The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Brian Stewart -- Where Do Our Times Fit In History?

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

Brian Stewart is a veteran of The Bridge but we've missed him the last few years as he was off writing, and then selling, his highly successful  book -- On The Ground. Today he returns to talk about current times and how they fit in history. I've done 1520 episodes of The Bridge, this may be in the top ten! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You're just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. And today, Brian Stewart, the award-winning author and former foreign correspondent, is with us to, well, to talk a little bit about history in terms of the big stories of our time. So we'll do that right after this. Hello, once again. Welcome to Wednesday of another busy week here on the Bridge. And I'm excited to do today's program because my old friend, call us. Lee. Brian Stewart is with us. So welcome to the program. Once again, Brian, you've been on here

more than a few times, but it's been a little while. Hi, Peter. After a very successful and best-selling book on the ground, which came out last year, still selling lots of, you know, stories about your career and putting stories in context, talking about the business of journalism and what you've seen over your time. So congratulations. Congratulations on that book. It's been rewarded with much praise and mentions in the honors list. So good for you. Very nice to hear that.

Thank you for Peter. So the object of today is not to deal up to the moment with the stories of today, but to put the big stories of our time into some context in terms of where they land in the world of history. And there's three, basically three areas I want to cover. I want to cover the Iran War. I want to cover the Russia-Ukraine war. And I want to cover the Canada-U.S. trade war and the relationship between our two countries. But I'm going to save that one at the end and start with, well, start with the Iran War.

You know, you've covered conflicts in different parts of the world over your distinguished career as a foreign correspondent. But when you look at this one, what do you see? Where do you place it in the, I don't know, the lexicon of the history of conflict? Well, it certainly is a momentous war because a lot of things are being tried out that are very new, but also it's a continuing, continuation to some extent of a seemingly endless drama in the Gulf region and the Middle You know, Peter, my first memory ever of a newscast was when I was a little kid about five years old in Montreal, and my mother was listening to news on the radio. This would have been about 1947, maybe 48.

And the newscaster was saying something about a grenade was thrown into a marketplace in Gaza. And I said to my mother, Mom, what's a grenade and what's a Gaza? And that's all those years have gone by and still the story, the region is the flame, issues are not settled, wars of different natures are breaking out.

This one is a very, very peculiar war, but also at the same time, very familiar. What it most reminds me of is the great Suez crisis. I don't know whether how many listeners will remember that clearly now,

But in 1956, Egypt nationalized as Suez Canal, the ultimate of choke points of maritime shipping, right? England and France went into a complete frenzy because that was their basic historical link. It was their canal they had built and then the colonial era had controlled. And together they went into an alliance, secret alliance with Israel to attack Egypt. And they attacked Egypt in October and November. in November of 1956, a completely secret war, illegal war in almost every way you could possibly think of, and a complete fiasco and disaster. It was a disaster because the public were cheerful at the thought of war at the beginning, but like so many great powers, they had

utterly underestimated their foe, their enemy. They thought they would march into Egypt and just carve it like soft cake. And of course, Israel got what it wanted, which was advanced into the Sinai Peninsula. But when France and England, Britain, sorry, landed on the shores, Port Suez, they were met by very strong resistance. And it was very clear that their insane plan that they would march onto Cairo and end the war because the Egyptians would give up easy, ended in disaster. It also ended a disaster when the Americans entered and said,

we don't want this. This is a very bad Cold War move, and they threatened to basically bring down the towers of British commerce to undercut the pound sterling. And that's how the war ended in a fiasco. It was a war that Britain only was able to get out of because Lester Pearson of Canada came up with a solution of setting up a peacekeeping, the UN peacekeeping.

the first one ever. So it reminds me of a great power, underresting the enemy, getting stuck into a war because of underestimating the enemy. This is a continuation of history to a remarkable degree. Many, many similarities here.

But look, I go back over my memory to the Korean War, even of 1950. America severely underestimates the Korean resistance and ends up in a three-year-long war with a peace at the end of a peace agreement, sorry, a truce that is still continuing. A terrible, in a way, failure of a war. It didn't end in defeat, but it ended still in a kind of failure.

