Rory Stewart sees fundamental evil in Trump

The New Statesman. Hi, Rory. It's Oli Dugmore here from The New Statesman. I can't wait to talk to you today. Plenty going on in the Middle East, but of course Middleland, regionalism, Canberra, I want to talk about all of it with you. See you soon. Bye-bye. Hi, Oli. Yeah, really looking forward to it. I'm going to grumble a little bit about the fact that you're going to drag me up to some weird bit of happen dance to do some kind of jewelry heist. But yeah, no, I'd love to talk to you, hopefully as well. And see you soon. Since leaving politics, Rory Stewart has become one of the most influential voices on the matter in Britain. In this episode of The Exchange, I sat down with the former diplomat, Cabinet Minister and Broadcaster, to understand the formative experiences that shaped him. His early years in boarding school, and the early influences that informed his view of Britain, and its place in the world. We also explore his views on the war in the Middle East, drawing on decades of personal and professional engagement in the region. And as geopolitics shifts and the old assumptions come under strain, he offers his view on how the history, politics and religion intersect, and where Western understanding has fallen short. What alternative really would it feel for the regime, if the regime wants to survive other than to demonstrate that if you attack around there are consequences? And then turns to Britain itself. And what Stewart sees as a growing intolerance towards Muslims, what are the consequences of that misunderstanding? And what does it mean for our politics more broadly? Where does this go? What does this mean for the way that we think about fellow citizens, human rights, our equality as humans, dignity? Finally, we discuss the state of Westminster politics. It's incentives, it's blind spots, and how it can increasingly feel disconnected from the public. And the lives of the people that is meant to represent. I'm Oli Dugmore, this is the exchange from the new statesman, and here's my conversation with Rory Stewart. Rory, there's a great deal to talk about. We're going to talk about the Middle East, we're going to talk about Middleland, and I think probably a brief detour to English identity as well. I'd like to start with you if I may, I want to talk about your life a little bit before we do that. I think by many people's standards, your life has been quite unusual. You've walked across Afghanistan, you've chewed the princes. Do you think about your life in those terms? Tell me how you conceptualize your journey to this moment now. Yeah, I don't know whether this is true for everybody. I certainly find this I become a kind of middle-aged guy. My idea about what my life is and what I've done and what I'm going to do keeps shifting around. So I guess when I was in my 20s and 30s, I thought of my life more as a kind of story or narrative where I imagined kind of dramatic moments. It definitely in my 20s I imagine it was sort of end with a heroic death. So I had a kind of clean shape. And once I failed to die and made it through into other bits. So to show you. And then of course leaving politics is another strange thing. I don't know how much politicians talk about this, but there's a sort of natural structure around your constituency or being a minister or the kind of you have a sense at least when you're a minister sometimes you may not be getting much done, but you're sort of in the room and you're sort of around the edge of things that seem to have meaning and significance. It's step back for a bit. It's a bit doubtful how much impact you really are having on well, but it feels like you might be. And then since I left politics. I then have to work out who I am and what I'm doing and in particular I'm 53 now. What happens next? I guess if I were lucky I might have another 20 years of working life. And part of the issue is do you change as a person, do you run out of ideas? Certain things are options. I can't be a police officer anymore. I've always wanted to be a police officer, but that's not something I can do. That's interesting. So that question then about who you are and what you do now. How do you answer it? Who are you now? Sorry, we're straightened at the deep end. Yeah, you got me straight in the deep end. Yeah. Well, I mean, one of the things that I am is somebody kind of very overshadowed by AI by artificial intelligence. I'm somebody trying to write a book very conscious that I feel at least within a few months a large language model would be able to write a pretty fluent convincing version of my book without me almost instantly. And in fact, a whole series of books that I've been trying to write. I've abandoned because I realize that I'm beginning to sound like Chad GBT. I'm trying to write a book on geopolitics, you know, kind of the shape of the world since 1945 and where we're going. And that's of course exactly the kind of thing that large language models are really good at. I mean, they may be rubbish at giving you a recipe or remotely accurate advice on board games, but they're really good at kind of bullshit. Invitating a voice. Yeah, invitating a geopolitical arc. So that and podcasting to I mean, I had an amazing experience very recently where I was trying to mug up on the pool and I came across a podcast that was so brilliant on the micro detail of what was happening village by village town by town and a four day period of a massive pop up rising in the pool. And I was about halfway through that I began to notice from the voices that clearly this thing was just an AI generated thing I was willing to pick up because all I kept saying, oh, that's so interesting. And then what happened in back to poor and then the guy was and I realized someone had just fed all the local news reporting from the pool and generating this beautiful structured thing. So I yeah, I'm going through a midlife crisis inflected by AI. I think the way I've consoled myself with similar thoughts about that is that I believe or want to believe that the things that we do that are human, whether it's the writing, whether it's the conversation. I believe because what you've just described the moment you twigged, this isn't two people having a conversation. I imagine you perhaps felt slightly cheated regardless of the value of the information that you were consuming. And I hope I think that most people feel the same way. I think there is value in I think you could you could slap it across the top of the new state. You know, AI not used in the creation of this product. You are reading human words edited by other human beings, the conversation you're listening to now. It could be replicated, but it's not authentic. I had a word meant to breakfast this morning going where my eight year old had 11 year olds had asked how much sugar there is in a custard tart compared to a scoop of ice cream. And I reached for chat, you know, my eight year old literally broke down in tears. It's kind of inconsiderate. And so daddy, you don't touch that you said you weren't going to use chat, you're not thinking properly. You're not even discussing it with us. This was meant to be an interesting conversation and you're just reaching for this large language model. It was a really interesting kind of revelation of trying to remember what being a human is. And I guess it's I guess it's not unusual because I guess our grandparents were being