Come Back, America! with Rory Stewart

Speaker 1 What are you getting for the holidays? Something useful? Probably not. That's right.
I know you're in-laws. They're not getting you anything good.

Speaker 1 Most holiday gifts end up in a drawer, back of the closet, or you leave it there at your cousin's house. Accidentally,

Speaker 1 but not this one. Mint Mobile's offering unlimited premium wireless.
$15 a month. That's their best deal of the year.
AKA, the only holiday gift you'll actually use every day.

Speaker 1 Mint Mobile's best deal of the year year

Speaker 1 happening now. Three months, six months, 12 months, unlimited plan, $15 a month.
All of them come with high-speed data, unlimited talk and text, and the nation's largest 5G network.

Speaker 1 You can bring your current phone number over to Mint.

Speaker 1 Contract? No.

Speaker 1 Nonsense? No.

Speaker 1 Don't get them socks. Get them premium wireless for $15 a month.
Shop Mint unlimited plans at mintmobile.com/slash TWS. That's That's mintmobile.com slash TWS.

Speaker 1 Limited time offer upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12-month plan. Required $15 per month equivalent.
Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only.

Speaker 1 Anything greater than 35 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. Capable device required.
Availability speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com.

Speaker 2 The Subaru Share the Love event is on from November 20th to January 2nd. For 18 years, Subaru and its retailers have supported over 2,700 local charities through the Share the Love event.

Speaker 2 When you purchase or lease a new vehicle during the 2025 Subaru Share the Love Event, Subaru and its retailers will make a minimum $300 donation to charity.

Speaker 3 Visit Subaru.com/slash share to learn more.

Speaker 1 Hello, everybody. Welcome once again.
Weekly Show Podcast with Jon Stewart. My name is Jon Stewart.
I'm actually the person in the intro. It just, I don't know, it just worked out that way.

Speaker 1 We are talking to you Wednesday, April 23rd. We always try and date it because of the speed in which

Speaker 1 current events

Speaker 1 has been moving. It is exhausting.
We are approaching the first hundred days of

Speaker 1 Donald Trump's represidency and

Speaker 1 the first congressional casualty, Mr. Dick Durbin, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois.

Speaker 1 Illinois? Illinois. I like to add the S.

Speaker 1 Although what would he plural Illinois? Illinoises?

Speaker 1 I don't know. We'll figure it out.
He said he is not going to seek re-election. And here's the shocking part.
He's only been in Congress, I think, 40-some years, and he's only 80.

Speaker 1 To see a senator self-deport

Speaker 1 at the ripe young age of 80, my God, my God, what have we become

Speaker 1 as a society

Speaker 1 to drive these kinds of adolescent junior senators from office?

Speaker 1 It's like watching someone declare for the draft as a freshman. No, sir, you're not ready.
You're not ready to go.

Speaker 1 You must mature.

Speaker 4 Oh, we're so

Speaker 1 generally fucked. And the trade war is apparently now.
This is going to be such an interesting, Houdini-esque

Speaker 1 escape from these utterly disastrous, self-inflicted tariffs. You saw Trump today in a press conference.
Well, no, you know, China, they've got to make a deal. They've got to do it.

Speaker 1 And so because they have to make the deal and because because everybody's kissing my ass, even though no deals are done, I'm probably just going to, you know, remove the tariffs at some point, having nothing to do with the fact that yesterday I sat down with Target and Walmart and all the big box stores and they were like, you're fucking killing us.

Speaker 1 We are the only thing keeping the economy going for cheap goods and we will have nothing on our shelves in like a week.

Speaker 1 You're going to see a run on toilet paper that would make the COVID era panic seem like a stroll in the park, for God's sakes. And somehow they'll pull off the

Speaker 1 feat of saying this was the plan the whole time and what a brilliant strategy it was to tank the global economy for as long as he did while still getting nothing out of it.

Speaker 1 Meanwhile, overseas, who the hell knows? How will the EU move towards China? Will Russia just be able to consume Ukraine in the way that they want to?

Speaker 1 We just have no idea. This is a failure on all levels.
The first 100 days have been nothing but sturm and drang and noise signifying nothing.

Speaker 1 And it doesn't have to be this way. So many of their policy goals could be achievable in non-chaotic.

Speaker 1 terms, and yet they seem incapable of playing that out. Fucking madness.
But we're going to get the view from Europe today with our guest, which I'm very excited about.

Speaker 1 Quite a renaissance gentleman that we have joining us on the program today. Delighted to have him.

Speaker 1 Ladies and gentlemen, delighted today, the Stewart Brothers.

Speaker 4 That's it.

Speaker 1 Reunited Rory Stewart Nee Leibowitz.

Speaker 1 Brothers from a different mother, co-host of the rest is politics, but truly

Speaker 1 an enlightenment gentleman, author, former MP, former minister.

Speaker 1 We're just excited to have you discussing things with us today.

Speaker 1 Rory, you are obviously, you know, your career as an author and as a minister, you're so ensconced in politics

Speaker 1 as well as broadcasting and all these other things. We just thought you'd be a great person to give us a broad perspective on the view from overseas towards America.

Speaker 1 As you know, America, we're very shy. We don't like people to think about us.

Speaker 4 That's right, Johnny. Famously shy.

Speaker 1 Famously shy. Yeah.
And obviously, I don't want to start on a confrontational note. And

Speaker 1 these conversations should be civil. And we're going to try and keep it that way.
But Rory, here in America, we're wondering

Speaker 1 why is Europe

Speaker 1 so hostile? Why do they use us so?

Speaker 1 The UK, the EU,

Speaker 1 why do they victimize America to such an extent? It's hurtful, Rory.

Speaker 4 It is, it is, and you're right. And this is what J.D.
Vance wants to know and all those wonderful signal chats. Why were we so mean to you? Why have we been bullying you for such a long time?

Speaker 1 Why, Rory? That's really the simple question.

Speaker 4 No, that's right. I mean, it's an amazing flip, isn't it?

Speaker 1 That J.D.

Speaker 4 Vance sometimes wakes up in the morning and thinks the United States is this incredible global superpower that's going to tell China what to do.

Speaker 4 And in other moods, he's like, oh, oh, we're the victimized kid on the playground. Everybody's stealing our lunch money.
These horrible Europeans, you know,

Speaker 4 and that I think at some point, I was trying to get my head around

Speaker 4 the mentality, but I guess the mentality at the moment feels like from Europe, that the Trump administration is obsessed. with not being taken for a sucker.

Speaker 4 They seem to think everybody's kind of ripping them off all the time. Yes.
Is that right?

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 I don't think there's any question about that. And we have a very powerful man baby at the helm.

Speaker 1 You know, I think so much of this, what makes it so difficult is that a lot of the ramifications that are being felt economically throughout the world are the product of kind of a psychological wound

Speaker 1 that our present leader suffered as a real estate developer from Queens who did not feel that he was given enough

Speaker 1 fealty from the Manhattan real estate.

Speaker 1 And so because of that, this is all a search for validation, loyalty, and fealty. Unfortunately, it seems to be plunging the world into a global depression.

Speaker 4 And John, it's weird, isn't it? Because I noticed this, that we talk so much about his psychology.

Speaker 4 And of course, it's very difficult to work out his psychology.

Speaker 4 So you'll get people who know him well, they'll say one moment, oh, he won't be able to put up Freelon Musk for more than a couple of days because he can't bear anyone else in his limelight.

Speaker 4 And then they'll have to change their view and they'll be like, oh, no, the thing about Trump is he really likes wealthy people.

Speaker 1 Or

Speaker 4 they'll say, you know, he doesn't, he doesn't, you know, he, the one thing he cares about is the stock market.

Speaker 4 And then when he tanks the stock market, everyone's like, no, no, no, he doesn't really care about the stock market.

Speaker 4 But what I think it's showing, if I was going to be pretentious for a second, please, is that the structure is falling down.

Speaker 4 You only start focusing on the psychology of the individual when the system isn't working.

Speaker 4 Because when you've got a properly functioning system, you know, the civil servants are working, the courts are working, Congress is working,

Speaker 4 the details of the sort of mysterious psychology of the president is less important.

Speaker 4 It only becomes important when it all goes executive orders. And I think that's what's so strange about this.

Speaker 4 This is a guy who, particularly with tariffs, has suddenly found this sort of emergency weapon that he can deploy. And then we all have to start worrying about his psychology.

Speaker 1 Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: Well, it's actually, it's the modus operandi for this administration is to, you know, throughout the history of the United States, the executive has always had a great deal of power, but it's always supercharged that power through the process of emergency declarations.

