458. Can Trump's Peace Deal Actually Work?

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That's the restispolitics.com.

It was wall-to-wall Trump.

Here's Trump arriving.

Here's Trump at the Knesset.

It really was the Trump show, parts of which were slightly mind-blowing.

Everybody is a little bit scared of him.

They're dealing with somebody who isn't carefully calculating within a rules-based order what to do, but can be extraordinarily reckless.

The bombing has stopped, hostages are being reunited with their families.

So, that of itself is a huge achievement.

But I think we're kidding ourselves if we think this is peace.

What we've got now is the beginning of the framework.

Seeing the Palestinians returning to their homes, now 90% rubble.

There's no international structure.

There's no UN structure here around this deal.

There's no Palestinian authority connected with this deal.

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Welcome to the Rest is Politics.

You're me, Alice Campbell.

And with me, Rory Stewart.

And we're going to devote the first half of this episode to Peace in Our Time, Donald Trump in Gaza and Egypt.

And then the second half talk about Latin America.

Lots going on in Latin America.

So, did you manage to watch much of yesterday's proceedings?

Nope, didn't get much of that.

I've been talking to a lot of people in the region, talking to Israelis, talking to people in the Gulf, talking to Palestinians.

But what was your sense of the actual proceedings, the whole thing?

Well, I had a really strange day.

I was all over the the place.

But every time I was kind of had five minutes, ten minutes, I would just sort of get on my phone and get onto one of the news channels and just follow it.

And it was just, it was wall-to-wall Trump.

Here's Trump arriving.

Here's Trump at the Knesset.

Here's Trump doing this.

It was just, it was literally every time it was Trump doing stuff.

And then occasionally, you'd get to see hostages meeting their families.

You'd get to see Palestinians being released.

You'd get a sort of broader sense.

But it really was the Trump show.

And parts of which were just slightly mind-blowing.

I mean, fair play, when this plan, this 20-point plan, first came out, you and I were both very, very skeptical that it would kind of lead anywhere.

It has led somewhere.

It's led somewhere very significant.

And that is it, whereas if phase one, and that has been the bombing has stopped, Gazans are going home, and hostages are being reunited with their families, Palestinian prisoners are being released, and aid is going in.

So that of itself is a huge achievement.

fair play.

Let's start maybe with that one.

So, this is, of course, pretty much what the ceasefire agreement in January was supposed to be.

So, we're now going back 10 months, which was torpedoed in March largely by Netanyahu's government that didn't proceed to the next phases.

So, the basic structure from the moment Trump came in, people will remember that Trump, as soon as he came in, announced within a few weeks, I've achieved what nobody else has ever managed to achieve.

I've done what Biden could never do, I've got peace in the Middle East.

And that peace was basically hostages released, ceasefire, Israel withdraws its troops.

And since then, if you go back to July, for example, beginning of July, they were still in the middle of the negotiations that have been going on since January.

And a huge tribute to all these negotiators.

The work that Trump has done, the work that Jared Kushner has done, the work that the Israeli delegation has done, the work that the Qataris did, putting pressure on Hamas,

Egypt, etc.

I mean, you must be be familiar with this from Northern Ireland.

I mean completely sick of this because for at least 10 months, but

basically an outline for a year and a half, they've seen what the beginning of a ceasefire could look like.

And essentially, I think what's been happening is they've been going back and forth with the Gulf countries, who are the people with the influence on Hamas, saying, why won't you agree to hand over the hostages and disarm

and the United States that has the influence on Israel saying, why won't you stop bombing Gaza?

And we sort of know the reasons why they didn't want to do that, but we can also see the reasons why, in the end, it would make sense for them to do that.

And they got there in January, collapsed in March.

They were trying to put it together again in July, which is now, I suppose, three months ago.

And now finally, it's happening.

Well, when it was collapsing, I can remember we talked about it at the time, and our shared sense was that that was at the point at which we genuinely did feel, got a lot of flack for saying so, but we felt that Netanyahu's felt his own political interests of survival were to keep it going and i think where you do have to give credit to trump is that

and you could say belatedly because it is essentially the same deal if he always felt he had the power really to force netanyahu to do something he was a bit uncomfortable about and then do it in a way that gave netanyahu the sense that he was very much part of it then he could have done it earlier that is true but i still think when you see all of the things that happened at the same time yesterday it was an extraordinary thing to pull off.

And then I think it's interesting, I've talked a bit to Tony Blow, who's, as you know, pretty closely involved in this.

And he is, you know, he's pretty clear this has been the kind of framework the whole way through.

Essentially what it is, what this is basically saying is you have Gaza without Israeli troops all over the place and you have Gaza without Hamas.

That's kind of the framing of it.

But he did say that Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have been pretty impressive in the way that they've they've done this.

Really, absolutely on it and pushing the right people and pushing the right buttons.

And the one thing that I think is really interesting about Trump, I've been trying to think about Trump because of course we've got such a negative view of him and I know you have, I've got a very negative view of him.

I think the one thing

that you give him is this for good and bad this ability just to sort of and boy did you see it yesterday just to command all the energy and all the attention.

But I think what that's a reflection of more significantly is his

instinctive understanding of the power of the United States still.

And that ultimately is what pushed Netanyahu.

I'd love to come back to the Blair point, which I think is fascinating.

But just to develop your sense of American power.

When Biden was operating within the old world, in some ways, America was hiding its, I guess, its steel fist and a velvet glove.

It was

reluctant to do certain kinds of things.

So something amazing has happened, as you say, to American power.

