Germany's Fight Against the Far Right

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And Rory, we have a lot to talk about and a lot of it European, a lot of it Ukrainian, a lot of it American. I think we should kick off with the German election. Huge event. A Brücke, a bridge to talk about what's been going on in Washington, not least Macron, who was there Monday. We're recording Tuesday. Kirsten, who is going on Thursday and who just before we started recording. You've been able to catch up with us in the States has announced that the UK will be increasing defense spending to 2.5 within the next couple of years. And one of the means by which they're going to do so is to cut. We felt this was coming. We've talked about it before cut overseas aid and development. So we can say how very unhappy we are about that. So lots to talk about going on the States as well. It seems like every day there's something big and something new. But should we kick off with them with Deutschland? Yeah. So as listeners to the podcast will be aware, Alastair is our German expert. So the tradition here is I give my vague idea of what I think happened and then Alastair tries to fill us in. So essentially, this was an election in which the big stories were that Friedrich Merz, who ran the alliance of the sort of traditional conservatives, not the far right conservatives, traditional conservatives was predicted to win and indeed he won. But not by as much as some people hope. There were moments in the polls when he was well over 30% and he came in in the high 20s. The second really big story is that the AFD, which is this far right party, and we can get into what we mean by that because we're often challenged by people saying, why do we call them a far right party? They're a very, very nasty party managed to get 20% of the vote. But the most traumatic thing is that they did incredibly well in former East Germany, where they really seemed to sweep the board. And in some areas got 30% and in some of the cities, even in areas 40% of the vote. So it was out in the East, the AFD performed incredibly well. Meanwhile, Schultz, who was running the equivalent of the Labour Party in Germany, went to their worst defeat since the 1880s. So that was the Chancellor who had been running the country just previously collapsed. And the left did surprisingly well, getting up to about 10%, partly because young people were very worried by some of the stuff that Metz had been saying about immigration. And then the final thing is that Sarah Wagenknecht, who we've talked about, who's a far left politician, just dropped below the numbers that she needed to qualify. So instead of getting 5%, which is the threshold, the German system is not like the Israeli system where basically everybody gets in on anything. She got something like 4.97%. And she will probably take that to the Constitutional Court because there are some questions around overseas ballots. And that may even mean a rerun of the election. Anyway, that's my rough idea of what happened over to you, Elster. Well, I think that's pretty good, Rory. I think you've got the basic outlines right. I think the biggest thing to come out of this is that either of you Melz will be the Chancellor, probably in a coalition with the Social Democrats. And the big thing that they were worried about, because the reason that Schultz's coalition ultimately collapsed, and we can argue about whether Schultz was any good anyway, he'd been a very well respected finance minister, but I don't think ever really cut it in the way that people need to in the modern age, as it were, as the number one. But he had this three-party coalition. All three constituents of the three-party coalition went backwards. And the FDP, the more liberal conservative, liberal conservative parties it were, they fell below the 5% as well. So Schultz, Harbeck, the green leader, and the guy who's been leading the FDP, they've all basically said, right, that's game over for us, we're out of politics, or we're going to step back. What I think will happen now, I could be completely wrong about this, a coalition will be formed called a grand coalition between the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats. I have to say, I think if they've got any sense, they will put this guy Boris Pistorius in charge. He is the most popular politician in Germany by a quite a considerable margin. He is currently the Social Democrat Defense Minister, very, very strong in Ukraine. And what has been really interesting over the last three or four days in particular, and you mentioned the rise of Dylinka, the left-wing party, I actually think they benefited from Elon Musk's attempted intervention. I think they also benefited from the fact that Meltzer had been talking so much about needing to increase the defense infrastructure. And there was this buzz went round that this was going to mean conscription of the young. And so all sorts of things went on. It's not a simple picture. And Dylinka, the AFD did particularly well amongst young men, Dylinka did particularly well amongst young women. So that was going on there as well. So when you're saying Pistorius to be the boss, you mean Pistorius to be the boss of the major left-wing party? So he would lead them into an alliance with Meltzer as the chancellor leading the major right-wing party? Yeah. And if not the boss, then certainly doing a very, very big job. Now, you could argue, just keep him as defense minister. The guy that I mentioned last week who, King Bell, who'd been on the, who's one of the kind of the leading figures in the Social Democrats, he's already, I was a bit alarmed by this, he's already talking about, you know, we're going to be driving a hard bargain. We're going to be asking for a change of course, etc. I think if they've got any sense, Meltz and whoever is going to be leading the Social Democrats negotiations should really try to get together a program pretty quickly. Again, on that, my understanding is that in the German system, Schultz remains as chancellor until such time as the new coalition could be formed. If they try to do what some German governments have done in the past, which is negotiate incredibly detailed 100-page coalition agreements down to every last dot, Schultz will be stuck as a dead duck chancellor for a long time, at a time when Germany is facing this incredible challenge. So, speed is of the essence. I think so. That means pragmatism, that might mean psorias and chart. In terms of the two biggest issues, I guess, that this new government needs to deal with, I would reckon they are immigration and defense. And actually, we had a really interesting conversation. People haven't listened on leading with Franz Timmermans, who was very senior figure in the EU and is now the leader of the Labour Party in the Netherlands. But he was suggesting that in Belgium, the right had done very well and defeated the far right by not talking about immigration at all, just talking about cost of living. I don't think that's an option in Germany, because the numbers of people that have come in are so