561. How Trump’s Chaos Keeps Splintering the World Order

What happens to the world when it stops believing American promises, American leadership, and stops believing in Donald Trump's boasting of his own greatness? In recent days, we've had some answers. Nuclear Pakistan, oil-rich Saudi, and Turkey, one of the biggest conventional militaries in the world, coming together to form a new strategic alliance, and with Egypt next in line, it seems, talk of an Islamic NATO. The Iran war grinds on, no end in sight, US munitions seemingly low, and that being watched closely and exploited by Russia and by China, from Ukraine to Taiwan. And as an explosive-laden drone is found inside Leipzig airport, as the German government warns of being subject to daily hybrid warfare, US and European intelligence agencies both warning Russia may be about to test NATO's solidarity. Either with some kind of attack on a Baltic state, or even Poland. August used to be called this silly season because nothing much happened during the summer. Right now, not least with wildfires burning all over Europe, lots is happening, lots of it serious, and all of it is really related to this question, how do we make sense of this ever-changing world order? This episode is powered by Fuse Energy. Now, changing your energy supplier should be fairly straightforward. Yet, many of us still put it off, even when we might be paying more than we need to. It becomes one of those jobs we know we should do, but never quite get around to. Switching energy suppliers always manage to somehow get pushed to the bottom of the to-do list. And it's probably because we think the process is going to be really, really complicated. But with Fuse, switching takes you just three minutes, so roughly about as long as it takes you to make a cup of coffee. And with 24/7 support to guide you through the switch, it's easy to break away from your life. Right now, Fuse Energy's tariffs are up to £100 below the off-gem price cap, so stop overpaying out of habit. Switch to Fuse Energy in just three minutes. Get Tripp Plus for free with the code POLITICS at FuseEnergy.com/politics. Visit FuseEnergy.com for full terms and conditions. This episode is brought to you by NordVPN. And I must thank NordVPN, because on my Grand European tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go. I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creef, and of course, the thing flashed up saying this is an unsecured public network, and I was able to go to my VPN, and it was a little reminder of something. I mean, we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks. Well, I think, are you not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this? I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to NordVPN.com/restlesspolitics. And the link is in the episode description. A BetterHelp ad Imagine carrying a backpack every day. Every conversation. Every mistake. Every expectation. You probably wouldn't notice how heavy it was until someone asked if you wanted to put it down. Sometimes feeling better starts exactly like that. Better isn't one size fits all. Better is personal. It's therapy. Tailored to you. To help lighten what you've been carrying. Match with a therapist who truly cares about you. Match with a therapist who truly gets you. Visit BetterHelp.com/restpolitics. Welcome to the Restless Politics with me Rory Stewart. And me Alastair Campbell. And today we will be talking about the development of a new, almost NATO-type alliance, which has emerged between Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan. We've been asking, what does this mean for the United States? And what does it mean for the United States? What is it doing? voices within Turkey saying, well, actually, this is much more a kind of something that's closer to our coordinator with some of our political and religious beliefs. Then the Saudis, I got a message from somebody I know in Saudi who said, if you're, if you're confused about what this is all about, check out a guy called Ali Shihabi. I don't know if you know Ali Shihabi. Ali Shihabi is a Saudi commentator who is thought to be very, very close to the Royal Court. It's a bit how some people used to see me when I was a journalist writing about what the Labour Party might be thinking of doing back in the day where we were, we were in opposition. So I checked out Ali Shihabi and he said this, this military alliance reflects a recognition that American deterrence has been significantly weakened and that the Iranian threat will increasingly need to be managed. by regional powers. So that goes to the heart of what we've been talking about. How are people responding to Trump, responding to this very, very different sense of an American foreign policy? And then, of course, Pakistan is fascinating because, you know, Pakistan very much defines its foreign policy in relation to India. And it's India, by the way, it was Indian newspapers that started talking about an Islamic NATO, a Muslim NATO, a Sunni NATO. And so, but the Pakistanis, I don't think, want necessarily to be seen as nuclear protectors of Saudi Arabia or of, or of Turkey. So you then having to work through what would this mean in practice? If, let's say there was another fight between India and Pakistan, are the Saudis meant to get involved? Are the Turks meant to get involved? Are the Turks and the Pakistanis, why are they not already getting involved in the flare up that started again with the Houthis in Yemen? So I think it's sowing a lot of doubt. And that I think is when you say there's no American imprimatur on this, I think they're struggling to work out exactly what this means and why it's come around at this time. So what it doesn't yet have is what made NATO more than just an alliance of countries, makes NATO an integrated fighting force. And I won't get into all the jargon of the different NATO systems and structures that do this. One of the most famous is a headquarters system called SHAPE. But essentially what this is about, is making sure that you really work together under a supreme allied commander to coordinate where your priorities are and make sure this country is providing the trains, that country is providing the troops that you're working