373. Europe vs. America: Crisis in the West

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Welcome to the rest is politics with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell.

Rory, you're in America, and I'm in Germany. Very fitting. And it strikes me that's where a lot of the rest is politics issues of interest have been happening. So I think I'm afraid yet again, we're gonna have to talk about Donald Trump, but in the context of his vice president, J.D. Vance, and his trip to the Munich security conference, what Trump has said about Ukraine. And I think this broader theme of the extent to which allies of America can continue to see them as a reliable ally.

And then I think given that we've got Yulia Navalnaya, widow of Alexei, on leading this week, I think at some point we should talk about the first anniversary of his death at the hands of the Putin regime in a polar penal colony. So where do you want to start in all this kind of America, Europe, Ukraine, Trump, Vance stuff?

Well, let's start bang where you are, which is Germany with the Munich security conference. And just to explain to people a little bit about what that is. It's a conference that's been going since the 1960s, and was very much set up, really, to bring the West together for the interests of security and peace. And the early meetings were quite small, but they had, you know, great figures like Henry Kissinger involved. Over time, it's grown, it's almost become one of the sort of regular bits of the international conference calendar, along with Davos, where we were in January. And traditionally, it's been a place where the US and its allies express their shared values.

So if you've gone to the Munich security conference anytime over the last 30 years, generally, what you would hear is Americans and Europeans talking about their shared commitment to democracy, the rule of law, if you were an Afghan or an Iraqi, or somebody who was not part of the Western group, you might have found the tone pretty patronizing, because the Munich security conference was often where the United States turned up and lectured other countries, particularly countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, but also countries in Africa and Asia on not being democracies, lecturing them on their absence of free speech, their fraudulent elections, and generally giving the impression that the US and the West had a superior model.

But perhaps you can tell us what happened when JD Vance turned up. Well, he was certainly in lecturing mode, but it wasn't Asia and Africa, it was Europe, he was lecturing. You mentioned it being created in the 60s, 1963, there is something called the Munich rule. And the Munich rule goes as follows, engage and interact with each other, don't lecture or ignore one another. Now, I don't know if any of JD Vance's team had briefed him on the Munich rule, but he sure as hell didn't follow it. And I think people in the room were, even though you know, we know this is his style of politics. And we know that he's very much focused on the domestic agenda. But bear in mind, his speech came within a day of Donald Trump announcing that he'd had this phone call with Vladimir Putin, and further announcing that they might be meeting up in Saudi Arabia to bring an end to the Ukraine war. And that led to all sorts of, you know, anger and fear and some upset. Europe totally blindsided, Zelensky effectively blindsided.

So I think people thought, here's JD Vance, he's the deputy to Trump. This is the Munich security conference where defence and foreign policy is what it's all about. He's going to come along, and he's maybe going to put some flesh on the bones of what Trump had said, of which there was nothing. And instead, we got this kind of MAGA talking point stuff about freedom of speech, and a pretty full frontal assault on the idea that European democracies are not really democracies at all.

Yeah, just to remind people of the speech itself. I mean, if you haven't watched it, it's pretty uncomfortable watching. And it went down, I should say, like a lead balloon. So JD Vance stands up and here are all the European allies, as you say, nervously turning up to hear about how we're going to form an alliance. And he begins by saying, the threat that we're facing in the world is not a threat from Russia or China. The biggest threat comes from Europe's retreat from its most fundamental values. He then goes on to accuse Europe of planning to annul elections that it doesn't agree with, censor free speech, arrest Christians for praying in their homes. And to give a sense of the tone, imagine you are a European leader turning up and you're a bit nervous about Trump. And this is, I'm not quoting directly. But what seemed a little bit less clear to me, and certainly, I think to many citizens of Europe, is exactly what are you defending yourselves for? You are afraid of the conscience that guides your own people. You need to be responsive to your citizens. You need a mandate to govern. Don't put your opponents in jail. The voice of the people matters. And as John Paul II said, do not be afraid.

So how do you think that goes down if you're sitting there as a European leader? The whole thing went down very, very badly for all sorts of reasons. And I think the main reason it went down badly was that it wasn't really serious in terms of taking on the issues of defence and security that are front of mind at the moment. But the second thing was, it was so condescending and so patronising.

The impression I was left with watching Vance is that there is definitely a strategy going on here with the United States at the moment of treating their friends like enemies and their enemies like friends. The first ones they went for were Canada and Mexico. They went for Denmark. They went for Panama. They're going for the European Union.

And also, when he talks about democracy, this is a guy who still, to this day, has not accepted that Joe Biden won the election in 2020. And he talked about as not accepting the will of the people. And then freedom of speech. This is a government that has thrown out the Associated Press from the White House or not being allowed to travel in the press corps on Air Force One because they refuse to report as a fact that the Gulf of Mexico does not exist. It is now called the Gulf of America. So they talk about free speech. They talk about democratic values.

And then if you look at the stuff, I know you want to talk about this later, the stuff that they're doing in relation to the courts. Vance it was this week who said that judges really are not entitled to interfere in the running of the executive. Well, judges exist to interpret the law and the constitution. And many judges think that this government is breaking the law and defending the constitution. So it's a very, very strange thing.

One big problem is that, of course, it reinforces exactly what Europe's and America's enemies have always said. So, of course, if you're China or Russia, or indeed you're Viktor Orban in Hungary, you spent years saying all this talk about democracy coming out of Europe is hypocrisy. They're all a bunch of hypocrites. And now we have the US Vice President confirming what we always believed, which is these democracies are a sham.