boring when they discovered Google. Oh, let me get the encyclopedia. Yeah, yeah, I very often I think I mean my daughter's much younger. She's only 18 months old, but there are still moments of inspiration. The level of emotional intelligence displayed by a human being that doesn't have access to the tools that you and I have access to and therefore just has to navigate the world via their own intelligence very often can sort of ground you even when they're not even two years old. Tell me about if we go back a little bit, put yourself in the shoes of your eight year old. Tell me about that relationship in your household. So were you the precocious child saying put the encyclopedia down, let's have a conversation. Yeah, I mean I was I was I think although of course these things are so weird. I mean when you look back as a 53 year old or what you were like as an eight year old so many myths and stories nonsense get in. The story at least I've developed is that I was a very, very sharpie super confident, quite extrovert, quite kind of punchy little kid, very very small tiny, but very kind of fearless, very into climbing buildings and kung fu and behaving like a monkey. And it wasn't really till I went to my secondary school at 13 that I remember. realized that I was, you know, dressing in weird Malaysian batting shirts and I was not even very eccentric little kid. But nobody really pointed out to me, I was just enjoying being me. That's strong. That's a really significant moment, right? Because there you are, a unique human being and then you come into contact with something as institutional as the school you went to. And that's quite, I mean, there is the metaphor, right? You know, creativity, difference, the beautiful things about human existence. And it's like, well, welcome to Eaton. Now you're going to dress like this actually. Yes. And I think it's not just dress like this. It's also, and I imagine these, I think actually these schools have probably changed and what it is to be a boy has probably changed over 30 years, 40 years. But certainly the school that I went to 40 years ago was a school which was very, very concerned with a particular vision of what it meant to be a boy or a man. Very, very competitive, very much about being cool, very much about dominated by sporting heroes. I mean, there's be true of a lot of high schools, right? And, and therefore, the real, certainly I felt the real compliance that was being demanded was not the school telling you to wear your uniform. Actually, a lot of the pressure was on what you wore when you were not in uniform. You know, were you wearing the right kind of shoes, were you wearing the right kind of, you choosing the right kind of, and it was horrible fashion at the time. And they, it was like hair spray and pacy pattern shirts. But you must dress like this regardless. And winkle pickers and train packed black jeans. Yeah. We've, we've covered up the new states from before the sort of the experience of boarding school, the consequences both. I mean, in, in extreme instances, right, there are multiple, multiple stories about psychological, physical abuse for children. I'm not in any way implying that's what happened to you. But that boarding school can be this really quite traumatic experience for young boys. I mean, we've, we've been, we've been slightly joking about it, but could, could you talk about how your experience has made you who you are now? I do want to come back to the question about boys and men. I'm going to after this, but just to be on you specifically for a second, Rory. Yeah. So if I think about me, it prepared me very, very well, I think for being in a military base in Iraq for walking across Afghanistan for politics, because along with the damage it might, might not have been doing it also formed a certain kind of resilience and competitiveness and confidence. I remember my American female colleague in Iraq, who was understandably getting pretty frustrated with the fact we were living in a shipping container with flies and sandbags around us and people mortaring us and living off military rations. She was getting frustrated with the fact that I seem to be so sort of natural and enjoying it. And because in a way, I'd lived a complete institutional life. I mean, I'd been in boarding school since I was eight in canteens living on my own. And being dumped in a military base in Iraq was not incredibly different, different what I've been doing since I was eight. And the, and being on your own and having to improvise and make new friend groups and define who you are without your parents and without your family and outside of a home environment. So I think there is, but there may be also something specific about it because it generates a much higher proportion of, or seems to kind of people going into politics and to public life and journalism and acting than other privileged private boarding schools. Do you think those private boarding schools as a whole? Do you think they're still an important part of Britain? I mean, the way you describe that classical training, if you like, that in the past might have been as a colonial administrator in Victorian Britain or what it was designed for. Yeah, exactly. Do you think it, you could still say the same thing about them now? Do you think they're an important part of our society? I think they definitely are. I mean, I think whether you've been to one of those schools or whether you haven't, you're incredibly conscious that there's a sort of subculture there. But they themselves are totally altered. I noticed that Charles Moore, who was this journalist, complaining that in an article that all 13 of the King's scholars that eaten last year were ethically Chinese. So these schools are now much more like an American university. They're sort of global things where and as far as you can see in many, many of these schools, it's incredibly diverse, but it's the sort of global elite rather than the sort of British upper middle classes. They often have campuses actually in those countries. I think Harrow has a, literally has a school somewhere in Southeast Asia. I want to circle back to what you were saying about the idea of what it meant to be a boy and a man. And if we could just talk about that in the present day, what you think it does mean to be a boy, to be a man in 2026 in Britain? Well, I think that we were talking just before we came on air with this amazing Louis through documentary on the manosphere where he's interviewing male influencers, projecting a particular vision kind of Andrew Tate masculinity. And of course, I've got two sons, so I've been trying to get my head around this. I think there seems to be on a sort of rough population basis biological differences in terms of male testosterone aggression, competitiveness, appetite for risk, particularly with young men. And I think it's important to bring up boys and educate them in a way that recognize that roughly on average, they're a bit different because. And that I, I've been very moved by teachers, I've talked to a teacher in States in recent, who was talking in a very funny way about what it's like having 15, 16 year old boys in your class and the kind of things they get up to and the sort of tolerance you need to have for the madness of what people can do. And I do feel that is quite important, which is how do you celebrate aggressiveness but not violence? How do you celebrate risk taking