at, how many munitions you've got, making sure that the caliber of rounds that your rifle's running on a consistent right across all the NATO countries. That's the really complicated, almost software of the system that operates in these headquarters systems that makes NATO so formidable. So far, we're not seeing any of that really out of the Saudi-Pakistan-Turkey thing. And then as you've just said, the big trigger points where the conflicts are likely to come from are conflicts where it's not quite clear that everybody's absolutely aligned. So Turkey and Pakistan have been much more, let's say, soft on Iran than Saudi. Obviously, Pakistan's been doing the negotiations with Iran, so they're not likely to be leaning up to protect Saudi against Iran. Saudi's unlikely to want to be drawn into a war with India. And of course, this Indian point suggests another strange pattern that's emerging because Israel has developed its own alternative network of allies, which are India, Greece, Cyprus, and potentially increasingly UAE, as well as some of the states such as Somaliland that are emerging in the Horn of Africa. There again, it's not burden sharing, it's splintering into these funny regional groups and raises questions. Here's a couple of questions that I got from talking to people in the region. One of them is, why did Egypt not in the end come on? So there's an R4 arrangement, which would have included Egypt, and Egypt didn't in the end join this. Why was there not an attempt to include other countries? It doesn't look, at least from the distance, as though countries like Kuwait or Qatar were actually invited to join, or Azerbaijan, which might have been pulled into this agreement. Why has Saudi checked out so much recently of the Iran negotiations? MBS and the Saudi team have barely been seen in the negotiations, which have been being done by Qatar and Pakistan recently. They're the factors that have led to the thinking that has led to this particular alliance forming at this time. And just think about how big a deal this has been for some of them. So if you go back to the Arab Spring, Erdogan, president of Turkey, he was backing the protests against the Saudis. And they were very, very angry because they saw that as a threat to their whole kind of monarchical system. You mentioned the UAE there. The Saudis, and the UAE were fighting Turkey in Libya. They supported Sisi of Egypt, former general, absolute military figure, who Erdogan in the past has denounced. What's brought those two together? I think it's Gaza. And I think we shouldn't underestimate Gaza's role in this. Both Erdogan and Sisi are really worried, not just about what Israel's doing in Gaza, where Erdogan has a very, very, very critical, to the point where lots of Israelis have painted him. I think one of the leadership contenders for the upcoming Israeli election has basically said that Erdogan is an anti-Semitic dictator. But both Sisi and Erdogan are on the kind of genocide side of the debate. They're also worried about the taxes that have been on Lebanon and Syria. And so I think that's what's brought them together. But as you say, it is interesting that Egypt's not there as stage one. The talk is that they will be joining this at stage two. And that's when it does start to look like a much more formed thing. And just on the point about, Rory, about shape. And, you know, I have quite a lot of experience of shape because I was working there during the Kosovo War. And it feels like a kind of mini United Nations. I mean, you've got all these countries, all the sort of fighting over who gets the deputy job this and the deputy job that. And how do you balance America's power against the powers of the other countries that are involved? And but there's this very interesting guy. The reason why I think there's a bit of division going on in Turkey, Erdogan projected this very much not in the NATO Article 5. He talked about Article 51 of the UN Charter, which is the inherent right of everybody to be able to defend themselves. It was the foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, who I think would be a great person to talk to on the podcast because he's a fascinating figure. He said, quote, it's technically the same as Article 5 of the NATO treaty. He went on to say, there would be a permanent secretariat based in Saudi Arabia, regular committee meetings between the defense ministers, the foreign ministers and the heads of the military, and said Egypt would join at a later stage because it was a, quote, natural partner. So I don't know whether he is, as it were, pushing the envelope while Erdogan carries on doing the more subtle diplomacy. But I think that that was a very, very interesting, seeming divide in the Turkish interpretation of this. So the thing that I think is the thing that was keeping me awake at night, which is what this means for the world, and the big US picture. So you've just pointed to the NATO shape thing. And I think what you saw when you were in Kosovo, and what I think is, we're not putting a proper price on, is that what the United States was able to do from the end of the Second World War until about 2016, and in some ways until 2024, was have something which it's almost impossible to put a price on. And I think that that's what the United States was able to do. And I think that's what the United States was able to do. superpower was able to write the strategy for the world. Almost every component ally played into an American system. And it was only the Americans who had the full global picture. The British, you know, tried to do this before the First World War. But it has been many, many decades since France or Britain or Germany has pretended to be able to do what the United States was able to do, which is sit there thinking, okay, we need air defenses in South Korea, we need Patriot missiles for China, we're balancing that with the need for counter insurgency warfare troops that may have to be deployed in the Middle East. We're having to think about tanks in Russia. This is where our airlift is, this is where our seven fleets are. And they were doing it with a European countries which were increasingly large in terms of their expenditure. Trump often boasts that he's