And that's partly because of the way that Trump uses it.

Obama, Biden to some extent, often seemed powerless.

They would say, here's a red line in Syria.

The red line would be crossed.

They couldn't really act.

Biden was putting pressure on Netanyahu for a ceasefire.

He never got there.

What's different about Trump?

What's different about Trump is an incredible recklessness and a total disregard for global norms.

So we can see it.

Here's a 50% tariff on Brazil to back my friend Bolsonaro.

Here's $20 billion going to Argentina.

Here's airstrikes against Iran, etc., etc., etc.

And what's happened there is all these players are now off balance because they're dealing with somebody who isn't carefully calculating within a rules-based order what to do, but can be extraordinarily reckless.

And as you said, absolutely, this has worked with Israel.

And it's also given Netanyahu, for some reason, coverage with his far right.

I mean, what's the reason he stopped fighting or was reluctant to stop fighting?

He was scared about Ben Gabir and Smotric, that they would collapse the coalition.

Somehow, Trump's participation in this has created a situation where it looks as though his coalition will hold in a way that it didn't look like it was going to hold in January, March.

And it's true with the Gulf, too.

The Gulf are profoundly, I guess,

worried about the way that Israel is behaving, incredibly resentful of that.

The attacks on Qatar, totally thrown off balance, and probably pretty resentful of the way that Trump is behaving.

But somehow, I think everybody is a little bit scared of him.

And unfortunately, this is one consequence of something that we hate, which is the collapse of the rules-based order.

In this case, probably is getting results because if you are Mohammed bin Salman, or if you're the Qataris, or if you're Israel, you do look at this guy and think he has power.

And he uses that power in all sorts of different ways.

And the other really bizarre sense you have in the last 24 hours because i mean even though i'm absolutely prepared to say this is in in a very significant part down to him and the way he operates and the sheer brute force of the way that he applies that power at the same time i heard somebody saying that it's like watching a split-screen presidency you have this guy who's talking about being being the peacemaker and bringing peace to the world in the Middle East and this is the 3,000 years of history.

And then over in his own country, he's doing as much as he can to fuel division, to fuel hate.

He talks, and everybody in this side of the screen is they're great friends of mine.

And over here, they're all his enemies.

You know, the slob governor in Chicago and all this sort of stuff.

And that's, I think, part of, and again, I'm not sure it's that thought through.

I think it's just the way he's always operated it instinctively.

It is a kind of form of strategic chaos.

Yeah, the split screen, Ezra Klein, who we interviewed on leading, also has this idea that it's a little bit like those optical illusions where you can see a face or a vase, but you can't see both at the same time.

And I think this is the nature of this new form of power.

So let's lean into Mohammed bin Salman, for example, in Saudi Arabia, right?

Where you can see your same split screen.

On the one hand, he is the great reformer who's done extraordinary things for opening up the Saudi economy and Saudi society, and it's a great success story and people are going there.

On the other hand, the early days of his rule were the most extraordinary examples of random power, famously.

If you were turning up to have your passport renewed in the Saudi consulate in Turkey, you were not expected, like Khashoggi, to then be chopped up with chainsaws.

If you were Mohammed bin Nayaf, who was the previous Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, one of the most powerful, wealthy men in the world, friends with U.S.

presidents, senators, and everybody, you're not expecting when you turn up to the palace to suddenly find yourself arrested, locked up in a hotel room, stripped of most of your possessions and find yourself under house arrest years later, along with many other close relatives of Mohamed bin Salman, some of whom still haven't been heard of to this day, most of whom lost their money.

So we are in a new world, and it's a world that actually I want to talk about a little later in relation to a new book by a man called Da'em Poli.

We've got Saudi doing it.

We've got Trump doing it in the US.

We've got Israel doing a version of this.

I mean, what is Netanyahu doing?

With that strike on Qatar, and what may happen,

I would not be at all surprised.

if there is soon an Israeli strike on Iran again, that he reopens the front with Iran.

They're all people people who sense, and same with Putin doing his drones, they sense that power in the modern world involves being excessive,

provoking, going beyond the limit, doing things that shock people and make them think, this is completely unnecessary.

Why did you need to do that?

Just adding to your theme, so if you watched through the whole day yesterday, so for example, when Trump was addressing the Knesset to the Israeli parliament, and he was doing his usual thing,

he had an auto-cue, there was a script, but he kept sort of, you know, going off on tangents.

And one of his tangents, because he had

Herzog, the president, two down through on his left, and he's got Netanyahu who's sitting in front of him, and he just turns to the president and says, and I don't even know if this is possible in the Israeli system, but because it's possible in the American system, he obviously thinks it's an appropriate thing to say.

He says, hey, I have an idea,

Mr.

President, why don't you give him a pardon?

Give him a pardon.

Just give him a pardon of all these silly charges that he's he's facing, you know, corruption and the like.

And of course, huge applause from all of Netanyahu's supporters, huge applause in the galleries, from all the kind of people who've been put it there

to Lord Trump.

And then later, when he met Sisi in Egypt, and the thing in Sharm el-Sheikh was extraordinary, you had these leaders coming in from all over the world who,

my Fiona said this morning, it was like they were like extras in his film.

It was his film.

He stood there and it was literally like a red carpet thing with peace, this massive peace 2025.

And one by one, they had to come up and just stand there and shake his hand and pulling Macron and pulling Orban and doing his usual thing.

But then when he sat down with Cece for a sort of proper bilateral, brought the cameras in as usual.

And he just started to, he went straight in.

He didn't talk about the Middle East thing.

