Tony Blair

is to be able to have a certain sort of what I call a bit of a Zen-like attitude to all the criticism and the disputatiousness that will go on around you because it's just going to happen.

And then today with social media, it happens to an even greater degree.

And one of the things I often say to leaders is, you cannot pay attention to this stuff.

I mean, OK, get someone to summarize it for you in half a page and you read it in the morning.

Honestly, you start going in, you go down that rabbit hole, you'll never reemerge.

I mean, we did try.

a lot, contrary to what's sometimes written, for example, with Russia.

I dealt with President Putin a lot when I was prime minister.

I think it was myself and President Clinton who took the crucial decision to bring China into the world's trading framework.

The G7 at the time was the G8 with Russia there, and China would always be invited.

I think we did try.

I honestly think we tried a lot to recognize that we were going to live in a new world.

The power was going to not shift from the West in the sense that the West would become not powerful, but the East was going to become also powerful.

I think we kind of did understand that and worked towards that.

The problem is that, and particularly in these last few years,

Certainly, China and Russia have come to a position that is, in terms of fundamental values and systems, seemingly hostile to Western democracy.

And that's difficult.

I think what we underestimated was probably how fast India would rise, because at the time, it seemed India was still going to be quite constrained.

We live in a multipolar world today.

And personally, I think that's a good thing.