It also really strengthens the hand of far right populist groups in Europe, who, of course, have the same line. We don't really live in a democracy. All these governments are a bunch of out of touch, dictatorial elites. And of course, it means that the goodwill and the mutual trust, which you might hope the US might have with its European allies to rebuild, begins to disintegrate.

Now, I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about the impact that Vance's visit had on the AFD and on German elections. But before we do that, just one point, which I'd also like you on, which is the communications point.

I was reminded, and this is a very unfair thing to say to David Cameron, but I was reminded a little bit of watching David Cameron try to write his first speech for his first visit to Pakistan. So this is back in 2010, 2011. And he had written a speech, which essentially in the first draft involved going to Pakistan and telling the Pakistanis some home truths. He was going to tell them that they didn't treat their women correctly, that they were corrupt, that they supported terrorism, that they didn't support human rights. And I said to him, listen, this seems to me to be a terrible speech to make. You should make a speech praising Pakistan and building a relationship with them. And if you want to make those points, make them in private. So I rewrote the speech overnight. In fact, I barely slept that night, presented it to him. And he said to me, yeah, Rory, but I don't get what the headline is that's generated out of your speech. I mean, okay, my speech, maybe it's only going to be page five or six in The Times, but I don't even see where your speech lasts. So I said, but this is about a 20 year relationship with Pakistan, right? This is not about an article in The Times. And he said, well, I'm feeling quite tired now. And I think we should knock it off for the day. And he headed up upstairs.

So can you help me understand? Presumably, this is part of what's going on with Vance. He's not really trying to change European behaviour. If he was, he'd do it through private meetings, he'd produce a positive shared message.

He's trying to do the equivalent to David Cameron landing an article in The Times. I couldn't help thinking when I bumped into David Cameron just before Christmas, he did at one point say, is Rory Stewart ever going to say anything positive about me on your podcast? Anyway, I think that what I would say about that is that it was very much for the domestic American audience. But because he was in the room he was in with all these European diplomats and leaders and military figures and spooks and all the rest of it, I think he probably did create the effect he wanted to create.

I asked our friend, Anthony Scaramucci, how has Vance's speech gone down in the States? And he said, Fox News love it, MSNBC hate it. And the New York Times is about the only paper that's telling you what he said. And so it was a very deliberately divisive polarizing speech.

I think on the substance, though, there is a real problem. He is clearly interfering in the election in Germany. The norms of diplomacy are if there's an election going on in a country that you happen to be visiting, and you're a leader from a different country, you just don't get involved. And how did he get involved? Well, first of all, he said in his speech, spelt it out, he said, there is just no room in modern life for firewalls in politics.

Well, firewall, as I've said, I think in the last two or three episodes, Brandt Mauer goes to the heart of German post-war politics. The Brandt Mauer, the firewall is that all of those non-far right parties saying they will have no truck with anything that can bring back memories of the Nazi years. And no, you can argue whether that's right or wrong. You can argue whether it's right or wrong that Alice Feidel, the leader of the AFD, wasn't invited to the Munich Security Conference. All the other leaders were. She was there in a TV debate last night where all the other leaders said they would not work with her in government.

You can argue about whether it's right or wrong, but that is the position of the mainstream parties in Germany. He effectively came out for the AFD, as Elon Musk has done. He did not meet Schultz, the chancellor. He didn't have a separate private meeting with Schultz. And his people were merrily briefing, what's the point? He's not going to be here for long anyway.

And he went off almost immediately after the speech and met with who? Alice Feidel, the leader of the AFD. What did she do? Tweet out what a great speech it was. Now, when you talk about the impact on the election, I don't know. I actually don't think it's going to move things. I think if I, the bits of the debate that I saw were very much about who will or won't work with the AFD, who else might have in a coalition, the Social Democrats or the Greens, a lot about Ukraine with the AFD, the only party really that is not standing with Ukraine.

But how that impacts on the election, I just think the polls have been settled now for so long that we kind of almost know the results already.

Just to go back to your firewall, and again, to do a brief explainer, that the reason for this is that in the 1920s and 30s, Mussolini and Hitler got into power because at a moment when they had relatively few votes, pretty small percentage of the national vote, they were invited into government. In the case of Italy, Mussolini was put in charge by the king. In the case of Germany, Hitler was eventually put in power by Hindenburg. In both cases, the lesson that we drew from that is that what allows the far-rights and in those cases, the genuine fascists and Nazis to take power is when the mainstream parties and particularly the mainstream parties from the right decide to cooperate with them and give them space. And usually very naively, usually they said, we're bringing them in because we're going to be able to control them. Famously, von Papen in Germany thought, you know, Hitler would be an easy tool and once he was in power, they'd be able to manipulate him.

On the other hand, in Belgium and in Finland, in the run-up to the Second World War, the mainstream conservative parties very, very courageously did not tie up with the fascist parties. Now, it's very difficult to do. I mean, if you think about it in the UK context, it would be, let's say, Tommy Robinson suddenly had 15% of the vote and you were the conservative party and you were being crushed in the polls. And you were being told that the only way that you could stop him coming into power was to line up with labor, which is effectively what you have to do. Your supporters go absolutely nuts, right? They hate labor. They've campaigned against labor. But that is the lesson. I mean, that was the lesson that most of us drew from the 20s and 30s. It remains from political scientists, the central lesson of the period that fascists get into power because mainstream conservatives enable them.

