410. China, Russia, and Cyberwarfare: Is the UK preparing for the wrong war?

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Welcome to the Rest is Politics with me, Alistair Campbell.

And me, Rory Stewart.

Breaking news, Rory, the Dutch government has just collapsed.

We might get a few researchers beavering away as we talk to find out more about that.

The strategic defence review presented by Kirstama, big news in the UK and I think as well as going into the detail of that we should look back at the defence reviews that happened as it were in our time because I think there's some interesting parallels and differences to draw.

Also related to defence I think the election in Poland at the weekend where Donald Tuskai narrowly lost and that could give him a bit of a headache going forward and difficulties possibly in relation to Ukraine as well.

And in the second half I think we should focus on China and Asia more broadly.

You've been in Japan at a conference in China.

I've been in Kazakhstan, where China came up way more than the United States did.

So lots to get going on.

Let's start with defense.

So on your 14-hour flight back from Japan, did you have time to read the Strategic Defence Review?

I did.

Well done.

Let's give a quick introduction, down and dirty, to strategic defense reviews.

So I guess the cliché on British Strategic Defence Reviews, which has been a long-standing tradition, is they tend to be very, very elegant, elegant, a very big picture, and not funded in a great deal of detail.

And actually, in a funny way, if you wanted to make a joke about different national characters, you could look at the way the Americans, the Germans, the French, and the Canadians do their defense reviews.

So the Americans basically sound like a general giving orders.

They're very, very brisk.

They're connected to rafts of classified documents on funding.

And they're full of very aggressive language about dominating, deterring.

The French, as you'd imagine, talk a lot about sovereign capability, but one of the interesting things about the French is that they all are driven by a legally binding law about funding that happens in advance of the review.

The Germans are most woke of all.

The Germans Defence Review under Schultz, which came out last year, has a lot of talk about feminist defence policy, climate, human rights, arms exports.

Right up your street, Rory.

Right up your street.

You love the German Defence Review.

And the story of British Defence Reviews is that, in my experience, I used to be chair of the Defence Select Committee, so I used to spend a lot of time looking at these things, is that when they come out, everybody celebrates them, because partly I fear, because it's quite a tight-knit group, all of whom have contributed to the Defence and Security Review.

And then a few years later, they all say they were complete rubbish.

So the last one that we had that came before this was put together by your friend and my friend, Boris Johnson.

And this was the Strategic Defence Review, which came out in 2021.

Sorry, just before you go on, Rui, was that the same Boris Johnson who, three months before the invasion of Ukraine, said that it was absurd to think that we'd have a war in Europe involving tanks ever again?

That one.

That would be exactly the one.

And unusually, being fair to Boris Johnson, this was the complete consensus of all the great poo-bars and grandees who were involved in his strategic defense security reviews.

So it was released to great fanfare in 2021, and it missed one big thing, unfortunately, which was Russia-Ukraine, which happened within a few months of the review.

Instead it said the big future for Britain is Asia-Pacific and the real kind of headlines of the review were we were going to send an aircraft carrier to sail around the Pacific and reinforce the United States in the Pacific and we were going to tilt hard towards quantum and AI and away from old-fashioned legacy things like tanks, artillery shells, etc.

Now, the only reason I'm saying this is that at the time I was a very rare voice saying, I cannot see the point of us tilting towards the Pacific.

It seemed to me completely mad.

Britain has very little equity in the Pacific.

We would have done much better concentrating on Europe and on Africa, and in fact, backfilling the US, while the US went to the Pacific, done stuff in Africa.

And it's also very striking that it completely ignored Putin invading Crimea in 2014 and all that we knew about hybrid warfare and attacks on the Baltic, which the Defence Committee had been writing about.

I've just been rereading some of the stuff we did in 2014-15.

We wrote about it a lot, and yet it really didn't feature at all.

And the reason I'm raising it is that this review, which was brought together very elegantly by a man called John Bug, who wrote the biography of Attlee, was really celebrated at the time.

There were very few dissenting voices, and yet within a few months, it proved to completely misread the risks of the world.

Well, before we go into explaining what's in this defense review, let's go back to the one that I was involved in in 1998, where I think it was, I guess at the time, peace dividend was the sort of phrase that was doing the rounds.

But that one too actually became somewhat overtaken by events.

In fact, so that came out in 1998.

And George Robertson, who was then Defense Secretary, was in charge.

And he's the guy who was the main author, along with Fiona Hill and General Barons, as the sort of three that put this one together.

But after the September the 11th attacks, they actually added a chapter.

to the 1998 Strategic Defence Review.

We need to look further into how we should allocate the investment which is needed, including, for example, intelligence gathering, network-centric capabilities, special forces capabilities, unmanned aerial vehicles, etc.

I also went and had a look at it and some of the kind of headline stuff.

And it was really interesting because, you know, at the time, as I say, the country felt pretty confident.

We didn't really feel under threat.

But let me just tell you the thing about aircraft carriers, for example.

So the Strategic Defence Review recommended that our then three Invincible class aircraft carriers should be replaced.

And the new ships, the Queen Elizabeth class, as it became known, entered service in 2017 and 2019.

So we're talking almost two decades between the review and that happening.

The Royal Navy fleet was reduced from 35 to 32 frigates and destroyers.