enormous. And basically, Schultz tried to do that. He tried to not talk about immigration and didn't work for him. So, we've got Metz and his immigration policy seems to be twofold. Firstly, it has to be a what I would call a safe third country policy, which is something like the EU-Turkey deal, which is where you sign a deal with a country like Turkey. And that effectively stops the flood of or stops enormous numbers of migrants coming across the border. I don't want to use the word flood because it seems a bit kind of unpleasant. The second thing is being realistic about doing some, but they're largely symbolic, returns of foreign criminals. So, there are 80 Afghans who've been convicted in one of the lander who could be sent back. They need to do those things quite practically and quickly, and then they need to get numbers down. If they can do that, then I think they can move on to other things, just over to you on immigration for a second before we do a defence. What Metz said when he was, when it was clear he was going to win, and they have this extraordinary tradition in German elections, where on the night, as the results are still sort of coming in, the leaders do a TV brown table. So, if you probably heard that Metz did this thing, we'll come on to what he said about the United States, but he did it sort of sandwiched between Vidal and the FD and Schultz. He had quite a good attack on her, but he basically was saying, for him, you've got two of the three that he said, immigration, the economy, cost of living, and defence and foreign policy, and Europe's place in the world. And I think on immigration, this is where I think it could get very tricky in the coalition, because of course, what the AFD are going to do, and the longer this goes on, the more they will be able to try to use this as saying, this is just the old politics still at work. Look at Schultz there, he lost and he's still the chancellor. Look at Pistorius, he lost and he's still the guy who's running Ukraine. And Metz, he only got 20, less than under 30% of the votes. He's got the lowest approval ratings of any chancellor that we've ever had elected, blah, blah, blah. We're the shiny new thing. So, that's why I think they've got to do it fairly quickly. But I think that some of the stuff that Metz was saying during the campaign, in order to kind of keep the AFD at bay, will kind of be very, very difficult to get through the social democrats. I thought what was for me the standout moment of this round table, which I'm sure you've seen, and it's so interesting this about translation. So, I got back from Germany and I went to the German embassy for the results coming in. And being a bit of a show off, Roy, there was a BBC there and then the German people were through there watching the German television. So, of course, I went through and watched the German television. But when they were doing this round table, he said this thing about America being gleichgültig about Europe. Now, gleichgültig, if you put it into Google Translate, I think we'll say indifferent. But interestingly, the translation that then I presume was being translated simultaneously. But there was obviously translated by whoever was doing the translation as doesn't care about, which I think sounds harder. How do you make sense of these kind of linguistic differences and translations? How hard do you think it is? Can you think of contexts in which that phrase is used? Can you give us an example where someone might use it in ordinary speech? Let's say my mother-in-law was, and then you inserted that phrase towards me. What would that imply about her views? No, I think more it would be that your mother-in-law is gleichgültig about whether you go on holiday to France or Spain. It's like, I'm not that bothered. I'm not that bothered. It's not sort of passive aggressive. She's a bit sort of peed off with the whole thing. I don't listen. There'll be some German listeners who will understand this better than I do. But when I heard it, I didn't hear it as he doesn't care about Europe. What he said was what's been happening in the last few days, and it was a very, very strong statement, means we, Europe, have got to learn to be independent when it comes to defence and foreign policy. He said that he found the interventions of Musk. He didn't mention them by name, but Musk and Vance. He said they were shameful and on a par with Putin's interference in elections. That's a very, very strong statement. So maybe he did mean, and he doesn't care about Europe. We had Macron in Washington yesterday, Keir Starmer on Thursday, and everybody sort of seems to want this love actually moment when Hugh Grant stands up and basically says to the American president, well, you could fuck off. And I remember at the time, I was, I've ever seen that film with the cinema, and Hugh Grant does his things because people have seen me arriving. And they're all sort of looking back, yeah, that's what Blair should have done. So Matt's got quite close to the love actually moment. And I've got no doubt Trump will have been told about it. But I think on immigration, they will have to at least come up with some of the things that Matt's has been talking about during the campaign. And if the social Democrats have seen to soften that too much, I think that gives Matt's a problem. Because what vital has been her line of attack at the moment is, well, there you are, one in five of you voted for us. These people are saying that your votes don't count your illegitimate, your old neo-Nazis, et cetera, which of course they're not saying, but this is what they're sort of pushing back. And therefore, we actually are going to become your big voice in the new Bundestag. And so it's quite a powerful line of attack. This Matt is not just for Germany, Matt is for Britain, every country in Europe. And the question is, can you come up with a policy that controls immigration massively reduces the number of people coming into Europe without breaking European Union and international law? And there's sort of three positions, isn't there? There's the kind of status quo business as usual, which in the case of many countries, populations feel is just not working. So I think Germany had something like 800,000 asylum seekers last year, extraordinary numbers. On the other extreme is what's being pushed now by the far right across Europe. And that involves two things. It involves putting police on borders, basically breaking Schengen. So Schengen at the moment, as listeners will remember, means that there's free movement without border checks in Europe. So these parties are basically saying, let's leave Schengen and let's put up these very strong borders. And secondly, they're talking about forced deportation of enormous numbers of people, including for the for the extremists on the far right, forced deportations of nationals, you know, German, Austrian nationals who they want out of the country. And so the challenge for Matt's, and I think everybody who wants to beat the far right in Europe, and this is the existential fight and increasingly it's an existential