443. China’s Plot to Topple Trump: How to Bring Down a Superpower

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This extraordinary meeting, which brought Modi, Xi Jinping and Putin together, increasingly those countries now see the US as a more and more aggressive, unpredictable threat.

I hate to say this, but it's been perfectly timed for Xi Jinping.

China's seen as the US's big peer competitor.

Instead of having China isolated with Russia peeled off, they've been forced together.

There's so much trolling of Trump going on this.

Russia can say things China can't.

They have this mate who can go out there saying unbelievably aggressive and hostile things against the West.

We've really effed things up.

Well, we're now in a position where the Chinese Communist Party can hold the moral high ground.

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Welcome to the Rest is Politics, face to face with me, Alastair Campbell.

And with me, Rory Stewart.

And you are back from Bosnia and Singapore.

Yes.

We talked about Bosnia last week.

We'll talk a little bit about Singapore this week.

And I'm back from the Orkney, but

it's the Orkney or Orkney or the Orkneys.

It's Orkneys.

It's Orkney, Orkney.

Yeah, just say Orkney.

Why do we say the Orkneys?

Well, I don't put as plural on, but you're right.

I put in a definite article which I should the Ukraine, which is

very word, wouldn't it?

And it's like people who say Afghanis when they should say Afghans.

It's all very strange.

So, Rory, we've talked a lot in recent weeks about the United States, about Ukraine, about Gaza.

We're going to stay very much on a foreign policy focus, but very much focused on Asia, on China.

This extraordinary meeting that Xi Jinping has been hosting.

Then, in the second half, we're going to look at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

You were in Singapore right at the moment of this extraordinary meeting which brought Modi, Xi Jinping and Putin together.

So India, China and Russia together, Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

Give us a bit of sense of that.

Well, I mean, I do think this meeting is

very consequential.

I mean, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization has been going for some time.

It started with mainly Russia and China and four of the stands, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, a few others.

And then it's grown.

And the signs are that it's growing still because some of the people who are there are not full members of the SCO, but they're there at this thing, which I think has been,

I hate to say this, but it's been perfectly timed for Xi Jinping.

And the absent force in this is, of course, Trump, because Modi, and I think I'm glad to see the New York Times

finally agrees with me that the real story at the heart of the India-US rupture is the Nobel Peace Prize.

The fact that Pakistan has said that they would nominate Trump and Modi was really pissed off that Trump tried to take credit as this is one of his 10 wars it is now that he's stopped the India-Pakistan skirmishes recently.

And so Modi's there, and Modi is there, very much, I think, signaling that the bipartisan American 25, 30-year effort to get Modi much more into the American orbit, he's kind of resisting that, not least because of the way that Trump has treated him.

And of course, Putin, fresh from his winner-takes-all summit with Trump in Alaska, is there very much looking just like one of the big three in this new nexus?

And of course, Russia, India has been tricky.

India-China has been tricky, not least because of the border skirmishes that happened a few years ago and the war of the 60s, but also China-Russia is tricky.

And yet Trump has seemingly bought them all together in a way that, you know, makes them look like a, well, they're definitely vying to be, a rival collection to the Western Alliance.

Strategically, as you're saying, the big U.S.

policy really for for 20, 30 years has been to think about how to make sure that China is relatively isolated.

I mean, China's seen as the US's big peer competitor.

And there have been different US attempts to do this.

And it went on through all these different administrations, Republican, Democrat, through to Biden.

And through Trump One.

And through Trump One.

And the idea was, as you say, very important idea, that India, which is this enormous population and increasingly enormous economy, would remain within the Western orbit.

That Japan, South Korea, Philippines, Philippines, Vietnam, Australia would be on the US side.

And then there was another idea which was being sold by some of the people who were in the new Trump team.

So Marco Rubio seemed to talk about this, Elbridge Colby, who's the deputy defense guy, used to talk about this, of what they called a reverse Kissinger.

And the idea was that in the 1970s, Nixon and Kissinger decided to isolate Russia by reaching out to China.

The reverse Kissinger was going to go in the other direction.

We're going to isolate China by reaching out to Russia.

And there were some people who thought when Trump started taking the Russian side on Ukraine, maybe this is what he's up to.

But as you say, this conference in Shenzhen shows the collapse of the entire strategy because instead of having China isolated with Russia peeled off through Trump's Charm offensive and Modi peeled off in the other direction, what's happened is they've been forced together, have been forced together in, I guess, one very, very fundamental way, which is increasingly those countries now see the US as a more and more aggressive, unpredictable threat.

If you're China, you're thinking, is the US Navy going to stop my oil supplies coming through?

If you're Russia, you really are very conscious of all the stuff that the US and the West have done against its economic system.

If you're India, you're now facing 50% tariffs.

And you're facing it in a way that you can't predict.

I mean, I wanted to turn to you on this because if you're Modi, you're going to be very perplexed.

You would have thought that you'd done everything right.