Speaker 1 We have an emergency declaration, we have to suspend habeas corpus, emergency declaration. What if we imprisoned all of our Japanese citizens? Emergency declaration in the 50s for tariffs.

Speaker 1 They're very shrewd about, you know, the Alien Enemies Act. They find those moments.
So he catastrophizes to get elected and then uses those trumped up, pardon the pun, catastrophes

Speaker 1 to enact these emergency powers that basically negate the other branches. And I think that's how he operates.

Speaker 4 And John Klein, again, please.

Speaker 1 Lori, I'm here to help you.

Speaker 1 Thank you. You know, originally I was going to get Europe's vision of us.
I'm here to help you.

Speaker 4 Well, you do need to help us.

Speaker 1 Please.

Speaker 4 So let me, I think, give a little bit of background. So I was

Speaker 4 briefly a British soldier, and then I was a British diplomat. And I served in the Balkans, so the Bosnia and Kosovo interventions.
I was then in Afghanistan. I was in Iraq.

Speaker 1 Famously walked through Afghanistan and wrote a brilliant book about it.

Speaker 4 Thank you. Thank you.
And in all those places, I worked very, very closely with the United States. And so I think I need to begin by sort of setting up the world that I grew up in.

Speaker 4 It was an American world.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 4 European or British, but it was an American world. And I think

Speaker 1 it's

Speaker 4 just trying to get across the sense that since the Second World War,

Speaker 4 the world has been defined by the US. The U.S.
set up NATO, basically set up the UN, set up the World Bank, set up the IMF.

Speaker 4 And when we deployed to Afghanistan, we deployed because the United States had triggered Article 5 of NATO. As something you've pointed out, we came to help the United States.

Speaker 4 Somebody who was in NATO had been attacked, and we deployed to help.

Speaker 4 And I developed so much respect for my American colleagues for their professionalism, for their seriousness. And I really mean this.
I mean, they were more professional and serious often.

Speaker 4 I'm afraid than we were, because they had more power and more responsibility. Right.

Speaker 1 And took that power and responsibility seriously. Is that the...

Speaker 4 Yeah, and you really got that sense. You know, I became close to people that listeners will be familiar with, General Petraeus, General McChrystal, Richard Holbrook, Hillary Clinton.

Speaker 4 I worked with these people.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 I was so struck by how committed they were, how serious they were, and how idealistic they could be.

Speaker 4 Often when we Europeans were being a little bit cynical, It was the Americans in the room who'd say, no, we've got to do this properly. We actually care about democracy or we care about human rights.

Speaker 4 We're not going to allow this warlord to just go around abusing people.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 it was very precious to me. It was very precious to me

Speaker 4 when I used to teach at Harvard. I now teach at Yale.
I'm married to an American.

Speaker 1 Don't, by the way,

Speaker 1 don't think that that means that you can stay. Just know this.

Speaker 1 We've changed the rules slightly.

Speaker 4 But particularly not after appearing on your podcast, John. I'm going to blame you when I turn up and some ICE agent looks at my TikTok account and flings me out.
That's right.

Speaker 1 We'll send you to Louisiana and whatever happens after you. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 4 I'm going to, I'm coming after you.

Speaker 1 As you should, sir. I'm going to be there.

Speaker 4 And you better come and visit me in Guantanamo or El Salvador or wherever it is.

Speaker 1 Because it'll be your fault. Absolutely.

Speaker 4 No, so just to finish this thought, I mean, I think to really understand the bewilderment.

Speaker 4 and maybe even the overreaction in Britain and Europe to Trump too,

Speaker 4 you have to understand

Speaker 4 how for 70, 80 years America created this very, very complicated, delicate balance of allies. I'm going to finish with a final little anecdote which mattered to me.

Speaker 4 When I was chair of the Defence Select Committee in the UK Parliament 2015, we were looking at basically options of shutting down most of the British defence manufacturing and just buying from the US.

Speaker 4 because it was going to be cheaper and they produced at scale. And we were looking at closing down most most of our Navy and becoming a sort of Marine Corps attached to the US.

Speaker 4 And we didn't do it in the end, partly because we were worried about employment in the UK and the Navy put up a fight for its own institutions.

Speaker 4 But nobody then, nobody 10 years ago, ever said, well, wait a second, are you not taking a big risk here? Because what happens if the US was no longer a reliable ally? It was inconceivable.

Speaker 4 I mean, literally nobody in that room said, well, hold a sec. You're going to put yourself completely dependent on buying U.S.
defense equipment.

Speaker 4 What happens if a president comes in who says he's going to switch off the software on the F-35s?

Speaker 4 Or, you know, you're going to get rid of your aircraft carriers and your Navy and you're going to design yourself into a Marine Corps to deploy with the U.S. Well, what happens if the U.S.

Speaker 4 is trying to take Greenland off you?

Speaker 1 That never came up before?

Speaker 1 That wasn't something that got thrown around in the room?

Speaker 4 I mean, it's maybe a silly point and obvious to listeners, listeners, but we had no doctrine. When we went to military training or we looked at strategy, we had no doctrine for what to do if the U.S.

Speaker 4 became an adversary. We literally don't have any plans for defending Greenland because it was inconceivable.

Speaker 1 Right. So that you never thought that we would trigger Article 5 by attacking you.

Speaker 4 Right. I mean, when we wouldn't know what to do.

Speaker 1 It makes sense. Yeah.
So here's where it gets complicated, I think, Rory, because you mentioned a couple of things and we'll roll back. And this is maybe

Speaker 1 the explanation of where we, you talked about sort of

Speaker 1 viewing America as sort of this idea that

Speaker 1 our government and our civil service, they all functioned really efficiently and effectively and were run by serious people who had created this worldview where we were the centerpiece of a democratic free world.

Speaker 1 We amplified our power throughout these various allies and we respected each other and we supported each other.

Speaker 1 The truth is it was the failure of that world order to live up to expectation that led to Trump in the first place to a large extent, as you've seen from

Speaker 1 Brexit and populist movements throughout all of Europe. And

Speaker 1 your experience in Afghanistan and Iraq,

Speaker 1 you viewed the

Speaker 1 idealism and seriousness of the people in a really positive light. And it was moving.
And you were impressed by, you know, how hard they worked. But it was a disaster.

Speaker 1 It was a pig fuck.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 1 that led to a real

Speaker 1 loss of faith and cynicism in this world order. And Trump came in as a hard, truth-telling diagnostician.

Speaker 1 This world that you thought was real

Speaker 1 is actually, we're the victims of this. I mean, the irony is we set up a world that we now claim is abusing us.
Yeah. It was our choice.

Speaker 4 John, you've put your finger on probably the most difficult thing that we face, which is this contradiction.

Speaker 4 Because you're completely right. Along with all the stuff.

Speaker 4 that was so positive, there was what you call the pick fuck.

Speaker 1 I was just... By the way, that's trademarked.
Don't think you can just slap that on t-shirts

Speaker 1 and go out there and sell that wherever you want.

Speaker 4 Well, it's part of the Stuart brother thing.

Speaker 1 We can use this. We're brothers.
Stuart Brothers, pig fuck t-shirts. We're fine, yeah.

Speaker 4 So I was back in Afghanistan in August, this August, just now, right? And I sat down with the governor of Bamiyan.

Speaker 4 Last time I sat down with the governor of Bamien, she was a human rights lawyer. This time he has an injured eye, a big turban.

Speaker 4 He's surrounded by guys with clashy coughs, and he was the governor of Bamiyan before 9-11.

Speaker 1 Is he Taliban or is he a warlord? He's Taliban.

Speaker 4 And he blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas. He was the guy that did all this, and he's back again.

Speaker 1 Oh.

Speaker 4 So if you wanted a symbol of how little we achieved, we literally invaded the country to get rid of the Taliban. We spent 20 years.
We spent over a trillion dollars, $1,000 billion.

Speaker 4 And then we hand the country back to the Taliban again. So in that sense, of course, Trump's got a point.
And I could add to that, right?

Speaker 4 Of course, I ran the British International Development Institution, and I could see there was so much wrong.

Speaker 4 You were obviously being tongue-in-cheek when you're talking about government efficiency. Of course, government's massively inefficient.
And I could see all the problems with USAID.

Speaker 4 But what's happened now is we live in such a binary world that there's not much room for the Stewart brothers to say, well,

Speaker 4 yeah. government screwed up and it was inefficient and we've got to reform it and we've got to do better.

Speaker 4 It's all now either you're 100% behind USAID and it was the most wonderful liberal institution in the world, or shut it down, turn off the computer, cut all the funding worldwide. So

Speaker 4 it's the sense of, and this is where I think you want to call out Trump and Musk. It's the bad faith that

Speaker 4 initially people thought, well, you know, maybe they've got a point here. And here are some recommendations I could make to make government a bit more efficient.