fight, as you've just pointed out, not just against the far right, but the far rights backers in the United States. There's a clear attempt, incredible attempt by Vance and Musk and to some extent, Trump, to undermine our own democracies from inside. Listeners don't quite understand. We do not interfere in other countries' elections. For a very, very long time, the tradition has been, you let the election happen for obvious reasons, because you don't know who's going to win, like you want to be friendly with whoever wins. And they have gone right out, Vance, Trump, Musk, to try to back the far right that they're doing at the FD. They're now talking about doing Vox and Spain. You said they're talking about it. The leader of Vox was at the CPAC, this right-wing conservative conference where Bannon was doing his Nazi salute and List Trust was speaking to three people in a hundred chairs. And when Trump was there, the leader of Vox was there and he singled him out in the crowd and basically talked about Vox as the future of Spain. That's right. And Elon Musk has now tweeted out saying Vox will win the next election, will be the next Spanish government. Yeah, he did say AFD would win the last one in Germany. But for some reason, though, when I get election predictions wrong, Musk's supporters get very angry with me, but when he gets election predictions wrong, it never seems to have any effect on their view on his judgment. We can maybe talk about Musk in the second half, because I think the views on Musk are not quite as the social media platform might be projecting it. What I think is interesting about Merz, you know, because I was in Germany, I've written my column this week about some of the German election stuff and they had so many TV debates, I can't tell you. Fiona was with me and most evenings we would have something to do, they'd go and watch a TV debate, but Fiona doesn't speak German. So she'd be sort of, you know, lying on the bed, reading a book or whatever. But it is really, really interesting how just watching them as they came on and seeing how they spoke and seeing how people reacted to them, she got a sense of them that was really close. And, honestly, it makes me sometimes wonder whether politicians, whether they actually matters what they say. So she sort of looked at Merz and he's kind of growing on me, you know, he looks sort of serious and strong and confident. He's quite reassuring. Schultz just looks like it's all over, the game's over, he's given up. Harbeck looks like a really nice guy, but he's not going to win. And that vital, she's really, really unpleasant. So she's sort of got them. But the thing about Merz, that I find very, very interesting, is that, so this is a guy, Roy, that there's something in this for you, let me tell you. This is a guy who was first talked of as a possible Chancellor several decades ago. He was in the running when Merkel first became Chancellor Candidate for the CDU. When she was in power, he became one of her biggest critics. He got no progress through the party. He left Parliament and he went off to be a kind of corporate lawyer and make lots of money. He was still firing pot shots or whatever you. He then lost two leadership elections. First of all, he lost, well, he lost, he didn't run eventually, eventually against Merkel because he knew he wasn't going to win. He then lost against Merkel's chosen successor for a while, Annegret Karambauer. And then he lost to Armin Laschet, who was, who eventually became the candidate that lost to Olaf Schultz. So this is a guy who has really been through it. And I just think he's one of those politicians who, because he has been through so much, I think Fiona was right. You look at him, he's got strength. He's got a real strength there. I know we get pulled into overstatement hyperbole because of the world we're living through and the way that Trump's conducted himself in the last four weeks. But I think it's reasonable to say that this is probably the most consequential German government since Adnauers in the late 40s, in terms of scale of challenges facing. And again, to remind listeners, Germany is an enormous economy, third largest economy in the world, largest population in Europe, the big economic engine of Europe, even with the economic challenges facing. So he's going to have to find that middle way on immigration, find a policy that reduces numbers dramatically without breaking European law. He's then going to have to come up with a defense strategy, which we can maybe get into a little bit, rebuild the German economy. And I think those two things could be connected. And then I'd also argue that he needs to reimagine or help with other European leaders to completely reimagine what Europe is. Now, the question I suppose is, now that I've laid out all this grand vision, he's obviously got the right instincts. He often says the right thing. The question is, has he got the temperament? I mean, there have been these brief moments, there was this completely unnecessary non-binding vote where he got himself in a muddle with the AFD before the election. And he can seem, I don't know, is there a sort of slight Rishi Sunak sense of, okay, she being a little bit thin-skinned and rebarbative? I think because of the experience he's been through, I think he's a lot tougher than he probably was. I think there was a time when he was a bit thin-skinned. I think the temperament stuff is really interesting. I've actually just been, while I was there, I bought lots of books. There's quite a few biographies of him. And there's one I read by a guy called Volker Reising, which is called their unfair might bar, which means the unavoidable one. I mean, that's sort of rather interesting. There are so many biographies of him, given that he's never been a mayor, he's never been a minister. It's fascinating that he's had so many biographies. But the thing is, his first Spiegel front cover. Now, you know, the Spiegel is like the big weekly magazine. His first Spiegel front cover was 25 years ago this week. He was a big player around then. And he's one of those politicians that people, even if they don't like him, which a lot of people don't, they sort of find him quite interesting. And he's very conservative. He comes from a conservative background. And I said to you about the last book, the book I read, their unfair might bar, that had this, which was written by a woman, which talked a lot about his quotes, problem with women. This book had his wife's version of what he was like. And she had this wonderful quote, "I love my husband as though he were a complete work of art." She talked about it being, you know, love at first sight. He's quite religious, I think. He said at one point he would never marry somebody who wasn't a church girl. He's got, here's a really, this is my favourite, very trivial fact, Rory. He's one of four children, two of whom have sadly passed away, but four children, two of them with brown eyes left-handed, and two of them with blue eyes right-handed. I was fascinated by that. He's a qualified pilot, flies himself around in his