Ambani, who's the guy, the big Indian billionaire who processes the oil, had invited Jared Kushner and Trump's daughter to his wedding and the sort of kind of big deal.

Modi and Trump seemed to be mates.

And there was a general sense that Trump was like some sort of classic kind of

old-style dictator, and all you needed to do was invite the family to the wedding and give some...

There are 10 Trump buildings, I think, in India.

And yet none of that worked.

And that's why, you see, I think that, see, you have this bipartisan policy, Republican-Democrat presence, as you say, and with very little resistance, basically saying India is going to be a future power.

We've got to get them on board, etc.

Trump seems to do that term one.

You have these what came across as like love-ins between the two of them going to,

you know, I think there's 110,000 people at one of the rallies that they did together in term one.

And the only thing I can think of that's caused this rift is this India-Pakistan Nobel Prize thing.

2001, America lifted sanctions on India that it imposed because of its nuclear program.

2005, it began actually negotiating a pretty generous nuclear cooperation deal signed in 2008.

And then 2016, they made India a, quote, major defense partner, which meant it had access to some of the technologies without becoming a kind of fully fledged ally.

So that's what's being, it would seem, being reversed.

And if you think about it, the raising of the tariffs to 20 to 50%,

which is going to hit their economy and particularly small and medium-sized people really badly.

The reason that Trump gave was because of Indian increase in the buying of crude Russian oil, which is true.

We've talked about this before.

It went from, I think, 1% of their oil to something like a third.

But China is a bigger importer of Russian crude, and yet he's not gone after Xi Jinping in the same way.

Just on the business side, Beta, one of the really substantial things that I think has come out of this summit is Putin and G

have done some sort of deal on the new Siberian pipeline.

So, this is about energy from Russia to Mongolia.

And again, avoiding American ships.

Absolutely.

You're not exposed to the navy in the sea.

And if you look at what Xi Jinping said, member states, he's talking here about the SEO, should, quote, oppose Cold War mentality, which is what we normally associate with them and Russia, block-based confrontation and bullying.

We know, and that, by the way, is he's looking at Modi when he says that and he's talking about the tariffs, and safeguard the international system with the United Nations at its core.

And if you think about that, so China is often seen by the Brits and by the Americans as the country that is most blocking anything that happens at the United Nations, and he's flipped this around.

This is something fascinating.

Xi Jinping's been trying for years to sell this line, and nobody's been listening.

And Trump has suddenly made it plausible.

Suddenly for the first time, China's attempt to say we represent predictability, the UN system,

fair business, which seemed ridiculous two years ago, now seems very interesting.

Second thing, on Russia, the China-Russia relationship is amazing because on the surface people say Russia's a much smaller economy.

What's China got to benefit?

You've talked about oil and there's some other material things like the fact that Russia is a market for Chinese goods.

But I think there's a bigger thing, which is that Russia can say things China can't.

So if we take your point that China is portraying itself as the guardian of the international rules-based system, they have this mate who can go out there saying unbelievably aggressive and hostile things against the West.

They have a friend in Russia who has nuclear weapons.

They have a friend in Russia who has a network of allies in Africa that they can draw on and in Central Asia that they can draw on.

And they have a friend who can propose things they can't propose.

So Russia can say things like, we're going to create an independent payment system.

We're going to get away from the old US-dominated system.

And it's a very, I don't know quite how you define the relationship, but Russia is very, very useful to China.

They also do, though, have all three of them still have their tensions.

I mean, the border stuff has never been fully resolved with India.

Xi Jinping is probably a little bit worried about the extent to which North Korea is getting a bit too cozy with Putin.

And Kim Jong-un is going to be at this massive military parade.

This is apparently, and again, I think there's so much trolling of Trump going on this.

They are sort of almost willfully saying, you had your military parade, Trump.

It was a total flop.

This is going to be the biggest you've ever seen.

This is going to be the kind of military parade that Trump really loved to see in Washington.

Modi,

who Trump would expect to be sort of, you know, down in his knees begging to be allowed back into the American orbit, arrives at the meeting literally holding hands with Vladimir Putin.

They walk in hand in hand.

They go and join Xi Jinping, who looks like he's the main guy.

They're sort of slightly bowing down to him.

Modi then posts a picture of himself in his car with Vladimir Putin, who of course Trump had got into his car, but

unlike Trump, Modi has a camera in the car.

So the picture of him and Putin, and he does a tweet saying, always interesting to talk to this guy.

And then I think the other thing that's really really interesting about what Xi Jinping's doing, because the other thing that they feel, and this is partly their fault, because they've always never really worried too much about international communication, they feel that the story of the Second World War has been overly dominated by America and the Allies.

Yeah, so we, America, Britain, we think we won the war.

We won the war, and they think that actually the real battles that decided the

Second World War were fought in and by the Chinese and the Russians.

The Chinese against Japan, Russia against Germany.

And that is another story that

he's been telling.

So, what this week has become essentially has been militarily with this massive show that we're going to see on Wednesday, diplomatically, by bringing these

powers to the...