Trump gets into power because the Republican Party ultimately allowed him to do it because Republican senators did not vote to impeach him after January the 6th. He gets his appointments through because Republican senators vote to get people like Hesketh in as Secretary of Defense.

You said quite understandably, you know, there's disagreement about whether this is the correct view and how far can it go and what happens when those parties begin to develop so much support that it begins to challenge it. But it's something very, very precious to European peace.

I wonder, I mean, going around Germany and we're in Baden-Württemberg at the moment and, you know, you see lots of posters on lampposts and so forth and you get a sense that the main thrust is very much the two big guns, CDU and the Social Democrats and the AFD and the Greens and the others feel a little bit like they're fading. But the mood music is all around the AFD in terms of the issues of immigration and effects of globalization and particularly I think last night Ukraine.

But I still think that for an American Vice President, and bear in mind Trump said after this, what a great speech, it was a brilliant speech, I watched it, wasn't it amazing? So I think it was a very, very deliberately provocative speech, no doubt about that, at a time when Europe was feeling a bit vulnerable because of what Trump had just announced.

And I also think there's something very interesting about when we talked to Michael Lewis and he said this thing that he thought that MAGA was very much about Trump, that if Trump was suddenly wiped off the face of the earth, would anybody be able to do quite what Trump has done? And one thing that I think was interesting watching Vance deliver his speech, he can't do funny, he's not funny. He had this line which you could see from the way he delivered it and the look on his face he thought was going to get the whole audience sort of behind him, he said, if America can survive 10 years of scolding by Greta Thunberg, surely Europe can put up with a few months of Elon Musk. It felt like, you know, your previously mentioned lead balloon. It was like people were sort of looking at this guy thinking, are you for real? Now, of course, they are for real. They're incredibly powerful. Vance's speech got massive coverage around the world, huge. I can't think, I mean, with the possible exception of Dick Cheney in terms of policy, but I can't think of a vice president who would have made quite that big an impact in the way that he did.

So I think it was very, very deliberate, deliberately provocative. And I think it has provoked a reaction from Europe, which is basically not a bad reaction. We have got to step up and get our act together. Because as Zelensky said, that was the other big speech was Zelensky and Zelensky basically said Europe can no longer assume America is going to be there for it.

I think that J.D. Vance currently is in a good position. Now we're four years out, so much can change.

But he is in a stronger position than people anticipated to be the next US president. And his relationship with Trump and his ability to tie in with the crowd has turned out to be stronger than many, many people thought it was during the campaign. And maybe just worth laying out what he said in that speech and what the kind of fact checking is. So basically, the examples that he gives are twofold. They're either examples, and when he says democracies collapse in Europe, they're either examples of Europe being worried about what social media can mean. So in Romania, a completely unknown candidate powered by TikTok and Russian money shot up to the head and almost won the presidential election. And that election was cancelled. And Vance complains about that. He complains also about attempts to sort of monitor hate speech on social media. And he puts that in the category of free speech, free elections.

There, we have to understand what's at stake. What's at stake is that laws preventing people from spreading hateful lies have been on all our statute books forever. It's not a sort of simple case of free speech or not free speech. You cannot shout fire in a crowded theater. You can't go around publicly whipping up mobs to attack and destroy migrant hostels, claiming that an attack had been mounted by a Syrian asylum seeker when it wasn't, for very good reasons, right? This isn't about dictatorship. And this is particularly true in an era of social media, where these things can move so much faster, can get 3 million, 7 million likes much more quickly.

The second question is around questions of norms. So he's very upset about the fact that the British have put a buffer zone around abortion clinics. So I'm talking to you here in New Haven, Connecticut, literally 100 yards from the door when I'm standing at is a clinic that provides family planning advice. Outside it, at all times that I walk past, almost without exception, is a group of people handing out pictures of unborn fetuses and challenging any woman who walks into that clinic. So let's say you've made the very, very difficult decision to have an abortion, and you go to the family planning clinic right next door to me here. You have to walk straight through a large crowd of people who are demanding to know why you're trying to murder and kill an innocent child. In order to prevent that in Britain and in Scotland, two different laws, buffer zones have been put around, 200 meter buffer zones, so that women are free to go into those clinics without being harassed or bullied. And JD Vance has made this the centre of his speech. He's even claimed that in Scotland, it would be illegal to pray privately in your own home, which is complete nonsense, right?

Then he gets upset when we talk about what anybody talks about there being a danger from misinformation. This was a classic piece of misinformation, probably where he does know the facts, but he chooses to misrepresent them. So this is about a guy called Adam Smith Connor. He told the story, and he said that he was charged with the heinous offence of standing 50 metres from an abortion clinic, silently praying, not obstructing anyone, not interacting with anyone, etc. Truth is that, as you say, there is a buffer zone. He had been requested multiple occasions to move away, and it also emerges that he's getting his legal support from a group called Alliance Defending Freedom International, which is an American conservative Christian legal advocacy group. Yet again, interfering in the politics and the governance of another country. If you go back to when we talked about Project 2025, Rory, and of course, Vance, much more than Trump, is absolutely in with that crowd. Their utter obsession with abortion, it came through pretty much every chapter. So this is a guy who's on his own agenda. I think this is not just Trump's agenda. Trump's agenda, we know, is about Trump, and it's about winning.