There was a lot of focus in this one about submarines, in the new one and submarines.

Back then, we did confirm the purchase of an initial batch of astute class submarines.

They're now going to go.

And interesting on nuclear deterrent, so the current one that we're about to talk about, they're talking about £15 billion more.

Back in 1998, we did not exploit the maximum capacity of the Trident missile system.

We could have, I think we reduced the warheads from 300 to 200.

So clearly, although we were increasing the size of the army, the truth is that...

If you read back to it now, it feels like you're reading in a much more peaceful age.

Whereas what Keirstarma set out yesterday was very much an argument that we are in a more dangerous age than any time since the end of the Cold War, certainly, and that's why we have to up our game.

You've completely identified the challenge which will be at the heart of this defence review.

So what you pointed out in 98 is that these reviews come down to what's the threat, you know, what's the big threat that's coming in terms of national security, and then what kind of kit and what kind of people do we need to deal with that threat.

And related to that, your other point, which is procurement and the length of time it takes to make a kit.

So you have to make a judgment on threat and then you build an aircraft carrier that doesn't appear for 20 years.

And obviously the world changes a lot in 20 years.

That point of 98 and 9-11, of course, is really interesting because it's just another way of, I think, getting listeners to concentrate on how consistently poor we've been around the world and predicting things.

I think we talked about the fact that Basically, no Iran expert predicted the Iranian Revolution just before it happened in 1979.

No Soviet expert predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall in 89 or the collapse of the Soviet Union in 91.

And in 1998, I was in government.

In 1996, I think, we talked about this a bit when we interviewed Alex Younger on Leading, we were basically moving to shut down almost all our counter-international counter-terrorist capacity.

within our intelligence and security services.

It was a tiny, tiny fraction of what we were doing.

And then after 9-11, it became nearly 90% of the entire activity of those organizations, sort of changes on a dime.

What's What's the risk here?

Well, the risk here is that Fiona Hill, who we interviewed on Leading, and we should, you know, maybe get George Robertson on.

He's keen to get on, actually.

Often I saw him recently and he said he was keen to get on.

They wrote this basically in January, and it's been ready to go for some months.

And privately, they've been pretty frustrated about how long it's taken to get out.

But in some ways, it's fortunate it took so long to get out because, of course, it was written initially for an old world.

So the George Robertson that I spoke to in Edinburgh, I guess, in November, was the George Robertson who was still very much, we're focused on fighting Ukraine with the US as the major funder and donor, the kind of Biden world, US and Europe against Ukraine.

And you can still see traces of that in the report.

So there's still quite a lot about buying American kit.

So buying these incredibly expensive, multi-hundred million dollar American F-35 aircraft using American nuclear missiles to be fired off those aircraft.

But in between, they've had to change it to adapt to the fact that suddenly we have a very different Trump, a Trump who isn't interested in the war in Ukraine and who is much less interested in NATO and almost certainly is going to be removing American assets that we were relying on from Europe much more quickly.

But what it hasn't quite got to, and I think this is maybe the gap, is that I think if it had been written three months later,

it could have been much, much bolder about thinking about the new European defense and security architecture.

It recognises a little bit belatedly that the American thing is fading.

It hasn't quite got the full direction to the future.

That's why in the end, the politics around it become so important.

And I actually thought the message, the overall messaging of the government yesterday was pretty effective, talking about moving to war fighting, readiness, never fighting alone.

And

there was a lot of emphasis on NATO without actually going into.

And Fiona Hill is very, very articulate and very robust about her view that Donald Trump is, frankly, unreliable in relation to our relations with the rest of NATO, but seeing it as the alliances that we can build, but not always just talking about America.

And then the whole thing about innovation and so forth.

Just very briefly to go through what the key announcements were.

There are a lot of recommendations, but we're talking about 12 new nuclear-powered tax submarines and the 15 billion investment in the warhead program I mentioned.

Massive focus on a hybrid Royal Navy, blending drones with warships and submarines and planes.

And we should maybe talk a little bit about that incredible Ukrainian operation the other day when we talk about drones.

A new drone centre, £4 billion worth.

New digital targeting web, £1 billion.

Six new munitions factories.

And it was interesting how much Kirst Armer and John Healy wanted to focus on the jobs element, British jobs, making British munitions.

New stockpile of 7,000 British-built long-range weapons.

Better housing and equipment for members of the armed forces.

And my God, God, they need it.

And I think there was an understanding that we are going to need more troops, and that is going to mean pay and morale being addressed.

So they were the sort of the

main chunky bits.

And there's a lot in it.

I guess what I wonder, and I'll be interested in your take on this, and we mentioned last week that conversation I had with the reform member, and he said he doesn't think the young people, if we were in a world war, young people wouldn't fight it.

Do you think there's a risk in Kirstama talking about war readiness, almost saying like we have to be ready now, and imminent, there's an imminent danger from Russia?

Do you think if then nothing happens, that sort of feeds into the idea that young people just think they're being played and they don't really feel that they're part of the defence of the realm, as it were?

Yeah, I think there's always a big risk of that, isn't there?

But part of the problem is how do you talk honestly about risks?

Because the temptation for politicians is always to,

instead of saying we don't, the truth of the matter, which is we don't know much about the world, we can't be certain exactly what kind of threat Putin faces.