The rest of this politics podcast is not actually going to see that show.

I mean, we're going to see if actually we're not flying to Beijing to witness the tanks.

No, but we are going to be watching it on our television,

or in your case, on a sort of laptop.

And then the other thing is this history stuff, which to them is incredibly important.

And of course that relates to Taiwan as well.

Because what they feel is that out of the post-war settlement, that the French, the Brits, the Americans should have had a better understanding of China's, quote, rights to Taiwan.

So this is like a big deal that's happening right now.

And it's very, I think a lot of it is very psychological.

geared towards an America.

And they want the American diplomatic, political class to be thinking and saying, Trump, I'm afraid you have created this.

David Rennie, who was the economist correspondent in China and is now their geopolitics correspondent, has pointed out that the Shanghai Cooperation Organization that you've been talking about a few years ago didn't really look like it added up to very much.

Nobody could quite work out what it was going to do.

And he points out that China is perpetually kind of floating these funny organizations and seeing if they work or not.

I think that there was another one called the Confidence and Stability Organization.

And BRICS is another one we can talk talk about in a second.

And the story really here was it didn't make much sense because actually Central Asia was basically controlled by the Russians.

The Chinese didn't have much influence over it.

And then Iran joined and then India and Pakistan are both in and they don't really like each other.

So how are you really going to make this work?

As you say, suddenly it's got new life because suddenly it's an opportunity for Modi to demonstrate he's not dependent on Trump.

BRICS is another interesting one.

So BRICS we've talked about before has begun to expand from Russia, India, China, South Africa to take in all these other states that are now queuing up to join.

I think this is the beginning of us looking at new organizations, which we can't quite define.

They're not tight

like NATO.

They don't have those kind of security guarantees.

They don't have Article 5.

They're not the European Union, right?

They're not providing those kind of trade things.

We'll get on to one of them maybe after the break, which is ASEAN, because you've just come back from Singapore.

But they are a very, very odd shifting symbol.

If you listen to analysts, analysts, I've been listening a lot to an amazing guy called Sesha Kobuyev, who's the Carnegie, he's the Carnegie Russia expert.

And he says, you know, they're blocks, but not economic blocks.

They're clubs, they're not alliances, they're minilaterals.

And then he produces others because he's a Russian intellectual.

They're sentiments, they're synonyms, their acronyms, their regions.

But I think we'll keep coming back to these as we keep studying because I think they are increasingly useful as the US alliances begin to fray.

And the US had a few going.

It had AUKUS,

had this little Quad arrangement in Asia, which was.

Still going, but must be.

That's a classic example.

What happens to the Quad, which is America, Australia, Japan, India?

What happens to that now that he's sort of basically said to Modi, you are basically PNG, never darkening.

And actually, he's been pretty aggressive on Japan with tariffs, too.

Yeah.

Just to go back to my little trip to Singapore, because it relates to what you've just said.

And by the way, Singapore have just, they're talking, I think, with Morocco and the UAE

about forming an organization of smaller economies to try to get back to what they would say is more fair trading and so forth.

So there are lots of new things that can emerge from this.

So I was at an event in Singapore with...

about 500 people in the audience from the energy industries and the insurance industries and some quite big cheeses and there was about half and half Asian and the rest were expat American, British, Australian, German, whatever.

And they very helpfully gave me one of those fancy polling apps that you can get instant answers, right?

Now, the first thing I did, I asked them, you and I have done this before events, and I said, hands up, this was without the app, hands up if you've mentioned the name Trump in the last 24 hours, okay?

And around about two-thirds, three-quarters put their hands up.

I then said, this was before the Shanghai thing, hands up if you've mentioned Xi Jinping in the last 24 hours.

Three hands.

I'll come back to why I think that's significant.

It's basically just because he just keeps on going.

He doesn't feel the need to be shouting and tweeting and all that stuff.

Then said, which is, on the polling app now, which is the most powerful country in the world?

USA or China?

China 60, USA 40.

Okay.

Which country do you think will most benefit from Trump's tariffs policy?

USA 19,

China 81.

So this is serious business people thinking this doesn't add up.

This is going to harm America more than it harms us.

And this was the absolute killer for me.

Which of the two superpowers do you see as the greater threat to global stability?

Have a guess.

I guess you're going to say US now.

USA 79, China 21.

Now, I just do not believe that would have been the case a year ago.

No, it's unimaginable.

Because I was thinking about this on the way into sea this morning, that it's a kind of miracle that the US, given how rich it is, given how many troops it has, given it had nuclear weapons, that it managed for 70 years to basically convince the world it wasn't, for most people, a threat to stability.

That many, many countries in the world sort of understood where the US was coming from, understood roughly what the rules were, and therefore, you know, if you're in Europe, you allow yourself to be completely dependent on US security guarantees in a way that you wouldn't have accepted Chinese or Russian security guarantees.

