Chapter 1: 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. Trump's vanity and narcissism is such that he sees himself as the king. He wants to be an emperor.
He wants to be an unelected monarch. And the question now is, is it broken? The continual humiliations and insults from Trump. Does this mean that Britain now needs to think about a radically different grand strategy for the next 20 years?
Trust has broken down because of the way that Trump has conducted himself.
The whole world is locked in a kind of abusive marriage where the Trump administration is saying to everybody else, you can't afford to leave me.
The most powerful man in the world can't count, can't add up, doesn't know what a percentage is. Why have we got somebody so stupid as president and why do we treat them as normal?
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Chapter 2: Is the special relationship between the US and UK broken?
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Chapter 3: What does Trump's conduct mean for UK foreign policy?
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Chapter 4: How does Trump's behavior affect global trust?
You'll get four extra months free on the two-year plan plus a 30-day money-back guarantee. The link is in the episode description. Welcome to the Restless Politics with me, Rory Stewart. And with me, Alastair Campbell. So with the king in the United States, we're going to be talking about his role in diplomacy.
Chapter 5: What changes does Britain need in its grand strategy?
We're going to talk about Donald Trump and expectations for the visit. We're going to talk about what that says about the broader relationship between the UK.
The special relationship.
So-called between the UK and the US. We're going to talk a lot about the Balkans because we did a very interesting interview with President... Serbia this week, and we're going to get into a broader picture in that region, which is, I think we don't talk about enough.
And we're going to talk a little bit about what's happening inside Labour on a day when Keir Starmer yet again is facing a few travails. I had a wonderful expression on my German podcast this morning, Roy, about King Charles. He said he's a diplomatische Wunderwaffe. Oh, what's that mean? It means a diplomatic wonder weapon.
Let me start you off then on the King's visit. So right at the heart of this is this whole question of this thing called the special relationship, which was put together almost exactly 80 years ago, this phrase by Winston Churchill. And it defined a world that was an anomaly, emerged really in the Second World War through the relationship between Roosevelt and Churchill.
And after the Second World War was a big UK bet that they could be the junior partner in a US liberal order. And broadly speaking, America leading the world and us doing what we were told would work because there'd be free trade, there'd be a clear financial system, there'd be a rules-based international order, there'd be united nations. And it's not always been easy.
And there have been moments where it's been a bit scratchy. So I was reminded not just of the fact that Harold Wilson refused to go into the Vietnam War, but Edward Heath refused to allow the US to use British bases or overflight for the Yom Kippur War.
Yeah.
There were controversies, even in 1986, Libya bombing, where other European states refused to allow the US to use bases or overfly. And we did. And then, of course, there was the relationship that you saw with Blair and Bush. But ultimately, it sort of worked as a bet for Britain.
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Chapter 6: What are the implications of AI and tech dependence on the US?
I think
I think contemporary monarchs may be surrounded by sycophants, but given that they're not shaping all foreign policy.
Also, I think to be fair to your friend, the king, I think he does actually quite like to occasionally meet people who challenge his views and what have you.
But the risk of them, I mean, sorry, just on this king thing, I think it's a really, you know, when we're trying to understand how Trump makes decisions in foreign policy. We've tried different types of analysis. We've had the very strong one, I think, which you and Michael Wolff were pushing, which is the reality TV star.
There is the view which is often sold by the mooch, which is he's fundamentally either interested in headlines or making money. But I think another very powerful way of seeing him is to see it really as a court. I've been reading recently in a very geeky way about Elizabeth I dealing with the Spanish and the Netherlands in the late 1500s. You get a very Trumpian sense.
She will promise troops, and then she'll pull them out. She'll insist they pay for the troops, which are her own troops. You've got to pay for my bases, but then I'm going to reserve the right to move them off somewhere else. Why does this happen? Well, fundamentally, because she's a queen. Trump is behaving like that.
A lot of the things that we're going to get onto with Serbia, with bribing, with corruption, comes out of the nature of this courtroom.
I did. Talking of core, I did the podcast The Court of History the other day with Sidney Blumenthal. He used to work for the Clintons and a guy called Sean Valence. And it was interesting. They were essentially – it's the court of history, but they essentially were seeing Trump in those terms. And Sean actually made the point that within the White House now, in terms of any history –
There are the occasional picture of a Lincoln or an FDR, but essentially all of the historical stuff in there now is about Trump. And he actually said that Trump's view of history is that history is what has preceded his arrival and it's all been a preparation for that. And that's how he thinks.
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Chapter 7: How does King Charles play a role in UK diplomacy?
potentially the whole world is locked in a kind of abusive marriage where essentially the Trump administration is saying to everybody else, you can't afford to leave me. You know, yeah, okay, you might complain and I might humiliate you and beat you up, but the fact is you'd never be able to make it on your own. Too expensive, too complicated, you're screwed, right?
That's because we believed we had a relationship of trust and that trust has broken down and largely, I would argue, because of the way that Trump has conducted himself. And it turned out they weren't really joint bank accounts.
We didn't really have joint ownership of the house. And there was certainly no prenup. Yeah, there was certainly no prenup. So painful, horrible. You can see why people want to bury their head in the sands. And my experience in government, and you're a bit more optimistic about government, but my experience in government is generally change is difficult.
And if the whole institutions, our intelligence service, our foreign office, our army, has spent 80 years built around the assumption that they're just junior partners to the United States. Changing that requires a complete revolution at the top of the civil service to come from. Let's now go down the other option.
Let's imagine that we really concluded that it's not sensible anymore to put all our eggs in the American basket. That doesn't mean getting in bed with China. It doesn't mean we'll ever be entirely independent. There will still be many things we'll have to depend on the US for, and in many ways we'll share things with them, but we need to hedge.
That brings us to our Stubb Square, and how do we develop this European-Canadian-British square? The pessimistic view, which would be the Elbridge-Colby view and the view from the Republicans, is they'll never get it together. My various wives may claim they're going to leave the House, but the fact is, The Germans are never going to fund it.
The French are going to be selfish and just insist all industrial policy is done in France. The Canadians are going to talk a great game, but they don't really want to get it close to Europe, and Britain has too many internal political problems, and it doesn't have the money to do it. Do you think there is a world in which Germany, France, UK, Canada can really begin to pull?
What would be those steps, and what would Metz have to do, and what would Macron have to do, and what would Starmer have to do to actually rebalance?
Well, I honestly do think that it means us getting back into European Union fully fledged. I've come to the view that the sort of single market customs union is nice, but it's not going to take you there. I worry, as you know, as you call him, my friend Emmanuel Macron, but I do worry that he doesn't necessarily share this vision.
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