but not carelessly responsibility? How do you celebrate competitiveness, which isn't belittling other people? Yeah. I mean, I feel like this is already a pretty solid foreshadowing for some of the stuff that we're going to talk about in the rest of the interview, as particularly rates in the Middle East and perhaps also in England and Archaeological Culture here. Let's start to turn then to the Middle East. You mentioned earlier, right? And I brought it up as well. Your walk, the book you wrote about it. How do you think about both that journey that you took but also turquoise mountain, your legacy in Afghanistan and obviously with the lens too? You start that book, the Taliban is just falling and now obviously more than 20 years later they're back in power. Well, I think the first thing on the Afghan intervention, that is one of the biggest facts in the destruction of the whole post-war American order, the rules based international order, a failure of that sort. I mean, nearly two trillion dollars was spent in Afghanistan, so two thousand billion dollars. And in effect, nothing really was achieved. I mean, as you say, that book is written about an invasion that takes place to get rid of the Taliban. We spend 20 years on the ground. We spend thousands of billions of dollars and we then hand the whole country back to the Taliban again. So that's the kind of big picture. And then the odd thing in my life is that at the same time, I set up a charity which is now run by my wife, called Turquoise Mountain, which has been now running for 20 years and is still running in Afghanistan and still has a few hundred employees on the ground is supporting a few thousand female weavers. Has primary schools, has clinics, has restored part of the old city of Kabul, has expanded to do things in Myanmar and Syria and the West Bank and Jordan as well and in other parts the Gulf. So I, and that of course, a personal point of view was probably the most fulfilling satisfying thing I've ever done in my life. It, I loved it. I spent two years building this thing and I just really loved the people I worked with, the community sides working with, the challenges of opera rating in an environment like that, but also how quickly you can get things done. I mean, one of the things that maybe people who work in overseas development are not perhaps as honest about as they should be is that it can be incredible fun, real challenge, and that actually particularly for a younger person, very, very exciting. You can pose in quite a kind of pious way and everyone like, "Oh my goodness, you're so wonderful, you're an aid worker in Afghanistan." But actually the reality is, it's such a privilege because you can build a school in a fraction of the time you could in Britain, you can get a health center off the ground in a place that's never had a health before. I remember talking to you a long time ago now, I can't remember when, about operationally, when you would try to visit or go to Afghanistan. And I think you might have just left government and you were talking about the way in which obviously there are plenty of people in Afghanistan for whom the kidnap of a very recent British government minister would be a bit of a boon, quite a valuable ransom, likely. And so when you told me that, I obviously was sort of, I thought that would be incredibly scary thing, but then there's also a part of my psychology was like, "Well, I just found a bit fun though, doesn't it?" Yeah. Sort of last flight in. Exactly, last, last flight in. Yeah, yeah. No one would think, "That's right, you're complete right." I mean, we underestimate fun in things. I mean, sometimes very disturbing ways. If we're understanding political evil, even at its most extreme, you can only understand it if you understand that a lot of things which are very disturbing are actually fun. You know, I'd be aware of that in my own time in Iraq. I think I am very, very clear that that Iraq invasion was a catastrophic, horrible error. That did a lot of damage to Iraqi people, killed a lot of people, made the situation worse. And at the same time, as somebody age 30, working in Southern Iraq, it was one of the most stimulating, exciting years of my life. How do you weigh that up? Or how do you weigh up my father, who I think would probably have said he loved his experience in the second mobile? Despite the fact, it's also obviously horrible. There's an axis there, isn't there, the exhilarating and the terrifying, I guess. You used to phrase there, political evil, extreme political evil, and it stuck with me. Where'd you, if you're looking around the world now, where'd you see that finding its expression? How would you apply it to our modern moment? The word evil means many, many different things, but for me, one of the most fundamental aspects is carelessness, that it's a reckless, casual disregard for consequences. So that could be us in our own private life, the way we treat a romantic partner, just causing chaos, sleeping with lots of people, not caring, and misery, it causes them. Or it could be what I see in Donald Trump, which is a whimsical, complete disregard for thinking through consequences. In this case, he gets out a bit in the morning and he thinks, "Oh, Israel's going to bomb them anyway, and why don't I join in and we'll bomb Iran?" And he upends all the economies of the Gulf. I mean, UAE, Dubai will struggle to recover in the next 10 years from what he's done. He has driven up oil prices, he's crippled the economies of Europe. People mean that very poor farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, will not be able to access fertiliser because he's driven up the oil price. He has unleashed misery on Iran itself. And my guess is he just doesn't care. And so for me, evil in Trump is just a sense of a sort of slick, charming, recklessness. Okay, let's talk about Iran and Dylene's work. I don't, I actually, I find what you just said, very compelling. I suspect the challenge that I will offer you now is if you consider Trump on the one hand and then the Ayatollah on the other, there will be a great many people who say to you, if we were to categorize one or indeed both of them as evil, that I would start with the Supreme Leader of Iran. And it's interesting to me, you turn to Trump first. Yeah, I mean, it's a good challenge. So, the Iranian regime has killed tens of thousands of people in January, February this year. Machine gun people in the streets, snipers on roofs. It has been running prisons with political prisoners for decades. The revolution itself was born in a flurry of violence and killing. It propagated an Iran-eraq war in which millions of people, including a lot of young men, were sent to their deaths through minefields. And it makes the whole thing more brutal in sinister because it reinforces it with a particular Islamist, nationalist doctrine. And it runs proxy militias and all this kind of stuff. So it's a genuinely disturbing, horrifying regime. And it's reminiscent of the horrors of totalitarian regimes around the world. Very reminiscent of the way that Putin has run a lot of things in Russia. He's not necessarily shooting people in the streets, but it's definitely massive repression, political prisoners, corruption, and actually assassination internationally. It's certainly got echoes of the way Qadafi around. There be other way, the way that the North Korean leader runs North Korea. And China has got