But once it flips, once America starts acting unpredictably, starts flinging bombs around at Iranian nuclear sites, starts talking about clearing out Gaza, starts talking about grabbing Greenland, starts putting 50% tariffs, starts saying to Europe, by the way, we're not providing security guarantees, you can spend 5% of your GDP on defense, then people wake up and say, wait a second, this country is so big, so powerful, it's potentially unbelievably dangerous.

What happens if the US Navy starts stopping our oil moving around?

What happens if they start doing to us what they did to Russia?

What happens if Trump wakes up and thinks, oh, I've got all these lovely toys in my inbox.

You know, I can...

Tariffs are just the beginning.

I can sanction you.

I can invade you.

I can bomb you.

And then you really begin to think, well, how do we have other allies?

How do we deal with this?

It's interesting how, you know, we've got today, Tuesday, we've got this Bolsonaro trial starting in Brazil, which is, of course, part of the bricks.

But it's really interesting, if you think about it, that that is a case of where the institutions of a country like Brazil appear to be holding in a way that in America the institutions don't appear to be holding.

And of course,

what the Chinese can say, and they've started to be much more open about this.

You know, if you meet Chinese diplomats and people who are kind of in the Chinese sphere, they will start to say much more openly than they used to.

You know, your democracies just aren't working, are they?

They can't get anything done.

And the thing, the other thing I've noticed is that the French appear to be hitting back a lot harder.

Macron did a tweet the other day basically saying we've now passed Trump's deadline on Putin.

He's been played again.

Le Poin, the French news magazine, is out today

and the front page, Trump will see this, I've got no doubt, it's basically Putin's man, you know, the man from Moscow, is a picture of Trump.

In the last couple of weeks, two European countries have called in the American ambassador.

The French, because Kushner, Jared Kushner's dad, who's the eminently qualified, pardoned, convicted criminal who's now the ambassador, he got called in for basically saying that Macron was fueling anti-Semitism because of recognition of Palestine.

And in Denmark, the ambassador has been called in because they keep going on about Greenland.

So there's a little bit of sign of fighting back.

And do you know the other thing?

I mean, maybe

I'm sort of overstating this.

If you look at the picture that's sort of been dominant from the meeting

in China, Modi, Putin and Xi.

It's very similar to the picture of Trump and Putin.

It's almost in an identical room with interpreters just hanging back and they're sort of smiling and Putin looks a lot happier.

And I guess there must be part of Trump that has a sort of fantasy that he could host this type of meeting and be one of the you know, hang out with the three or four other strong men in the world.

But it doesn't work because the problem is that nobody in the end is going to quite believe that the American Western liberal democratic system is going to be compatible with those types of relationships.

So he can stage these things and I'm sure he'd have a dream that he could do a military parade and Putin and Xi and Modi would all turn up and they'd all do it together.

But it doesn't work.

Whereas China can very credibly say, we've been at this for a very, very long time.

You can rely on us.

We've got these big interests and pipelines.

Well, that's why I was saying it's so interesting that so few people talked about him is because they don't need to talk about him.

They kind of know what he's trying to do.

It's clear.

and he has these very occasional big international moments we've got one now but then he just kind of gets on with stuff and there was an australian who was at this event that i was speaking at there was a dinner the night before and he said in a typically fuzzy way he says you know i mean we've really effed things up when we're now in a position where the Chinese Communist Party can hold the moral high ground over our alliances.

And the point about the alliances is there's this meeting in China that's very ordered and you see the family photo and it's all sort of minute by minute, everything works.

And the contrast was post the Alaska summit, the European leaders all getting onto planes and sort of rushing over to Trump to try to get something going on in Ukraine, result of which has been literally zilch.

As I'm afraid we predicted, I mean, I do think this is a very, very odd thing that Trump managed to create an expectation in the media three weeks ago that I honestly never believed that he was on the cusp of solving it.

You know, there was going to be this peace deal, that the Europeans will somehow convince themselves they could talk him into it.

There was all this story about how Trump had been played, and we sort of emphasized it.

But I think we keep coming back to the fact that Trump doesn't change as much as we want to believe, that he's consistently been on Putin's side.

He's still on Putin's side, and he doesn't really listen to the Europeans.

How does he feel?

Because we know he watches a lot of television.

We're assuming that this meeting will have been covered on Fox News.

How does he feel when he sees them effectively laughing at him?

Because that is kind of what they're doing.

They're basically saying, you've given me, you've given me Modi this smack in the face and here I am holding hands with the guy who's, you know, at war in Europe and bowing down a little bit to the guy that you say is your great superpower enemy.

I can't get in Trump's head and I'm sure the Mooch is much better at this than me, but my only one thing I would say is that with people like Putin, we imagine that Trump is on our side, and therefore we imagine that when Putin refuses to accept Ukrainian demands, Trump will feel that Putin is laughing at him.

My view is that Trump isn't on our side.

Trump's on Putin's side.

What he's really interested in is getting some minerals deal or some economic opening and lifting sanctions to Russia.

And he doesn't give a monkeys about the fact that Putin is flouting him about the European position on Ukraine, because the European position on Ukraine is not Trump's position on Ukraine.