We talked about crime.

And this guy, I'm with this guy all the way because you commit a crime in this guy's country and you know you're going to pay the price.

It's not like with our slob governor in

Illinois.

Background for that, people who aren't concentrating, right?

U.S.

ambassadors sitting there in Egypt for the last four years complaining about human rights, complaining about European citizens tortured, Italian citizens disappeared in Egyptian prisons.

Cece is a military dictator running a profoundly authoritarian regime.

The standard American line for years, hypocritical though it would have been, would have been respect for human rights and all this kind of stuff.

Trump is basically saying, if only we had more leaders like him.

I told you, I met Cece

just as he took over, and I was part of this plan to try and get him to kind of democratize and you know be a nice guy kind of

yeah.

Which you which you've done a certain amount of and maybe not too much of but you've done a certain amount of this yeah a fair bit of that and with you know varying degrees of success.

I think we have to put Egypt down as didn't exactly move the dial very far.

But I remember when talking to about you know the importance of values and the importance of you know taking the public with you on this journey and making them feel part of this journey.

He did look at me like I was kind of from another planet.

I thought, this is this is not going to work.

But there's Trump basically saying, this guy is my guy.

And then when he had the later, when he had the leaders behind him and he was just sort of wheeling them in, there was only one Lecton and he was in charge of it.

So he says, where's Victor?

Where's Victor?

I got Victor a 28-point lead and he's going to do even better in the next election.

Where's UK?

Where's UK?

He goes.

It was like, and it was a show.

The whole day was a show.

The really big worry I have out of it, this is where it's very different, I think, to the Good Friday Agreement or Bosnia or any of these other peace processes or post-conflict processes,

is that, let's say we're through, they keep saying we're through phase one.

The number of points at which the detail is so difficult and where things can go wrong.

And I just worry that yesterday was such I get the whole thing, you know, day of joy for the hostages, day of joy for Palestinian families being reunited, all that.

I get that 100%.

But because of the way Trump communicates, I think

you have a sense that it's all sorted.

Yeah.

And it's not.

Yeah.

So two things.

Quick shout out to a book that was published two days ago called The Hour of the Predator by a man called Da'en Poli about authoritarians and tech bros who really would make these connections between Cece Mohammed bin Salman Trump and Bukele in Latin America, who maybe we can talk about a little bit after the break when we get to Latin America.

But your bigger point, right?

Phase two.

So phase one is basically a ceasefire.

Phase two is supposed to be reconstruction of Gaza.

And this is something that

you and I saw because this was very much my time in the Foreign Office, your time in government, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq.

And the story and the great clichés that you will remember were there were meant to be three things you do when you reconstruct a country.

governance, security, economic development.

If you look at Gaza from that point of view, and what was the logic?

Well, the logic basically is that governance is at the heart of all of it, which is a pompous way of saying if you haven't got a government which seems, and again this sounds like jargon, credible, effective, legitimate, ideally elected, it's very difficult to do the economic development and security.

And how do you illustrate that?

Well, look, if,

and I found this when I was in Iraq.

So I was the

deputy governor coordinator of this province in southern Iraq, and I'm sending back reports every week talking about all the good stuff we're doing.

This week we've fixed all these schools, we've sorted out the petrol, we've repaired a clinic, we've created these jobs, we've set up the police.

But actually what's happening over my time there is an angrier and angrier local population who are demonstrating outside my door.

And the fundamental problem when I say to them,

look, why are you so angry?

We're doing all these things is our problem isn't what you're doing.

The problem is you're doing them.

And who are you?

And this is the problem to cut to the chase with this technocratic Palestinian administration, if it ever emerges, that's meant to be running Gaza.

They will have to make every day the most difficult decisions in the world.

Decision number one.

Hamas is fighting with tribal groups which have been armed by Israel.

These are tribal semi-criminal groups that Israel have turned into militia and are given weapons to.

They're fighting.

Whose side do you intervene on?

What do you do?

And who intervenes?

What are the security forces that intervene?

And where you're into this other complicated thing about international force and where that comes from.

Exactly.

And at the moment, the story is maybe Pakistanis, Egyptians, Indonesians, but then there was a little bit from Shama Sheikh.

Well, they'll stay on the borders and there'll be a local Palestinian police force in charge of doing this.

How does that really work?

There is a firefight taking place in the streets between these two groups.

What do you do about it?

Who do you shoot?

Secondly, when you start doing your economic development and somebody comes and says, of the 32 hospitals, why are you starting with that one, with that community rather than that community?

Number two, why did you hire that contractor?

What do you mean you've spent $2 billion on that?

I know this guy.

He's completely corrupt.

He will have stolen hundreds of millions of dollars.

It's too slow.

You're not creating any jobs for this tribe.

You're creating jobs for that tribe.

Hamas is influencing you and you're discriminating in that direction.

Then the question isn't technical.

It's not just saying,

this is how you build a hospital.

It's politics.

It's the stuff that you live and breathe every day.

It's exactly the same as, you know, why are you investing in Bolton instead of investing in Dorset?

So you just dropped in there 2 billion for this project, that project.

And there's a prior question to all of this, which is where does the money come from?

And I can remember being at one of those big donor conferences on Bosnia.

And the sums of money, I don't remember them off the top of my head, but I do remember we were talking astronomical for the time, sums of money, that countries around the world with governments present were basically, they're almost outbidding each other no i'll put in this and i'll put in this what it where i think we are global economy wise is where i think if you were to do something similar now a global donor conference to help rebuild gaza where is the money going to come from who are going to be the big donors okay and traditionally

traditionally two of the big donors of course were the us and the uk so forget interventions i mean forget afghanistan iraq which were three trillion dollar interventions three thousand billion dollars if you even look at Pakistan, for example, in the 2015-16, the UK government was giving £400 million a year just to Pakistan.

