Tony Blair

But I think on the whole, Western intelligence is reasonably good.

And of course, we'll get much better now with the tools it's got at its disposal.

How good are they at that?

I think they're all over this stuff now, the intelligence services here in America, in the UK.

But you also got a whole new category of threat to deal with because the cyber threats are real and potentially devastating in their impact.

And you can see from Ukraine, I mean, war is going to be fought in a completely different way in the future as well.

So I think, I mean, the whole reason I started this institute was because I think the quality of governance, of which the leadership is a big part, I think it is the determinant.

In today's world where capital is mobile, technology is mobile, any country with good leadership can make a success.

You can take two countries side by side.

same resources, same opportunities, same potential.

Therefore, one succeeds, one fails.

If you look at it, it's always about the quality of decision-making.

So if you take, for example, before the Ukraine war, if you take Poland and Ukraine, when both came out of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s,

I think people would have given Ukraine as much chance as Poland of doing well.

Poland today is doing really well.

Why is that?

Because they've joined the European Union, they've had to make huge changes and reforms, and therefore they're a successful country.

You look at Rwanda and Burundi.

It was Rwanda that suffered the genocide.

But Rwanda today, I mean, it's one of the most respected countries in Africa.