The other question I asked them was which other countries or entities could become a rival superpower or a replacement superpower of one of the two.

Now, it was meant to be a word cloud, which didn't work.

So at the end, they only had a choice of four.

Okay, so it wasn't complete.

But the four probably aren't wrong.

Three of them, anyway.

European Union, India,

Saudi Arabia, or Brazil came up as well.

So

what do you think the rough sort of lie of the land was in a very well-informed senior business audience in Asia

by a mile, well over half, and then European Union and Saudi back together and Brazil kind of nowhere, which I think is fair enough.

Because India's there, a billion people, its purchasing power parity GDP is now enormous.

you know, much bigger in purchasing power parity in the UK.

The other thing that was,

you used the word perplexed about the Indians, and that's the word that the Indian Foreign Minister used about the tariffs.

Said, you know, we're just very perplexed.

And the other thing they're perplexed about is that, have you read about who Trump has sent as his ambassador to India?

He sent this guy, Sergio Gore, G-O-R, who is this guy that nobody's quite sure where he came from.

He was head of personnel in the White House.

There's some suspicion that he's actually a Russian and he's not remotely qualified to be the ambassador to India.

And

they're just, they're perplexed.

They're perplexed.

Why have we got this guy?

Right.

Well, back after the break.

See you soon.

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Welcome back to The Rest is Politics with me, Roy Stewart, Mielist Campbell, and Alistair Campbell back from Singapore.

So you were right there.

It's a long way to go, but you're right there in the center center of Southeast Asia and in the center of ASEAN, which is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

And we don't talk enough about it.

500 million people, right?

This is bigger than the European Union.

This amazing zone that effectively historically linked India and China, incredible historical influences, Indian Buddhism, Hinduism spreading east, Chinese influence spreading down into Vietnam and later, some of these countries, Indonesia becoming predominantly Muslim, Malaysia becoming predominantly Muslim.

What was your sense looking at the world from that perspective?

Did things feel different moving out of Europe and suddenly putting yourself in Southeast Asia and looking at the world?

No, I think the...

Look, Singapore is an amazing country.

It is one of the most phenomenal countries in the world, I think.

They've got unbelievably clever politicians that they pay an awful lot of money to.

They've had four prime ministers.

I love their foreign minister.

And maybe we could get him on.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

i'm very keen to get lawrence wong the prime minister on because he's a he's a really interesting guy they've had four prime ministers in 60 years and lee kuan yew was there for 31 years i think lee kuan yu's son lee kuan yew's son was the third prime minister if i worked out it's the only country in the world where i've met every single prime minister at some point very good but it's that's since every prime minister since independence yeah because every prime minister they ever had i am eight years older than singapore

and i met lee kuan yu when he was retired then you had this guy go chok chong who was very, very tall.

Then you had Lee Kuan Yu's son, and now you've got Lawrence Wong.

And he's only been there a year or so, like four prime ministers in 60 years.

How many did we have in the last decade?

But there you have a sense of a country that is

very comfortable with its own skin.

It's also, you know, thinking about how these alliances are shifting.

It's relied very much on the United States.

And, you know, Lawrence Wong, when the tariffs happened, he was one of the few who came straight out and said, this is wrong.

This is dangerous.

This is counterproductive.

But we have to deal with it.

Okay.

The thing I'd say, you mentioned, you know, ASEAN as a grouping.

I think it is a really interesting grouping, but it's not like the European Union.

You know, they don't have that kind of, they're not sort of underpinned with all the kind of construct that the European Union has.

But I think they're becoming much more

a body that will over time possibly emerge into something much more concrete.

You go to Australia a lot.

And what I feel on my couple of trips to Australia is that looking at the world from Asia-Pacific feels very different because our whole story really in the West is generally a story of decline.

We have a feeling that our glory days sort of stopped in about 2004, 2008.

ASEAN feels so different because these are countries which in the 1970s, 1980s, I grew up in Malaysia, I lived there from 78 to 81 and then I was in the British Embassy in Indonesia in the late 90s.

These are countries which when I was growing up, many of them had per capita GDPs and average wealth, which was like sub-Saharan Africa.

People were on $300, $400 a year.

And they have been growing, many of them.

Indonesia grew for years at 7% a year.

Not quite Chinese rates, but very, very fast growth.

And they came through the financial crisis in a way that other people didn't, and they began to attract an enormous amount of Chinese investment.

So there are many problems, and maybe we can get on to one of the big issues, which is the question of democracy in these countries by looking at a couple of examples that have come up recently but but i still think there's a sense of optimism energy and change because people's lives over 40 years are immeasurably i mean they they've the wealthiest of these countries i think just to to run through them to give a bit of a sense you've got singapore which as you say is hugely wealthy so purchasing power parity maybe a hundred and forty thousand dollars a year when yeah and which half a century ago was kind of you know a very poor country yeah yeah yeah and um then you've got countries like malaysia which I guess are beginning to get to the level of about sort of Greece or Romania, middle-income status, below them, Thailand.

