about its tech sovereignty and Google having to try to reassure Europeans, and Microsoft will be doing the same and other American companies the same, that they can let you use their products without the American government either being able to spy on the contents or have a kill switch.

And the kill switch point is that the head of the International Criminal Court

was sanctioned by Trump, basically accused of being a terrorist, and Google and Microsoft effectively felt they were forced to completely disable all his accounts and all his access to everything, leaving Europeans thinking, well, could this happen to us?

And there's some really interesting questions about whether you can set up legal structures, subsidiaries to actually give Europe sovereignty on this, and how you balance that against the other brutal point, which is

Google would never make openly, but that France is spending 20 billion on tech, and that sounds like a lot, but...

Google and the other tech companies will be spending over 300 billion next year alone on the next stage of their tech investment in AI.

So the Munich Security Conference is chiefly known, I think, for many listeners, because this is where JD Vance, very radically in February last year, a year ago, made a speech to Munich to a horrified European crowd, which you watched, I think, live.

Tell us a little bit about it.

The other thing that was happening a year ago is that this was the moment when Germany was about to go into an election, when the AFD, the alternative for Deutschland, the far right, was on the rise.

And, of course, Elon Musk was still very much part of the Trump administration.

Musk was openly campaigning for the AFD.

Vance, the vice president, took time out of his schedule to meet us, the leader of the AFD.

And it was the first time that we began to see something that's in the national security strategy, which is about the US using its influence in order to support Russia.

what they seem to see as the kind of patriotic real parties against the sort of liberals who are wiping out European civilization.

In other words, a moment where it felt as though the US was, and the administration, particularly people like Marx, putting their emphasis on trying to almost campaign for the FD and hoping they were going to win the election.

I picked up a few sentences from it that I thought were quite striking.