Some people think that he would take four or five years to recover from what he did in Ukraine.

That's the Alex Younger, more optimistic position, and that we've got time.

Other people think that if he were to do well in Ukraine, he'd be moving into the Baltic quite quickly.

Some people think we need to fight him in Ukraine.

Some people think we need to fight in the Baltic.

And these are real experts disagreeing.

So when the government's communicating, what it isn't really able to say to people is

we're in an uncertain world where we don't quite know what could happen.

You know, the US could become more normal again after Trump or it might not.

Putin might back off.

Xi Jinping might not go into Taiwan.

We need some capacity just in case.

And the threats to us are not

Napoleon or Hitler trying to land on British soil.

And that means that the risk is that you need to excite people because you want them to pay more tax.

You want to increase,

GDP from 2.5% to 3%.

That's tens of billions of pounds extra you're taking in a tax.

Are you saying that part of the job is actually to explain to people that we might have to invest very significant sums of money, as we are doing in Ukraine right now, in places like Lithuania and Latvia and Estonia, and that our troops might have to go there rather than give any sense that we might actually have to see British people fighting in Britain?

That's the bit that I think was when we talked about this.

they talked a lot about this kind of home guard idea, people getting more engaged in the reserve, the cadet force and so forth.

It is sort of trying to shape the psychology of the nation to think that we can no longer take it for granted that Britain might not be involved in a conventional war very close to home.

Yeah.

Well, if you look at detail of what they predict the most likely nature of a conflict with Russia would be, it's much more about missile exchange than it is about Russian soldiers landing on British soil.

I suppose the point I was trying to make, though, which is, you know, goes to the core of what you were involved in in Iraq and we were all involved in in Afghanistan, is that in order to get votes through parliament and raise money, you're under a lot of pressure to really emphasize how much of a threat it is.

So, I mean, obviously, the most controversial is this question about weapons of mass destruction, but the same was true in Afghanistan, which is Obama saying, in order to catch a Sunbin line, we need to win in Afghanistan and stabilize Pakistan, or Afghanistan's an existential threat to global security.

And the problem with it is it creates, in the short term, as I think you were implying, the sort of motivation maybe from the public or politicians to get behind something.

But in the longer term, the risk is that people think you've overstated your case and they then overreact in the other direction and think, as they do now with Iraq and Afghanistan, that these were $3,000 trillion wars and that they weren't really much of a threat to us anyway.

So that's why I think, I don't know whether this is what you were saying, but that's only my instinct, that the really good politician, really great leader, is able to

say this really matters without pushing the argument so far that you create kind of exhaustion and a reaction against you.

Well, I just

looking at some polling.

41% of under 30 say they would refuse conscription in the event of a world war.

So I think this thing about, you know, one of the lines in the review is that every part of society will need to play their part.

That is trying to engender a sense of real risk, real threat.

And they sort of analyse analyze the threats as Russia being kind of imminent, not imminent, but a real threat to

our way of life and a lot of focus on cyber attacks.

China's probably next in line and then North Korea and Iran as being very, very unpredictable.

I thought this was interesting, the way that Keir Starmer and John Haley both emphasizing this never fight alone, this sense of the alliances.

And I think that goes back to, it was interesting, I watched a little bit of the parliamentary debate.

Once they got over the fact that there was lots of the Speaker very angry and lots of MPs angry that this whole thing was announced in a shipyard in Glasgow rather than in Parliament, but once John Healy got up on his feet,

really emphasising this point about the alliances that we have to build and working with other European nations.

But then we're going to talk about Poland in a minute.

And just think about that.

You were saying there the challenge for politicians to persuade the country to take a threat seriously.

And, you know, the fact is that even though it was a very, very narrow defeat, Donald Tusk, the Prime Minister, his candidate losing, presumably, if Poland was totally signed up to this, are they now spending almost 5% of their GDP on defence, if Poland was fully signed up to the threat that he's talking about, then you might have expected his candidate to have won that election.

So the challenge for politicians in this is really, really tough.

I just want to take about one more stage, which is just to remind people what a hole Britain is in.

And Sophiana Hill and George Robertson and General Barrens are dealing with a British military where the number of soldiers we've got is famously at the smallest level since the Napoleonic War.

You've got some figure about a football stadium.

Yeah, they can fit in one of our bigger stadiums, yeah.

And if you look at the figures, the US will have something like 2,500 battle tanks ready to go and about another 1,700 in reserve.

The Chinese have about 5,000.

The Poles have about 777.

This is a slightly unfair question, but guess how many ready tanks we have in Britain?

I'm saying 120.

20 20 to 25 ready.

Oh god.

How many unready do we have?

Well we've we've got about 148 going through upgrades at the moment right.

Okay.

But the gap between Poland having 777 in a pretty good state and us having 20 and the same's true with our ships.

You know half the time our aircraft carriers are being refitted.

We have a particular problem around our frigates where only six of them are really able to to float around.

We've only got, if you look at planes, we built these two enormous aircraft carriers and each aircraft carrier can take between 60 and 80 of these F-35s, but we've only had the money to buy 33.

That means that you can't fly the number of sorties remotely that the US or the French could, and you don't have a carrier battle fleet to defend them.