Those are probably the richest.

Thailand's the kind of Detroit of Asia, making all the cars.

Then you've got one notch down, which are these new emerging manufacturing powers.

Vietnam, which benefited enormously from first Trump and Biden, as they began to put tariffs and sanctions on China, trying to tilt people away from manufacturing in China.

People began manufacturing in Vietnam.

Indonesia, another big example of this, big, big growing economy, 300 million people.

And then you've got the countries that are struggling more.

So Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Burma, which has had a really torrid time.

Philippines?

And Philippines, I guess, probably in the category I'd put with Vietnam and Indonesia.

Brunei?

Brunei right up there with Singapore.

When you go through, a lot of those have got real problems.

I mean, Myanmar you mentioned.

And

two of them have recently been at war.

One of the many wars that Donald Trump has successfully resolved and brought to an end, and they'll never fight again, and there's no trouble between them at all.

Not.

Let's just take a look at two of the countries in particular.

So you mentioned Indonesia.

Indonesia was meant to be, the president of Indonesia was meant to be at this great shindig in China, but had to call it off because of all these massive protests.

Which

the spark was the revelation that the 580 parliamentarians get a generous generous housing allowance on top of their salaries?

And then the police,

quotes, accidentally killed a protester who was

on his motorbike, and the riots have kind of gone on pretty badly.

Even to the point that President Probo Subianto has actually visited the family to kind of apologise on behalf of the state, et cetera, et cetera.

They suspend TikTok.

They've got 100 million people on TikTok in Indonesia, and TikTok suspended their live

function

because that was clearly having a bit of an impact.

So the protests seem to be still going on.

It's actually, you mentioned the population there.

It's now the fourth most populous country in the world after India, China, and the States.

It's got the highest number of Muslims.

of any country in the world, the biggest number of mosques.

Economy has been doing well, but growth projections

slightly slipping.

And one of the big things which I think is is behind this is the inequalities, you know, we're seeing this around the world, the growth and the wealth that's being created, it tends to be going towards people at the top rather than people at the bottom.

Indonesia, as I say, I lived there for two and a half years and

Indonesian is one of the only languages I can speak or could speak reasonably well, partly because it's not a very difficult language.

It's not.

No,

it's an amazing language because it was a trading language.

And the original languages, Sumatran, Javanese, Balinese, are very, very complex.

But Indonesian, which is essentially Malay, it's a kind of archipelago trading language.

So if you say, I went to the market, you'd say, I to go market yesterday.

Sayapargi kapasar kamaren.

I will go to the markets.

Sayapargi kopasar besoka.

I go to the market.

I to-go market tomorrow.

But they went through this incredible transition.

When I was there, and you'll remember this because actually when I was there, I was in the embassy when you were taking over.

Robin Cook turned up as the new foreign secretary.

I arrived in 1970.

Did he lecture you on the ethical foreign policy?

He absolutely turned up, told us about the ethical foreign policy.

And then in 1998, we had the big Indonesian financial crisis.

And then Gordon Brown, with his then-assistant Ed Balls, turned up, and then your friend Gus O'Donnell turned up.

So I took him shopping.

So I saw all your mates

as a baby diplomat in the 90s.

But in 1998, I was standing in the streets of Jakarta with, I think, 200,000 students with the police firing plastic bullets at us, looking very much like the scenes you just see.

And Reformasi came.

Suhato, who'd been in, military dictator, had been in for 32 years, steps down.

And Indonesia then rapidly became one of the great democratic miracles and everybody was very, very hopeful.

2004 things began to stagnate a bit under a guy called Susilo Bambong Yuriono, but still for the next 10 years, the most democratic country probably in Southeast Asia.

And then in 2014, a man called Jokowi came in.

And for the last 10 years, Indonesia has begun to go backwards.

So they've begun to shut down this very good anti-corruption organization that used to fearlessly pursue ministers.

Civil society's been sidelined.

But it was still a pretty inclusive settlement.

The only lot that were not allowed back in were the old military dictator, Suhato's family, and his son-in-law.

Probo Subianto.

Probo Subianto had commanded the special forces, killing people in East Timor.

During that time, 98, they were abducting student protesters.

It was his guys who were crashing into the side of the crowd and ripping away, and the body's never been found.

So he was the one persona non-grata person.

Very difficult to quite.

I'm trying to think of what the analogy would be, but I suppose it'd be like if Russia had a massive democratic change and Putin was out, and then suddenly A Gorbachev figure came back.

And suddenly Putin's son comes back

20 years later, right?

I mean, it's a really, really weird moment.

Or, you know, North Korea, you topple the dictator, and suddenly, to your horror, after 20 years of democracy, the North Korean dictator's son comes back.

So Probo has spent the last 15, 20 years trying to reinvent himself in different ways.

He flirted with being an Islamist, so he went with the extreme Islamist parties.

He then flirted with going very anti-foreign.

anti-elite.

