501. Is Starmer Too Soft on Trump? Inside the Munich Security Conference
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Thanks for listening to The Rest Is Politics. To support the podcast, listen without the adverts and get early access to episodes and live show tickets, go to therestispolitics.com. That's therestispolitics.com.
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.
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. This year, one year on, a lot of the conversations have still been about J.D.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–1:44
2
What insights do Rory and Alastair provide from the Munich Security Conference?
1:44–8:18
3
How did Marco Rubio's speech at the conference compare to JD Vance's last year?
8:18–31:41
4
What are the implications of Keir Starmer's stance on Trump's influence in Europe?
31:41–41:54
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The Rest Is Politics
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