The US government's probably giving $2 billion a year.

USAID is now gone.

There is no more American money.

The British money, and I don't think people have fully taken this on, when I was Sex Safe for DFID, we were spending 0.7% of GDP, and it was almost entirely untouched, unconditional, unrestricted anywhere in the world, $20 billion a year.

Today, the headline's gone from 0.7 to 0.3, but we're spending of that two-thirds on asylum hotels in Britain.

So there's 0.1 left.

So effectively, the budget has gone down from, let's say, 20 billion to 3 billion.

And of that, already the money is given to the World Bank and the IMF, which we're committed to.

Then you have humanitarian responses, which we used to give £100 million to.

There's no money.

Literally no money.

So then the whole burden falls on Qatar and Saudi, right, to pay for this whole thing.

Because again, this is not like people draw analogies with the end of the Second World War.

You know, America and Britain defeat the Nazis, occupation, reconstruction.

No.

From the time of the Atlantic Charter onwards, America and Britain were already thinking about reconstruction of Germany.

Israel has no interest in reconstruction of Gaza.

I did a conference earlier this year.

speak to a lot of Israelis about this.

The one consistent theme is we want no responsibility for Gaza.

Yes, there's been $50 billion worth of damage to Gaza, but if you expect us to contribute one cent, you can forget it.

So the other big donors back then were Japan.

Their economy is not great.

And they've got, providing she gets through a new prime minister coming in who may or may not be as committed as her predecessors.

US-UK, as you say.

Germany facing similar pressures to the UK.

So I think in the end a lot of it will fall on the Gulf.

But meanwhile, as you say, the needs will be now.

And I think it was right yesterday.

There was all this focus on the hostages but I did keep thinking as because there was kind of wraparound television coverage of the whole thing far less seeing the Palestinians returning to their homes now

90% rubble possibly finding bodies there and so forth so they're going back to that they're going to expect some sort of recovery fairly quickly and they will look to the famed international community to do that.

And I really do worry that parts of the international community, not least Trump, will think, well, we've done our bit.

Absolutely.

So now it's over to the rest of you.

So firstly, what do we know about Trump?

He's not going to put any boots on the ground and he's not going to be writing big American checks, for sure.

Secondly, the upside of Trump's autocratic rule-breaking behaviour is that he can pull off a ceasefire.

The downside is this pompous word legitimacy.

There's no international structure.

There's no UN structure here around this deal.

There's no Palestinian authority connected with this deal.

And when he talks about what security forces...

That's good.

But when you look at the security force going in on the ground, the sort of questions, if you are Egypt or Indonesia or Pakistan or the Gulf, that you'll be asking, is what is the legal authority under which this group operates, right?

Let's say you're a UAE colonel or Pakistani colonel on the ground and you're having to make this decision, what do I do?

Do I shoot this person?

What is your authority to shoot that person?

Are you there legally under an Israeli occupation?

Are you there under a UN peacekeeping mission?

Or are you, as Trump seemed to be suggesting yesterday, reporting to the U.S.

CENTCOM commander, the admiral in charge of U.S.

forces,

with the U.S.

somehow saying, we are in charge, we're coordinating.

By the way, we're not providing any troops.

We're not providing any money.

But you, the UAE colonel or Pakistani colonel, you're somehow following American.

Are you going to get a Security Council resolution?

Well, I mean, again, Trump goes back and forward on that.

If you can't get an elected Palestinian authority that people can look at and say these horrible decisions, because within six months, 12 months, people will be so angry.

I mean, people are hoping at the moment their houses will be rebuilt.

You just point out there's no money.

Rebuilding $50 billion worth of damage is like a 10, 15-year project.

So people will be so

impatient.

Where will the jobs be?

Will the borders be open?

Will you be able to have a port?

Will there be an economic activity?

Are the trucks actually going to be able to cross the border?

Are you going to be able to cross as a migrant worker into Israel in order to get revenue?

Probably not.

So your family will be very, very poor.

You won't have a job.

Your house will be in rubble.

So this government...

that you're going to have to be patient with is neither an international UN sanctioned body nor is it a Palestinian body.

It's a body that very quickly you'll begin to say if you're an angry Palestinian, is this a sort of proxy for Israel?

And then Israel will say from the other side where it's like, is this a proxy for Hamas?

No, and also

the other thing that will happen, because we've had no real international media access, I think the stories that are going to start to emerge about the scale of devastation, the scale of destruction.

So let's take at face value, 67,000 deaths.

You're probably going to find there's more than that now.

Those stories will start to get told.

And so I just felt that there was something discordant about the tone yesterday.

I think that if only Trump could find it within himself to say, look, this is a great breakthrough and we've made progress.

And now here are the steps that are going to have to be taken.

Instead of which it was all the war is over.

peace in our time,

the most momentous day in a century.

You know, Rubio said it was the greatest day in 50 years and Trump said, is that or he said, okay, 100.

I mean, it's all this kind of boastfulness and this self-aggrandizing stuff.

And I have to say,

I think that is part of what, this is why we're back to the sort of split screen stuff.

It's part of what has allowed him to make it happen, the over-the-topness, going over the top, that sense of making somebody like Netanyahu a bit scared of him.