increased NATO expenditure. And what this meant is that the US was able to leverage Europeans who were spending $900 billion a year on defense with the US pushing towards about $900 billion. If we meet our targets heading towards 2035, the amount that Europe and Canada, the non-US NATO members will be spending will be staggering, right? We'll be pushing up to probably something approaching two thirds of US expenditure. All of that relied on the fact that the US could use that, it could almost double the size of its own troops, not quite, but certainly significantly increase its reach and not just its reach, not just that it was able to use its Western allies for boots on the ground. It could use our bases, which was very important. And we've just seen this with Iran, with the fights over whether or not Spain would allow the US to use bases, whether Britain would allow the US to use bases, could use our bases, could use our intelligence, could use our diplomatic pressure, could use our networks. Now, what's happened is that all of that has been destroyed because the US has gone penny wise, pound foolish. Hexeth and Trump, they've been destroyed. They've been destroyed. And Trump appear to see the world in this crazy black and white way where they think, well, what we're going to do is we're going to save some money by removing a US brigade or we will insult the europeans over greenland or we won't follow through on our nato guarantees and it doesn't matter because we're spending a trillion dollars we're going to save money in europe we'll save money in the middle east we'll bring it all home and we'll be stronger but they're not stronger they're much weaker because what they can't put a price on is everything that they're losing in terms of their alliances their influence their bases their intelligence things which would cost much more to rebuild now they've lost them well i guess is that a useful place to talk about what has been the big debate within the us in recent days which relates to the cost of munitions used and the cost of munitions which they may seek to replace because there's something very very strange going on here on the one hand donald trump is saying we're going to hunt down the people who are leaking out this fake news about us not having munitions and on the other hand pete hexer is going back to congress to ask for even more money because this war is costing so much more than they thought it would when they said they'd be able to sort out the iranians in days the other really interesting thing to me that speaks to what you've just said is that iran which we said right at the start has got a greater tolerance threshold for this kind of conflict i used in the introduction the word you know they feel emboldened and so they've issued a warning and this was issued by the national security council which is you know right at the top of the islamic republic regime said the united states must never again threaten the islamic republic call for the united states to lift its naval blockade lift sanctions withdraw the u.s military from iran pay war reparations release frozen assets end all attacks on iran allies in the region and threats against the country now i think when this whole thing started if that had been there i mean they did all the sort of belligerent war talk stuff but for them to do that and for it not to land with people like you and me and everybody else saying well this is just utterly absurd i think suggests that trump is in a much much worse position in relation to what's happening around than we're being led to believe and the cost on the munitions so the wars cost up to sort of 40 billion the patriot interceptors and i mentioned again there's a there's a link to ukraine here because you know zelensky's constantly saying if there's one thing i need it's the patriot interceptors and america's used so many of them in tackling the the attacks from iran that they're kind of running out it's really startling we've covered in the podcast before that that the patriot systems are these exquisite very expensive systems a lot of them designed with a lot of raytheon components which do something very unique that almost nobody else in the world is able to do and one of them is to intercept these extraordinary ballistic missiles missiles coming down at hypersonic speeds and this is really what we were very worried that ukraine was being deprived of as the u.s withdrew its support because although ukraine is able to do really good stuff with drones it doesn't have systems that can hit these very fast-moving ballistic missiles the patriots have incredible optical equipment and extraordinary designs and nobody in the world has ever been able to replicate how extraordinary these patriot missile systems are but america was very worried it was running out of them very worried that it was running out of them partly because the story had always been that it needed to keep them in the pacific in case there was a threat from china yeah and the story was it couldn't afford to give these things to ukraine couldn't even afford to give these things to supply them if europe wanted to buy them this was one of the big arguments for the u.s getting out of ukraine is because it didn't have enough patriots for china and then there's been this extraordinary reporting csis has suggested that they have used something like half their patriot missiles cnn suggests they may have used 80 of their patriot missiles in iran again csis suggesting of these air defense systems which were in south korea they have may have used up as much as a third cnn suggests from reporting inside the pentagon it could be 50 of their entire stock and these are things with a three-year lead time and they cost every time they whack one off it costs four million dollars and of course what the iranians and this is very relevant to when we get on to talk about russia ukraine what the iranians worked out is they can put a drone up there costing you know 20 grand 30 grand 40 grand whatever it might be but it's it's taking a patriot interceptor to to bring it down one of the i go back to my point and also about trump's constant desire to boast about american power the whole thing has been projected we are so powerful