own plane. Like grand chaps. Correct. He's unlike grand chaps. He's never changed his name. He's very wealthy by political standards because when he went out in the wilderness, he worked as a very senior corporate lawyer. He worked for BlackRock. He made millions out of that. People say he's a bit arrogant, but I think he's a very, very interesting guy. And I think he's somebody who's going to be very conscious of his own power. And I thought that was what came through in the immediate aftermath of the campaign. Let's try to push, if we can, politely to follow up on our Syrian present interview with an interview with Chancellor Mertz as soon as we can on leading. We'd love to. And he speaks very, very good English with a slight annoying American twang. The thing that's so interesting about him, day one, before he's even, well, not day one, but on the day of the campaign as the results came in, him coming out with this thing about, you know, basically what Trump and Vance have been doing and saying, we've got to understand how dangerous and how serious this is. This is a guy who was chair of something called the Atlantic Booker, the Atlantic Bridge. His political hero is Ronald Reagan. He's somebody who really does feel that the transatlantic relationship is fundamental to Germany's national interest. I mean, I think we'll see quite a lot of this from conservatives. I mean, it's certainly true for somebody like me in a much smaller way than him. I mean, I grew up very much believing deeply, deeply in the transatlantic relationship and therefore watching what Trump's doing is almost more traumatic and more startling. Whereas if you came from the far left and you always thought America was a sort of brutal imperial power, I guess you're not that surprised about it. Just to finish off as we go into the break, he's going to take over. He's got an amazing lift in which he's going to have to come up with an immigration policy. He's going to have to address cost of living in the German economy. He's going to have to win back East Germany somehow, make them believe again in his government and then in defense. Now, Germany is in a very interesting position there. Schultz, as listeners will remember, announced this 100 billion euro package and it felt at the very beginning of his tenure as though Germany was really going to become a major defense power. But a loss of problems have emerged since, which are a little bit reminiscent unfortunately of some of the problems that Britain faces. So serious problems in recruitment, when they were trying to deploy German troops to Lithuania, they could barely put 5,000 troops together and deploy them in the field. There's a real sense that for 30 years, NATO hasn't really taken the Russian threat seriously. I was talking to a German engineer yesterday who was saying that they used to test their bridges to make sure they could take tanks. They haven't taken that for 30 years. Now, part of the point here though is that if Germany really invested in defense, this could also be part of their industrial strategy and their economic revival. Because actually in the United States and Israel, big defense spending has actually been completely central in terms of innovation, tech developments, this thing called DARPA that the Garcy Dominic Cummings is obsessed with, in which US defense spending basically contributed to the development of everything from GPS satellites to the internet. So I think there could be a possibility of saying, look, Germany has exceptional engineers. Yes, the car industry has been in a bit of trouble, but it could be repurposed and start thinking much more about military production. And it could also be a way of rebuilding those bridges, rebuilding those roads, really thinking about how to get the German economy off the ground. Now, think about that for Britain. Think about that for France. Think about defense spending as an enormous industrial opportunity. Before we go back to that, Roy, did you put the adjective ghastly in front of Dominic Cummings? Because he appeared to be calling for you to be killed on social media this week. Did I read that correctly? It's a reminder of being realistic about who people like Dominic Cummings and Musk and Vance and the far right are. Because it's very easy to say to yourself, and lots of my friends here in the US, I'm talking to the US at the moment, will say, well, they have a point about this and a point about that. And you begin to treat them as though they're reasonable people. So I knew Dominic Cummings and I would have a meal with him, and he would talk to me about civil service reform and inefficiencies. And I'd think, oh, we've got a lot in common. We both want to improve efficiency, make government more serious, make it more agile. And I deluded myself into thinking that he was somebody in good faith who you could have a reasonable conversation with. And then, as you say, he's literally just put out a tweet in which he's accused me of conspiring with, and this goes all the way back to Brexit, accused me of conspiring with Dominic Grieve to flout the biggest electoral event in world history. And I quote, I should face the penalty that used to be given to traitors. In other words, I should be executed, should be put to death. Now, there's a lot of things wrong with it, including the fact that actually, yes, I was strongly in favour of Remain and I voted for Remain, but I also tried very hard to get a moderate self-Brexit deal through. Yeah, I would have called you a traitor because you weren't loyal after the anti-Brexit cause, but I wouldn't have killed you. Exactly. So yes, there's that, that he's completely rewriting history, but it's also the astonishing idea that, I mean, it's not a safe world out there. This is a world in which in the United States, there are a lot of people with weapons, with crazy conspiracy theories, there are politicians getting death threats, and it's not very helpful for him to have 1.2 million of his followers and 6,000 likes saying that Rory Stewart should be killed. We should put in the newsletter if somebody wants to see an absolutely brilliant positive use of Twitter. Ben Wallace did a thread about Dominic Cummings, which is really, really worth reading. Basically, you get to the end that Ben Wallace essentially says, I mean, the problem with Dominic is that he thinks he's a guru, but nobody treats him as a guru. All he's ever done really has come up with quite a good slogan, which I don't think Dominic Cummings would like very much at all. Back to the more serious matter of the new German Chancellor. There's another point, Rory, which I wanted to draw to your attention that came from this book. He wrote a book when he was in exile called What Now, Germany 2.0, with a former social democrat minister by the name of Wolfgang Clemont. So Rory, part of his political rehabilitation was to do a political media project with somebody from the other side and look where he is now. So in 15 years time, maybe I can have a comeback. I like the vision. It's great. One of the things I want to tell you from this very