I mean, one of the reasons why Boris Johnson's Defence Review was a sort of classic Boris production.

It was quite elegant in literary terms.

It made great claims about global Britain, but in the end, it came down to a British aircraft carrier bobbing around somewhere in the Pacific, completely dependent on American planes to fly off the deck and American ships to protect the aircraft carrier.

I mean, is it completely sort of, it's a bit like Boris stuck on a zipline.

So guessing from that state and guessing from a massive, you know, £15 billion famous sea kind of black hole in our finances.

22 billion.

22 billion.

Who knows what the black hole is.

There is 22 billion.

I believe Rachel Rees on this.

No, no, no, this is the this is the Ministry of Defence

unaccounted for black hole.

This isn't in, not really in her figures.

And I think where George Robertson and Fiona Hill are being a bit polite is

George Robertson really, I'm sure,

he can correct me if I'm wrong, would have wanted the government to come out with a clear commitment to three or even three and a half percent of GDP on defence.

That is where a lot of the politics was yesterday, because there was all this sort of you know, dancing around what was a commitment, what was an ambition, what was a hope.

And Labour were very much holding to the line that because they'd said they would get to 2.5 and they have, that when they say there is the ambition to get to 3%, they will.

But what you're saying is even at that,

there is a huge gap between what that would deliver and what others are feeling that they, maybe those particularly those that are closer to Russia, feel

they have to develop.

And of course, if the Americans maintain that

they're not going to provide the sort of security guarantees that we've taken for granted since the Second World War, then the bill goes up.

Yeah, and if you look at one of the bits in the plan, which I guess is not an iron dome or a golden dome, but a kind of British tin dome, which is a sort of slightly cheaper British version of trying to knit together electronic warfare satellites to provide protection for the UK, they've put, I think, a budget of about a billion behind it.

That would almost certainly, I would guess, 12, 20 billion to do it properly.

You know, you defend a very, very small amount of the UK with that kind of budget.

And the same is, you know, this question around, are we really serious about, instead of really leaning into Europe, really working out what European defence procurement would look like, developing a new generation of European fighters, to keep being reliant on these American F-35s where access to software is always tricky, and where this idea of flying nuclear weapons off them.

The idea would have to be to fly American nuclear weapons off them.

And again, do we really think we're in a world where we can completely rely on the US being willing to actually give us control over American nuclear weapons off the bottom of our planes.

Not really.

The problem with all these reviews that you've pointed out is that we're always fighting the last war.

We always find it impossible to predict what the next one will be.

We didn't see full Soviet Union.

We didn't see 9-11.

We didn't see Ukraine.

So what are we not seeing now?

Because the risk is that actually this is about the last war.

This is about us fighting the Russia-Ukraine war.

What could the future war be?

Well, it could be obviously China-Taiwan.

And that's not necessarily about China attacking Britain but that's about all American assets suddenly being stripped out of Europe as they rush off to deal with China Taiwan leaving us with nothing yeah it could be quantum computing so this is this extraordinary idea that we could get to a quantum computing that could completely overwhelm all our encrypted classified military systems in the space of about a week allowing enemies to get into every detail of the way that our command control works.

It could be wars in space.

It could be autonomous swarms of drones.

It could be biological warfare.

You'd be scaring quite a lot of people here, Rory.

Yeah, but I suppose the reason we're scaring people is that Britain, as usual, has made a very elegant, sort of exquisite sort of Oxbridge essay

on what it thinks the world will be like and how we're going to focus.

But we don't really have the money to have the mass and the coverage across multiple threats.

And that's the problem.

Because we're so short of cash we're always having to make a bet now of course the other thing which all three of the reviews have alighted upon is the role that our special forces play i think we do have to recognize the extraordinary operation of the ukrainian special forces and intelligence services and these drones taking out

so many russian bombers i mean that was James Bondes getting these drones into Russian lorries getting them to four airfields deep inside Russia.

And getting a lot of them on the other side of the Russian position, so firing in from Siberia.

Absolutely.

And taking out so they've they've you know I mean who knows what the the true value is and but if they're if it's true that they've taken out a third of the planes that were responsible for these sort of long-range bombing attacks on on Ukraine I mean that is a hell of a hit and I don't know if you saw yesterday I just saw a picture of the the meeting in Istanbul which didn't really go anywhere of between the Russians and the Ukrainian delegation supposedly to talk about a ceasefire, but actually yet again just agreeing a few releases of prisoners.

But my God, the Russians looked like they'd swallowed a really, really, really bad pill.

And the Ukrainians were looking quite chirpy.

Psychologically quite clever, too, wasn't it?

Because I guess the story that

was being sold in the international media was here are the naughty Russians mounting attacks just before the peace conference in Istanbul.

And that may well have lulled the Russians into thinking, well, the Ukrainians aren't going to attack us at the moment because we're about to go to Istanbul.

The other final point, I guess, is that Britain has always liked to spend a lot of money on very high status, very, very expensive bits of what we call exquisite precision kit.

That, of course, is a reminder that in a world of swarming drones, some very cheap things, and you can get, you know, some of those Iranian drones basically cost $1,000.

You can get up to a $10,000, $30,000 drone, can take out incredibly expensive bits of kit.