we have such military power this is like you know darlington against paris saint-germain but it's not and the iranians have worked out just as the ukrainians as the underdog have worked out against russia they've worked out that the way that warfare has changed gives them an advantage when it comes to this kind of big against small warfare maybe it's a time here or just to get the current episode of leading with johnny mercer the former veterans minister where i thought he was fascinating about his own life fascinating about his mental health but i thought one of the most interesting parts of the interview was when he was talking about his sadness and his kind of bit of anger as well that al khan's is not in the government al khan's the former military guy who was defense minister under kia starmer and it because he was saying he absolutely gets this the way that technology is changing warfare and making it harder for the bigger powers sometimes to tackle the so-called smaller powers and i think that's what we're seeing in in the in the battle in iran right now i was just trying again to um play devil's advocate with myself and and try to make the republican case make the hex's case is this have you you got tired of being infantino spin doctor you're now going to be hex's spin doctor so if if i'm a hex's spin doctor what they're trying to write about is that they're trying to make the republican case make the hex's spin doctor at the moment is the story that the united states couldn't afford to pay for the whole world other people needed to burden share middle east needed to pay for its own defense europe needed to pay for its own defense and this is the story they would spin at you they would say well look turned out that when we withdrew our support from ukraine and saved ourselves 100 billion dollars ukraine didn't collapse instead europe stepped up footed the bill and ukraine is still surviving they would say we had great success in venezuela amazing special forces operation no soldiers killed cuba is now about to collapse and that will be a u.s foreign policy objective they've had for decades that they have hit iran with incredible precision weapons and that they have massively degraded their economy and their strike capacity they will say that their ally israel has never been stronger it's now a regional hegemon that syria is now an american ally that hamas and hezbollah are a trillion dollars a year on its defense and it's going to become more and more war ready warrior culture promoting uh tough guys like hexis more and more kill ready to operate and that russia didn't manage to defend its allies in venezuela and in iran and syria in the way that people expected that china has found itself in an awkward position because it's been unable to get its fuel supplies through and also wasn't really able to support venezuela or iran so the paradox is this given all of that what they seem to have done is two things that they went wrong in ways they didn't anticipate the first is that by saving money they actually weakened themselves for the reasons we were talking about earlier because they ended up instead of having reliable allies they changed it from them being a deterrent of last resort able to use helpful allies into a world in which they became an exploitative force weaponizing dependency and just driving their allies away but the second odd thing is with their enemies so the second odd thing is with their enemies and the second odd thing is with their enemies because the actual truth is that they haven't created a more peaceful world iran which they've hit hard is more dangerous than it was before russia feels more dangerous than it was before china paradoxically feels more dangerous than it was before because the world's been so distracted by this other chaos that actually china can just sit back while america consumes its patriot missile programs destroys its allies so paradoxically by hitting hard and doing these things they've actually made their adversaries more desperate more violent and hitting them harder than if they'd left them alone in the first place over you well i think what you did there though was you highlighted the difference between a political communications case which can be made and you make that in a way that hexes probably would make it but the longer term strategic questions are not operating in america's favor i do think there's an element to which trump became so emboldened by the speed of the operation in venezuela the the relative success of it the fact that delci rodriguez then came in and is sort of more or less doing the americans bidding we said right at the start iran is a completely different level of opponent i also think that maybe the the one the other thing i used to talk about what keeps you awake at night we've talked a little bit in recent weeks about nuclear proliferation i just wonder on this saudi turkey deal the extent to which the pakistan is the only muslim nation with nukes is a factor or isn't a factor. I can remember back in the day, there's this guy, you will know who I'm talking about, that everybody called AQ. AQ Khan was the Pakistani nuclear physicist and engineer who was broadly known as the father of the Pakistan nuclear weapon. When he died, I think he died about five, six years ago, he was celebrated. His nickname was the savior of the nation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I can remember post 9-11, for example, I remember all the meetings that we had with intelligence, Tony Blair would always at some point say, what's AQ up to? What do we know about AQ? What is he up to? He was this sort of giant figure with the nuclear debate. When we think about Pakistan's nuclear weapons, I think we tend to think of them in terms of Pakistan, India, Kashmir, and that very, very tense, difficult relationship. Does this bring Saudi and Turkey under, a nuclear umbrella? Now, I don't know the answer to that. My sense is that they're trying to play that down. But I think it's another reason why this became such a big thing when these three countries came together and announced this, for all the different framing that they put on it. And it connects to the story that we were covering two weeks ago, which