interesting book is that it's very good on why Meltz and Merkel didn't get on. It's more, I think, than just they were both ambitious for the same job, which she talked about in her own book. He was one of the first kind of culture warriors and he used to talk about this thing called, you know, talked about German culture and she felt he was pushing the wrong buttons at the wrong at the wrong time. And then once she became Chancellor, he then started to really become almost like a bit of a renter quote, critic of everything that she did. And so there's a wonderful quote from where he was going for the leadership to become the Chancellor. And she had this quote that basically said, well, you know, he must have qualities to God as far as he has, which is one of the best sort of damnings with fake praises. And there's a wonderful account of when they met. He was invited to her 70th birthday and there was this very, I'm sure you've seen lots of this in Conservative Party of people that you know to be sworn enemies, you know, oh, dear Angela, oh, dear Flaynard, how lovely to see you. Click, click, click, click, click. So anyway, I think he's going to be a very interesting Chancellor. And I think how he builds the power, that's partly about the coalition and then how he does with the public, but also how he uses that power thing is going to be fascinating. Let's take a short break. And then let's come back and maybe integrate all these really interesting questions about Europe and defence into what's now going on with Trump, NATO and Ukraine. This episode is brought to you by NordVPN. September, new term, darker evenings, calendars filling fast. Everyone's getting organised, including the people watching your online activity. NordVPN stops that. One tap and your connection is encrypted. Public Wi-Fi at the station, coffee shop or library, safe. No prying eyes, no one harvesting your data, just you browsing away in peace. Threat Protection Pro also blocks malicious links, scans downloads, keeping your devices clean. Think of it as the bounce of your browser. The shady stuff doesn't get past the door. And it keeps prices honest. Online deals shift depending on where you appear to be. With NordVPN, you see the real numbers, not the inflated ones. One account covers up to 10 devices, phones, laptops, even the tele, or install it on your router so the whole household's protected without effort. To get the best discount of your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/restispolitics. Our link also gives you four extra months on the two-year plan. There's no risk with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee. The link is in the episode description box. Welcome back to the Restis Politics with me, Rory Sjoerd. And with me, Ernest Campbell. And of course, the reason I think that we're many reasons, but one of the major reasons we're focusing so much on Germany now is that this is the hinge moment in which Europe now feels completely different to what it felt like four weeks ago. And feels completely different because, as I think we've said on this podcast, we're suddenly realizing that we have spent 80 years creating an entire system that totally depends on the United States. We're vulnerable to the US in every way. We've built our complete security and defense infrastructure in a little American cocoon. We buy American planes. We rely on American tech, the seven largest tech companies in the world are American. And at no point in the last 70-80 years certainly has the British foreign policy elite, or at least since Suez, really questioned whether America isn't its ally. And we can get into that a little bit because, of course, that's central to the way that you and Tony Blair thought about George W. Bush and it's central to the wars that I fought in in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of American coalitions. And suddenly now, we have entered a world in which, as you've pointed out, Friedrich Mertz is saying that America may be indifferent to us. What's that German phrase again? Now, that is a really interesting word because if America shifts from being the unquestionable ally to something that is even neutral towards us, and in relation to Ukraine, and this is what's really brought it to the fore, potentially even slightly allying with Russia against Europe over Ukraine, then everything is suddenly turned on its head. I don't think it feels slight, Roy. I don't think it's slightly. I think it feels. I mean, maybe this is a good point to just say a bit about Emmanuel Macron's visit yesterday, because on the one hand, they did the whole Bonomi and the touchy feely and the headline in their Spiegel this morning was lots of shoulder slapping, but not much agreement. Let's just take a couple of things. He was asked directly, you know, I've been in these White House situations with presidents and visiting foreign leaders, both when I was a journalist and when I was with a foreign leader. And what normally happens is you get greeted, Tony Blair, Macron yesterday, you get greeted, you get taken through. There was some very nice footage, actually, behind the scenes of Macron being introduced to Trump's team and including some of the backroom team of my view. And you go in and then they bring in what they call this pool spray, which is dozens of sort of guys with big sticks, and it's very chaotic and badly organised. And normally you have like a couple of questions. And Trump just turned it into one of these kind of long rambles. Well, let's talk about that for a second, because I think it's really important. So I'll do a little bit of explainer on background, and then we'll get into the texture of the thing. So just to remind people on the basic background, we're now at the third anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Last week, we reminded people of the fundamentals, which is that Russia feels that it's been making progress on the front line, and it's found that easier to mobilise troops, partly with the help of North Korea. And Ukraine has struggled to mobilise troops. And Ukraine has been kept alive with about $120 billion worth of US funding and about $140 billion. Or $350 billion if you're Donald Trump. $140 billion worth of European commitments have kept this thing going. So Europe committed about $20 billion more than the US, but between the two of them, enormous amount of commitment to Ukraine. Trump, of course, said he was going to fix it when he came in. There was a meeting in Saudi Arabia, which we were just leading into in the last pod. And an astonishing flurry of statements came out of that in which Trump said that Zelensky was a dictator, that he had a net popularity rating of 4%. He implied that Ukraine was responsible for starting the war. And essentially, no demands, no serious demands were made against Russia, and no security guarantees were offered for Ukraine. And Marco Rubio, who was a real Russia hawk, in fact, famously embarrassed Rex Tillerson, who was the first Secretary of State by asking repeatedly, is Putin a dictator. And has been on the record again and again, saying