its fair record of exterminations, killings, political prisoners, etc. So it's all completely true. And I guess what's so disturbing is that although Iran has essentially been in that situation for nearly 50 years and was preceded by a Shah who's secret police killed thousands of people, what one's struggling with when one's looking at the United States is a country that presented itself in a completely different way, that did not say to the world, we are a theocratic authoritarian state. But instead we symbolize liberal democracy, we symbolize rights, we symbolize constitutions, we symbolize rules based on international order, we symbolize progress. So yeah, there are different forms of evil. Could we actually dial into the history a little bit because there are clearly moments in modern Iranian history and indeed much further back that are informing, I think, the strategic choices that are being made now, particularly around sort of endurance, pain thresholds, both for America and the global economy and for the Iranian society around martyrdom. I mean, you mentioned the Shah, we could go back and probably talk a little bit about Mazadeg, we could talk about, for example, you know, Kabbalah, there are moments aren't there in history that inform what's happening now and I would you talk about them a little bit? Yeah, I mean, I think everybody's nationalism is different and there is in Iran, there's very strong form of traditional person nationalism with an architecture which is quite secular which reaches all the way back into the ancient world and resistance to Rome and all this kind of thing. And very strong consciousness in Iran of the fact that Western powers basically cut the country up and stole huge bits of its territory in the 20th century. And then there's a very particular narrative, particularly driven through a Shia ideas of martyrdom, particularly Imam Hussein and Kabbalah and this sense that Shia Islam has always been about being an oppressed martyr and sacrificing all life for a cause. And those two things came together very, very politely, for example, in the Iran or Akbar, where you had nationalism, territory, Shia Islam, ideas of martyrdom together. And add to that a fundamental idea which is shared by the Iranians, the Chinese and Russians, which is that the West is determined to screw them over that America has had only one objective in its mind since the 1970s and Israel's had only one objective in its mind in the Iranian mind, certainly since the 1990s, which is to destroy that regime in extermination. And the belief that if they give an inch, they will be wiped out. And that any and they will have concluded from the last, experience the last 18 months that they will feel their mistake was that they didn't cause havoc last time, that they were very measured in their response. I think you remember that there was almost a moment where when the initial Israeli strikes were happening, when Iran's response was to say, in 24 hours, we're sending a missile over, are you ready? Are you ready? Here it comes, and where actually, although his will are fired rockets and led to a situation where Israelis left more than Israel, they just fired only a fraction of the rockets they had. They probably had 100,000 rockets, they could have fired a few thousand. And what they will have concluded is that instead of getting credit from the US or Israel for restraining themselves, they thought what they were demonstrating is measured deterrence, right? You fire a missile at us, we fire a missile back. You know we can mean business. But if you don't attack us, we won't unleash our full force on you. There's been a shadow wall going on between Iran and Israel for 30 years. That's been conducted by that, you know, occasionally they attack each other's vessels, occasionally they assassinate each other's people. But Israel and the US were no longer playing by this games. Israel responded to the restraint of his by saying, well, you're a bunch of suckers, you didn't use your missiles quickly enough and we're going to come and kill you all and kill 1500 of that leadership. And then when Iran didn't respond aggressively to the initial strikes, Israel concluded, well, you're a bunch of suckers in your two slurs. So we'll hit you even harder and we'll keep hitting it. We'll hit you even harder. And ultimately they got to a stage where Israel and the US were signaling that they were going to kill all the leadership of the regime, topple the regime. They cymbled a signal that they might arm the Kurds to invade. At that point, there's no leverage left. And at that point, what alternative really would it feel for the regime, if the regime wants to survive other than to demonstrate that if you attack Iran, there are consequences. Hence, let's drive up the global oil price. Let's attack the Gulf. Let's cause chaos. Let's show people that you can't just attack us and get away with it. And all the people who showed restraint, some of those people actually been killed, people asking for restraint. Yes, quite. And then I suppose if you're considering much of this has centered around Iranian attempts or lack thereof, depending on your perspective, to pursue its own viable nuclear weapon. And admittedly, I don't know, you may well do whether or not much of a commanding the italist son is actually in a position to lead the country, but by all accounts, a slightly more hard line figure and one would anticipate the events of recent weeks. You look at North Korea, if you're on that axis of evil, as George Bush described it, you can say, well, they're not being subject to this. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don't think it slows down that pursuit of nuclear. Exactly. There'll be a huge acceleration of people getting nuclear weapons because they will conclude it's the only thing that can defend you. And this begins really with Gaddafi because effectively what happened is a huge amount of effort was put into telling Gaddafi that if he gave up on his nuclear program, we would lift sanctions and he could become a friend of the West. He gives up on his nuclear program and then a couple years later, we invade and kill him. Ditto was Saddam Hussein, basically, who was put on a huge pressure to step away from his nuclear programs. And from his chemical weapon programs, he actually turned up to have abandoned his chemical weapon programs entirely under international pressure. And the only result was that we kill him. Ukraine, a very similar situation, was encouraged to give up its nuclear weapons and told that if it gave up its, and it actually had them, unlike the others, it wasn't abandoning a program. It physically had nuclear weapons. Gave him up because it was told they would be safer if they didn't have the weapons. What happens? Russia invades. Right? So it's not just countries like Iran that are going to try to develop nuclear programs. It's Saudi Arabia will try to develop a nuclear program. It's European states will try to develop nuclear programs. I mean, who wouldn't develop a nuclear program if you're in a world in which Trump and Netanyahu can literally get out of bed in the morning, make no international legal arguments, not make any arguments to Congress, not bother to consult their allies, and destabilize an entire region, plunging the global economy into a horrible mess with no due process, no thought, no moral argument, no legal argument, no pragmatic