was this story that the US was suddenly going to allow Saudi Arabia to enrich uranium, which is part of the precursor to its own nuclear weapons program, potentially, although they framed it as civilian. And again, you heard voices from Washington saying, this looks like America's got reckless and is giving Saudi a nuclear weapon. But the reason we have to do it is that if we don't, other people will. And the implication was that China now is in a position to provide a civilian nuclear program, or maybe, as you say, Pakistan. And this, again, is balance of power. I mean, I was thinking about the fact that there are you and Tony Blair sitting around a table talking about this stuff. One of the big changes is the relationship between countries like Britain and countries like Turkey and Saudi Arabia since 1989. So since 1989, the British economy has broadly grown three or four times larger. The economies of Saudi Arabia and Turkey are 15 times larger than they were in 1989. So one of the reasons why the US is now having to make concessions that it never would have considered doing when you were in office is that Saudi is so much wealthier, has so many more options. And China, of course, has much more capacity to build civilian nuclear programs. So the ability of everybody to shop around and not be dependent on the US is much greater, which is why it's even more reckless and mad that the US, rather than leaning into these relationships, treasuring them, bringing people ever closer to themselves, decided to weaponize them at a time when there are alternatives out there. Yeah. And I also, I was surprised that we had some pretty interesting reactions to this new alliance from India. The Indian government, as opposed to the Indian media, was playing it down a bit. They were being very restrained. And I think that was their way of saying, we don't see this as Riyadh, the Saudis having left us. Okay. Because they didn't inflame it. They didn't, in a way, give Pakistan what they probably wanted. The Iranians, likewise, they weren't that angry. There were some politicians of lower orders who came out and said, you know, this is pathetic. The foreign minister used it to talk about the importance of Muslim unity. When Muslims stand together, we can face every challenge by malicious outsiders head on. Israel, we've talked about. But the problem is that it wasn't much from Europe. And I feel that, you know, remember when we talked to Alexander Stubb, the president of Finland, and we were talking about what a new Europe might look like and what a developing European defence architecture might look like. He talked about Ukraine and Turkey. So I was a bit alarmed that there was almost like a, this was seen as a policy of interest to the United States and the countries involved in their regions, as opposed to Europe. That's exactly right. So if we were, completely right, and you're right, we should have got there earlier. But I think that's exactly right. And I think that's exactly right. If we're really caring about shaping a middle power future, Europe, Canada, UK, etc, it should have been Europe working out how to bring Turkey on side, potentially Saudi Arabia, Qatar into a middle power alliance, rather than allowing it to chip off into yet another kind of micro alliance that the dream has to be US, China, and a bigger European Western led alliance that hopefully brings in places like Turkey and Saudi rather than sending them out into yet another spinning block. Well, listen, should we take a break and then come back and talk about all sorts of interesting things going on in Europe related to Russia and also Ukraine and the Johnny Mercer interview that I mentioned, which I really do recommend to people just search Restless Politics leading wherever you get your podcasts. There's all sorts of reasons why it's worth listening to, but some of them relate to what we've just been talking about. And when we come back, we'll talk about Russia, Ukraine, and some very interesting things going on in relation to warfare, drone politics, and even drone organized crime. This episode is brought to you by Lloyd's. Now, we live in a world which is completely saturated with information, social media, podcasts, data. I think in politics now in public life, I think one of the worst things is that politicians just dealing with such a volume of messages of information. So I guess information overload is a real issue. And it's whether you can analyze that and manage that in a way that works for you. Yeah. And I suppose it's the same true with your personal finances. And Lloyd's provides a bit of assistance on this. So they've got something called Explore Your Spending in the Lloyd's app. It's AI powered, and it helps you make sense of your spending by answering some pretty straightforward questions around your personal finances. You can ask questions, get answers in plain English, receive personalized insights to help you make more informed choices based on the data that Lloyd's has. And of course, it's discreet, and you're getting that confidential advice from Lloyd's. It's app features like this that make 14 million people bank on Lloyd's for more. Head over to Spending Insights in your app to try it out. "And Russia? We assess a Prime Minister with high confidence it was Russian." Holding the Russians accountable is World War 3. "They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people." "Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. You've got to ask yourself, do you want to play or not?" "You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing!" "Are you prepared for bombing?" "We would need to understand the policy context." "All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today, and disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO." "A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia?" "Yes." "New from Goldhanger." "Who is going to be able to pull this off?" "You're my soldier, are you? Sergeant Tom McDuff, Duffy!" "An audio drama journey like no other." "Men like Duffy, they are our most valuable weapons." "Devised as a technically rigorous geopolitical action thriller." "We have two times friendly key I.A." "Where Britain plays its strongest hand." "He's the