And we haven't quite worked out, I think, either the procurement mechanisms, because a lot of these companies that manufacture stuff don't want to manufacture $1,000 drones.

They want to manufacture $350 million aircraft.

We haven't found out how to deal with the sensitivities of the Navy and the Air Force, who love these expensive bits of kit and obviously feel...

always feel threatened by the idea of things that don't have humans in them.

Before we go to the break, let's just have a

quick brief discussion on Poland and the election at the weekend.

So, so this was so close.

I mean, the exit poll gave it to the liberal pro-EU mayor of Warsaw, Rafał Tzaszkowski.

But then, when the results were finally counted, he did not win.

The winner was this pro-Donald Trump nationalist historian, Karol Navrocki, 50.89 to 49.11, with a record turnout, almost 73%.

So, the 27% who didn't vote, again, had a very, very big impact because

had they all voted for one candidate or the other, it would have been very, very clear.

But as I mentioned earlier, this now has pretty big implications for Donald Tusk because the president in Poland has the right of veto of the legislative programme.

And so unless you can have, it's a kind of sort of weird cohabitation, unless they can get good relations, and it's very unlikely that they will.

And this guy who's won, Navrodsky, survived an awful lot of sort of scandal stuff that was thrown at him involving violence and prostitutes and houses and all the usual stuff.

He's an interesting character, isn't he?

He was a proud football hooligan and has got, along with the Polish team, he's got Chelsea tattooed on his body.

He was a sort of boxer and a bodyguard

and seems to, at least Donald Tusk.

says very openly, was connected to gangsters and to the mafia.

It's also a reminder of what we saw two weeks weeks ago in Romania, which is almost the same story.

In Romania, again, it was a liberal mayor of Bucharest, so the capital city, running against a right-wing populist who had the rural areas behind him.

And in this case, the rural areas came through.

And I think, you know, the map of Poland is extraordinary, just how geographically, I mean, it's almost as though there are two completely different countries in the way that they vote.

And also a lot of division between gender as well, young men voting for

the kind of Trump backer.

Also, yet another election where the American administration interfered directly.

Trump met him in the Oval Office.

Amazing thing to do.

Met him in May, didn't he, in the Oval Office?

Yeah, and then Christina M, the security person, she actually went to the CPAC, the right-wing conference in Poland and spoke out in favor of him.

So you could be, if you're Trump, if you've got those sort of narcissistic tendencies, you're probably thinking they're thinking that, you know, I swung it by my endorsement.

It's probably what took him over the line.

But it does mean now that Poland has an issue.

Donald Tusk is going to be having a vote of confidence so as that he can get some of the political authority back.

The Law and Justice Party, I mean, this guy is not an official candidate, but he had their backing.

But they are now hoping they'll be able to sort of, you know, disable the government so as to come the next election, they'll be back in.

So, you know, it just shows the ups and downs.

There was Tusk not that long ago, seemed to be flying high.

There he's on the train to Ukraine with Starma and Mackerel and Mertz and one of the big guys in Europe and now he's having to deal with this very difficult domestic situation again.

Yeah and it comes back to our theme that we've been exploring a lot last two years which is it may be that the movement back to people like Tusk, the sort of apparent return to the kind of more liberal center and what we saw in Australia and Canada may turn out actually to be the exception in Europe.

And that this victory in Poland and the rise of reform in Britain and the position of the AFD in Germany and what you've just mentioned in the Netherlands.

I think you're being too pessimistic, Roy.

I think it's all to win for all to play for, all to win for.

All to play for, all to win for.

Can I finish this just before we go to the break?

I've been very, I noticed, very pompous and silly about this defense and security review.

I think given the brief they were given, Lord Robertson, Fiona Hill, Rich Barrons have done a really, really good job.

It's one of the best defense and security reviews that we've seen in 25 25 years.

And the government has accepted every single one of its recommendations.

So broadly speaking, it's really positive.

And obviously, people like me can sit and backseat drive and point out all the things that they might have missed and the fact that there's nay money.

But I think they did a hell of a good job.

Yeah.

Okay.

Good.

Let's take a break and then we'll talk about China, Japan, Kazakhstan, and all things Asian.

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Welcome back to The Restless Politics with me, Rory Stewart.

And me, Alistair Campbell.

So, Rory, how is Japan?

Well, amazing.

At the moment, I'm really lucky of going there almost every year.

And I was in Kyoto, and as you say, meeting with a lot of people talking about China and a lot of Chinese business people.

I think that the most dramatic thing that's changed in the last six months is the incredible resurgence of optimism amongst a lot of Chinese businessmen.

If we'd been talking, let's say, a year ago, and I think we did a bit of this on the podcast, there was a very gloomy story.

Property market going wrong, banking going wrong, a lot of people very worried about Xi Jinping's nationalism, slight sense of balance of payments, money flowing out of China, people pretty unhappy about the way the regime was behaving.

That's not the feeling that you're getting now.

And I think there are two main things.

One of them is that the economic indicators are looking better.

So they

made their growth forecasts in the first quarter.

Now, we're not talking about 10% growth, but we're talking something more like 4% or 5% growth, which is still obviously going to be double that of the United States.

And the second is tech, of which one big example is DeepSeek catching up on AI, but actually also Huawei making big advances on chips and some big advances on quantum.