Everything now is about the domestic audience, and it's about him trying to take over, either when Trump falls over, or when he goes at the next election, before the next election. The final thing, I guess, before the break, is just maybe to put this back in the American domestic context. So again, here I am in the US, and people are focused very, very strongly on what Trump's actions, and we've talked about a lot of those actions, shutting down the American International Development Agency, firing auditors, obviously firing all the civil servants who work in USAID, overturning your right to get American citizenship if you're born in the US. What do all these things mean for the Constitution and law? Because your rights as a USAID civil servant were protected by Congress, a congressional statute that said you could only be fired if you committed a misdemeanor. This is why, famously, risk-averse parents want their kids to be civil servants, because you have a job for life, right? No longer in Trump's America.

The ability to become an American citizen if you're born on American soil is to do with the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, right? And he's cancelled the 14th Amendment. He is freezing spending, which has been approved by Congress. Now, all of this stuff basically says that Congress doesn't really matter, congressional statutes, congressional spending doesn't matter, and the Constitution doesn't really matter. The big test now that people are focused on is, will he now also challenge the courts?

And there is a really interesting dance taking place. So the Supreme Court, people remember, has, thanks to his previous appointments, a six-person Republican majority. And the Supreme Court will want to show that it has power, and therefore, it's going to be very careful what it challenges. It's probably not going to challenge the USAID ruling because it's too late. Everyone's lost their jobs. The building's been shut down. What it may do is challenge the 14th Amendment ruling. And then how does Trump respond? And what is he actually up to? Is he actually openly saying, I don't care about the law? Well, it certainly seems to be rhetorically.

So here's a couple of quotes. He tweeted out and has now pinned to his truth social, "he who saves his country does not violate any law." And J.D. Vance said in 2021, he quoted Andrew Jackson, "the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it," which basically says we don't care what the Supreme Court does. We'll just continue because they don't have any enforcement mechanisms. That's one view, right?

Another view is that actually, they're doing it more gradually and more subtly. And that one of the problems as regimes change, this happened in Venezuela, this happened in Turkey, happened in India, is that the shift from populism towards fascism often happens under the guise of acting according to the law and following proper procedures. So there's also other stuff going on.

You get the Justice Department issuing letters saying that the reason they're doing something, they're seeking to overturn a 1935 precedent set by the Supreme Court. You have Harvard lawyers coming out, a guy called Ben Barron, Jack Goldsmith, saying that actually what the regime is doing is good faith test cases to challenge the Supreme Court. And you've got other legal scholars in the US saying, no, no, this seems to be going far beyond this, that actually they're challenging fundamentally separation of power, free speech, equal justice under the law.

In that list of people that you mentioned, of course, the other one whose name keeps coming up is Orban. And Vance is a massive admirer of Orban, is openly saying that one of the best things Orban did when he came in was take on the universities, take on the courts, take on the media. And it's hard to think they're not doing something similar.

Just on the courts again, Roy, the other thing which I find amazing, remember when we were in Chicago and we bumped into, I think you'd left by then, but I bumped into Eric Adams, the mayor of New York. Yes. Now it turns out that because he's been saying very nice things about Donald Trump, and because he's basically been saying he supports Trump's crackdown on this, that, and the other, illegal immigration, etc. The Department of Justice has basically said, we've got to drop this case against Eric Adams. And several US attorneys have now resigned, including some of them who are avowed open conservatives, Republicans. And this is now creating a real mess. And Trump has now backpedaled and basically said, I've never said that you should let Adams off. This is all going to, I think, unravel fairly quickly.

But meanwhile, this is the thing that people keep sort of emailing you and me and others and saying, meanwhile, what Musk is doing is literally getting his hands on the levers of power and of money within the American government machine in a way that no American presidential team has ever tried to do before. The big test question with this now is about enforcement. So when the courts say something, traditionally, the convention is a federal official, government official will follow the court ruling. So, you know, when I was a minister, and you will have experienced this again and again, if the courts strike us down, we grumble, but all our civil servants implement and follow what the court has ruled, right?

And even Boris Johnson, when the Supreme Court ruled that it was illegal for him to probe Parliament, actually brought Parliament back, attacking the Supreme Court, attacking the opposition and doing all this populist nonsense, but he did actually bring it back. But what happens if the court rules and Trump tells officials don't implement that rule? Well, they don't have many options. They can sue the official for contempt of court, but that may become a badge of honor for a low-level official. They can try to appoint their own independent prosecutor, the court can, to get around the problem caused by Trump. They can try to tell the US Marshals to come in, because the US Marshals constitutionally are supposed to implement the court decisions.

But if all of these things fail, they're really, really stuck. And there have been times in American history in the 19th century when they were stuck. Now, when that happens, then there is no check and bounce to Trump, because what you'd find is the legislature is with him, and the judiciary increasingly don't want to challenge him because they don't want to be revealed as paper tigers. They don't want to tell him to do something he won't do for fear that they just lose all their authority.

Well, listen, let's go to a break, Rory. And before we do, I want to give you my tweet of the week from Munich. It was from the guy we interviewed on Leading a few months ago, Tim Snyder. He tweeted as follows. "I'm in Munich. People keep asking me to decode JD Vance's speech. Okay. In Vance English, free speech means let Elon Musk run your elections. Democracy means let Russia run your elections. Now move on. 2025 is about what Europeans do, not what Americans say." So let's come back after the break and talk about what Europeans are today in Europe, in Paris under a meeting organised by Macron actually doing. Very good. Look forward to seeing you after the break.