But the over-the-topness in this stage, I think, is setting us, laying the ground for a failure to understand the kind of thing that you've just said, the processes and the organizations that now have to be put in place very, very quickly to avoid an escalation of the sort of violence that's already starting to creep in.

And you've put your finger on something that maybe we haven't concentrated on enough, which is the question of Trump's attention span and patience, because one risk with Trump, which we maybe have seen with Putin in Ukraine, where he seems to have just lost interest now and given up, is as you say, that he may have felt he's done his job now.

He did Alaska.

The Ukrainian government, his job was Alaska.

Wall-to-wall attention.

I'm doing something big.

I'm doing something bold.

You've got two weeks, Vladimir.

Well, how many weeks ago was that?

And actually, we should just give a shout out to our current leading interview with the former Ukrainian foreign minister, Dmitro Kaleber.

I mean, it is amazing how he somehow manages to stay positive and optimistic.

But I don't think he's in any doubt, under any illusion, that the Ukrainians are not as reliant upon the Americans as they were.

If we follow your instinct on his patience, the only way of getting to a peace is continual pressure day in, day out, on Hamas, who need to be made to disarm and withdraw, and on Israel, who need to be convinced to withdraw and to give the freedom and autonomy to Gaza to allow it to reconstruct, flourish, grow.

And how's that going to happen?

Well, that pressure on Israel can only come from one place.

It can only come from Trump and the US.

And what I think I fear, we don't know with Trump's, he's so unpredictable, but there's definitely a chance that he loses interest and he feels he's done the heavy lifting and he's not going to continue to apply day in, day out pressure if, for example, Israel refuses to withdraw from the lines it's currently at.

Because the most optimistic scenario that I can see at the moment, I mean

I hope I'm wrong, but the most optimistic scenario I can see at the moment is go forward, six months, 12 months, Gaza is very poor, very high unemployment rates still in rubble israel still mounting strikes and military raids hamas still there on the ground not fully disarmed in a very ambiguous position with the government no opening of ports no opening of airports the u.s engaged no two-state solution no political sovereignty from palestine basically simply gaza in a more unstable poorer situation than they were in before october 7th you'll still have the the settler movement sort of focused on development in the West Bank.

I thought the King of Jordan made a very interesting intervention yesterday.

He basically said this is a great day.

They're all saying that.

But unless there remains a commitment to a Palestinian state, then the war effectively isn't over because that's what they've all been fighting over for so long.

So I think we're in a very, very...

unpredictable, vulnerable, quite dangerous place right now.

And of course, so many people have

bought into, and I don't want to be a killjoy.

I really don't.

I mean, I get the joy, I get all that, I understand why people were so excited and so happy and what have you, but I think we're kidding ourselves that we think this is this is the end of, or if this is peace, they're not going to be at peace with the and just think of all the Think of all the resolution that's going to have to be done, think of all the people who are going to feel more radicalized, probably on both sides.

And so I think unless there's that understanding of the processes that have to to be put in place.

And, you know, going back to the Good Friday Agreement or going back to Bosnia,

the big day, Good Friday was not the, that was not the end of it.

That was the framework.

And what we've got now is the beginning of the framework.

And Netanyahu is selling a story to the Israeli people of unconditional surrender by Hamas.

This is a great victory.

But the truth is, Hamas has not disappeared.

There are still thousands of them around, clearly.

And what we've learnt here is what we should have learnt in Vietnam, what we should have learnt in Afghanistan, which is that unless you have a political path, unless you have economic reconstruction, you're not going to be able to destroy an ideology.

The idea that you can just drop bombs, kill 67,000 people, and eliminate a movement like Hamas has never worked.

Didn't work with the Taliban and Afghanistan.

From the Israeli perspective, they hear you say something like that and they'll say, yeah, and don't forget, part of that ideology is to wipe us out.

So we still feel at risk.

You know, the fundamentals are still not on the side of a long-term peace, I guess is what is what we're saying.

The only thing we always believe, and I think there's wisdom in it, even if it's considered liberal wishy-washy nonsense, right?

Is that long-term peace requires, in the end, both Palestinians and Israelis feeling safe, prosperous, and having their own legitimate governments.

And nobody is offering that to the Palestinians.

So it's very difficult to believe that these problems are going to go anywhere anywhere so long as the only approach is one of violent military force.

We should also say to our listeners that our fellow goal hanger podcast Empire has done a series on the long history of Gaza all the way back 11-part series starting in 1450 BC.

I'm also going to give a shout out to a friend of mine Don McIntyre.

Remember Don McIntyre, Middle East correspondent, and he wrote a brilliant book about Gaza a few years ago.

He's now updated it.

I think it's only an e-book now, and it's called Gaza.

But I think we need, we need, because a lot of people

seem to think this whole story started two years ago.

It did not.

It's been around for, and that's why I think it might be a little bit premature to say it's now all over.

Final shout-outs from me, some great European and American commentary for people who want to go deeper.

On the American side, you can see the spectrum covered by David Ross.

Phil Gordon more on the Democratic side, Elliot Abrahams more on the pro-Israeli Republican side, Eust Hilterman from the International Crisis Group, and a lovely article actually on an exhibition that's been done in Paris on archaeological finds in Gaza, covered by Josephine Quinn and the London Review of Books.

Excellent.

Well that's enough plugging.

We'll go to a break.

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

And me, Alistair Campbell.

And Rory, do you know what we were doing exactly a year ago this week?

Last year was probably,

I mean not for you, but for me probably the biggest audience we've ever played.

Do you remember us doing O2?

Difficult to forget?

That was quite a thing.