you can't trust Putin with anything. Putin doesn't want to make a deal with the United States. He just wants to make the United States weaker, has flipped around, along with all of Trump's teams, into a position of deference and trust towards Putin. And you can see the Russian media absolutely celebrating it. Loving it. Yeah, the Russian media is saying we've won, yeah. Well, yesterday, in the pool spray at the top, as they call it, one of the questions that got through was asking Trump whether he'd called Zelensky a dictator. Did he think that Putin was a dictator? And he just wouldn't answer. And Rubio, Rory, as you know, I'm a big fan of Foreign Affairs magazine, 2016, Rubio wrote a piece about his fundamental foreign policy beliefs and the big pillars for foreign policy. Military strength, while they're cutting the military right now, protecting free trade, while they're not doing that, and moral clarity in defending freedom. This is the other one, he said. Russian's aggression in Ukraine is an historic affront to the post-World War II global order on which the entire global economy depends. And I actually felt, looking at them yesterday, I don't know if you, they had, so yeah, Trump and Macron there, yeah, JD Vance, then Rubio, and I think it was Suzy Wiles, the chief of staff, and Hesketh with his ridiculous Stars and Stripes handkerchief was in the back with all the hacks. But Rubio genuinely looked uncomfortable to me, because they're having to sit there, and they then had to sit through the press conference, where Trump just comes up with the most extraordinary nonsense. So this was also the day in which the US decided, astonishingly, not to abstain in a vote with the United Nations, but to vote with North Korea, Russia, and Hungary in the United Nations on Russia's side against Ukraine. You forgot Belarus and Eritrea. Fantastic, fantastic. So I mean, unbelievable. So Macron then gets on a plane, and of course, what he's doing is he's setting off to save the world. So he's jumping on a plane, and he's going to go and convince Donald Trump that he should provide above all security guarantees. Macron keeps coming back and back saying, there's going to be security guarantees, US deterrence is going to behind us, you know, we're going to get a peace deal together. And there wasn't a really great article in The New York Times we'll share for subscribers and others in our newsletter in which they interviewed various former British ambassadors to the US talking about what a strategy might be in that very strange fantasy world that we all live in that we can actually change Trump's mind on something. You know, so they had lots of ideas about, you know, don't don't get into a discussion on what Zelensky's like, because that's, you know, going down a rabbit hole and we'll just annoy Trump, don't contradict him when he says 300 billion and try to just get him to vote and play to an idea of strength. Anyway, enough. So Macron arrives, he goes in to see Trump, there's a thing before there's a thing afterwards. And how do you then read what results actually Macron gets out of this charm offensive? It's really hard to know. I like you watch the whole thing. I watched his arrival. I watched the pool spray at the top, during which you say that you, you know, these ambassadors are all saying don't correct him. Macron did correct him, because Trump was going off on one about we've spent 350 billion dollars, which isn't true. And Europe has just done all this stuff, but they're going to get it all back because it was all done in loans. And Macron put his hand on his arm and said, no, no, no, that's not right. Let me tell you, in fact, and you could see Trump almost like shrinking in, because his instinct would be to say, don't dare talk to me like that. Do you know who I am? But he kind of knew he couldn't quite go that far. And then in the later press conference, there were several moments where I saw Trump while Macron was speaking, particularly when he was speaking in French and Trump was having to get his earpiece in, where he started tapping his index fingers against, against the side of the lectern. And I think that was a bit of sort of, you know, I'm the main actor, this is going on too long. So I think when you say what was the outcome, it depends on what he said afterwards. But what I think Macron did very, very effectively, he got the balance right between the sort of puke making ego stroking that you have to do, which Keir Starman and people are going to hate it when he does it. You just wait. Keir Starman will say, Donald Trump's arrival in the White House has changed the game. There's now a new opportunity. We've got to work together to seize it. He's going to say that. And he's going to say, just get ready for it. He will say, you know, we have to, the leadership that he's showing on this issue and other issues, he's going to say all that. But what Trump, what Macron also did, and I hope that Keir does something similar, when talking without saying, no, he's not a dictator, what Macron did, he talked about the courage and resilience of the Ukrainian people. I think we know what he meant. Three or four times, he said, you know, this, this Russian aggression. And one of the most powerful moments for me was when they were talking about Trump is droning on about, he's going to get his deal and the minerals and the rare earths and all that stuff. And Macron, literally on back of that, saying, if there's compensation, then the people don't have to be compensated like the Ukrainians, because of course, it was the Russians that started this war. And you can see Trump sitting there thinking, do I contradict this? I noticed Vance sort of shuffling in his seat at that point. I mean, so it's very interesting, what having forced myself to watch Trump that long. Firstly, he was more courteous towards Macron, and more sort of charming than I was expecting. So he did do a lot of praising him about Notre Dame and talking about D-Day, and there was a lot of that back and forth, as you remember. There was, of course, an enormous amount of the trademark, let's use this opportunity to attack Biden and talk about how Biden let all these very dangerous, you know, millions of illegal immigrants into the United States and, you know, move off the subject, Ukraine to just boast about what an amazing president he's been and how well he's done. And he managed to get a journalist asking him, you know, are you pleased about the fact that you're doing really well in the polls? Roy, let me jump in there. Somebody who I've read on social media, who I follow and who actually I think is usually accurate, said the journalist who asked that question, who Trump called that journalist first, Brian, I think you have a question. And the question was, you must be very pleased with this poll that says that you're the most popular president since George Washington. Right. According to this guy on Twitter, that guy is the boyfriend of Marjorie Taylor Group. Mega-magic person, right? So if that is wrong, I'm happy to apologize to Brian. But in any event, you talk