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Welcome back to the rest of politics with me, Alastair Campbell. And with me Rory Stewart. So Rory let's talk about Ukraine then and what we think Trump is trying to do and whether we think Macron was right to call to this kind of what's clearly an emergency meeting him and Schultz and Rutter from NATO and Keir Starmer and the Tusk from Poland, Prime Minister Denmark and you know he's got together the Europeans and I think part of this is about showing a bit of weight so we're not going to be excluded from this. But meanwhile, Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, is out saying why should we involve Europe? All they want to do is keep the war going. This from the country that started the war. And likewise, the Americans, Kellogg, who is Trump's special advisor on this, is essentially saying, well, you know, instead of whining about not being in the talks, why don't they come up with some constructive ideas?

So what do you think about European reaction? Yeah, well, I think the first thing to frame is that what's triggered it is that Donald Trump has announced that he will be meeting Vladimir Putin in Saudi Arabia and America and Russia between them are going to be deciding the fate of Ukraine. And they're not inviting the Ukrainians along, right? That's the first problem. And then the second problem, as you pointed out, they're not inviting the Europeans along who are providing just under half of the funding and support for the war. And that's, of course, at the heart of Trump's general attitude, because it's also true when he talks about Greenland, he's not actually interested in the opinion of the people in Greenland, whether they want to be part of the United States or not. And when he talks about Gaza, he's not interested in the 2 million Palestinians who actually live in Gaza when he's talking about creating his little beach resort on the Mediterranean.

So somehow he's going to solve Ukraine by talking to Russia. Problem one. Problem two, we don't actually know what he's going to do in that negotiation. It's complete chaos. So there is, as you pointed out, Kellogg. And Kellogg seems to be saying to the Europeans, come up with a plan. Lovely. And Europeans who want to be optimistic are scurrying around thinking we'll come up with a plan and we'll help shape this. Then you've got another quartet, which is Rubio, Whitcoff, Mike Walse, and Ratcliffe, who again, seem to be making nice noises towards the Europeans. You've even got J.D. Vance in private going around the Munich Security Conference saying, don't worry, we're not going to sell out the Ukrainians. We're going to be tough for the Russians. But this ignores the 300 pound gorilla, who's Trump himself. And Trump himself clearly wants to get this done quickly. And the problem getting it done quickly, he didn't have any leverage over the Russians. The Russians have been making a lot of battlefield advances. They found it easier to mobilize soldiers, troops than the Ukrainians have. They found it extremely easy to manufacture missiles. And so if he wants a quick deal, he doesn't have much to push back at Putin with. And, you know, I'm very happy to get in a second, maybe into the question of what these different deals are. I think there are three possible scenarios that might come out of what Trump's doing.

But the split that I want to come back to you on, Alastair, is there's a split basically within Europe, which I would describe, maybe this is unfair, as Britain on the one hand and Macron on the other. The British view is being frightfully keen, trying to take Kellogg seriously. David Lammy was absolutely delighted that he got a meeting, very delighted about how close the UK government is to Trump, one of the only people who got a meeting with Trump when other people were excluded. And the UK is talking about molding Trump's mind, coming up with a deal with an offer and sees itself as this absolutely pivotal relationship between the US and Europe. And Kirstein next week.

Macron, I think, is a little bit more doubtful. Macron is beginning to think about the worst case scenario. What would it mean if we had to cut US weapons out of European supply chains? Would we be able to cancel F-35 orders? What other alternative countries could we turn to? I think there are people in Europe even beginning to ask questions about whether actually Europe may have to turn to China for semiconductors, EVs. How does Europe make long-range missiles? So over to you. Tell us a little bit about your sense from the inside of the British government of how they're seeing the situation.

Am I right in saying that actually Lammy and others are quite pleased at the moment, strangely, with their relationship with Trump and are hoping they can shape deals?

Look, I don't think there's a foreign affairs minister anywhere in the world, but particularly Europe right now, who isn't very, very nervous about what Trump has announced and about how it's going to play out. But I do think the British government thinks it can carve out that place that traditionally the UK has managed to have as a sort of bridge between America and the European Union. It is interesting. It may be bullshit, I don't know, but it is interesting how on the few occasions he has talked about Kirstein, but Trump has been very positive and very warm and I've always worried whether that's a sort of divide and rule thing going on with the European Union.

He does have a kind of curious relationship with Macron. He obviously knows Macron's not going to be there for that long. Schultz is clearly not going to be there for that long. But I think he's got a bit of a grudging respect for Macron and the fact that Macron does kind of say what he thinks. And even the fact of this summit today, this meeting today, is Macron basically saying we're not going to sit around and just imagine we get carved out of this. We will be part of this discussion because it's about us. And to be fair to Mertz, by the way, Mertz has been pretty strong since this thing. He's basically said, you know, there can be no talk about Europe security without Europe being involved. And there can certainly be no discussion of the settlement of the war with Ukraine without Ukraine being involved.