And finally, he started using AI to do weird dad dancing and portray himself as a sort of cuddly Japanese anime to get young voters and won this incredibly convincing victory in which the police put a lot of pressure on village headmen and village chiefs, started saying, we'll investigate you for corruption, basically, unless you deliver your village for a promote.

So Indonesian democracy now in big, big trouble.

Yeah.

And well, and the other thing that's happening, partly because this is about parliamentarians' allowances, some of the violence has been directed at the homes of politicians, arson, government buildings.

So my friend Sri Moulyani, because something's never changed in Nishapistin, Sri Muliani is the finance minister, has been essentially the finance minister and the central bank governor on and off for sort of 30 years.

But her house was looted and attacked.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

And then we've got Thailand,

where this is a name that is well known in the United Kingdom, Rory.

Why is the name Shinawatra well known in the United Kingdom?

It's a football connection.

Correct.

Which football club was owned by one of the previous shares?

No, no, no.

Manchester City.

Oh, gosh, a really big club.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And

when did he go?

He went just before they became really successful, I would say,

because they then got the big bucks in.

He didn't put in enough money, despite being a massive

billionaire.

I think he did a fair bit, but nothing like what the current owners have done.

Just off the back of Manchester City, and I know you're very keen to talk about what's just happened, but sort of quick memory.

I don't know anything about football, but I know a little bit about Thailand.

As you say, Texas Nawatra came in as prime minister in 2001, was toppled in a military coup in 2006.

Then his sister came in as prime minister in 2011, same family, toppled in a military coup in 2014.

There was then nine years of military rule.

There was an election in 2023, which we covered on the podcast.

People remember that Peter Limjendrat, who was leading the Move Forward party, who was really an exciting, I think, Ivy League-educated young guy who was going to lead Thailand away from its domination by the royal family and the military, won the election, but was then sidelined in a weird deal where the military then brought back Shinhawatra.

He was pardoned from his crime of Lesse Majeste, and eventually his daughter ended up as prime minister.

Over to you.

Yeah, and she's now no longer prime minister.

So if you throw in another member of the family, one removed, you've had four members of the same family essentially kicked out of office by the Constitutional Court.

This was because of a phone call that she had with the leader of Cambodia, which was leaked by Hun Sen, Cambodian, clearly I imagine to damage her, in which she was in the eyes of the Thai people and the Thai institutions overly familiar, overly flattering, overly conceding to his power.

So she's now got the boot as well.

And as you say, it's one of these really interesting examples that we can see in Brazil, and we can see in Latin America a great deal.

Is it that we have this wonderful, strong institution called the Constitutional Court, which is holding people to account, or if you're from the opposition, and this tends to be the position I'm from, actually the Constitutional Court is an absolute toy of the military and the monarchy

and any sort of populist democratic party immediately, because that's how Peter

was disallowed as Prime Minister is because the Constitutional Court suspended him, accusing him of some violation.

But I assume that you're in favour of Les Majeste,

that one should not be allowed in any shape or form to criticise.

We have covered, I mean, as you point out, somebody's in for 50 years for criticising the Thai king.

And the Thai king is this very eccentric figure who appears to live in a small village in Germany and who famously has this dog who's been made a general and all these kind of things, because we're talking, ASEAN, how interesting the democratic movements are.

So again, if we go back to the 90s, the glory days of democracy, we believed, or at least we believed in our little embassy, that the world was getting more and more democratic, because it wasn't just that Indonesia had got rid of its military dictator and its heads of direction.

In 1986, the Philippines had got rid of Marcos.

Kory Aquino was going in a democratic direction.

In Cambodia, you'll remember in the early 90s, there had been a UN-led intervention, which was one of these things, a little bit like Bosnia and Kosovo, where the UN sent in 44 nations, 20,000 troops, took over the government, set up this uneasy coalition between the king and Hun Sen.

There was demobilization of the Khmer Rouge, there was Truth and Justice Commission.

A lot of my friends my age were there in Cambodia doing this stuff.

Fast forward,

things look much, much more dubious.

Indonesia, as I say, gone backwards.

Thailand, basically, different forms of military rule.

Hun Sen kicked out his partner, the king's party, and has now handed over to his son, General Sen, and has made a public statement saying, my son will be prime minister in the 2020s, my grandson will be prime minister in the 2030s.

So he's setting up his own little monarchy in Kabaddi.

Meanwhile, the Philippines, again, if you were to go back to your time in government, the key figures now in the government are

Marcos's son, Bong Bong Marcos, who's the president, Duterte's daughter, who's the vice president.

One of the leading opposition figures in the senatorial race is Bam Aquino.

And if you look at the Senate itself, the Senate's only got 24 people in it.

There are four siblings out of those 24.

Two Viljiars, two Estradas, two Caetanos, two Torfos.

So eight out of 24.

So whatever the Philippines is, I mean, yes, it's a democracy, but it's a very different type of democracy to the ones that we're used to.

Well, you can see that Trump is studying these things very, very closely, can't you?