So some of the things, the few remaining areas in the world where the US was thought, okay, China can do everything except AI, chips, China now seems to be catching up.

And my goodness, on things like energy manufacturing.

So there was a real sense of China rising.

That confidence and the scale of ambition was what I felt in Kazakhstan as well.

These things go up and down and they come and go and people get moods and the whole sort of vibe thing.

But what was your initial?

I went to Kazakhstan a fair bit between 2010 and 2015.

And I'd completely forgotten that it was in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, that Xi Jinping launched the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013.

And when we think about, we talk about, we talk a lot about how we're sort of bedeviled by short-termism.

So just get this, the Belt and Road Initiative, it emerged from Zhang Jamin, his predecessor, his what he called his go-out policy.

He launched it in Kazakhstan.

He then went a month later in October 2013 to Indonesia, where he added the whole idea of the maritime Silk Road to the literal roads and rail, and then presented two years later a document entitled Visions and Actions on Jointly Building Belt and Road.

Two years after that, it was incorporated into the Constitution of the Chinese Communist Party.

So, I suppose at its heart, the Belt and Road Initiative is a project that's economic, it's geostrategic, it's geopolitical, but it's using existing routes for trade and adding new routes for trade that essentially connects China to as many parts of the world as can be done so you've got the south belt which goes from China through Southeast Asia South Asia onto the Indian Ocean through Pakistan you've got the central belt which goes through Central Asia West Asia the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean and then a north belt that goes through Central Asia and Russia to Europe and I think there are two things for it one is that at the core of it all is infrastructure, China building roads, ports, broadband networks, train lines.

So for example, if you get on the train from Mombasa up to Nairobi at the moment, it's completely not just a Chinese train, it's completely staffed by Chinese people.

It's also these huge ports.

So you can see them near Colombo, near Malacca, on the Pakistani coast, a big port.

beginning to open.

That gives them a lot of different advantages.

One of them is that the Chinese Navy is able to dock in some of these ports and will be able to do that more easily in the future.

So

Chinese naval base is now developing in Djibouti.

It's also, though, that it can define the new terms.

So for example, when they roll out the Huawei 6G network, they can essentially create the digital protocols.

for a lot of these countries.

They've got very, very good technology, but if they define their digital protocol as standard rather than a US protocol, you could imagine in the future US autonomous vehicles, maybe a Tesla, wouldn't be able to operate on that network.

BYD would operate on that network.

And then the final thing is that the finances of these things are very odd.

Often these ports haven't been profitable.

Many of them are loss-making.

It's not absorbing as much Chinese cash as people would hope, but it's certainly putting a lot of people into bad debt who are facing huge interest rates, which gives China a different form of control over these countries.

And the sums of money you're talking about.

I remember first trying to get my head around this when I was in DFID because Pakistan was the UK's single largest international aid project.

And I discovered we were spending £400 million and I was told this made us the most important country in Pakistan.

Then I found that China by that stage had committed £42 billion, which was not just 10 times as much, it was 100 times as much.

In other words, they were doing as much in a year as potentially as we could do in 100 years.

Now, it won't all come.

Not all that money will come.

It gives you a sense of the gap and scale.

The other thing to understand about the the way that it works operates as a network, you've got what you might call the hard infrastructure, like rail and road, and there's also what they refer to as soft infrastructure.

And these are the trade deals,

the fact that they have legal structures and court systems that cover the whole initiative, not just necessarily relying upon one nation state.

So it adds enormously to their soft power.

And my God, did they exploit it?

And get this, Rory.

The project, which is now touching 140 countries representing 75% of the world's population and half of the world's GDP is set for completion in 2049 to coincide with the centennial of the founding of the People's Republic of China.

That is long-termism.

It's very long term.

And the other things which are extraordinary is that China decided very explicitly that it was going to also pursue green technology, batteries, critical minerals and rare earth, solar panel production, electric vehicle production, and now chips, AI, quantum, and in almost every case, they're meeting those targets.

And they do it in the most extraordinary model.

The Chinese economic model is a very interesting mixture between subsidy, particularly from local government putting money in, and then crazy competition.

So if you take EVs, state subsidy will go into electric vehicles, but it will start with four four or five thousand quite small chinese companies duking it out

ferocious competition a lot of them going out of business until eventually you get two or three national champions emerging like byd which are now producing this extraordinary range of vehicles i mean all the way from you know affordable vehicles which you can sell in southeast asia right the way up to a hundred thousand dollar

luxury electric vehicles which are you know as good as anything tesla produces i noticed the day at walking the dog that our local C-11 bus is now a BYD, and BYD is now selling more cars in Europe than Tesla.

And I'll tell you something I find really strange about the way that America looks at China.

And it really was brought

home by J.D.

Vance and that statement he made about, we subsidize Chinese peasants to make goods that we then buy back from the Chinese peasants.

I mean, the stuff that they're involved in is a level of scope and sophistication that we really, really ought to take more seriously.

And when

you're sitting as I was watching some of these presentations about the range of this thing, and Kazakhstan is not a bad place to do it because Kazakhstan is an incredible country that's in the ninth biggest country in the world, but with a population of under 20 million.

So you have the lowest population density in the world.