about a planted question. So you've got the president of France there effectively representing the whole of Europe. And your first question is a planted question to say how amazingly popular you are when the real polls are actually showing anything. But that says to me what strength that says. So we had all that. But there was another thing going on all the way through, which is Macron kept saying, it's been a great meeting. And we've agreed in this meeting that there's going to be security guarantees from the United States, haven't we, Mr. President? And Trump scrupulously never says that. Absolutely never. In fact, actually in the pre-meeting, Trump said, he's a great guy. But I remember when we had dinner in the Eiffel Tower and he came out and he gave this great speech in French. And I kind of understand everything in French. But afterwards, I discovered that he'd said that we'd agreed all these things, we never agreed. He's a cheeky guy. So basically what Trump is signaling is that he thinks that Macron's technique is to come out of these meetings saying, we've got all these agreements on all these wonderful things and that that will be the fact. And actually Trump isn't even pretending. He refuses to use any of Macron's language. He's refusing to say there will be American security guarantees, there'll be American deterrence or anything of that sort. When Macron challenged him over the facts on the European spending and the facts are clear, Europe has spent more than America. And he sort of just looked at the president, you can believe that if you want. It was totally in his alternative facts mode or the disinformation space, as Zelensky calls it. I don't know if you had time to read it, but I sent you a report by the Institute for the Study of War. Now, this is not a liberal PENCO organization. I think your friend David Petraeus is on the board. This is like, these are serious military people, they're close to the military. And they put out a report this week, very factual, but it essentially was debunking all of the claims that Trump has been making. One, Zelensky is not at risk of losing Ukraine right now. They have this extraordinary stat. At the current rate of advance, it would take Russian forces 83 years to capture the remaining 80% of Ukraine. So they've got 20%. So, and then they're not risking it. Most Ukrainian cities are still standing. They're very, very, they were very clear this point that Trump keeps making in these mini-me-farage in the UK as we say, why doesn't Zelensky hold elections? Answer, because they're prohibited to hold elections under the Ukrainian constitution when they're at war. On the losses, pointing out that the numbers, Trump keeps talking about millions, not true. States as a fact, Europe provides as much direct aid as the US. Ukraine did not misuse half of aid. They had these reports from people who've been monitoring the aid that it has not been misused. And if it has been misused, most of that money stayed in America anyway, and also debunking the fact that Ukraine have been trying to avoid negotiations with Putin. And I think it's going to be very hard for Kier Starmer. Macron, I thought, did it well in terms of don't, you know, France Timmerman, who said that thing, don't get in a fight with a pig. Because the pig loves rolling around in mud. I think Kier will have to sit there when Trump comes out with lots of this nonsense. But like Macron did, find one or two points that you are going to be very, very clear about making. And I've been thinking a lot about this. I don't know how you make this argument to his face. But I actually think that somehow, Macron, Kier Starmer, Mao Tseung gets there and the rest of them, they've got to get it inside Trump's head, that people like Xi Jinping and Putin, when they look at Trump surrendering so much and boasting about what a great dealmaker he is, he's actually coming over to them as unbelievably weak. Yeah, he gave Trump so much. He gave Putin so much with getting nothing in return. And Xi Jinping said, this guy's weak. That's right. And I think that's what they're gambling on. They're gambling that they can appeal to Trump's vanity and that they can say you're being ripped off by Putin. He's going to betray you. The problem is that that weighs against another instinct, which is Trump basically doesn't want to have anything to do with the rest of the world. He's not interested. And you can explain to him that Putin is a threat to Moldova, or that Putin is going to go into Lithuania, which is a NATO country. And if he gets into Lithuania, that's the end of NATO. There's no common defense. And Trump doesn't care. Because I think we keep misunderstanding him. I mean, we've got this story that keeps being produced that he's transactional, pragmatic and transactional. He's not pragmatic and transactional. There's nothing pragmatic about the idea of turning Gaza into a beach resort on the Mediterranean. It's not practical. And there's nothing transactional about what he's doing with Ukraine. I mean, remember, a transaction implies there's two sides. You're doing a deal, the art of the deal, but it's not the art of the deal. What he said to Ukraine is, give me $500 billion worth of your minerals. Now, the U.S. at most has spent $120 billion, $130 billion. And when Ukraine says, why? The answer is, give it to me. And when they say, and what do we get in return? Are we going to get security guarantees in return? He just says, no, give it to me. In other words, it's not actually transactional. It's not a deal at all. It's robbery. It's extortion. He's just saying, give me stuff. Same with Denmark. Same with Denmark and Greenland. So, okay, let's say we've got that kind of personality. Obviously, deterrence, NATO, is psychological. It's not down to exactly how many troops the U.S. has. It's down to Russia's calculation that when push comes to shove, the U.S. will launch nuclear missiles ultimately to defend NATO. And again, what's defending Taiwan against China? It's psychological. It's just the belief that the U.S. might do something. And God knows, one doesn't want anyone to test that belief, right? You test that belief, then the nukes have to start flying. So, the whole point about deterrence is this belief, the confidence. So, at the very least, we're in a situation in which Trump just doesn't care. At the worst, in relation to the Panama Canal or Greenland, potentially this guy is becoming a strategic adversary in which he's going to leverage his money and troops to actually go after us. Now, the problem with that is we don't have any doctrine to deal with that. We have no way of thinking about the United States as a strategic adversary. We don't even plan for it. There's no war college in Europe that's thought about what would be involved in fighting the United States. There's nobody alive who actually has ever envisaged that this might happen. That's what's so extraordinary about it. You know the question I get asked more than any other going around the place, and it was the same in Germany, but also two people at the swimming pool today. This