Now, that being said, another leading interview we did a fair while back now with Fiona Hill, who was a foreign policy advisor to Trump in the first term and Foreign Affairs magazine. I don't know if you saw this, but they reposted the article she wrote in November 2021 about what that was like. But there was this lie that really struck, leapt out at me. If a foreign visitor or caller was one of his favoured strongmen, Trump would always give the strongman's views and version of events the benefit of the doubt over those of his own advisors. And she gives examples of where that happened. And if you just think of the point I made at the start of the programme about treating your friends like enemies and your enemies like friends, he continually gives this sense that he believes Vladimir Putin when he talks to him. He says, I've talked to Putin. He wants peace. He wants this to stop. He wants to, you know, and I trust him and he trusts me. We have a great relationship.

Whereas Zelensky, they kind of basically talk about him as Zelensky constantly bigging up the Americans because he has to. But Zelensky himself, the way that they talk about him is very, very different. And I think that this is creating the sense within the European community that, you know, Zelensky is right when he says you can't rely on this guy anymore. You cannot rely on America anymore. And within the American politics, you know, how badly does that damage him politically, which is what he thinks about the whole time. And the answer is probably not very much. No. And it's also interesting how little criticism comes out.

I got some pushback from Denmark after our comments last week, where I'd said that it seems to me that Denmark is being quite sort of isolationist and saying we're okay in Denmark. We don't care very much about the rest of the world. We're not prepared to criticize Trump. And the pushback was to say, well, Denmark spends a great deal on international aid and cares about European institutions. But I think the deeper point is this, that for Denmark, as for Ukraine, and maybe even for Britain, they don't even really feel they can criticize the US, whatever their private views are. They feel very, very small. They feel very, very vulnerable. And we forget that a lot of these countries have essentially created their entire foreign security policy for 70 or 80 years around the idea that the US is there to support them. And these alliances are so precious, they can't even bear the thought that they may now be dealing with a rogue actor and speaking out.

Just on the different deals then, just to lay out as simply as I can, and with apologies for oversimplifying, but there's a deal that Putin wants. And then obviously, there's a deal that Europe and Zelensky might want, and maybe something in between. So let's take the extreme. So Putin's deal, he laid out in Istanbul. He wants the five oblasts in Eastern Ukraine recognized as Russian territory. He wants no security guarantees for Ukraine, so no NATO, no European security guarantees. And he wants to cap the Ukrainian army size. And obviously, he wants all sanctions lifted. So that's his view. He would then be able to say, I've won, got all this territory, no security guarantees for Ukraine.

And what does that mean? Well, why are people worried about that? Maybe it sounds okay on the surface. Well, basically saying there are no security guarantees for Ukraine and the size of the Ukrainian army is going to be capped then leaves him the wonderful option of wandering into Ukraine whenever he wants. He can invade whenever he wants, because there's no guarantees for Ukraine. And even without wandering into Ukraine, he would have such incredible leverage over Ukraine from that position, he could force the Ukrainian government to effectively be a puppet satellite.

So other extreme. The other extreme would be a scenario where probably with a loss of pressure from the US, more sanctions, dropping the oil price, really crunching the economy and investing an enormous amount in the war on the front line to make Russia lose a lot of lives. They've got about 1200 wounded or killed every day at the moment. They force Russia into a different position. That other position would be freezing the front line, no recognition of Russian ownership of those territories and the security guarantees in place for Ukraine, NATO guarantees, European guarantees, US guarantees, which allows Ukraine to rebuild.

And the question really there is what leverage does Trump have over Putin? What leverage does Putin have over Trump? What would it take for Trump to say no? What would it take for Putin to say no? So Europe is calculating and I think the British are really hoping that Trump's ego will mean that if he doesn't get a pro-Ukraine deal out of Putin, he'll become very angry and go anti-Putin.

But the risk is, in fact, that Trump just wants a deal as soon as possible and that's what matters to his base. Something very strange that Trump always talks about millions, he says millions of lives are being lost. And I thought, why does he keep saying millions? And so I checked out the numbers in so far as you can. So Zelensky says that more than 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed. Tens of thousands more are missing in action or in captivity. He says that the 19,500 Ukrainian children have been deported. UK Defence Intelligence reckons that in December, 1523 Russian soldiers were being killed and wounded every day. Zelensky says 350,000 Russians have been killed and there are other reports suggesting that that could be even higher. So we are talking about huge numbers.

It doesn't strike me that Putin has necessarily felt that much heat at home. I thought there was a point when he would, but it doesn't seem to have happened for the casualties. But there must come a point, particularly with the economy, where he does. This is maybe where Trump is right, that Putin does want this war to end, but there's no way he's going to end it on the basis that Russia moves backwards. And likewise, I cannot see either from what Trump has said, what Vance has said, even what Marco Rubio has said, I cannot see that America will be putting in the sort of investment that you were talking about to keep that war going, given that part of his shtick that got him elected was, I'm going to end these wars.

And all these things, of course, depend on people's calculations. So there are big structural weaknesses in Russia. Intelligence analysts will point out there are big problems in the Russian economy. There's problems with armored vehicles. There's problems with the number of soldiers they're losing. Equally, Putin will be aware there are big structural weaknesses inside Ukraine. So he'll be very aware that Ukraine is struggling to mobilize, that the Russians are tending to advance slowly on a lot of these fronts. And so there's a game of chicken going on. Putin probably thinks Ukraine is going to crumble anytime. And people being optimistic about Ukraine say Russia's only got another six months, 12 months.