It was a thing on stage almost, and it was set up like a boxing ring.

Yeah, but we didn't fight.

So we had sort of 14,000 people in the round peering down at us following on from the Royal Abbott Hall.

Yeah.

That was a pretty bizarre moment in the world of podcasting.

It was, it was, it was a good moment though.

I enjoyed it.

And now we're going to do it all again.

We are.

We're off on tour again, and this time we're going to do London, Bournemouth, Manchester and Glasgow.

You're going to bring along the bagpipes as usual.

So it's 9th to the 16th of November in all of those dates.

So if you want to get tickets to any of those shows, just go to therestispolitics.com.

Dead easy.

We'll be able to cover the whole world, delve into some of your lessons on leadership and much more.

Yeah, I also wonder, do you think it'd be, I'm now throwing this out as a live idea, don't you think we should show some of these impersonators, particularly of you.

There's some great impersonators online of Rory Stewart.

Really?

I think the ones of you are much better than the ones of me.

Anyway, we're looking forward to it.

Now, Latin America.

We don't talk enough about Latin America because it's so interesting and there's so much interesting stuff going on there.

But let's do a bit of Argentina and a bit of Peru.

And maybe a bit of...

I've got a really interesting thing about Chile as well.

Okay.

Well, a little bit of framing.

When Trump came in, and I'm sorry it all keeps coming back to Trump, but a lot of what he was obsessed with relates to what's happening in Latin America at the moment.

And probably, I guess three things.

One of them, immigration.

So Venezuela, 8 million people have left Venezuela.

Cuba lost, I think, 20% of its population in the last five years.

And that goes to stuff we talked about, right?

Colombia refusing to accept migrants.

But the second thing, crime.

Cocaine production consumption has doubled in the last 15 years.

New markets have opened up in Latin America itself and in Asia, which has then led to to this incredible explosion of criminal gangs in countries which previously were considered pretty safe in Latin America.

And then the third thing is this whole question of small government against big government, which brings us to Millais.

Anyway, where do you want to go?

Let's start with Millais, because Millais is this extraordinary, he's quite a strange character.

Very, very...

I know you're obsessed with politicians and their hair.

He's unique.

The hair is unique.

I think he's called the wig.

That's one of his.

And of course, you mentioned chainsaws in relation to khashoggi's murder yeah his chainsaw was a symbol to say i'm going to cut the state down to size then taken by musk which shows that the whole world isn't all about

yeah it isn't all about trump influencing other people it's sometimes about other people like orban and millais influencing trump absolutely and also both kemi badenot the conservative leader here and nigel farar's reform leader have both said that millais is something of a role model and example well so he's become a global brand i mean who would have thought an argentinian president would become a global brand?

Of course, but that's some time back.

That's some time back.

You heard of Maradora.

I played with him, you know.

And so what happened recently is that there were local elections in Buenos Aires.

It's a big part of the country.

And Millet did very, very badly.

Marling campaigned personally and hoping that he'd do well.

Yes.

He said that that would sort of turn it around.

And that left the markets a little bit spooked.

He has come out and said he's going to change his style a little bit.

I think the chainsaw is going to be left in the locker.

But he's now got really much bigger elections coming up on October the 26th.

They have midterms like the Americans do.

Half of the lower house and a third of the Senate are up for elections.

So these are big, big elections.

And although his chainsaw approach and sort of absolutely disruption and all that, it has brought inflation down considerably.

Yeah, let's just remind people a little bit on the economy because we came back into this.

And again, in terms of self-criticism, I certainly was a little bit skeptical about whether he would be able to pull this off.

The conventional wisdom, of course, in all these cases is it's much more difficult than it seems.

And Argentinian politics was difficult, and it was difficult handling the fact he didn't have a majority in the lower house or the upper house.

So how was this guy who called himself an anarcho-capitalist, who was basically a TV pundit, going to be able to do all the stuff that he wanted to do.

He would inevitably, the story was, at least from my Argentinian friends, be blocked by the system.

In fact...

These words are

faster now.

Yeah, he came in and he did these extraordinary things.

I mean, he cut government spending by something like 35%,

which was removing something like 5% of GDP.

He got rid of all the subsidies on public transport, heating, groceries.

He fired tens of thousands of civil servants.

He cut, I think, pensions by 30%.

And inflation went down from 144% a year.

So if you're running a small grocery shop in Buenos Aires, you were putting up your price maybe in the morning and the afternoon, and then again two days later, to inflation now being only projected to be 25% a year instead of 144% a year.

So all that seemed amazing.

And he remained remarkably popular, over 50% popularity, even a year.

And despite the fact the poverty rate was soaring, as we talked about, despite the fact many people were beginning to feel the strain until recently.

Right.

When thinks prices have got out of control, it's been difficult supporting the peso, etc.

I think what's happened is that he's focused, understandably, on inflation.

He's managed to get inflation down substantially, but the economy, insofar as it is performing more generally, is not doing terribly well.

And then they had this problem with the peso.

And this is where he called in big really big favor from Trump and from Scott Besant.

Trump has said that he's his favourite other president.

Obviously, he is his own favorite, but Millet is number two.

Besant has waxed lyrical about Millet and essentially has said Argentina has to be saved.

So they're offering him this $20 billion currency swap.

Which again is absolutely unprecedented.

I mean, the only closest precedent of the U.S.

ever doing this before was Clinton doing it with Mexico.

But Clinton doing it with Mexico, which again was $20 billion,

was in a very different environment in the 90s.