Speaker 1 But of course they didn't care about any of that stuff. Well, no, and I think they do it.

Speaker 1 Where I think it goes wrong is the conflation with USAID

Speaker 1 and American hubris and adventurism overseas.

Speaker 1 The arrogance of we will spread democracy to Afghanistan and they will embrace it and we will be famously viewed as liberators in Iraq and it will all work out.

Speaker 1 And so I think to lump in programs that are distributing medicines to poverty-stricken children with HIV with

Speaker 1 a foreign policy that seeks to impose a worldview that may be alien to those areas and to enforce it.

Speaker 1 The same thing with COVID. You know, you can go from, you may think that these governments overreached and that they did certain things, but a lot of it might have been in very good faith.

Speaker 1 But ultimately, when you begin to erode your belief in the civic institutions and the infrastructure that upholds them, they become vulnerable to demagogues. Look, Brexit went first.

Speaker 1 You guys were the first ones to say.

Speaker 4 We were the canaries in the mine. Yeah.

Speaker 1 All right. We're going to take a quick break.
We'll be right back.

Speaker 6 At blinds.com, it's not just about window treatments. It's about you, your style, your space, your way.

Speaker 6 Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right.

Speaker 6 From free expert design help to our 100% satisfaction guarantee, everything we do is made to fit your life and your windows. Because at Blinds.com, the only thing we treat better than Windows is you.

Speaker 6 Black Friday deals are going on all month long. Save up to 45% off site-wide, plus an additional 10% off every order right now at Blinds.com.

Speaker 5 Rules and Restrictions Apply.

Speaker 7 This Black Friday, get six months free when you move your WordPress sites to Kinsta. Enjoy faster load times, no stress when traffic spikes, and hosting you can actually count on.

Speaker 7 We're G2's number one rated host for WordPress for a reason. Visit kinsta.com/slash BF.
That's k-i-n-st-t-a.com slash bf. Don't miss out.
Offer ends December 2nd.

Speaker 4 And I think the way that I look at it is that there were three things that defined the world after 1989.

Speaker 4 There was an idea of liberal democracy, and the number of democracies in the world literally doubled between 88 and 2003. The second one was this idea of globalization, free trade, open markets.

Speaker 4 And the third one was this rules-based international order,

Speaker 4 UN interventions in Bosnia, etc.

Speaker 4 And something happened between about 2004 and 2014. All those things were discredited.
2008 financial crisis wrecked our faith in markets.

Speaker 4 Iraq and Afghanistan wrecked our faith in these kind of international interventions. The rise of China,

Speaker 4 you know, China,

Speaker 4 we don't remember, most people don't remember, in 2004, the Chinese economy was smaller than the Italian economy. It was the seventh largest economy in the world.

Speaker 1 No disrespect to the Italians, by the way. No disrespect to the Italian.
That is in no way meant to diminish

Speaker 1 the accomplishments.

Speaker 4 The wonders of the Italian economy.

Speaker 1 And goodness of the Italian people. 100%.
100%.

Speaker 4 So as China explodes and becomes within 10 years the world's largest manufacturer and exporter, it doesn't become a democracy.

Speaker 4 So by 2014 we've got that and we've got the rise of social media and put all those things together and then it's very remarkable you talked about brexit but it's not just brexit 2014 narendra modi is elected in india 2014 putin takes crimea 2014 isis goes across the mosul border 2015 far-right party elected in poland erdogan also becomes a much more absolutely autocratic leader exactly this is this is erdogan's route 2016 trump's elected for the first time um So

Speaker 4 the world is beginning to change very, very quickly. And now we've entered with Trump to the kind of shadow world.

Speaker 4 So if I go through those three things, liberal democracies become authoritarianism. Free trade has become protectionism.

Speaker 4 Rules-based international order has become the strong will do what they will and the weak must suffer what they must.

Speaker 1 Do you think that this is then self-correcting pendulum swings, right?

Speaker 1 So the overreach of, let's say, liberal democracies who, you know, the fall of the USSR and all of those Eastern European countries becoming more democratic,

Speaker 1 these are natural swings.

Speaker 1 Because it's not as though these, you know, more autocratic societies function better. And, you know, with China, it was really their entry into the WTO, but China was going to grow.

Speaker 1 Anyway, is it maybe a failure of expectation

Speaker 1 of the people in these countries? We believe things to want to be more successful than they are or should be. Is it our expectations that are out of whack?

Speaker 1 Or is it a natural cycle of kind of pendulum swings that go along in terms of these disruptions?

Speaker 1 Or is it a failure of our societies to adequately remedy the unforeseen collateral damage of some of these swings? And I know that's a hugely broad question, and you can take any one of those.

Speaker 4 Well, I think it's four things. I think it's power.
I think it's America. I think it's the modern age and it's ideology.
And what do I mean by that?

Speaker 4 I mean that 1889 to 2004, America has defeated the Soviet Union. It is completely unchallenged.
China is still a minnow

Speaker 4 in the world. And power leads to overreach.
You're like, we've done this in Bosnia. We've done this.

Speaker 1 Hey, hey, go easy, settle down.

Speaker 4 The second one is America. And of course, America is a country based on can do.

Speaker 4 I remember arguing with American officials in Afghanistan, and I would say,

Speaker 4 you literally, you can't do this. You know, H.R.
McMasters was trying to eliminate all corruption from the Afghan government. He's the guy that went on to be Trump's national security advisor.

Speaker 4 And I said, you can't do it. And the answer was always, we're American.
You know, don't give us problems, give us solutions. What is it we need to do? Is it we need more troops?

Speaker 1 Is it we need more money?

Speaker 4 And when I said, you know, there was a document that was circulating,

Speaker 4 this is honestly true, right? The American government, the European governments signed up to a statement by Ashraf Ghani, who became the Afghan president, and it ran as follows.

Speaker 4 Every Afghan is committed to a gender-sensitive, multi-ethnic, centralized state based on democracy, human rights, and the rule of law, right?

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 4 Now, you think it's funny. I think it's funny.
But at the time...

Speaker 1 I remember that. Hamid Karzai had on his resume, he, him.
I think I remember that. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 No, but I mean, why did we not realize at the time how grotesque this was?

Speaker 1 So that's partly about America.

Speaker 4 Then I think there's the point about the modern world, which is that we are in a world of instant gratification.

Speaker 4 You know, when I was waiting for you to come on, I was, you know, scheduling my Uber Eats.

Speaker 1 And I don't want to know that there are...

Speaker 4 I don't want someone to tell me that it's going to take time or it's complicated or

Speaker 1 I want it now, right? Progress.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And then the final thing is ideology.
I think we

Speaker 4 thought that democracy had won and we couldn't see that we were in this funny, funny little bubble.

Speaker 4 And that most of the world wasn't really going in that direction. And that even these words didn't mean the same to different people.
So I remember feeling this.

Speaker 4 I worked part of my life in Indonesia and in Africa. We call a hundred different countries democracies.
In some cases, it means it's Sweden.

Speaker 4 In other cases, it just means there's been a vote, but there's a bunch of corrupt, autocratic bureaucrats who aren't paying any attention to anyone.

Speaker 1 No,

Speaker 1 it makes total sense. And I think the thing that America had a difficult time reconciling is we can't remove corruption from our country.
Right. Let alone.

Speaker 1 So when you hold other places that you're going into, and the other side of it is interventionism takes many forms.

Speaker 1 And we've tried soft power, you know, as they say classically, soft power, hard power, economic sanctions, all those things.

Speaker 1 None of it seems to be particularly foolproof in terms of influence and good outcomes. We've tried lightly bombing countries to decapitate their autocratic leadership, and that turns them into

Speaker 1 God-forsaken hellholes of warlordism. We've tried toppling them with our magnificent army and then holding those countries together with the sinewy textures of our nation-building engineers.

Speaker 1 That doesn't seem to work. You know, what we haven't learned how to do is to manage the expectations and dynamics to create little harm.
I'll go even further.

Speaker 1 I think we caused a lot of this populist turn by destabilizing the Middle East and causing a great deal of migration that ended up going into, you know, globalization and all these other ideals

Speaker 1 are now being challenged by the idea of the nation state. Yeah.

Speaker 4 John, so I think you're absolutely right. But I think we need to guard against too much despair.
Yes.

Speaker 4 The risk is that the right thinks we don't want to have any to do with other countries because we don't like poor people in other countries.

Speaker 4 The left can begin to think a bit like you're saying now, well, we screw it all up anyway, so maybe best we stay at home, we don't do anything.