So the optimists think that if Putin rejects the deal, actually, that will give Europe time to stockpile, train, build up, and then Putin will be in a worse position in a year's time. Putin probably thinks that if he says no, he'll be in a stronger position in a year's time for the reasons you just laid out, which is the US is unlikely to bail him out. And this is just to come to the end of this.

I mean, people will notice that Kirstein has talked about putting British troops on the ground, really big news. Macron has often talked about that. The Europeans are likely to increase their defense spending. So Germany will probably go up to 3% of GDP on defense. The UK may go up to 3% on GDP defense. And this is almost double what it would have been 10 years ago. But, but, but, but, but the problem for the Europeans is that they cannot operate in Ukraine without the US. They need to be able to buy US kit. Well, as we said, probably Trump would sell them US kit. But they also need this horrible jargon enablers, which means they need US intelligence. They need US electronic warfare. They need the US air picture. They need US logistics, air defenses. But most importantly of all, they need the psychological reassurance that if things go wrong, the US will be in there behind them. That I think is going to be very, very difficult to get to.

The other thing, Rory, Trump seems to be sort of backdating any future deal, where basically he seems to be saying we're going to calculate all the money that we've given in supporting Ukraine against Russia. And as part of any settlement, that means we've got to get access to all your, your minerals, which, again, is a very, very, we're talking a very old fashioned military diplomacy here.

And the other thing I can't quite work out, Rory, on the one hand, Trump and now Vance are basically saying to Europe, you're all a bunch of wusses, and you haven't spent enough on defense, get your act together. And meanwhile, I'm going to sit down with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. And we're going to agree to cut our military spending in half. So I don't quite get how that all hangs together either. So I guess the only hope if you're Zelensky and you're Europe, you're basically the only thing you got is to think, well, maybe Trump doesn't yet know what he wants to do.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. And it's that there's a paradox, isn't there? Sometimes it seems as though he really enjoys other countries being dependent on the US. You know, because if Ukraine's dependent on the US, he can, as you say, take reparations in the forms of hoovering up Ukraine's mineral resources. If Denmark is dependent on the US, you know, maybe he can get something in Greenland. If Europe is dependent on the US for defense and security, he can extract more cash. If Saudi is dependent on the US for bases, he can get more money out of them. Generally, it comes down to a heist. It's a funny thing where US protection is now called a protection racket, or US security is now called extortion.

On the other hand, sometimes he talks about them being independent of the US and not wanting to spend the money, at which point he would lose the ability to bully and extort because you'd end up with Europe standing on its own feet, understandably not relying very much on the US because why do you want to rely on somebody who keeps presenting you with an unexpected check every day for something that you didn't sign up for? And then, of course, the US would lose its power and influence quite quickly over the short to medium term because they wouldn't be dependent on the US anymore.

I guess that doesn't matter for him too much because I guess he's only in for a four year term. So he can make out like a bandit over four years and leave it to other presidents to worry about that they have no more influence over the global north.

Well, I believe him giving up on a third term when I see it on the idea of China. So suddenly say, yeah, we'll cut our military in half. I mean, I don't know if you saw it was the FT recently had a piece about this amazing new military headquarters that the Chinese are building, which is 10 times the size of the Pentagon, which suggests they're not really thinking about cutting back on defence.

And I'm sorry, but one small thing which I haven't done, which is hugely praise the people who are doing the serious work on Ukraine, particularly Jack Watling from Russia and Shashank Joshi with the Economist who are doing incredible work on the detailed pictures on the ground.

But if you were China, and you were looking at the US at the moment, why would you cut? Surely you would say this is the golden opportunity of a century. The US is setting out to attack and alienate all its allies, dismantle NATO, get rid of its security guarantees, abuse and extort minerals out of everybody who's relied on them or cash out of everybody who's relied on them. And this is the moment for China to say, actually, you know, we're a much more reliable partner. We don't have these pesky elections. We don't have people like Trump coming in. We have 50 hundred year plans. Let's do some belt and road initiatives. You know, we're not really an acquisitive, expansionary power. We don't really want to invade Ukraine or have a bit of Europe and we'll give you cheap electric vehicles will lead the energy revolution. And all your anxieties in the past, which were yes, but you know, we're a bit autocratic and corrupt. Well, you know, the US has just admitted itself that it thinks Europe is autocratic and corrupt and is certainly proving itself to be pretty autocratic and corrupt.

You'll mention of China giving you better and cheaper electric vehicles.

The face that popped into my head was Sheryl Crow. Now, Sheryl Crow, Rory, when she was going out with Lance Armstrong, the cyclist, she once complimented me on my hair. And I know how much hair means to you. But this way, I don't know if you saw, she's got rid of her Tesla. She sold her Tesla and she's given the proceeds to National Public Radio as a protest against Musk.

My final thought, Rory, before we have a brief chat on Alexei Navalny, I mentioned Foreign Affairs Magazine. They had some really interesting stuff these last few weeks about something that you and I discussed with David McCloskey when we talked to him, David from the rest is classified ex-CIA, about whether the intelligence relationships are going to suffer as a result of Trump and some really interesting pieces. A guy called David Gio, G-I-O-E, who is also like David, a former CIA analyst. And he basically says that because of Trump's record in the handling of intelligence, he thinks there is a problem. And there is a problem with the way that he uses information to trade. I hadn't been aware of this, but apparently once shared a piece of information gained from intelligence in a meeting with Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. We know the thing famously about taking documents to Mar-a-Lago.