best." "Against its strongest foe." "Don't do anything!" "Bear Hunt." "Available now wherever you get your podcasts." "We're not going to be able to do anything." "We're going to be able to do anything." "We're going to be able to do anything." front, is they are now going much deeper into Russia in all sorts of different ways. And I've been fascinated by these attacks on Wild Berries, which Wild Berries is sometimes called the Russian Amazon. So this is like an online platform where you can buy all sorts of stuff. And Ukraine is claiming it's a military target because lots of the stuff that Wild Berries is responsible for is ending up at the front line. But that's them taking this whole thing into the economic sphere, as well as the military sphere. And then the other thing we should maybe talk about in relation to drones, Rory, there's lots of stuff going on. So first of all, a Leipzig airport bus driver is wandering around Leipzig airport, and he looks out his window and he thinks, that's very odd, I've never seen one of those before. It turns out to be a drone. It's absolutely laden with explosives. And it's not far from a place where a lot of Western stuff is being delivered to Ukraine. And did you get these? Am I right that he sort of somehow stopped it with his hand? Or he. He said. He certainly went off and realised that this was not right, that he'd never see what it should be here. So he certainly fiddled around with it, which terrifies me, the thought of it. We haven't got the exact details, I think, released by the German government yet. But it seems to have been a quadcopter, which is not a very, very large thing, depending on whether it's the sort of thing that you buy for your kids or a more commercial thing. You're still probably talking about something that you can hold in your hands, but seems to have had explosives in it. Yeah. And I think we should both agree, Rory, do not buy one of these for your kids. That would be a very, very, very bad thing to do. So there's that going on. There's the German interior minister saying in all sorts of ways we're facing hybrid attacks most days, left, right and centre. We've then had the Lithuanians warning. They say that, and presumably based on intelligence, but basically saying that Russia is considering putting together a false flag attack against critical infrastructure in the Baltics. Using Ukrainian drones. This is why this was, there was another event this week where a drone landed and went off very near to the border between Romania and Bulgaria, very close to a very important gas pipeline. As yet, not entirely established the provenance thereof. It seems the one in Leipzig, people are pretty certain that the Russians somehow got that there. You're assuming an airport, pretty tight security, but they got one in there. And then the other thing, which I think is. Sorry, but you were just saying that, and I think. And I think this is the connection, isn't it? That the one that was found in Bulgaria seems to have been a Ukrainian. And then again, the question is, is this a Ukrainian drone that's gone off track? And we've seen a bit of that actually as far away as the Baltic occasionally reports of Ukrainian drones going off track, or whether it's, as you say, the Russians beginning to use Ukrainian drones themselves. Yeah. As I say, I don't think there's 100% clear yet, but the initial indications from the Bulgarian government is that this is likely Ukrainian, which either went astray or was being used for the wrong purposes. But what it does show is that, this relates to the discussion we had in the first half, is that drone warfare now is transforming the nature of real life battles, including between major powers. Can I just say on this, it's a really weird phenomenon, isn't it? Because you're completely right. It's very worrying, but it's not worrying in the way that you might first think. If you were to say to people, Russian drone warfare, hybrid warfare against Europe, they would probably, I guess, imagine something on an enormous scale. Huge coordinated cyber attacks, rail attacks, road attacks, airport attacks. And that's not what we're seeing. What we're seeing is every few months something happening. So Leipzig, I think this is the second time this airport, which is the key logistics hub for DHL and does quite a lot of supply into Ukraine, has been targeted. We've seen these drones going into Scandinavia. We've seen the poles responding. But these are things at pretty small scale. happening, as I say, every few weeks or months. Then we've seen this phenomenon of sabotage attacks. So you talked about the firebombing attack on Keir Starmer's house. You've seen attacks on warehouses. There was an assassination attempt against the head of Rheinmetall. But again, these have tended to be, it seems, people recruited on Telegram, paid a few thousand euro, and pretty incompetently delivered. So what's going on? Well, what this isn't is a phase zero pre-campaign for the invasion of Lithuania. This is not the Russian intelligence services releasing, you know, like SOE during the Second World War, setting Europe ablaze before an invasion. It seems to be something else. And what exactly is it? Well, one theory is that what they're doing is that they're testing European defences and response times. So they found out, for example, in Denmark, that these drones are not spotted by the military. They're spotted by civilians walking their dogs. They found out that Friedrich Metz takes about two months before he's able to identify a Russian is behind something. They find out they can get this stuff into Leipzig. They can fly stuff from shadow fleets. But I'm not sure that that's the key, because my sense is, if you were the Russian intelligence services, you probably would have guessed already that drones are pretty ambiguous and that European government's going to struggle to identify them and struggle to identify who sent them around. Here's my theory. One of the things I think possibly going on is that these are training exercises, that the GRU is keeping a capacity, a GRU, the military intelligence, keeping a capacity going, thinking, well, why don't we try? We've got the shadow fleets out there. Why don't we try flying