Speaker 4 Of course, the truth is that under American leadership since the Second World War, and particularly in that 89 to 2014 period, Every year the world got more prosperous, more peaceful.

Speaker 4 There were fewer refugees, there were fewer internally displaced people, more democratic governments. And the big success, which we don't talk about enough, is Europe.

Speaker 4 If you look at countries like Romania and Lithuania in 1989, they were very, very poor autocratic states. They are now prosperous liberal democracies.

Speaker 4 But it requires something that is quite different from the kind of intervention you're talking about.

Speaker 4 It requires really

Speaker 4 rich carrots and sticks and it requires patience. So how did this miracle for these dozen countries in Eastern Europe work?

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 4 It worked because they had the carrot of being able to join the European Union. They had very, very generous structural funds over a long time.
Their population believed in it.

Speaker 4 They had a reason to get behind it. Let's give US a bit of credit for the direction that Japan went in, South Korea went in, Taiwan went in.

Speaker 4 But partly it was because you haven't talked about it very much. I mean, how many of your listeners know that you've still got 25,000 soldiers in South Korea, right?

Speaker 1 All of them, because our listeners are very, very well.

Speaker 4 So keep going for that. 60 years.
Right.

Speaker 4 And the truth is you went through South Korea being a pretty poor military, authoritarian, protectionist government to what it is now, which is one of the most vibrant, interesting, dynamic, liberal countries on Earth.

Speaker 4 So there's a lot of stuff which has gone in the right direction since the Second World War, while the U.S. has been right at the center of this system.

Speaker 4 So I want to keep making the argument for that odd combination that American soft and even hard power, those 25,000 troops, can push things in the right direction.

Speaker 1 Sure.

Speaker 4 But it requires, I think, a couple of things. One of them is patience.
The second thing is, don't talk to the American people too much about it.

Speaker 4 Turns out the places which are going best are the places you never mention.

Speaker 1 How dare you, sir?

Speaker 1 I think you could be right.

Speaker 4 I mean, the fact you don't talk about South Korea is part of the trick, right? You had 2,500 soldiers in Afghanistan. No casualties for 18 months.

Speaker 4 You could have continued doing that forever, but you talked about it so much, much, Biden felt he needed to go big or bust. You don't think that was South Korea?

Speaker 1 Well, there has been though. For a long time, there's, and again, this is now the Trump kind of play of victimhood is that South Korea has used us.

Speaker 1 You know, all these countries, by not militarizing, by using our defense as a shield and creating stability for themselves, were able to focus their resources on this economic development.

Speaker 1 So they've done great, but we've suffered desperately because of that, because we're being forced to,

Speaker 1 you know, nobody ever talks about that. We like our influence being global.
We have more than 750 military bases. Nobody made us build those.
We did that. That was us.

Speaker 1 And as much as we want to pull back, Our Defense Department is getting a raise again. It's going to be a trillion dollar

Speaker 1 defense bill because we're going to build a golden dome and we're going to do all these other things.

Speaker 1 I continue to believe this, and I wonder if you feel the same way about the UK, that the issue in our country is not trade or trade deficits or

Speaker 1 all these other things. It's that we were unable

Speaker 1 to properly distribute and reinvest

Speaker 1 the gigantic wealth that has been generated in this country over these past 30 or 40 years

Speaker 1 into effective, competent change in our own country.

Speaker 4 That's completely right, John. So the story of Reagan and the story of Thatcher was that by releasing the markets, we were going to generate growth.
And you did.

Speaker 1 Trickle down, baby. Yeah, you generated incredible growth.

Speaker 4 I mean, I think one of the things that's difficult to understand in the U.S.

Speaker 4 debate is you are all thinking, well, the reason Trump came to power is that the American economy is relatively weak and that what Trump's doing is going around the world saying, you know, we've been taken for a sucker and they're all getting rich at our expense.

Speaker 4 Of course, the rest of us have spent the last five years looking at you thinking you're an economic miracle.

Speaker 4 Europe's economy was the same size as the American economy 10 years ago. You're now 50% bigger than us.

Speaker 4 So we look at you and we're like, wow, right. Then the question is...

Speaker 4 How do you reconcile that with how somebody feels in Dayton, Ohio who's voting for Trump? How does this make sense? On the one hand, the American economy is going gangbusters.

Speaker 4 You've got the seven largest companies in the world. You've got 70% of all global equities in the United States, you'll be exceptional.

Speaker 4 And yet, a lot of people feel their lives are very underwhelming, very disappointing. They're struggling with cost of it.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 here's where it gets tricky, Rory,

Speaker 1 because you're right. And by the way, the difficulties in those industrialized, or I should say, deindustrialized areas is very real.

Speaker 1 Those folks have much harder lives now as we we can't compete with China's low wage and low regulation environment that creates those. And it did hollow it out.

Speaker 1 But part of the issue there in terms of the political pressure is it almost invariably occurred in our

Speaker 1 small swing state. There's only five states that matter in this country because of our electoral college.
Generally, states are blue or they're red.

Speaker 1 There's some purple states that are still in contention. They are almost all suffering from deindustrialization.

Speaker 1 So that became, because here's, you could make another slogan in our country, and it's called, nobody gives a shit about Oregon.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because

Speaker 1 if Oregon was the swing state, then their issues, which would not be deindustrialized, they'd be something else, would be the ones that dominate. our policy and our public discussion.

Speaker 1 You know, if Iowa was a swing state, we would all be talking about tariffs on any hog-producing countries that might be going along.

Speaker 1 So this is an outsized response to a narrowly focused geographic issue. Sure.
Boom. Taking a quick break.
We shall be back.

Speaker 4 This episode is brought to you by PayPal.

Speaker 1 PayPal helps you make the most of your money. You can earn 20% cash back when you pay in four with PayPal from now through through December 8th.
No fees, no interest.

Speaker 1 Act now to get this limited time offer.

Speaker 8 Save the offer in the app to get 20% cash back when you pay in four from now through December 8th. PayPal.
Expires 12-8. See PayPal.com/slash promo terms subject to approval.

Speaker 8 Learn more at paypal.com slash payin4. Paypal Inc., NMLS 910-457.

Speaker 9 What if thousands of deals were waiting for you? Black Friday is here at Best Buy, where you'll find new door busters and big savings.

Speaker 10 But hurry, Black Friday deals and Saturday, November 29th. Shop now at bestbuy.com.
Best Buy. Imagine that.

Speaker 4 Well, let's look at this problem of democracy, right? Whoa, hey, well, so this is

Speaker 4 an issue in Brexit. So I present The Rest is Politics, which is the UK's biggest podcast.
And the question that comes almost every week to us is, why are we not rejoining the European Union?

Speaker 4 And people point out that something like 65% of the British public now think Brexit was a mistake. So it seemed like a no-brainer, right? 65% of the public think Brexit's a mistake.

Speaker 4 We'll rejoin the European Union, particularly when America is getting a bit erratic. Why don't we get closer to our European allies? But the problem is the problem you've just identified.

Speaker 4 Labour and Conservative, the two main parties, are fighting about this tiny group of states called the Red Wall.

Speaker 4 And those people, and they're mostly in de-industrialized areas, voted to leave the European Union.

Speaker 4 And so so although Keir Stanley, the prime minister, and his entire cabinet voted to remain in the European Union, thought Brexit was a horrible idea, they're not moving even a millimeter closer to even soft versions like rejoining a customs union or anything with Europe because they're worried about those few swing voters.

Speaker 1 And what will happen is reform, UK, will primary everybody from the right, and they'll be the ones that...

Speaker 1 I mean, I don't think Labour's in trouble with that, but I would imagine that the Tories will be consumed by reforms.

Speaker 4 So this is another way in which we all are a bit American. So this is a story in Canada.
It's a story in Australia. It's a story in the United Kingdom.
It's a story in Germany.

Speaker 4 Germany, the far right now, the AFD, which is this party that Musk was getting behind, this neo-fascist party, now up at 26% of the polls. It's the biggest party, right? Right.
In the polls.

Speaker 4 And I was a Conservative member of parliament. Yes.
And I...

Speaker 1 After having been a member of the Liberal Party of the Project. The Labour Party.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah, exactly. The Labour Party.

Speaker 4 And I... I don't know where my, you know, my politics in US terms is probably a little bit to the left of Hillary Clinton.

Speaker 1 But I'm not, I'm not, I'm not. I'm not.
That makes you a conservative.

Speaker 4 I'm not full Bernie Sanders, right? And when Boris Johnson became Prime Minister, I was so horrified. I mean, the guy's a complete, he's a terrible human being.

Speaker 4 He was clearly going to be a terrible Prime Minister.

