Rory Stewart

Why do you think when push comes to shove, Starmer decided to dig his heels in and let Healy go rather than give him what he wanted?

Yeah, absolutely.

Although I would say there is also a degree of gaslighting.

There's a degree of Trump's people and the Republicans trying to dress up.

a very, very savage, humiliating series of retreats from NATO by suggesting it's somehow our fault.

It's very tempting, I noticed, for Europeans to fall into saying, well, we've got to be honest.

We didn't spend enough on defense.

Maybe Trump's got a point, et cetera.

The truth of the matter is that America, just on this for a second, all it needed to do, it didn't need to spend the money on Ukraine.

It didn't need to keep

pouring money into NATO, all it needed to do was when asked, will you hold to the Article 5 guarantees, when the Secretary of Defense asked, will you support a Baltic country if it's attacked by Russia, say yes.

Because ultimately what America can do for us is find nuclear weapons.

I mean, that was always the nature of their deterrent going all the way back to the 80s.

And so America doesn't get to get away with saying that this is just about us spending.

But I agree, we're not spending enough.

There's much more we can talk about there.

We've, in the past, had this discussion about what the hell happens if we start ramping defense expenditure up by tens of billions of pounds a year.

That's a lot of money.

It's also something we don't admit enough to ourselves, that it's not a very productive form of investment.

We like to tell ourselves,