Final thing I just want to finish on the Southeast Asian story, because it's such a not just 500 million people in this critical place between China and India, not just one of the big economic stories.

So as I think you'll find as you go around talking to businesses, people very interested in Vietnam and Indonesia, and even the French, the Germans, the Brits, who think maybe they've missed the boat on China, keep hoping that in Indonesia and Vietnam they could provide alliances for the economies of the future.

But the story that we keep coming back to of social media disinformation.

Most of these countries in Southeast Asia have a very big overseas Chinese community.

Singapore is basically an overseas Chinese island state.

In Malaysia, maybe 25% of the media isn't Chinese.

And you have these farms of social media accounts that are used sometimes to promote commercial products.

in Malaysia, for example, sometimes to broadcast back into China to promote products in China with a Malaysian angle, then being used apparently by the Chinese government to promote Chinese views around these disputes in the South China Sea.

So there's been a big standoff recently between the Philippines and China in the Spratly Islands in something called, I think, the Second Thomas Reef, which is a...

Most of these islands are basically underwater.

This is sort of lagoon shaped like a Carabina.

And the Philippines beached a landing vessel vessel on this atoll some years ago and have been resupplying it.

Yeah, we talked about this a few months ago, yeah.

Absolutely.

The Chinese have been blocking their resupply and then they've sent Marines and others.

Anyway, the Chinese bot farms are perpetually trying to dig into Duterte supporters who are considered more pro-China against Marcos, who's considered more pro-American.

And the same thing is being played out across Southeast Asia.

And what you will have seen in Singapore is this very interesting question they all have to face, which is, what do they think of China?

When they're being optimistic, they would say, look, we've known China, we've dealt with it for literally thousands of years.

All you have to do is be polite to it.

It's this enormous giant.

At least they're predictable.

We understand what the rules are.

We don't necessarily like what they're doing with business, but we get them.

Whereas America is now increasingly unpredictable.

But I guess your Australian friend who was at your conference would probably say they're being naive, that China is increasingly a blue-water power.

I think 70 destroyers have been around Indonesia in the last few years from China, and that they need to understand that if something happened, let's say China went after Taiwan, all these instruments of social media, economic leverage and power will be used to make sure those Southeast Asian nations do not take the American side.

Well, the point that the Australian guy made was actually that this is happening with a record and reputation that Trump is shaping for them, which they don't deserve because of their human rights stuff, Uyghurs, Tibet, Hong Kong, all the other stuff that they, the

intellectual property theft, all that stuff that we know about.

So, yeah, it's listen, it's really, really interesting.

Your democratic picture, though, is not a healthy one.

No.

And a very strange one.

If you go back to those days of optimism of the toppling of Marcos, toppling of Suharto, the emergence of Thai democracy, people wouldn't have predicted it.

And of course, this confirms the general Chinese worldview, and a bit of worldview you get from Singapore, which is pretty authoritarian, that what matters is economic growth, that human rights and democracy is not necessarily what it's cracked out to be.

Many of these countries have elections and occasionally have changed.

They have to say those elections, which they had last time, they ended up with pretty much the same result.

I've talked to people in the same way.

They do worry about the opposition.

So it's not like they rigged the result.

The result is not rigged.

They worry about the opposition.

The opposition plays a role within the parliament.

But it's a kind of, you know, it's a well, what you call a controlled democracy, I think.

But it's a fascinating place.

I like going there.

And this thing, you know, we talk here about whether our politicians get paid enough.

They are the best paid politicians in the world.

Sort of over a million dollars.

Over a million dollars, yeah.

But they go and headhunt them.

They find them from the sort of brightest and the best, and they say, look, do you want to come and...

A lot of them come through the civil service.

I'm not sure I'd describe that as my fellow colleagues.

I don't think we were headhunted for our jobs in the cabinet.

Well, I thought David Cameron had an A-list.

On the A-list.

Oh, he's the A-list.

Liz Truss.

Pretty put out.

We've been talking a lot about the new world that Trump has created, and we began with China, India, Russia, the Shanghai Cooperation Agreement.

We then in the second half talked about ASEAN.

But all of this is about a world tilting away from the West, tilting away from European-American models of liberal democracy towards these authoritarian,

semi-democracy states, which haven't gone in the direction people expect over the last 30, 40 years, forming these new alliances from the Shanghai Cooperation Agreement to BRICS, to ASEAN, which are not quite NATOs, not quite EUs, but are probably the things to watch if we're thinking about the future shape of the world.

Yeah, and it's also probably why Donald Trump, whose instincts are authoritarian anyway, is thinking, you know, maybe they've got it right.

He gives himself a kind of historical intellectual justification.

for some of the authoritarian stuff that he's doing.

So this has been a very

not just foreign affairs, but a one specific region.

So, on question time, we'll maybe broaden out a bit.

Should probably talk about this new Downing Street team that's been announced.

We've got some very interesting questions this week about the Online Safety Act, about AI, and we should probably have a little chat about Farage wandering off to America to attack his own country.

Good, look forward to it.