Speaker 1 But a wonderful zipline photo op.

Speaker 4 Yeah, he's a funny buffoon. He's a good clown, right? I mean, it's the age of clowns in politics.
Yes. He's a funny guy.

Speaker 4 Trump maybe can also be quite funny sometimes. I mean, that's part of the problem with these people.

Speaker 4 I mean, you're funnier than both of them, but they're quite funny. And they're quite good television performers, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, they're charismatic, but they play into a real sense of grievance. That is real.

Speaker 1 The problem with a good diagnostician is they also have to be a good fixer. And that's where we're starting to see the chaos unroll.

Speaker 4 And a couple of things there. So

Speaker 4 I and 21 of my colleagues would not put up with Boris pushing ahead with a hard Brexit. And we resigned.

Speaker 4 We left Parliament, which is one of the reasons I've been a bit puzzled by why my Republican senator and Congresspeople friends were not doing the same with Trump.

Speaker 4 I cannot understand what they're doing. I mean, they say to me, well, you know, I'd lose my seat.
Well, we all gave up our seats to protest against Boris Johnson.

Speaker 4 So why are they not prepared to risk their seats to protest against Trump?

Speaker 1 I'm sorry, did you just say, are they not prepared to risk their seats? Is that

Speaker 1 are you suggesting that self-interest and self-preservation should not be the sole motivation for listen, Donald Trump has a hold on

Speaker 1 his constituency.

Speaker 1 I can't honestly think of even Reagan did not have, you know, they keep talking about cancel culture.

Speaker 1 The real cancel culture in this country is anybody who might speak out against Donald Trump, who might be on the right, is immediately exiled. There was a gentleman, this has just recently happened.

Speaker 1 There was a gentleman who was full MAGA, Pentagon spokesperson.

Speaker 1 He wrote an op-ed about the chaos going on in the Department of Defense. Donald Trump Jr.
just put out a statement. This man is excommunicated.
This man has been exiled from the MAGA.

Speaker 1 Like you can be cast out. Like it's Thunderdome.
Mad Max must you must wander the desert. It is a

Speaker 1 bizarre

Speaker 1 purity test.

Speaker 4 It's incredible.

Speaker 4 And for me, as a conservative who's turned against this, you see it very directly. So,

Speaker 4 you know, I had J.D. Vance

Speaker 4 tweeting against me and saying, you know,

Speaker 4 he said,

Speaker 4 I've always said that Rory thinks he's got an IQ of 130, but actually he's got an IQ of 110. So

Speaker 1 I love, by the way, I loved the specificity of that.

Speaker 1 I think it's 130, but it's 110. And most people are like, 110 is pretty good.
I would take 110. That's what I thought.

Speaker 4 That's pretty proud with 110.

Speaker 1 Sure.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it sounds great.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 4 So, yeah, so then you get, once that happens, and I've had Elon Musk tweet out against me, I've had Donald J. Trump Jr.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 4 It's amazing what's unleashed, because of course they have tens or hundreds of millions of followers in some cases.

Speaker 4 So then you suddenly are hit with a barrage of, you know, five, six thousand replies. And I'm trying to get in a fight with J.D.

Speaker 4 Vance about my interpretation of Christianity and his interpretation of Christianity. But most of the response that you get is you wouldn't be able to beat him in a push-up competition.

Speaker 1 He will punch you in the face, sir.

Speaker 4 Exactly.

Speaker 1 You know, the amazing thing is the issue with them is they believe their IQs are 180. Right.
And they're 110 or 100. You know, there's an infallibility.

Speaker 1 Now, what's happening right now will test their ability to...

Speaker 1 The reality distortion field that they have been able to project that's been really effective at inoculating them against any kind of accountability or criticism is really going to be pushed here because of this trade war.

Speaker 1 There is nothing that they pushed more vehemently. There is nothing that they described in starker terms as being the medicine that was necessary to reverse the

Speaker 1 victimization that Americans writ large have faced in the world. And you are watching it crumble.

Speaker 1 The president sat down with the heads of Target and Walmart and other big box stores, and they were like, hey, man, I just want to let you know, in two weeks, we are going to be out of shit.

Speaker 1 Like you are going to see empty, and all of a sudden, and then the bond market went crazy and treasuries, you know, the dollar is weakening. Treasuries aren't being bought up as much by

Speaker 1 as the safe haven.

Speaker 1 And all of a sudden today, Donald Trump said, you know, I'm thinking actually, you know, all these people are kissing my ass to make deals.

Speaker 1 I'm thinking I'm just going to drop the tariffs to like 40%, 50%. I don't know.
You know what? China has to make a deal. So why not just drop all the tariffs? Because they have to.

Speaker 1 And I'm wondering, will this be the moment that finally they go, oh,

Speaker 1 the man behind the curtain isn't brilliant, doesn't have the answers? Or will there be just another

Speaker 1 reality distortion kind of moment for them?

Speaker 4 John, I mean, again, you know far more about the U.S., but from the European and international perspectives,

Speaker 4 we are in a real

Speaker 4 existential crisis here. I mean, for the first time

Speaker 4 in 70 or 80 years,

Speaker 4 Europeans are asking themselves, maybe we need to be closer to China than the U.S. I mean, it's mad, right? There is no moral equivalence between China and even Donald Trump's US.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I just can't see that being an option. I just can't.
And yet, it's happening.

Speaker 4 And China,

Speaker 4 basically, China had one objective over the last 20 years, which is to break the link between the U.S. and its allies.

Speaker 1 As did Russia. Same thing.
Absolutely.

Speaker 4 And you can see Xi Jinping, the Chinese premier, has been touring around Southeast Asia. Usually he doesn't say anything, but the last week he's been saying, I'm going to be your reliable ally.

Speaker 4 You can see op-eds appearing in the Chinese newspapers about how Europe needs to reach out to China.

Speaker 4 We're going to get great offers on Chinese electric vehicles, which is going to make a lot of sense to us because they'll be very cheap and it will help us in the energy transition and poor people in Europe are struggling to afford electric vehicles, which we're forcing them to buy.

Speaker 4 So all this is happening, right?

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 1 it's completely bewildering.

Speaker 4 So we're praying that the world is going to right itself. You know, we're praying that the old United States that we used to know is coming back.

Speaker 4 And that in the end, the institutions of the United States, the midterms, and of course, sadly, in the middle of this, it's a really sad thing.

Speaker 4 People are slightly thinking, well, I kind of hope he screws up the global economy because that might finally destroy him.

Speaker 4 You know, people are thinking, well, the one thing Hitler didn't do is screw up the economy. He was quite good at creating jobs.

Speaker 1 Well, that's the authoritarian bargain. The authoritarian bargain.
You can disappear the unpopular. You can get rid of the immigrants and the trans and the thing, but the trains, really.

Speaker 4 You've got to get the trains running on time.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 4 So Trump is very interesting. If he can be the first proto-fascist who turns out to be entirely economically illiterate and completely incompetent and totally

Speaker 4 able to drive up prices in the United States,

Speaker 4 crash the stock market, destroy America's position as the world's reserve currency. And it's felt by people, right? It's felt in Medicare.
It's felt in Medicaid.

Speaker 4 I mean, it's not, I'm talking to you from Yale University.

Speaker 4 Obviously, the average voter does not particularly care what happens to an Ivy League University or even USAID or many of the stuff I care about: Voice of America, the Wilson Center.

Speaker 1 All the things that have been holding our great country back.

Speaker 4 That's right.

Speaker 4 And the tariff thing, I mean, I spent so much time talking to colleagues in Switzerland, in Europe, in Southeast Asia, in China about this.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 it is

Speaker 4 bewildering. I mean, your listeners will understand that Trump is

Speaker 4 saying four completely contradictory things, right? He's saying

Speaker 4 these tariffs are going to generate a huge amount of money for the U.S. government, right?

Speaker 1 No more taxes, all the money from tariffs. That's right.
It's the most beautiful word in the English language. Exactly.

Speaker 4 We're going to import all this stuff from China. And second thing is it's going to create lots of jobs, right? That's the opposite.
That's we're not importing things from China.

Speaker 4 We're going to make them here, in which case you don't get the tax revenue.

Speaker 4 Third thing he's saying is, no, no, no, these are temporary things which are being used to achieve something else.

Speaker 4 They're being used to get a concession on fentanyl from Canada or Mexico. In other words,

Speaker 1 Canada's been flooding us with over $40 worth of fentanyl over the last 10 years.

Speaker 4 So that's a completely different theory. That's like, I'm not actually going to keep tariffs.
I'm not going to get the revenue from it. I'm not going to get the jobs from it.