argument. Why wouldn't you break away from those alliances and try to set up your own way? Stay with us. We're going to take a short break, but we'll be back after this. There's a sort of paradox in my head was we're talking Rory, which is that on the one hand, I feel like our ideological paradigm of the way we're analyzing and understanding current global events. I've seen the surface of ideas that I think don't actually necessarily apply so well, whether it's responsibility to protect or the international rules based order or the Monroe doctrine. They feel to me like ideas from a previous century. Simultaneously, we're talking about Persian nationalism, which clearly has a century long history and is equally as valid and relevant today as it was in the past. And there just seems to be this moment right now where there's this things are in flux. I'm very glad you spoke about that, the shadow war between Israel and Iran as being 30 years long, because I've seen in English language media people talking about the fact that there was a 12 day war last year. Now there's a separate war happening now that as if Russia's participation, which we don't know the full extent of right now, but understanding that as developing in this conflict and also its involvement in Ukraine are two separate entities, the proliferation of drone warfare on the battlefield, the two things they're not being viewed or increasing they are in tandem. And then the hybrid warfare that's currently being waged was waged in Ukraine and now via the Strait of Hunters on global energy markets and commodities, I do feel like that that word's item vendor. It does feel that rather than there's a war in Ukraine and there's a regional conflict in the Middle East, it does feel like there is an increasingly global aspect to what's happening. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think what you're pointing to is that the world system has always been interdependent and interdependency. In other words, the idea that Britain is reliant on oil from the Middle East or the United States is reliant on chips from Taiwan and rare earths from China. It has been a permanent fact, right? I mean, even the ancient world, the Athenians needed to get their wheat in from the Black Sea. And there's always been two sides to it. There's been one way of looking at it, which is all this interdependency globalization is a kind of win-win, which delivers prosperity to us all, makes us interdependent and stops us going to war because we realize how much we need each other. The flip side, which is just sort of it's like one of those optical illusions you're looking at the same thing and the same thing viewed from another angle is vulnerability. You know, weaponize vulnerability. Oh my goodness, you know, I'm reliant on you for chips, I'm reliant on you for oil. I need to get that, right? And the genius of what America created from 1945 until the first Trump administration was a world in which somehow, by some miracle, a story, there's a space about stories and it's a story about liberal democracy and a story about free trade and a story about rules based international order. Convinced us that this whole thing was sort of okay and convinced us that nobody was going to wake up and use our mutual economic dependency as a weapon. But as soon as you've seen Trump do it, as soon as he's revealed, that the dollar is a weapon, that the fact that we buy 70% of our defense equipment from them is the threat. The fact that we, that he can suddenly instruct Google to shut off all the account access they had to the international criminal court. So we're completely vulnerable to US tech platforms, cloud computing, AI. As soon as you've seen that, you can't put the genie back in the bottle again. So the reason why Russia and Iran and China and what's happening in Latin America and what's happening with Gov is all part of the same story. Is it part of a story in which the collapse of that moral narrative? has suddenly turned all the strengths of globalization into a series of intolerable vulnerabilities and weaknesses. - One more question about this, and then I want to talk about England and Middleland. Just circle back to Islam for a second. So I'm interested in how I feel like there is a an understanding that's characterized by empathy that actually is an understanding of that world. And when I look across national British political discourse, I cite some recent examples, or whether it's Nick Timothy saying that Muslims praying in Trafalgar Square during Ramadan is some kind of act of domination, whether it's reform other parties on the radical right in Britain pledging to do things like banning the Berk, that essentially the way that I think much of our politics engages with Muslims in Islam is a bigoted one. And whilst there are obvious downsides and consequences, not least for Muslims living in Britain for that, there is now increasingly, I think, in the explicit national interest, in this instance in foreign policy, that ignorance means that the West's activity in Iran, it was more characterized by intelligence and understanding of empathy. It seems to me that our national interest might be better served. And I would just kind of invite your reflections on that culture, on that, the sort of animosity that exists in much of our politics towards people of this faith, people of this religion that live here. Yeah, I think we've got to be very clear that this is basically racist, I mean, essentially the AFD in Germany or the far right in Britain, or all those people on social media who are talking about Judeo-Christian values and saying, I've got nothing against people of color. I just don't like Islam. I'll basically racist. I mean, essentially what they're trying to do is drive hundreds of thousands, millions of people out of their country. I mean, the AFD, some of their leadership are very clear about it. They talk about remigration. You're a Muslim, you're gonna be shoved out of Germany. And it's the most amazing nonsense. I mean, this idea that somehow Islam itself is a kind of inherently bad religion and other religions are sort of inherently good is completely demented. I mean, the whole world history is littered with Christians doing horrible things. Buddhists doing, I mean, you really want to see madness. I mean, even Buddhism has a kind of radical French-Hindu-Nationalists doing that, things, right? Religious Zionists in Israel doing horrible things. All of them, if you're an extremist appealing to some weird scriptural justification, but the point is that the extremism proceeds to scriptural justification. It's not driven by the scriptural justification. This same Islam, and I've spent a lot of my life living in Muslim countries. I grew up partly in Malaysia. I lived in Afghanistan. I lived in Iraq. I lived in Pakistan. I, my lived experience is of extremely generous, dignified, thoughtful, empathetic societies, which don't begin to resemble the kind of ideas that white non-Muslims develop. It's, I mean, and it's partly just pure ignorance. It's not very different from the kind of way that, well, our experience, I suppose, with other forms of racism, that the kind of ways that people sort of out black people when they hadn't met any black people, or the kind of ways that people sort about people who were gay until they actually had some gay friends. I mean, a lot of it is simply that. They just don't know any