And Clinton would say, I guess, in his defense, well, Mexico was so integrated with the U.S.

economy.

It has this enormous border that it shares.

And at that stage, Mexico wasn't tapped out on its IMF loans.

Argentina, you would have thought in a normal world, if you were a MAGA base, would be the classic example of something which is not in the U.S.

national interest, doesn't really have much trade with the U.S., doesn't share a border with the U.S., is totally maxed out on its international credit lines.

Why on earth would the US taxpayer be putting $20 billion behind Millay?

Politics.

Also, I don't know the answer to this, but did Clinton get Congress backing for what he did?

Because, of course, that's the other thing that's happened on this: there's no even mention of whether Congress is involved in this.

But whether these elections, what's happened is the markets have got a little bit scooped.

His big thing was macro stability.

And they got a little bit scooped that maybe the public are not quite as supportive of this as they thought.

And therefore, where's that going to go into the future?

His ratings have started to drop.

And then, of course, the other story that keeps coming up.

Although that 20 billion has massively strengthened him as well, it's strengthened his popularity.

I mean, it's a real life thing.

I mean, it doesn't, in a sense, the numbers don't completely matter.

It's a bit like

the way that the US deterrent used to work with NATO.

It's not really the numbers.

It's psychologically

in the sense that Best since behind you.

The other sort of story that has hit into his popularity and into the sense of competence is our old friend, Corruption.

There's a couple of big corruption things going on, in one of which, although she denies any wrongdoing, his sister, Karina, who is also his chief of staff, and his closest advisor by some stretch.

I mean, the strange thing about Millet is he doesn't appear to have much of a life outside the public profile.

I mean, he's very, very, very close to his sister.

And she's got caught up in these leaked sort of...

conversations that she got caught up in.

She was implicated in one of these big corruption scandals.

So that has affected him as well.

So if these elections, October the 26th, go badly, then given how the markets got spooked about a local election in Buenos Aires, then we shall see.

We saw yesterday with Orban and, you know,

Trump will now feel that he can get directly involved in these elections in a way that I don't think any previous president has ever done.

Which brings us, I guess, to Peru.

So the big story is the story of Latin America, which has

had had a very, very strong influence of left-wing populists.

And we can give many, many examples of this, ranging from people like Borridge in Chile, who's turned out actually to be pretty

respectful of human rights, respectful of the constitution, through to people who are slightly further out on the edge.

So we will talk about Pedro Castillo.

but we can also talk about the Colombian president and then the far edge of left-wing populism in Latin America, which is of course Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba.

And in this incredibly polarized world, all the people who are instinctively on the right in Latin America, who think that their states are too big, they're spending too much money, they're too much in hooked unions,

instinctively think that any left-wing movement, doesn't matter whether it's Lula or Scheinbaum in Mexico, the basic right-wing critique would be these people are taking their country towards Venezuela.

And actually the truth is that many of them are, in a British context, kind of versions of Jeremy Corbyn.

They are people with strong left-wing identity, they often talk about Marxist-Leninism, but they're not actually locking up, well, not in all cases, locking up political prisoners.

It's like Michael Reed would say, it's like I guess Jeremy Corbyn was much weaker institutions.

And against that is the right-wing push.

So the right-wing push is Millé doing this sort of radical stuff and restructuring and Bukele,

who in El Salvador has come in, arrested 80,000 people, detained them without trial, and dropped the homicide rate in El Salvador to the lowest homicide rate in Latin America.

So a lot of people are looking at this and thinking, if we think about our problems, crime, immigration, security, well, actually, you know, we're not going to exactly do what Bukele is doing, but they're beginning to be pretty tempted towards that authoritarian line.

Trump is getting...

ever closer to it.

There was a piece I read this week by the former chief of staff to ICE under Biden.

I can't remember where I read it, but

he was basically saying that what ICE is doing now is,

you know,

we're almost moving beyond any previous American definition of authoritarianism.

But I think what's interesting, and Bukeley, you know, I mentioned Cece, Trump saying, I'm with this guy in crime.

He's a big fan of Bukele.

Yeah, and

wants to send his people that.

What's been going on in Peru, though, I mean, you regularly and rather gleefully, I fear, sometimes talk about Giostama's terrible terrible ratings but Dina Boloarte who until last week was the president of Peru she was down at two percent is that and I never quite understand the negative does that mean like negative 98 percent or am I getting confused about that two percent means that she has two percent approval that means that two percent out of two out of a hundred think she's doing a good job

right

she didn't she well it was hovering between two and four so just to remind people sorry because we covered it at the time and if real geeks can go back to our original podcast when this happened, but this figure, Pedro Castillo, who was a primary school teacher from a pretty simple rural background, ran on the back of something called the Free Peru Party, which is, you know, proper Marxist-Leninist.

I suppose more intellectual listeners from Latin America are definitely familiar with Jose Carlos Mariatogue, who was this great Marxist intellectual from the 20s and 30s.

He won, but not long after he got into power, he decided to do a weird reverse coup against himself.

Which is, although he was actually the president, he tried to run a coup d'état against Congress and judiciary, then they then impeached him, at which point his deputy, who was this slightly sort of anonymous figure, became, to great applause, you know, the first female president in Peru.

A few questions about just how able she was, whether she wasn't actually a little bit mediocre.

But anyway, she got in.

And she was sort of sustained by Congress, including being sustained by Fuhimori's daughter, who's traditionally from the right.

There were then protests.

The army was very, very violent.

People were killed.

So now there's a whole human rights story going on.