Speaker 4 I'm just using it to stop the fentanyl coming in. And then the fourth theory, which seems to be going with China, is I'm using it to damage somebody else's economy.
It's like sanctions.

Speaker 4 I'm just punching them. And I'm going to take some damage in my own economy, but they're going to feel it more.
Walmart will feel the pressure, but China macroeconomics will feel it more.

Speaker 4 He may be right, but then there's a whole question about who's got more political resilience?

Speaker 4 Xi Jinping with his people or Donald Trump with his people as the painer inflicted on these two economies in different ways.

Speaker 1 Well, I think we're seeing right now

Speaker 1 how it's changing.

Speaker 4 And so just, I mean, that's a kind of overly complicated way. As soon as you, I learned as a politician, as soon as you have four points, you've lost everybody.

Speaker 1 But the first one was good enough, Rohan.

Speaker 1 I was riveted by the first one.

Speaker 1 I don't remember any of the rest of it. But let me ask you this then.
So, but China, look, nobody is going to trust, they have the same problem that Trump has.

Speaker 1 When you are creating something out of executive action, you are not creating something lasting through legislation. And people understand that that has less stability.

Speaker 1 So a new president comes in four years from now and immediately reverses it. And so nobody is going to reshore the factories that were going to cost billions of dollars.

Speaker 1 But so the question is this, though. You keep saying, you know, 70, 80 years post-war stability.

Speaker 1 As Bannon would say, these are the great turnings, the 70 to 80 year great turnings. This is the new one.
So what is the new turning?

Speaker 1 Because it's very clear that the populist leaders have a very different view. They have a nation state.
Look,

Speaker 1 in the old days, it was democracy versus authoritarianism or capitalism versus communism. Now it's woke versus unwoke.

Speaker 1 It's purity versus multiculturalism, meritocracy versus DEI. Now, I don't buy that any of those things are

Speaker 1 real in the way that they are portrayed. But that seems to be the organizing principle.
And how do you create stability out of that?

Speaker 1 And can the EU and the UK be the leaders of that old democratic order? Or will they fall prey to the same pressures? Will Russia and the United States be able to split Europe like they're doing now?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Well, I think first thing is you've made a really important point, which is the world's changed. We've

Speaker 4 entered this funny shadow world. And basically what we're looking at is a

Speaker 4 new form of fascism, really. I mean, fundamentally, these people, it doesn't matter whether it's Erdogan or it's some of the people around Trump or it's Narendra Modi,

Speaker 4 these are people who think, like many people did in the 1920s and 30s, that liberal democracy was kind of weak and indecisive and incompetent and it failed people.

Speaker 1 I think Musk said that empathy is the world's biggest problem.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, like you, I was talking to Esther Klein recently, and he's

Speaker 4 the whole world's been talking to Esther Klein. I think you made that joke.

Speaker 1 Kids everywhere. Kids everywhere.
It's like Chalamé promoting a Dylan biopic. You can't get rid of him.

Speaker 4 It is like that.

Speaker 4 Exactly. You can't get rid of him anyway.
Anyway, one of his points is he thinks that Musk was motivated by the fact that he felt that his employees were rude to him.

Speaker 4 and that they kept asking for empathy and that a lot of this rage with DEI and wokeism is just Musk and other tech bros feeling that the people who work for their companies were not obedient enough to the great leader.

Speaker 1 That's interesting.

Speaker 4 Anyway, this idea

Speaker 4 that we're going to come in, we're going to bring in strong men and they're going to be efficient, they're going to get stuff done, and we don't care too much about all that other stuff.

Speaker 4 And it's, in their mind,

Speaker 4 it's all nonsense and inefficiency.

Speaker 1 You know, it might be woke, it might be law, but also that they're going to reclaim something. They're going to reclaim their country's default setting.

Speaker 1 The default setting of America being white, Christian, and male, male, the default setting of Germany being Germans.

Speaker 1 Isn't there something that

Speaker 1 it's a reset seeking to change what the Great Society or the New Deal or

Speaker 1 any of those other kinds of migratory, globalistic, you know, it's a reset.

Speaker 4 It's a reset and it's a reset that has two particular implications. The first is corruption, which I think you talk about a lot,

Speaker 4 which is these regimes foster corruption. I mean, tariffs is a very good example.

Speaker 4 Tariffs are a lovely thing for Trump because each individual business has to come on bended knees and ask for a little exemption, right?

Speaker 4 The second thing that it breeds is violence and conflict. So you mentioned Germany.

Speaker 4 The AFD in Germany say that there are real Germans and they do an analysis which basically, in their sort of ideology,

Speaker 4 says that Muslims are not real Germans. And that includes German citizens who are Muslims.
And they have this idea of re-migration, which basically means you push them out of the country.

Speaker 1 Of citizens.

Speaker 4 Of citizens. And this is true in Austria, too.
These parties have a full ideology where they've actually counted the number of people from different countries that should be.

Speaker 4 So they say we don't want zero Afghans, but in a Germany of 100 million, we think

Speaker 4 there should be 300.

Speaker 4 They've counted the numbers. It's a very, very weird.

Speaker 1 Can those people have families? Or

Speaker 1 it's capped at 300?

Speaker 4 I think it's capped at 300. Maybe if you get above it, you leave again.
And actually, the Austrian far-right, Kiko's far-right, has been very clear about this,

Speaker 4 that this will extend to citizens as well. Now, why does this lead to violence? It leads to violence because it questions

Speaker 4 the fundamental idea since the Second World War, which is the equality of everybody's rights.

Speaker 4 That it doesn't matter whether you're Muslim or white, you have the same rights. Once you question that, then other things become more likely.
And this is where it gets dangerous, because

Speaker 4 then you begin to think, well, you know, I should add a little bit to my territory here.

Speaker 4 And look at the way that Trump thinks about Greenland as an example of this, because I think other leaders are going to begin behaving like this.

Speaker 4 What's so strange about it is that he doesn't even have the grace to lie or be a hypocrite. So you talked about Timothy Chalamet.
Timothy Chalamay is being Henry V, right? Yes.

Speaker 4 He's going off to France, and he's at least pretending that he has a legal claim to France. You know, his dad's mum's dad was actually the king of France.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 4 Yes, yes. And when Hitler's invading Poland, he's at least faking a border incident, claiming he's responding to the Poles attacking him.

Speaker 4 What's odd about Trump and Greenland is there's no moral or legal excuse at all. He just says, I want it.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 4 I've got the troops. I've got the money.
Give it to me.

Speaker 1 And that collapse of

Speaker 4 international legal frameworks, morality is very unusual. I mean, it's taking us back almost a thousand years.
It's the mentality of a warlord.

Speaker 1 No question. No question.
But I think they are underestimating the role that stability plays in the economic successes of the last 70 or 80 years.

Speaker 1 And I think liberal democracies were underestimating the role that immigration. or uncontrolled immigration played in that stability.
That

Speaker 1 by, you know, there's a difference between recognizing human equality and not controlling borders.

Speaker 1 And I do understand you welcome people, but there has to be the biggest problem in immigration in this country is that our system is just utterly broken. There are no rules.

Speaker 1 They're bringing, getting green cards. You could be here for 40 years.
You could be here. We don't know how many people we want to have in.

Speaker 1 We don't, you know, by not being able to successfully articulate and execute policies, we make ourselves vulnerable to these other kinds of disruptions, which are far more existential.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 4 And I didn't quite get on to your point about Europe. Immigration, uncontrolled immigration, is the number one reason for the rise of the far-right in Europe.

Speaker 4 And unless mainstream centrist parties can come up with serious policies on how to be humane, generous, but also control immigration, how to say,

Speaker 4 we're going to take asylum seekers, but we're going to be realistic about the numbers we're going to take. These are going to be the criteria.
We're going to share the burden across Europe.

Speaker 4 If you can't do that, you're dude. If you can do that, this is an incredible opportunity for Europe.

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 4 An astonishing opportunity because

Speaker 4 suddenly we can be what we haven't been for a very long time, which is stand up and be serious about these values which are at the heart of the European Union.

Speaker 4 You know, we talk a lot about democracy, we talk a lot about equality, and of course Musk wants to suggest it's all fraudulent. It's not.

Speaker 4 And particularly in Eastern Europe, where people have been through this experience in 1999, they believe it deeply. Talk to a poll.
They really believe this stuff.

Speaker 1 There is room for a law and order liberalism. There is a room for a stable, progressive feeling that is not just

Speaker 1 based in idealism, but based in infrastructure and based in the idea of real governance that doesn't, you know, one of the problems here on the left is if you're going to solve one problem, that problem also has to solve every problem.

Speaker 1 If I want to do housing, that also has to solve global warming.