Muslims, right? They don't understand the lived experience of it. They don't understand that. Okay, now add to that the way of them, which this is being weaponized around the world. It's really disturbing, profoundly disturbing. And I, I mean, you can do things to sort of illustrate it. I mean, I, somebody was pointing out to me last night that Muslims on average in Britain give twice as much to charity as anyone else. But I'm not sure that's the way through to sort of look at the kind of statistical anomalies on that, it's much more about just trying to, get people to develop some love and enthusiasm and respect. Now, look, the same would be true if you were dealing with anti-Semitism. And maybe the route through as anti-Semitism. I had an example recently, I was gotten a fight on X with Tommy Robinson. - Sounds productive. - Sounds really productive. And one of his guys came into me and he said, you're such a slippery politician. Will you please answer two questions straight? Number one, are the too many Muslims in Britain? And number two, if so, how many should they be? So I wrote back and I said, number one, no, number two, C1. But what I really should have said is, just think about what happened if you changed that word to are the too many black people in Britain? Are the too many Jews in Britain? Where does this go? What does this mean for the way that we think about fellow citizens, human rights, our equality as humans, dignity, right? I mean, you can develop these things, right? All of us probably have elements of structural prejudice in our lives. Of course we do. I mean, in a sense the black lives matter was about many of us having to discover all the ways in which there are probably profoundly racist structures in a way that we view the world. I'm sure there are Islamic phobic and anti-Semitic structures in the way that we engage with a lot of things, but it's incumbent on us to recognize these, and recognize they're basically the same thing, right? The same hostility that people felt towards ultra-orthodox Jews in the 1930s, and in fact for some people even today, that they dress differently, they're wearing different headgear, they are an isolated community, is exactly the same as people saying, I don't like seeing Muslims walking down the street, dressed as Muslims, it's the same thing, right? It's saying, I'm uncomfortable with an alien religious culture that is isolated from me and that I can't relate to, but you have to try to break through and realize that if you get beyond the costume, here are warm, generous, funny, inventive people. Let's turn to something more hopeful than let's turn to democratic renewal, rejuvenation, perhaps discovering a little bit of that love in our society, your book, Middle-Land, let's talk about it. I mean, tell me, what does the word mean politically? Totally. So for me, the Middle-Land is a way of talking about this extraordinary border territory, which spills from Sudden Scotland into Northern England, and of which, Cumbria is an incredible symbol. And which historically really wasn't part of either Scotland or England, it was a Middle-Land. So separate land. Separate land. Before the Romans came, separate land for about 700 years after the Romans left. Cumbria was an independent kingdom of its own kings and bards and its own completely different language, nothing like Scottish Gallic or Anglo-Saxon English. And it still retains in the landscape, in upland sheep farming, in the place names, in the geology, in the culture, things which are really distinct traditions, which challenge our ideas of Britishness. You tell me a little bit more about the landscape and how it informs your understanding of, saying, being English and English identity. So the book, Middle-Land, is centered particularly on the Lake District and the area around Hedgensville. And it is above all a human landscape, but it's a human landscape that's now got caught up in arguments about rewilding. So it's in a very interesting space. Like so many other beautiful landscapes in Britain, it's dominated now by tourism, so billions of pounds made here by people like you and me going on holiday on the Lake District. But it's also a place where communities continue to live, including upland farmers with hundreds of years of attachment to the land who have created that landscape. The colors of the hills, and then you'll remember the classic color in Lake District is that it's a bright green down at the bottom, it's a sort of yellow in the middle and then right up at the top, it's a kind of beigey gray. And this is because of the way that farmers manage grass and sheep, it's to do with nitrogen and the soil, it's to do with these very ancient drystone walls that divide the color. land at the top from the bottom. Now that landscape is there in Wordsworth's poems. It's their internas paintings in the 18th century. It's the birth of the whole romantic movement in Europe comes out of this landscape, but it's a landscape created by very small farms of very tough, incredibly hardworking people. Often keeping native breeds, but predominantly increasingly reliant on sheep. And it's now at the front of a new form of culture war, where sheep are now regarded as a plague. And there is a great enthusiasm for the idea of abandoning farming and letting nature just take its course, which is the end of those farms. Should we talk about that a little bit? I mean, there is a thing you're there are people like Derek Gow, who's written about sort of rewilding, rewilding predators, apex predators back into the British landscape, primarily wolves. That finds its expression in the deer population in this country, which I know this is a contested figure, but many people will tell you that there are now currently more deer in Britain than they have ever been at any point in its history, because they don't have predators anymore. And the only predator is a man with a rifle. And so therefore, what do we do about that? Because if you're trying to grow forestry in Scotland and heard of red deer move through, it can be a bit of a problem for you. Same for the row, same for the rest of it. And so there is this debate, isn't there about should we reintroduce the links? I think wolves, yeah, probably slightly far off. I'm not sure that's going to happen anytime soon, Rory. But there are people who say, I think it's what you're alluding to when you're talking about the culture war, is that there are people who say, well, if a farmer loses 10 sheep from his flock every year, so be it because there are broader ecological questions here. And I think the other side of it is that there's a lack of understanding about the rural way of life. I'll be trying to weak out their livings. I mean, tell me what you're doing. I think there's obviously like any one of these debates. There's some really important points on both sides. So it's true that to start with, there is a biodiversity crisis in Britain. We've had a catastrophic collapse in species. There have been unbelievably bad farming practices. We have polluted our rivers. And so a healthier, better British environment would be good for biodiversity, good for climate, good for water quality, good for our quality. But we're also a very small island, and we're a very small island, which is very, very densely populated. We're more densely populated than India. And we're also an island where the same bit of land is used for a lot of different things. So