And the previous economy that did pretty well from the reforms of Fuhimori through to 2016, beginning to falter,

really losing its way.

the parties giving up on ideology and becoming pretty much kind of corrupt party machines.

And now this.

Boloati was the sixth leader of the country since 2018.

And three of them are in jail.

A lot of this about law affairs.

We talk a lot about this complicated question.

You know, on the one hand, we support the independence judiciary.

On the other hand, in many Latin American countries, there's a sense that they're just used against your political opponents, which almost certainly is what Trump is doing and will probably happen to Trump.

when he steps down.

And also, it's strange how you have high-level corruption and what might be termed low-level corruption.

There's probably a bit of both going on here.

But the media

and the opposition became obsessed with her

seeming fondness for Rolex watches.

And

her house actually at one point got raided so they could establish just how many Rolex watches she had.

Then there was another story in that she went off to have a nose job while she was meant to be doing some sort of...

It's a little awkward because if you're coming from the Marxist-Leninist less, I mean, originally sort of Vladimir Chiron, Chiron, who again was put in jail so couldn't run, which is why Castillo came in, and she was coming in on that ticket to be collecting Rolex watches and all, etc.

But you mentioned crime earlier.

Crime and the murder rates and contract killings have just been going off the charts.

So, what's next?

I don't know what's next.

What's happened now is that under their constitution, she didn't have a vice president.

Normally, the vice president would take over.

So, it's gone to the president of the Congress, a guy called Perry.

He's just survived

rape and sexual assault

investigations.

So it's a mess.

It's a total mess.

There, I guess, the question is

what's next for countries like Peru?

Are they going to, and I think this will be an opportunity for mini bukeles.

So we're seeing sort of versions of this, Paraguay, Costa Rica, Panama.

I mean, of course,

the pro-Trump right-wing candidate in Panama is feeling pretty uncomfortable because Trump's still talking about taking over the Panama Canal, confusing everybody.

But is there going to be room when the election comes for somebody trying to run on a Mile or Bikele ticket?

Because the situation in some of these countries I mean, w we talked in January of last year about this amazing moment where Ecuador, which had been one of the most peaceful countries in Latin America, suddenly found criminal gangs take over a T V station live on air.

Peru we got a producer produced this extraordinary figure that in 2024, 50% of the homicides in Peru were contract killings.

That the big story at the moment has been an attack on a local popular Latin American band that didn't pay exceptionally.

It turned out to be the final trigger.

You know, sometimes it takes a tipping point that feels a bit odd, but there was this popular band that got caught up in

a shooting.

And I think it was just the point at which the politicians thought, you know, enough is enough.

And the vote, I think

it was 124 zeros.

She got literally zero votes.

This was the eighth impeachment attempt.

And she got zero votes.

And she was taken out under a clause for mental incapacity.

Yeah, moral incapacity.

Moral incapacity.

Moral incapacity.

No, no, it was worse than that.

Permanent moral incapacity.

In other words, there is no coming back from this.

Liza, before we go, just when I mentioned

Chile, you know how I'm a big fan of compulsory voting.

Well, they've got an election.

Chile's got an presidential election on November the 16th.

Also, Senate and 155 seats in the lower house.

Now, I didn't know this, really.

They've had compulsory voting.

They had compulsory voting, voting, but voluntary registration.

Okay.

So if you registered, you had to vote, but you didn't have to register.

Then in 2012, they went for automatic registration, so everybody got registered, and voluntary voting.

And they've now decided to put the two together.

They've got automatic registration and compulsory voting.

Round of applause for Chile, I say.

Round of applause for Chile.

And fingers crossed, because, you know, obviously you and I are big believers in compulsory voting.

Because I think a lot of people in Chile are pretty sceptical about Boric, this young student leader.

He's only lowered this one term, though.

Right.

He can't stop.

Exactly.

But I do want to do a little shout-out from people who thought he was going to go for Venezuela and Nicaragua.

It's not been like that.

He has been actually more idealistic, more respectful towards human rights than many people anticipated, and is a...

I would argue, a sort of better version of the left-wing populist leader in Latin America.

Well, in which case, the Communist Party candidate won't come through.

Well, listen, we've got question time tomorrow.

tomorrow and we're going to do something a bit different.

We're going to be relentlessly positive on the back of a complaint that was delivered to me by hand by one of our listeners who said we promised such an episode almost three years ago.

Let's see you tomorrow.

Let's try it.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Alastair Campbell here.

Now, we've just released a series on one of the most controversial and consequential people of the past 50 years, Rupert Murdoch.

I think you can argue that he is the most consequential figure of the second half of the 20th century.

He holds power longer than anyone else in our time.

And it's meaningful power.

It's phenomenal power.

Power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.

This is where he becomes not just a newspaper owner, he becomes a major newsmaker.

Fuck Dacre publish.

There is always a premium on bringing him gossip.

I don't know what you mean by down market and up market.

That is so English class-ridden snobbery when you talk like that.

How you get it doesn't make any difference.

Actually, to be perfectly honest, whether it's true or not doesn't make much difference.

There is a massive, massive scandal brewing.

This was industrial, illegal activity, and that I think is what really cuts through to the public and thinks you people are really, really bad.

I would just like to say one sentence.

This is the most humble day of my life.

There is no Donald Trump without Fox News.

His dream was always to elect a president of the United States.

The bitter irony is that that turned out to be Donald Trump, a man he detests.

He is conquering the world.

There's nothing less than this methodical, step-by-step progress to take over

everything.

To hear more, sign up at the restispolitics.com.

Hi, it's David from The Rest is Classified

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