The Rest Is Politics
501. Is Starmer Too Soft on Trump? Inside the Munich Security Conference
16 Feb 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Welcome to the Restless Politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Ernest Campbell. And we're doing something quite radical here, which is our main episode today is going to be located in a time and a place. We're going to bring you right into the heart of the Munich Security Conference. 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.
And then we'll do Question Time sometime early next week. Very good. We've also been really lucky to do some fantastic interviews, and we are being spoilt for choice for leading in the coming weeks. So we have been talking here to Sarah McBride, this extraordinary transgender congresswoman from Delaware. We've had a fantastic interview just now with Gavin Newsom.
who I am strongly encouraging to run for it, to go for it and try and get to the White House. And also Alexander Stubb, the president of Finland. And we've also got in the can, as it were, coming up soon, Rob Malley, who was US administration's leading advisor on Iran and also the former German chancellor there. So this is an episode where we're really going to try to bring you into two things.
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.
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Chapter 2: What insights do Rory and Alastair provide from the Munich Security Conference?
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.
And just relentlessly bumping into people. So the first person I met after coming through security was Maya Sandu, president of Moldova. I then bumped into Priti Patel, I then pumped into – how do we describe this? Somebody who works for British intelligence, quite senior in British intelligence services. I saw her too. Yeah. And on it goes.
I then, while we were waiting for Alexander Stubb, I chanced upon – a presentation by the Ukrainian military about how they'd been developing their defense systems since the war started, which was absolutely fascinating. I had to leave that early. I like this much, much more than Davos.
I think there are far fewer people just endlessly looking over your shoulder to see if any more importance comes.
Yeah, it's less corporate. It's more defense and security. Much more about defense and security.
And I think that there's something sort of quite old-fashioned about the about the setting, which I quite like as well. And I think speeches are still so important in history and in politics and in the day-to-day. A lot of the conversations this week, going around the place, in Davos, every single conversation was about Greenland, pretty much.
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Chapter 3: How did Marco Rubio's speech at the conference compare to JD Vance's last year?
And secondly, he might be thinking that's the sort of thing that Trump's like because he likes when we're fit and strong. Anyway, the Saudi minister was saying almost in terms, look, I'm feeling all this angst. I'm really paraphrasing now and I'm sort of adding a bit of my own interpretation.
I'm feeling all this angst amongst you Europeans about the global world order is sort of vanishing in front of your eyes. But where we've been, it's kind of not really been there for quite a long time. And what you haven't yet fully caught up with is that we're emerging in a very different way as well.
The other thing that was fascinating on that panel was, I mean, Giorgia Maloney, the Italian prime minister, is one of the best eye rollers on the planet. I mean, her facial expressions are eye rolling. Kaya Callas ran her close yesterday. When Mike Waltz was... talking about all the wars that Trump has stopped.
And when he was echoing the lines from Rubio about basically nothing happens in this world without the United States, she was doing very good eye roll.
On UAE, sadly, we'll return to that. 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...
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of Keir Starmer's stance on Trump's influence in Europe?
So let's say it's The Rectangle of Power, where the US is actually separate from Europe, UK, Canada, Japan, South Korea, right?
Yeah.
Australia. Put them all together, you've got enormous economies. Put those a lot together, actually, the economy's larger than the US, larger than China, if they can coordinate. So let's say those economies want to reduce their dependence on China and the US. critical minerals, and independence, right?
Independent sovereign control of critical minerals, quantum, AI, cloud computing, satellite, ISR, ballistic missiles, financial payment systems, debt, right? How would we do that architecture? What kind of leadership would we be looking for? It's a huge shift. I keep coming back to this very, very weird moment where Europe and the UK didn't manage to get their defense agreement together.
So a lot of Starmer's speeches about it. It came down to the fact that Europe wanted the UK to pay a few billion and the UK thought it was too much.
But what you expect at a moment of crisis is political leaders not to get caught up in that sort of stuff, to see the big picture, not to get dragged down into a few billion here, a few billion there, some rules here, but really think we've got to make this work.
I mean, that is a fair point. And I think it relates to a desire sometimes for governments and politicians not to make people scared. And I think we're reaching that point where we maybe do need to make people a bit scared about what this all means. I think we've... I think it was interesting talking to Alexander Stubb.
So he said, part of the argument of his book is, you know, 1918, 1945, 1989, real turning points in history. And the responses then dictated safety or not, security or not, prosperity or not for the next generation. And he was arguing that 2022, invasion of Ukraine, rather than, as I sometimes see it, Trump term two, is that moment in history. And I'll tell you what I actually liked about it.
Maybe this is just because I'm too political. You're looking for Keir, I think, to come to the Security Conference and make a big, big speech about us. And I think there's elements of that. But Churchill would have done it. Possibly. Yeah, I'm sure he would. But I actually quite like, can I just read you the ending?
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