And then another interesting piece that was written by a couple of people from the Brookings Institute, essentially that they see Musk's role as a risk to intelligence. Apparently at one point, SpaceX were going to try to get Musk an even higher security level, clearance level, and were advised against it because the sort of examination that he might be subject to would lead to questions being asked about that. So I think this is something that the Brits, the Australians, the Canadians, particularly Canada right now with what's going on. I think this is something that we should keep an eye on. They actually said that this is a quote from the piece by these two people in the Brookings Institute, "American adversaries surely see what's going on as an espionage and blackmail bonanza." This was Musk's team now all over the kind of infrastructure. And they say that the treasury itself is a huge player in domestic and foreign policy.

Final thing from me before we get to Navalny is just to pay tribute to Latin American analysts. Probably the best analysis that's coming out on Trump are from people who specialize in Latin America and the Caribbean, partly because they've seen this slip from populism to fascism and how it works. And the point that they keep making is that it doesn't happen nowadays through dramatic sudden military coups. It often happens with democratically elected governments slowly taking things. So there's a great thread from Javier Corrales, who's been doing great stuff on the 11 signs that Trump is becoming a Latin American style leader. There's great work by Federico Finkelstein, who's written a book called The Wannabe Fascists, which looks at this space that Trump and many other Latin American leaders operate between populism and fascism. And finally, of course, there's your friend Moses Naim, who was the man who brought the three Ps.

Absolutely. Yes. If you want to understand what's going on in the United States, look to the Americas and particularly to Latin America, right? Over to you, Navalny.

Just before that, you probably would say I wasn't a racist, but might as well. Millet in Argentina in all sorts of trouble at the moment because he backed some weird cryptocurrency, which turns out not to be quite what it seems. So he's got lawyers and judges taking a look at that. We interviewed Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Alexei Navalny. It's out on leading this week, and it was timed to the first anniversary. I was very, very impressed by how many people turned out at Navalny's grave in Moscow yesterday. Now, the truth is, since Navalny's death, there has been very little organized or disorganized opposition to Putin in Russia.

So those people who turned out, I was watching on the German news, there were some of them interviewed, and they said, you know, we're taking a risk being here, but sometimes in life, you have to stand up and be counted. So that's their courage. I think the courage that they both represent came through in that interview with her. It was incredibly moving, wasn't it?

And one of the things when people listen to that leading interview is the level of her commitment to her husband, the sense that she doesn't question for a second his decision to return to Russia, doesn't in any way at least feel or say that she feels any resentment towards the fact that he took himself away from his family, was in prison for many years, and then eventually murdered, because she believes completely in his idealism, his vision for Russia, and is going to put herself through the same danger and sacrifice that he put himself through to keep the fight going against what feels like, from her point of view, almost hopeless odds.

It's not as though she was saying to us that anything's happening anytime soon. In fact, she seemed to be saying nothing can happen so long as Putin remains in power in Russia. But this question of when these regimes collapse is the key, isn't it? You know, we could see the weaknesses in Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria for a decade, but nobody predicts that it was actually going to happen suddenly in December.

We can see the weaknesses in Putin's Russia, but I remember us in 2014 being in meetings, National Security Council saying he had six months to go. I think it's actually our friend Mooch who draws our attention to the great Hemingway quote, which is from The Sun Also Rises, where Bill says, how did you go bankrupt? Two ways, Mike said, gradually and then all at once.

And the other thing, I don't know whether this would be timed to Navalny's anniversary, but there's this guy, Vadim Stroikin, who is a musician. And he has joined the long list of people who have mysteriously fallen out of windows while being visited by the police. And of course, this was then announced as a suicide, yet another one falling out of the window. And I think this is just, this is something that Yelena Navalny, she talked to us about, they've normalized this idea that they can just sort of pick off their enemies wherever, which is why it's so brave of her to carry on doing what she's doing when we all know what happened to her husband and her account of his life in prison.

I really did find, even by all we know about Putin, the way he treats his enemies was pretty shocking. So I hope people listen to that. And the other thing I think it underlines Roy is the importance of legacy. And we talk a lot about legacy and, you know, very few people, let's be frank, very few people have a big legacy.

But part of legacy to me is the fact that I woke up this morning in this hotel, went for breakfast, came back, turned on the telly to see how the German four-way debate was being interpreted by the media the day after. And I actually alighted on this documentary on Arte, the Franco-German television station. And it was a long, long, I actually had to go out. I only watched half of it, but a long documentary about Navalny. And it was fascinating to watch.

They played the bits of Yeltsin when he was leaving power, when honestly he could barely get his words out. He was slurring, he was breathless, he looked really puffy. And then this young guy comes in and it's the young Putin talking about what he's going to do for Russia. And when you see that in the context of what you know happened to Navalny, and now this guy's striking falling out the window. When you see Putin with his hand on the book, as he's taking the oath of office and talking about standing up for all Russians and so forth. It was a very, very moving film. And that, as I say, is part of legacy.

And what she and their daughter Dasha are clearly going to do is to make sure his memory doesn't get forgotten.

And while talking about leading Rory, Antti Skaramucci and I talked to Mark Carney on a live stream at the weekend. People can see on YouTube or we're going to put it on the leading channel next Monday as our usual leading interview.

Well, thank you, Alistair, very much and look forward to our chat tomorrow on Question Time. See you then. Bye-bye.