if you move away from the kind of abstract to the real and look at a covering valley, that same bit of land can be used to produce sheep. And we still eat lamb. So part of the problem is we're going to, if we're not going to become vegetarians, we've got to get that lamb from somewhere. Now, if you shut down the Lake District farmers from producing lamb, we will buy it from New Zealand. What is the result? Well, not just the sheep has to move a long way, but that sheep is destroying the New Zealand biodiversity. I mean, that's the thing that we do a lot in Britain, which is that we feel good about ourselves. We push the problem to China. So China has coal-fired things. And then we buy all the t-shirts from China. We pat ourselves on the back and say, we're not polluting, but actually our consumption of t-shirts, our consumption of land, is just creating that problem for someone else's country. So if we're going to eat lamb, take some of that responsibility and accept that sheep have an impact on the environment. Secondly, think about living human communities. Think about the fact that the farmer also is the person whose kids keeps the local school open, whose tractor clears the local roads. Think about the fact that the landscape that the tourist is paying to visit is not actually likely to be a landscape of scrub, gorse and bracken. But in fact, they may want to see farmers sheep, dry stumbles. And think about how you could do this in a varied way. Think about the possibility that the RSPB could rewild this valley, but another valley could be protected for sheep farming. Another valley could be commercial forestry because we need that too. Our houses, our power stations require fast-growing softwood, not native wood. These are really difficult stuff. We need renewable energy. But where do we put that renewable energy? What kind of renewable energy? And that's what isn't happening in this debate. What at its worst, what happens in this debate is on the one hand, you have extreme traditionalists saying, I'm not going to change anything. And I have a right to pollute and wreck the landscape. And on the other extreme, you have people who I'm afraid often actually are not from rural backgrounds, they're from urban backgrounds, with fantasies about wolves and beavers and links, who don't really are not really forced to think about the impact on the ground in Cumbria. And actually, not even being honest with themselves, with the truth, which is that they really wanted to improve biodiversity and air quality and climate, it would be much more efficient to rewild the green belt than to get involved in Cumbria because biodiversity per square meter is much, much greater in southern England than it is in the Uptans. You know, it's, I could talk to you about this for a very long time, Rory. And I think there are, you know, another frame on this is the really quite stringent animal welfare standards that we have in this country, rightly so, that mean that there's quite a high cost imposed on farmers for producing livestock for human consumption. But at the same time, if you're going to permit the import of products from countries that don't have as rigorous animal welfare standards, you can have farmers in other parts of the world, I would probably think more about Australia as relates to beef than I would land from New Zealand, but nevertheless, who it's actually cheaper for suppliers to ship their products from halfway around the world than it is to buy them from British farmers. That's such a good challenge, right? Because if we agree ethically that we, you know, let's take some, which I think is difficult to disagree with, which is that battery chickens are horrendous. I mean, the life of a chicken living for a few weeks with this beak cut in total distress for the sake of our chicken or eggs is horrendous. How can it make any sense to say we're going to stop that happening here, but we're going to continue to buy those things? The chicken is suffering just as much abroad as it is here. So that I don't get. I also don't get why we don't understand that turning the green belts into the largest forest in England would have much more benefit because we're closer to it. A lot of the natural capital benefit comes from the number of people that are near that place. Here, there are 12 million people that would be able to benefit terms of air quality, leisure, access from those woods. Why are they all dumping it all up on what was my former constituency? Well, the answer is because it's the most spastic populated constituency in England. It's not an accident. They treat it like a blank space on a map. They almost, the implications sometimes when they read these articles as well. Nobody really needs lives there. It's not going to make any much difference to anybody. Why don't we put our wolves there because they're really aren't any people there, either. It's a pattern. The reason to be suspicious the rewilding when it's pushed the latest. Those were the arguments used why we should have the munitions factories, why we should have the nuclear facilities. Why are we spending billions of pounds a year in Cumberland cleaning up nuclear waste? Well, because some lovely chap in the 1950s looked at him and thought, "Well, maybe you really lived there." Why don't we do that there? Do you know, I think this is such an important issue. Again, even the idea of, I think, quite a lot of people that have this idea of the English countryside and the rolling hills and the field of wheat. So, while you're looking at a monoculture, you're looking at an industrial version. That's not actually a wild place, the perception you have of it. I even talking to you about this now, Rory, I feel like I know that this conversation will sound slightly eccentric to significant parts of the audience because they're not from Cumbria, they don't live real lives. They don't necessarily see the value or the importance of food systems of farming. I would probably suggest that perhaps the international events right now demonstrate are quite the importance of having slightly less extended global supply chains. But nevertheless, there is a. It relates to the gap, doesn't it, between the issues on a local level you could talk about Cumbria, you could talk about the West Country, you could pick anywhere in Britain and then our national political discourse where people will be listening thinking, "Why on earth are they talking about sheep farming in Cumbria?" Yeah, why are we not talking about Prinsendr, for example? Right. So, one of the interesting things that I learned as a politician is that there isn't a direct relationship between what actually matters and what the media talk about. that if you try to do that, you will be able to do it. try to challenge that, you get in real trouble. If you try to say, okay, this thing that is dominating all the headlines, yeah, I get it. It's a problem, but it's not a problem remotely on the scale of the fact we've got hundreds of billions of pounds worth of debt, right? Or it's not remotely engaging with the reality of, you know, the kind of conditions that Naz Shah or Angela Rainer's family grew up in the conditions of people, I guess, the bottom four or five percent of extreme poverty in Britain. We don't talk about at all. Homelessness, we don't talk about very much, right? And it's very difficult to challenge. It's very difficult to say, here's this scandal that's