The longest train journey is 31 hours.

You've got 15,000 kilometers of train line going across these vast empty spaces.

But they're linking up different parts of the world.

And when you talk about these 140 countries, I mean, okay, we're not there, France is not there, Germany's not there, but we talked to her about Poland.

Poland is, and the Baltic states are.

Now, some countries come and go.

But I think that it was interesting, I was talking to quite a lot of diplomats who were there, and it was the classic sort of event full of diplomats and spooks and soldiers and the usual lot.

But it was interesting, Maloney was the only European leader who was there.

She sat down during the day with all five Central Asian leaders.

And I think we underestimate the economic opportunities in some of these countries and the extent to which they are just looking to China.

And when you look at the list of African countries now directly involved in the Belt and Road Initiative, and I was talking to one guy who's sort of expert on this whole sort of debt diplomacy thing, and he's American, and he was saying, look, this is part of the sort of looking at them all as peasants.

Actually, the systems that they use, they're not that different to the systems that, say, the World Bank and the IMF use.

So we like to think that we're dealing with it.

We still want to think that we're dealing with something a bit backward.

But this is probably going to go down in history as a project on a par politically and strategically with something like the Marshall Plan run by the Americans.

China is unbelievable.

I went there first in 1981.

So my first memory of China is Beijing essentially being just bicycles and everybody still in Mao jackets with little red books.

The big change, and I think we've seen two big changes since then.

The first one was what Deng Xiaoping did, where he achieved this extraordinary 10% growth.

But he did it with a very different model.

His model was that there would be term limits on the leader.

It was very decentralized and it was very much a market economy.

And he had this slogan, hide our capabilities, bide our time, get things done.

Real restraints in foreign policy.

Was that really the slogan?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Give that to me again.

Okay, hide our capabilities, bide our time, get things done.

Secrecy, patience, action.

It's not bad.

It's not bad.

Good.

Secrecy, patience, action.

That's better.

Much better way of putting it.

And the big shift comes, like a lot of the shifts in the world, weirdly, in this 2004-14 period, because, as I say, China is still smaller than the Italian economy in 2003.

Yeah.

And then it shoots ahead.

So bigger than France, 2004, bigger than Britain, 2005, bigger than Germany, 2006, bigger than Japan, 2007.

By 2014, it's 60% of the size of the U.S.

economy.

And this is, in 100 years, nobody's been 60% of the size of the U.S.

economy.

This wasn't true for Germany in the First World War, not true for Germany and Japan during the Second World War.

And it's at that point that China, because Xi Jinping comes in in 2012, begins to shift from this very restrained approach to Deng Xiaoping to becoming more assertive.

That's when you see these islands being taken over and military bases being built.

That's when you see Chinese naval vessels going out confronting claims from Vietnam, Philippines and Japan.

This is, as you say, when the Belt and Road Initiative comes rolling out 2013, 2014.

And it's particularly encouraged, I think, by three things.

Firstly, by the 2008 financial crisis, which convinces China that the West has lost the plot.

Secondly, by 2016, where they're very struck by the first lecture, Donald Trump and Brexit.

I mean, those are moments where they really think these people

are losing it.

And from that moment onwards, I think there is a real sense in the Chinese leadership that they are inevitably going to be the global power.

And that then pushes America into this very odd position because America, although it's still theoretically bigger than the Chinese economy, it's not, if you look in purchasing parity terms, and if you actually look at how much Chinese are paid and how many people they can employ, so the Chinese defense budget is much smaller than the American Defense Budget, but the Chinese Army is twice the size.

China can manufacture, it's manufactured this year, I think, a thousand commercial ships compared to five in the United States.

It's got a capacity of 240 times larger in terms of shipping tonnage.

So we don't really, we're not quite good enough at translating these headline GDP figures.

into the ways in which China is already much stronger than the United States across a lot of fields.

The Center for Economics Economics and Business Research, they reckon that the Belt and Road Initiative is going to increase the world's GDP by $7 trillion a year by 2040.

The World Bank reckoned that it's going to boost trade in 155 countries by 4.1%.

And of course the other thing that that's doing is it's helping their soft power.

This is the other thing that came through talking to some of the non-American people who were there, which was the majority, was just the extent to which they don't look at China.

Now, we can, we rightly focus on things like the Uyghurs and the repression and all this stuff, but they don't see it in the same way.

The perspective they're getting is of a country that's, they think, treating them with respect,

modernizing them, developing them.

And the scale of these projects, I mean, the one that, I don't know if you're aware of this, because I know you know a bit about India and Pakistan, but the biggest single, the biggest single sort of strand of this whole thing is this China-Pakistan economic corridor.

$62 billion

of infrastructure projects throughout Pakistan.

And the reason why Kazakhstan is such an important thing within this, even though it's population-wise a small country, is that the Chinese see it as a hub for the whole Belt and Road initiative.

It's got the big dry port.

So you go through the thing.

It's just like it's mind-blowing.

And then the point you made about confidence and, okay, listen, this was at at a conference where Kazakhstan were trying to show themselves in the best possible light.

But I was mesmerized by this presentation they did of a new town that they're building called Al-Atau, a new city, and the aim is to have a population of 2 million people.

And okay, at the moment, it's just a sort of, it's just a display, okay?