Speaker 1 I also think,

Speaker 1 boy, this is getting us into a whole other discussion. And I apologize for this, but, but, and I really appreciate you taking the time and bringing these insights.

Speaker 1 But I think that the world's climate policies have been disastrous in a lot of different ways. One of which is the rhetoric of

Speaker 1 we cannot get to 1.5 degrees. We have six months left.
We have eight months left. We have, if we don't change our ways, they're asking human beings to no longer be progress oriented.

Speaker 1 I think how many COP conferences has there been? What has it been 40 now? And then what they would do is say, oh, we'll just put a carbon tax on. Oh, good.

Speaker 1 Well, in six months, when you're voted out of office, let us know how that goes. I think we have to rethink.
how this is all being accomplished. Yeah.

Speaker 4 And John, I mean, the most simple thing thing in Europe is that most of our environmental policies have been regressive, which means that they've had the biggest impact on the poor. Right.

Speaker 4 Because what economists...

Speaker 1 As everything does.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Well, and this is partly because economists have got a perfectly logical argument, which is what you want to do is you want to tax people's carbon consumption of their energy use, because that's going to encourage them to reduce it, right?

Speaker 4 But of course, who finds the biggest proportion of their income going on filling their vehicle or heating their home? It's the poor, not you and me, right?

Speaker 4 So we are pushing a green transition onto the shoulders of the poor.

Speaker 4 So this also involves having much bigger conversations about tax, about redistribution, about the kind of societies you want to have.

Speaker 4 And these are not easy, but to return to where I was, I was a working politician. And there's something very odd going on in politics.
I've written a book which in the US, it's a title you might like.

Speaker 4 It's called How Not to Be a Politician.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 4 And it's the story of my spending 10 years being a pretty useless politician. But I'm trying to be honest about what it's actually like being a politician.
You know, how totally mad your life is.

Speaker 4 How much time you're spending wasting fundraising. How much time you're spending trying to negotiate with the whips.

Speaker 1 Even in the UK.

Speaker 4 Even in the UK. I mean, it's much worse than the US, but even in the UK.

Speaker 4 You know, when I'm running to be mayor of London, I'm spending a lot of time going to see very, very boring wealthy people trying to ask them for money and putting up whatever their be-in-the-bonnets is about residence parking or Israel or whatever they want to talk to me about.

Speaker 4 I decide I want to minimize the horrors of what's happening with Israel and Gaza at the moment. But I'm saying to them, listen, I'm running to be mayor of London.

Speaker 4 Why are you asking me about my policy on, I don't know, Kashmir?

Speaker 4 Anyway, put that aside, I guess what I'm getting to is we have created a frozen system. Politics feels paralyzed.

Speaker 4 And one of the reasons you get the Musks and the Trumps is that they are offering to come in with with a sledgehammer and smash the whole thing up.

Speaker 4 And one of the things I'm trying to get across, I guess, to people who've not been politicians is until you've been in the system, you don't feel

Speaker 4 how you're just kind of stuck in treacle all the time. You just cannot move.

Speaker 4 We spend all our time meeting people and reading smart books about how we can transform things. And then when you try to do it, nothing happens.

Speaker 4 A hundred legal reasons, 100 process reasons. You You know, I was a, I found myself as the cabinet minister in charge of budgets of tens of billions of dollars.
And it was unbelievably unsatisfying.

Speaker 4 I felt it was more fulfilling when I was restoring one block in the old city of Kabul in Afghanistan. I ran a non-profit called Turquoise Mountain, which my wife now runs.

Speaker 4 It was really exciting and fulfilling. And I'm working with a couple hundred people and getting stuff done.

Speaker 4 When I'm in charge of a huge government department, The basic answer to almost everything you want to do is, I'm afraid it can't be done.

Speaker 4 And if it's not your civil servants saying it, it's the poll polling people or it's your political leadership saying, no, that's not going to work with this voter or that voter or the other.

Speaker 4 So how do we find

Speaker 4 energy and responsible energy? Because you began with this and maybe it's what I want to finish with.

Speaker 4 When I was running in opposition, I realized that the easiest way to win is you just say, this is all bullshit. These guys are idiots.

Speaker 1 They've got no idea what they're doing. Look at how crazy.
Hey, stop describing my show.

Speaker 1 That's my job.

Speaker 4 Exactly. And, of course, incredibly tempting, and it works very, very, very well.
But, of course, it also feeds into all the problems of our modern culture.

Speaker 4 This kind of Uber Eats mentality, our lack of tolerance with complexity or delays, and produces, ultimately, Trump, or in a smaller version, Boris Johnson, which is the politics of spectacle.

Speaker 4 the politics of statements. It's not really about, you know, my boring four points about how his tariff policy undermines itself, right?

Speaker 4 It's all about claiming to do something. It's the politics of reality TV.
And I think undoing that involves more than just you and me being thoughtful and earnest.

Speaker 4 It involves really thinking about the modern world and thinking about our culture.

Speaker 4 which is quite difficult to look at and the role that things like social media play in our culture, who our heroes are, what our morality is.

Speaker 1 And a persuasive case to improve those that can have electoral success, because ultimately it almost sounds like you're describing this kind of strange paradox of politicians in incumbent situations who show no courage so that they can keep these jobs that they don't do anything in and get very little satisfaction from.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 4 and deeply depressing. I mean, most of my colleagues are depressed.
Most of them feel their lives are much less than they wanted them to be.

Speaker 4 Let me finish with one last plug, because I work for an amazing American non-profit called Give Directly.

Speaker 4 And my slightly awkward link to that is they have a policy of giving unconditional cash transfer to the poorest people in the world.

Speaker 1 Like a micro loan kind of a thing, or is this a different...

Speaker 4 Except they don't ask for the money back. Oh.
It's just a grant. And the results are spectacular.

Speaker 4 You know, you turn up in a Rwandan village three months after they've received literally unconditional cash for every house and the whole place has been transformed.

Speaker 4 Electricity is out, everyone's got livestock, the roofs have been repaired, the kids are in school. It's unbelievable.
But it's an exact example of what we've been talking about all the time.

Speaker 4 The evidence is there, but the politics of it are unbelievably tough. How do you explain to a voter?

Speaker 4 that actually what all the research, all the randomized control studies showed that the best way to do international development is to literally just give someone $900 in cash, not monitor them, not ask them what they're going to do.

Speaker 4 Right.

Speaker 1 Bottom up, not top down. Yeah.

Speaker 4 And there is another example of amongst, I get hundreds of examples, of the fundamental challenges of our society.

Speaker 4 Decentralization against centralization, bottom against top, and above all, communication.

Speaker 1 And that will be, and listen, your mouth to God's ears, but this is a moment, as you said earlier, and I appreciate you summing it up in that way, of opportunity.

Speaker 1 And something is going to be built in the shadow of this chaos. And if we do it right, it's going to be something really lasting that can give the same kind of years of stability and progress.

Speaker 1 And hopefully that emerges

Speaker 1 from all of this. And that we still have podcasts after that happens.

Speaker 4 And that we still have America because we love America. We want you guys back.
Come back.

Speaker 1 Come back, America. The perfect way to end it.
Rory Stewart, thank you so much for joining us. Obviously, co-host of the rest is politics.
Please say hello to Alistair and everybody else. And

Speaker 1 really appreciate you being here and taking the time.

Speaker 4 Thank you for your time. Bye-bye.
Bye.

Speaker 1 I don't know any other way to describe a gentleman like that other than delightful.

Speaker 11 You appreciated the accent.

Speaker 1 I cannot tell you how much I appreciate

Speaker 1 an accent like that breaking things down.

Speaker 1 What it is is the four things that will destroy the world are simply this.

Speaker 11 I'm sure he'll love that impression.

Speaker 1 It's a terrible.

Speaker 1 I don't have the accents down, but my God,

Speaker 1 the other thing is for the life that he's led, you would think there'd be a little more wear and tear on the tires. He was in Afghanistan, soldier, then MP, minister, writer, teacher.
I mean, Jesus.

Speaker 11 I guess there's not too much sun damage in the UK to be done. So

Speaker 1 I cannot believe that you went to the pastiness of his countenance.

Speaker 11 I mean, how dare you

Speaker 1 at long last, Lauren.

Speaker 1 But it is, you know, what it was, I thought most interesting is there is a wistfulness and a kind of confusion in the accusatory tone of Trump and Vance.

Speaker 1 And the kind of, hey, I, you know, we were under the impression actually that you in the United States were were were benefiting quite a bit from this and we appreciated the stability so

Speaker 11 i know looking into this episode something that really sat with me was the european commission chiefs comments i'm currently having countless talks with heads of state and government around the world who want to work together with us on the new order Everyone is asking for more trade with Europe.