dominating everything and for two weeks, we're talking all the time about this thing. But you're not talking about the really difficult, interesting things, you know, where our food comes from, what we're doing about homelessness, what we're doing about the poor elderly, what we're really doing about adult social care. And actually, what we would need to do to actually grow our economy, reduce taxes, reduce regulation, these are really important questions. What would it actually mean to have a AI policy or a defense policy? Talk about any of that, different. We get caught up in, and I have this sort of debate with us, I mean, also it's got a much better, on the rest of politics, he's got a much better feeling for what the public want to talk about this week. But if you were a Martian looking at it, it would be very difficult to guess what it is the public wants to talk about because it's not necessarily the most difficult, interesting issues in the country. You know what's interesting about that? I read a column, it was about you and it was about Mitt Romney and it said that you'd been proven right on most things, but that you weren't, that you didn't have the fiber of a national political leader or something. And I thought it was so, it was Janangan National and it was so interesting about what it revealed about our society that someone can give an incredibly recent contribution about the need to increase defense spending in Britain. But at the end of the day, if you're not prepared to make an intervention on the print sound you're scandal or whatever, then it's, your sort of politics doesn't reward you for being right. Right. Yeah. It's not how politics works. It doesn't also, I mean, I've been wrong about lots of things too, and it doesn't necessarily particularly punish you for being wrong. I mean, it's a, it's, it's, it also finds it very difficult to accept that all you can hope for from a politician is that they're trying to learn and that there's some humility and they're trying to be a bit more right than wrong. But what I noticed is, is the right and the far right and the Brexit right have this amazing current tendency, having been catastrophically wrong in their decision to pursue Brexit, right, which I think majority of the British people now accept they screwed. That was a stupid decision. Catastrophically wrong in their flirtation with Trump. Catastrophically wrong in their vulnerability they exposed to US tech. Catastrophically wrong in the way that they managed immigration and British economy after 2017. And yet their brilliant trick is to suggest that the Liberal Centre have no judgement are universally wrong about everything, right? And it's a really interesting move because the truth is we're all wrong about lots of things, right about some things wrong about some things is very difficult to predict the future. But this weird thing that I've noticed when I'm engaging with Tommy Robinson, which is this particular, maybe this is about a particular type of mannest fear story, right? There's him saying I am, so a lot of folks on strength, right? So, Rory Stewart is spiritually weak, intellectually weak, physically weak. And that's quite a big thing because we see that the US Secretary of War and the US Ambassador to the UN are posting images themselves, lifting heavy weights and doing a lot of press ups. When I was fighting JD Vance on X, there was a lot about can you do more press ups than JD Vance, right? Then there's a lot of attacks saying Rory Stewart, "Pease sitting down." Right? That's your "Pease sitting down," then there is an enormous amount of, and then it gets into sort of weird stuff, right? There's sort of weird stuff around, you know, he's ugly and maybe he's a child molester, and then there's, and then there's this stuff around and he's wrong about everything, right? And you navigate your way through, you know, he's weak, he's wrong, he's a child molester, he's ugly, he's "Pease sitting down," and it's basically that's the repeated playlist, right? And it's an interesting playlist because it doesn't really bring you into the heart of political discussion, right? What do I actually want to debate all these people who are sort of, the spectator, for example, at the moment, got it in for me and I said, "How'd a good go with five different articles in about two months?" What I really want to say is, but dear Michael, what was this decision on Brexit and what was this decision on Boris Johnson? Right, I'm currently having a dominant coming, so again, what was this decision on Brexit? And why did you decide to go with Boris Johnson? I mean, I agree, you know, you are world-shattering geniuses who are omniscient and are predicted every single thing since the Peloponnesian wars to COVID, but those were screw ups, right? We're running out of time, Rory, so I'm going to rattle through a few quick ones, and I'll let you get on your way. How much of your interest in these local issues in Cumbria has to do with the mayoral election that's happening there next year? I'm very interested in Cumbria. I have decided not to go for the mayoral election. I mean, it was a difficult decision. I really, really love Cumbria. I spent some time walking around trying to work at how an independent campaign would work, so to be honest, that was very interesting in the idea, but I have decided that it's not for me. What does being English means here? I appreciate it. I said quick, far in that much. It's a lot of questions. It means a lot to me because I would also say that I feel many levels deeply Scottish and a loss of my idea of language, history, tradition, character is derived from Scotland. But yes, I think it's. Yeah, it's a form of lightness of touch. It's a form of a lot of things that I'm not, but that I admire in other English people. Yeah. In 2024, you described yourself as a passionate monochist. Do you still describe yourself as that? Yes, absolutely. I love all that stuff, and I love it partly because I mean, I can make an argument for you why I would rather have King Charles than an elected president like Donald Trump, and I think I'm sort of helped by that. But it's not really a practical argument. For me, it's a wonderful British compromise with past and tradition. Of course, it doesn't fully make rational, logical sense. It's an accident. And it creates a lot of anomalies, and it will create a lot of people saying, "What exactly are their powers?" But the truth is, without being distilled to the monochia, the power of the monochia in practice is extremely limited compared to the power of a president, right? And that's probably quite a good thing. My last question to you, Rory, during the London mayoral campaign, you said that Pratt was your favourite restaurant. Were you lying? I said, "It's my favourite pub, actually." You said your favourite pub? I thought my favourite pub was, and I said, "Pret." I read that, and I thought that must be a typo that can't be right. What's your favourite pub in London? I said, "I'm more of a presser-more, Jamie." I still think it's a hell of a quality product. It's a very reliable lunch option. Rory Stewart, thank you so much for giving us your time. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much. You've been listening to the exchange from the new statesman with me, Oli, Doug Morrow, my guest, Rory Stewart. This episode was produced by Catherine Hughes, the exchange will be back next Wednesday.