question, you must get this the whole time as well. What has Putin got on Trump? As the tech bros get involved, there's a combination of Trump trying to run America like one of his property companies, and in other words, treating the Europeans in the way that he treats his suppliers, which famously in New York means he doesn't pay his suppliers and they all get bankrupted, right? But Mike Brock has written quite a good sub-stack piece that I shared with you. It's terrifying. Yeah, which follows on the stuff that you're talking about with a sovereign individual. In that case, it's this intellectual dark web. It's Curtis Yavin. It's Peter Teal. Peter Teal being the person who financed JD Vance, for whom JD Vance worked, and the way that Musk, Teal, and others like Mark Andreessen, who also talks about this, basically don't believe in democracy. They think that we're in a new world, a fast-moving world, and the US government needs to be run in the way that they think they run their tech companies. So a lot follows on from that. They're very authoritarian in the way they run these companies. They very much move fast and break things. They're not about checks and balances. They don't believe, of course, in data privacy, which is why we've got all this stuff going on in AI. So put all those things together. But you then said nobody's thought about how we think about a world in which the US could be our strategic adversary. Well, of course, the last person famously to be interested in this idea and really developed with it was of course Charles de Gaulle, the French president. France had a shattering experience in Suez and in Algeria, where they realized that the United States could pull the rug out from on themselves, which is why France, unlike Britain, developed a completely independent nuclear deterrent that did not have US components in it. That's why we get mocked by the French for the idea that maybe we can't even use our tried nuclear missiles because we're reliant on the US for the whole thing. And they withdrew from NATO and tried to develop a vision of France and even of Europe, which was more impendent of the United States. And we for nearly 50 years slightly mocked them for that, thought it was unnecessary, expensive and absurd. And I honestly, if I talk about it myself, I actually remember back in the day, people like me 10 years ago, thinking, well, maybe the British military should become like the US Marine Corps, it should become just an expeditionary force that bolts on to a whole US system to go around the world. And now we all have to become Gaulists. And becoming Gaulists is a massive shift. Because I think I cannot begin to explain the many ways in which it would take 15 years at least, and probably 5% of our GDP by the end of that 15 years of the whole of Europe, before we began to have the kind of military forces that could provide a genuine independent force from the United States. And that was the other word that Melz used, independent of the United States. And Melz also said, by the way, he floated this idea, Germany, for obvious reasons, has no nuclear weapons, right? Germany, he is saying he's going to have to build up his own defences. But he's already talking about whether it's possible to get Germany and other European countries under the Anglo-French nuclear umbrella. But of course, there isn't an Anglo-French nuclear umbrella. There's a French nuclear umbrella ish. But as you say, we are so tied in to the American systems that that is going to have to be looked at. And of course, the other thing that's fascinating in this, you know, I know you, we probably were going to run out of time, maybe do something on this in Q&A. And you want to talk about the way that defense itself was changing. And I was looking at some of the numbers of drone use in Ukraine. I mean, you're talking about, in the near future, the potential for millions of drones to be used, it's gone from thousands to hundreds of thousands, and it's growing exponentially. But if you think this goes back to your point about the tech pros who think that democracy has had its day and they should be in charge, the influence that Elon Musk, remember we talked to Ian Bremer, he said that you could make the case that Musk has done more for Ukraine than anyone because of when he did give them access to Starlink. But Musk is now just echoing the Trump idea that Zelensky is a gangster and, you know, you can't be trusted and everybody hates him and all the sort of nonsense that he says. But the fact is, Starlink, owned by SpaceX, is now fundamental to some of these military battles. Now, that is why I guess world leaders are a bit wary about taking this guy on. But if Europe is serious about getting its act together, and you and I have been saying for some time, it needs to get its defense act together, then we're talking about sums of money. And Kirstam maybe started a process today. I thought one of the most moving things this week, Roy, I don't know if you caught sight of any of the Zelensky event with all those, Trudeau was there, von der Leyen was there, Costa was there, Janskjaar Stora was there from Norway. Two of the best speeches were his, Prime Minister of Norway, and Meta Frederiksen, who we spoke to recently, Prime Minister of Denmark, and stubbed the Prime Minister of the President of Finland. They made absolutely brilliant speeches about why they feel this threat, and why Europe has got to get its act together, together on defense. And this, by the way, is that this is what's so important about Kirstam's visit on Thursday. This is a massive challenge and opportunity for Kirstam's leadership, because I've always felt the route back to some sort of proper grown-up relationship with Europe for Britain is through defense and security, and that's what Brekir is going to take to Washington on Thursday. Well, let's make that, I think, the opening theme of tomorrow's podcast. Let's begin with that and get into some of the defense stuff, get into some of the European stuff, and maybe talk about where Europe could find new allies as the US falls away. Anyway, thank you very much. That was a really good episode. See you soon. Bye. Hi, everybody. It's Dominic Sambruk here from the Rest is History podcast, and I have a special message to listeners of the Rest is Politics. I know on the Rest is Politics you hear all the time about Najaf Faraj, about the threat of reform, the specter of Brexit, the anti-immigration stuff that's so common. Do you want to know where all of that comes from? Because we on the Rest is History have done an episode exploring just this. It's an episode looking at Enoch Powell, perhaps the most controversial character in modern British history, and his rivers of blood speech. And we will be digging into his effect on the Tory party, his role as a kind of intellectual godfather for reform, his importance in the wider story of race and immigration in Britain. So tune in to the Rest is History, wherever you get your podcasts, and look for episode Enoch Powell, Rivers of Blood. Is this the man who broke British politics forever?