some drones? Let's see whether this telegram mechanism works. What happens if we offer a few thousand euros to someone to do something? You're exercising a muscle. And in the process, you're also doing something else, which is that you're forcing European governments to spend an incredible amount of money trying to work out how to defend against these things. That's the version of your story around how Iran does cheat drones and then gets struck by millions of dollars. So there's a question, how does Europe get the reaction right? Because it might suit the Kremlin if we ended up spending tens of billions of dollars putting together very, very complex defence mechanisms against a quadcopter that you can buy for $800 on Amazon. Yeah. Well, that debate was raging within the German politics and media on the back of this quadcopter being found inside the airport. We all know that airports are, you have to go through security. It can be very balls-aching. It got increased after 9/11. And for the freight, the security should be even tighter, often isn't. So there was a debate, how did this happen? How did this thing get through? And you then have politicians all running off saying, we should be doing this, we should be doing that. It costs this, it costs that. And we're talking about a pretty big scale here. So just the ones that have been cited in the two months after the one that shut down two airports in Scandinavia, it was almost 100 sightings across 50,000 people. And that's what we're talking about here. And we're talking about 15 NATO countries. Germany and Belgium were the two that seemed to be most targeted. Germany, probably because it's the biggest country in Europe and Belgium, possibly because that's where NATO shape headquarters that we talked about earlier is based. And meanwhile, there was this phrase I read, which I think does explain partly why they keep doing this in the way that they do it. And the phrase was provoking a collective anxiety attack. It's not just about making the politicians feel they've got a problem with their hands. It's making all of us feel worried anxious, nervous. And that then gives the Russians the upper hand. If you think about the invasion of Ukraine itself, the buildup was huge. You know, we were talking about it for days and weeks beforehand. I even wonder sometimes people talk about that amazing American intelligence operation to get their plans. Part of me wonders whether the Russians were actually, you know, not that fussed about that because it was building the levels of anxiety. So I think this is something that we haven't got our heads around. Back to the point about what Johnny Mercer was saying in the leading interview about Al Khan's being on top of this, the nature of a war in 2026 is so different to war even 10, 20 years ago, let alone the Second World War that still defines for much of our political debate, how we think about modern warfare. Getting the right reaction and understanding what the Russian limits are and why they're doing so little as well as so much. I mean, I keep trying to sort of get my head around this. As you say, it's a lot of sightings, but it's definitely not yet at a level where it's panicking European publics, I don't think. It's puzzling generals, it's worrying policymakers, but it's not killing people. I mean, we haven't seen, I think in four years, nobody in Europe has been killed by any of these Russian operations. Now, part of that must be that they're very aware that they don't want to actually provoke a more aggressive European response. So I think they're taking a certain amount of risk. One of the stupid things, if they're flying these drones off the shadow fleet, is that might lead Europe to do what it should have done a long time ago, which is finally just shut down the shadow fleet, these illegal vehicles smuggling Russian oil out from which these drones seem to be being flown. Europe hasn't yet followed through on confiscating this $200 billion of Russian assets. It uses the interest from it, but it's still held off taking the full Russian assets. NATO hasn't deployed a headquarters forward into Ukraine. So there's quite a lot of things, quite a lot of, you know, a lot of, you know, a lot of pain Russia would experience if you were able to point a smoking gun and say, well, you've actually literally, here is a Russian connection to doing something that's genuinely big. And in particular, I suppose they'd be worried about alienating Washington. I'm also interested in whether there isn't, and this is something we never quite know, what's the boundary between the Russians being very, very smart and controlled compared to the possibility that GIU, Russian military intelligence, is actually quite incompetent? Are there limits to its capacity? Has there been a real impact on its capacity from shutting down many of the formal intelligence diplomats that were in the Russian consulates and embassies across Europe, does that make it more difficult for them to coordinate? I wouldn't overpush that because my sense is Russia is a big place. And if it wants to do more, it can do much more. We're just getting a glimpse of a capacity that could be 100 times greater. Yeah, but I think if you listen to the fairly neutral voices that try to cover the main battlefield, Ukraine is killing a lot of Russians, and not least through its better use of drones. We're talking in terms of Russian losses, something like 30,000 men a month. Ukraine, and you've got to be careful with all the figures, but Ukraine. Just on that one, sorry, I mean, you're complete right. That is one of the figures out there. What we do know is there are hundreds of thousands of casualties. Pinning down exactly how many are killed and how many wounded is quite tough. Yeah. And that they're having to go back to some pretty brutal tactics to get Russian men to the front line. And that is bound over time. I know we've been saying this for four years now. Surely that is bound over time. I know it's bound over time to sort of hit morale both on the front line and at home where everybody now knows somebody, knows somebody who's lost their life, or certainly knows somebody who is close to somebody who's lost their life on the front line. Rory, I