Speaker 11 And it's not just about economic ties. You know, Lord.
It's different time now.

Speaker 1 I think it's it's so amazing when you think about, you know, what has been the cry of like the conspiracy right forever, this new world order. And what is Trump ushering in?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 12 I mean, something that like I'm sitting with is I'm like, I can't believe we're kind of rooting for Trump to like, and you guys talked about this in the episode, but it's like, we're hoping he screws up the global economy so people start to see the reality of like who he is.

Speaker 1 Man, boy, do I hope that it doesn't take a screw up to the global economy for people to see who he is. And to be quite frank, I don't even think that will do it.
I just don't think that they view

Speaker 1 his actions and negative effects as being in any way correlated. They'll always view it as

Speaker 1 sort of like in the old days, you know, the left used to cling to communism. Well, communism's never been tried.

Speaker 1 You know, just because Stalin killed 8 million people in a forest in Russia, communism's never been tried. And I think you will always have that

Speaker 1 with Trump. And God, I hope it doesn't take this economic chaos to do that.
I hope we pull out of this spiral.

Speaker 1 Cooler heads have to prevail, but

Speaker 1 man, it is wild to watch, innit? It is, yeah. It's been 100 days, guy.

Speaker 1 I don't even think it's been 100 days. Look how old I look.

Speaker 11 I've aged so much.

Speaker 1 Not at all.

Speaker 1 Brittany, what are the people saying? What are the good people saying? What are they saying?

Speaker 12 Yes, our listeners.

Speaker 1 What do they want from us? Oh, congratulations on a Webby Award.

Speaker 11 Hey, congratulations to you.

Speaker 1 The Ram.

Speaker 1 You guys, look at us congratulating each other.

Speaker 12 We did it, guys.

Speaker 11 We're like the Spider-Man meme.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 12 Hey, John, whatever happened to Elon coming on the Daily Show?

Speaker 1 Oh, he came on and it was great. I thought it was a productive conversation.
I don't know. You know, the whole thing occurred.

Speaker 1 He, I guess we did a bit on Doge and I obviously came up with all kinds of billions of dollars that we could save from subsidies and corporate thing and blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1 That was the real cost savings to me. He, you know, said,

Speaker 1 he said, not, not us, we didn't make any entreaty. He said, I'll come on the show if you air it unedited.
And we went,

Speaker 1 Sure,

Speaker 1 fine. That's how most of them are.
So sure, what the fuck? And then he said, like, you're a propagandist.

Speaker 1 And he started to back away. And I said, look, you come on or don't come on, but don't pretend like it's, I don't live up to a standard.
And that is the last

Speaker 1 and I think Tesla was at, you know,

Speaker 1 at least 80% of its value at that point. And it's since, I think, plunged to whatever it is.
Obviously,

Speaker 1 not connected, but I did

Speaker 1 DM him. Is that a thing? Yeah, it is.
I texted him and just said like, hey, man, so is there somebody I should, you know, have our guys reach out to to make this happen? And

Speaker 1 I got ghosted.

Speaker 11 You got ghosted by Elon.

Speaker 1 I got left on red, man. Wow.
Yeah.

Speaker 12 I mean, we've all been there.

Speaker 1 Not by Elon, but

Speaker 1 well, actually, judging from his most recent revelations of his baby mamas, I think everyone has been left on red at some point

Speaker 1 by that gentleman. So, yeah, I don't imagine it will.

Speaker 1 I would be surprised.

Speaker 11 I think I have some bad news because I was reading that one of the reasons he's claiming he's leaving government is the nasty and unethical attacks from the left. So that might be why

Speaker 1 you're on red. Completely, I'm sure, undeserved, you know, in no way reflective of standing on a stage with a chainsaw celebrating the loss of livelihoods for tens of thousands of

Speaker 1 well-intentioned government workers. I'm sure.
Yes, no, this is all completely out of the blue. And surely.

Speaker 1 Listen, if there's one thing that this administration does better than anybody I've ever seen, it's play the victim.

Speaker 1 I've never seen any people ever, including when my kids were three and two years old,

Speaker 1 evade accountability and responsibility and blame others in the way that these people do. It's truly shameless.

Speaker 12 Amen, sister friend.

Speaker 1 Thank you.

Speaker 1 Look at us, the sisterhood of the traveling pants over here.

Speaker 12 Do you want another one?

Speaker 1 Yeah, give me another one. All right.
Give me another one.

Speaker 12 Is it worth it in this day and age to go to school for journalism?

Speaker 1 Oh, wow. Any question that starts with, is it worth it? I always want to end with, let me work.

Speaker 1 And reverse. All right.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow.

Speaker 12 Yeah, it's a tough one.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 it's.

Speaker 1 I don't know if they're talking about the financial. I will say this.
Is it worth it to society? Hell

Speaker 1 fucking yes.

Speaker 1 We need committed, idealistic, tenacious, resilient young students to go into journalism and try not to be defeated by the general outrage, incentivized

Speaker 1 financial system that we have of discourse. Like we need those people desperately.

Speaker 1 And the people that I've met that are going into that, that are young people are impressive and committed to all those incredible outcomes. Is it worth it to them?

Speaker 1 I don't know the world that you're walking into.

Speaker 1 You know, the executive producer of CBS, 60 Minutes, just quit rather than apologize because he didn't do anything wrong editing an interview, which everybody. does.
It didn't change it.

Speaker 1 So I don't know the world they're walking into, but I know if that world can change for the better, we need those people. So whoever wrote that, yeah.

Speaker 11 Do it.

Speaker 1 Do it. Yeah.

Speaker 11 I mean, I would, I was a working journalist who didn't go to J school, so I might be a bit biased. Right.

Speaker 11 But I will say that with the changing media landscape, I would just urge people who do invest in a program to make sure it's forward thinking and thinking about the new technologies and the ways you make a living now now as a working journalist, how to be a freelancer, you know, those more practical, forward-thinking things.

Speaker 1 So let me, let me go with Lauren's answer.

Speaker 1 Can we strike my answer? Because the answer that Lauren just gave was actually actionable and perfect. That I think, boy, that's such a good answer is to think about what that environment is now.

Speaker 1 and choose a program like that, Lauren. What she said.

Speaker 12 A little bit of life advice.

Speaker 1 Sister, what are, what, what, I don't know which member of the traveling pants you are, because I'm not sure who's in that.

Speaker 1 And I think there was four of us, but Jillian is working remote today, so she's not around. But

Speaker 1 yes, boy, that's a good answer. Brittany, how else can they get in touch with us? What can they do?

Speaker 12 Twitter, We Are Weekly Show Pod, Instagram Threads, TikTok, Blue Sky, We Are Weekly Show Podcast. And you can like, subscribe, and comment on our YouTube channel, The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart.

Speaker 1 Great job, as always, guys. Lead producer Lauren Walker, producer Brittany Mamedovic, video editor and engineer Rob Vitola.
Who, Rob, I'm telling you that pushing back my computer was just the ticket.

Speaker 1 I felt it. I don't think I banged on the desk as much for our audio editor and engineer, Nicole Boyce.

Speaker 1 Researcher and associate producer Jillian Spear, executive producers, as always, Chris McShane and Katie Gray. Thank you guys so much.
And we will see you on the next Weekly Show podcast next week.

Speaker 1 Bye-bye.

Speaker 1 The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart is a comedy central podcast. It's produced by Paramount Audio and Busboy Productions.

Speaker 13 Your global campaign just launched.

Speaker 5 But wait, the logo's cropped.

Speaker 13 The colors are off. And did Legal clear that image? When teams create without guardrails, mistakes slip through.
But not with Adobe Express, the quick and easy app to create on-brand content.

Speaker 13 Brand kits and lock templates make following design guidelines a no-brainer for HR sales and marketing teams.

Speaker 13 And commercially safe AI powered by Firefly lets them create confidently so your brand always shows up polished, protected, and consistent everywhere. Learn more at adobe.com slash go slash express.

Speaker 14 Lowe's knows that saving is always top of mind, especially this season. That's why we've picked some great deals for early Black Friday.

Speaker 14 Get free select DeWalt, Cobalt, or Craftsman tools when you buy a select battery or combo kit.

Speaker 5 More tools? Why not?

Speaker 14 Plus, we've got select pre-lit artificial Christmas trees starting at $59.98 because it's never too early to think Christmas. Get Black Friday prices without the crowds.

Speaker 5 Lows, we help.

Speaker 14 You save.

Speaker 5 While supplies last, selection varies by location.

Speaker 11 Paramount Podcasts.