But the display is mesmerizing in terms of what it is going to bring.

to that region and how it's going to fit into this broader, bigger economic plan.

And so I just think at a time when the Americans seemed absolutely hell-bent on damaging their soft power, on insulting a lot of other smaller countries than them, China seems to be doing the opposite.

Yeah, there's a book by Rush Dushi, who was one of Biden's China experts, in fact, led on a lot of the China policy, called Long Game.

And it was written relatively recently.

And in it, he argues, America isn't going to be able to actually challenge China dollar for dollar anymore.

China's too big, too powerful in purchasing power parity terms to do that.

Instead, what America needed to do, he said, this was under by

is emphasize three things, alliances, values, and predictability.

And now you look at what Trump is doing.

You know, where are the allies?

Where are the values?

Where are the predictability?

So the entire competitive advantage that the US was supposed to have in terms of balancing China in terms of this vision goes out the window.

Yeah.

They've already got apparently half of all containers, shipping containers, are already on the maritime uh the maritime part of this thing.

They've also now Russia and China have agreed a thing called the Ice Silk Road.

Maybe this is why Trump is so fixated on Greenland, going along the through the Arctic.

So the the the scale is is is mind-blowing.

And I think because we become because America's become America first, America first, because we in the UK, I think, have become so much insular since Brexit, because Europe's fixated on on its own problems.

I don't really think we focus nearly enough on the opportunities that come from an operation of this scale.

So, anyway,

it was really, really interesting to be there.

And Rory, you just made me think when you were talking about Japan.

So, I remember, was it last year I was talking about a friend of mine, Russell Jones, who's an economist, and he wrote a book about the history of the British economy.

And he's now written one about the history of the Japanese economy, which is again really interesting because it's not that long ago that we thought Japan was going to be, you know japan was the sort of rising star of the global economy and we thought it was you know even going to be challenging united states so stuff can go up and it can come down as well as as go up but china china feels like it is and what was that slogan again because they're not blowing their trumpets in the way that maybe trump does hide our capabilities bide our time get things done and and for for for real sort of professional listeners i'll try to remember what deng xiaoping's chinese phrase is which is much snappier although i like i like your your way of putting it secrecy patience action

i'm going to tell you russell jones is the title of his book i think i think i may have i may have told you that i absolutely hate the phrase it is what it is it's the worst phrase in the english language but it sounds quite good in japanese it's shoganai

So the book is called A Modern Economic History of Japan.

I think as you've just been to Japan, you'll enjoy it because it takes you through the quite techie at points, but it takes you through this sense of really commanding and other countries following everything they do.

And then these demographic and political realities kind of catching up.

But of course, what the Chinese don't have to worry about so much is all the democratic pressures.

And that's the danger in all this.

I think this is still the...

the big question.

And of course, six months ago, people were much more liable to say China is about to become Japan because its population has declined for the third year in a row.

It's the first country to become old before it becomes rich.

A lot of this is the one-child policy implemented, which means that the population is dropping very quickly in China.

And it's also true that Japan, it was very startling what happened because it was in such a technologically strong place.

It was about half the size of the American economy, four times the size of the Chinese economy

in 1989.

And it was leading everything.

It wasn't just leading in technology, you know, manufacture of cars, walkmans, but it was also leading in culture.

You know, it was generating Transformers and Pokemon and

new cartoons, new films, Super Mario, Nintendo.

So it was dominating our children's lives.

And then something very odd happened.

I mean, it sort of halted.

And now it feels, partly because it's aging, as though it simply doesn't have the cutting edge in innovation or tech anymore.

So that's what might happen to China.

But I was talking to a software, very, very senior software person in Japan.

So he's the CTO of one of the largest companies in the entire world.

He's got 150,000 software engineers working for him.

And he said, person for person, the software engineering graduates from Tsing Kua University in Beijing are so much better now than any European or American, partly because their mathematical skills are far superior, and that underlies their coding.

And he finds it very difficult to understand how we can really compete when the quality of the skills training is so high in China.

There's so much more to say about China.

We'll keep talking about it.

And I think it's worth us not getting so starry-eyed that we forget all that stuff that you mentioned, which is what is happening in Xinjiang, what is happening with human rights, the ways in which Xi Jinping is really crushing down on dissent internally and how uncomfortable a Chinese-dominated world will be.

There's a lot more to discuss in question time.

So what are some of the things you wanted to get onto when we get onto question time tomorrow?

Well, we had a really big response to when we asked for views from young women about whether they felt felt they were being ignored in politics, and if so, why.

We should probably cover off the Dutch situation with the government collapsing.

And we're also going to have to do a little bit, I think, on Gaza humanitarian, the US courts versus Trump.

Absolutely.

And just to say to people that, as you probably know,

there's 24 hours between the main episode going out and question time.

But if you become...

a Trip Plus member, you can listen to question time right now.

No need to wait.

Well, there we are.

Busy week, busy week.

Are you traveling again?

I'm in the Channel Islands now.

You're in the Channel Islands.

I'm off to Switzerland tomorrow, off to see the gnomes of Zurich.

Very good, very good.

Well, have a lovely time.

Thank you, guys.

See you soon.

Bye-bye.

See you soon.

Bye-bye.