mentioned organized crime. There's this, I don't know if you saw this extraordinary story about Colombia. And I'm sure you noticed, by the way, that one of the few dignitaries who went to the swearing in of the new Colombian president was your Fred Giardi Infantino. He was there with the right wing leaders of Latin America. So this is the story. I think it was the Financial Times that had this, that Colombian drug dealers or drug business people have been sending people to Ukraine to fight, you know, because it's a war and people can go and fight and they say they support the Ukrainian cause. But in part, what they're doing is trying to learn from the way that the Colombians, that the Ukrainians are using drones, because they use drones in their armed conflict to protect their in Colombia. I mean, you talk about unintended consequences of warfare. I didn't understand this until I sat down with somebody who's a former British intelligence guy and then a former British special forces guy talking about something which I think is really shocking. And maybe we should dig into more and expose more, which is the number of former British intelligence and special forces people and Americans and Europeans in general who are operating as mercenaries on the front lines in Yemen and across the Horn of Africa, and in Sudan, coordinating exactly these kinds of drone attacks and are being drawn into some of the most horrendous human rights abuses in the world. I mean, we talk about UAE supporting the actions of Hameti in Sudan and this genocide that happened in an attack on a town last year. But there are foreign, including UK, mercenaries right up there at the front line operating these drones, operating the kill systems, coordinating, controlling, not always on the ground with the guns. And some very interesting moral question. I was trying to push this guy. You know, what do you think when the people you're allied with just go and massacre thousands of women and children in a town? And I was very, very troubled by the response, which is I think there's a real moral blindness. I think some of these guys, and I'm not saying they're uniquely British, there are French there, there are Americans there, there are Colombians there. I mean, interestingly, Latin American mercenaries are very common. They're relatively affordable. They can be deployed quite easily. Just shrug their shoulders and say, well, everybody does it. Both sides are just as bad as each other. I mean, this whole world of drones technology is spilling out of Ukraine so quickly. The front line in Sudan is much more high tech now than people understand. It's not just a ragbag of child soldiers with AK-47s. There are people really there with fancy computers, bits of kit and fancy drones, which are either, Iranian drones or Turkish drones or Ukrainian drones or Russian drones. Learning from these systems from drug wars right the way through to genocide in Africa. Yeah. It underlines the point we've been making throughout this episode, that technology is changing the nature of warfare. Technology has changed the nature of organized crime over the last decade or two. But in 2425, the government, Colombian government estimates that these cartels launched 264 drone attacks. Quite cheap, usually dropping explosives on enemies. And the enemies might be other cartels or it might be the security forces. Colombia says it managed to neutralize most of them, 96%, either through jamming them or through destroying them. But the 4% that get through can do an awful lot of damage. But just think about that. There's you and I, very, very supportive of Ukraine. Ukraine wants to have support from around the world politically and militarily and including volunteers who go there. And here they are, they're going to do a lot of damage. Some of them to take back expertise that they then use to carry on killing people through drugs. And the line between domestic surveillance and war is becoming smaller and smaller. You talked about the killing of the Hamas leader. And many people will have actually seen the video caught by the Israeli drone. I mean, it literally hovers, goes into the building, and you can see him wounded in the building shortly before he's shot. So the experience on the ground in Gaza, and people on the West Bank now, is these drones very, very close to you, following you around, monitoring you, and making you feel that you could be killed at any moment. And let's add the final thing to this, which is AI. Because so much of what's happening at the frontline between Russia and Ukraine is about shortening the kill chain, which is this slightly sinister phrase for how do you make a decision more quickly to pull the trigger? And how do you make these machines so that they can't be jammed? The jamming gets between the operator and the drone in the sky. And if you give these drones independence, they don't have to communicate with the operator, and they can't be jammed as easily. And we may find that it may not be in Israel, may not be in Russia, Ukraine, maybe at front lines as places like Sudan, where people start hacking and using AI systems to take humans out of the kill chain entirely. And where we'll first see these drones just flying around making their own decisions about who to kill and when. Well, Rory, maybe that's a good place to end and to trail question time tomorrow. Because one of the things we're going to be talking about is prisons. And the last time I was inside a prison, one of the things they were briefing me on was the use of drones. They were having to tackle the drones being used to smuggle in drugs and telephones and very sophisticated operations going on inside prisons using drones to get stuff into the prisoners. I thought that was a very neat and useful segue. We're also going to be talking about the right wing of politics, more generally, how do the Tories restore Britain and reform deal with each other. We're going to talk about Abdul Al Saeed, who's just won this primary in Michigan and what that says about the future of the Democrats. And I want to talk about the River Rhine because I'm very, very, very alarmed about what's happening in the River Rhine. Good, looking forward to it very much. See you then.