Vietnam follows eight years of underestimating the Vietnamese all the way through the war until it was very clear America was stuck and it took them four years to get out under peace talks and the rest of it. Afghanistan, Iraq. two more cases when the United States, again, severely underestimated the sheer toughness, the endurance of regimes because they thought the regimes were foul, and in many cases, they were foul. But they underestimated that the ability and the tenacity of those regimes and the public

and their own people to put up a resistance that Americans just could not crack, no matter how sophisticated their techniques. and the rest of it was. So we now have, in Iran, the Americans, again, thought they could crack the regime in a hurry. They thought the people might rise up, overlooking the fact that they'd be mowed down with machine guns if necessary by a completely ruthless regime. And they under the overestimated the precision and power of the bombing, even though it was spectacular. But above all, they walked into a war with an endurance country, a country that had pretty much. being at least mentally at war and physically at war since 1970, 79, with the Iraqis invaded Iran,

with the U.S. assistance to some extent. And the eight-year war followed there. They've been used to hardships. They've been battle sanctions of all kinds. So they're used to hardships. They have a completely iron-fisted regime, if ever there was one, to crack down on any descent. And so that gets us into yet again, one more of the spiral of misunderstanding the foe, misunderstanding the nature of war, and getting oneself caught in a conflict that's far more difficult to get Oda than it was to get into. And we don't know how this is going to end, but we do know it's going to be difficult to get out of without significant compromises to the Iranians. Other things about it that historically really strike me, though, that in many ways we are in this,

profound new era, when the attacked country, no matter how small against a large country, has so many more options now than historically they had of the past to create basically havoc, to make it painful for the invaders' economy, for the world economy. Iranians are doing what the Ukrainians were able to do in the black sea, even the Russians, cut off supplies. The Iranians were able to take the war through the Gulf region and really affect the whole world economy by seizing the Strait of Hormuz, and we all know the story that's gone going there now, driving oil prices up, fertilizer prices up, grain prices got, now the Red Sea,

the Allied, the Allied, to some extent, of the Iranians have pretty much closed the Red Sea. So the world is facing almost another Suez crisis. But on a scale it now touches every single part of the world. Everyone's involved in this because the war is more costly in terms of the fuel to the poor countries, to rich countries alike, but to poor countries, it's devastating. And we're going to hear much more of that in coming months. And also, we're at that time and change in technology that the war has become technologically sound like something we've never quite seen before, where a much weaker country can attack the stronger forces. And because the stronger forces have to knock down the drones or the missiles from the weaker country, they're spending

enormous amounts of sums and money to try and, you know, nail them in, keep them inside Iran. But Iran keeps breaking out. And every time they break out, the American bill for the war goes higher. the public at home gets more antsy about the war and more resistant to it. The same way the British became very resistant to Suez, within a few weeks of oil prices going up and the military fiasco appearing. So there we are, and we have many new issues in this war, many new technological developments that put us in a new era. But always with war, no matter how new the technology, war has a familiar face.

It causes suffering to the poorest, through the weakest. It has a tendency to always go longer than expected. And in very rare shapes, do you ever get the quick, sound victory that the Americans and Israelis apparently had convinced themselves back in February, January, February, that they could pull off. Okay. I'm going to stop you there and let you catch your breath, because that was an amazing placement of...

this story in the context of of history. It was like going to you know to Harvard or Yale or Queens or U of T and listening to a distinguished professor his or her take on the situation. So that was

great. I want to just I want to follow up on, you know, on one point in particular. But before even I do that, your mention of the Suez crisis and the attack that the Britain and France did on on Egypt.

I can remember you and I sitting in the Royal Canadian Military Institute in Toronto having lunch with an old friend of my fathers from the Second World War and this goes back, it's got to be 30 years or more, who had been a participant in that rate.

He was still in the RAF at the time and he was telling us what that moment was like and the debacle that followed. And that's just a memory of mine. But to follow up on what you said, you know, it was Churchill and many others who did,

you know, you ignore history at your peril. And so you look at the U.S. track record. And it's not just the U.S. I mean, you know, we were in Afghanistan too. We had to, you know, back ourselves out of that one. some would quite rightly, I think, call it Canada's only the loss in a war. Correct.

But the very fact that the Americans especially have not learned from this parade of conflicts that have not turned out the way they expected, dating back to Korea and all the ones you mentioned. How can that be? How can they not learn, especially when you're dealing with countries in the Middle East, in the Gulf region especially? Like, what? Why are they failing to recognize this?

It is puzzling, Peter. And I would say they fail to recognize the pitfalls, even though they're surrounded by brilliant minds. I mean, in Washington, D.C., you can call the greatest historical minds in the world to have a conference and tell you what happened, what's likely to happen. what the Iranian people are really like on the ground and their extraordinary society that's built for endurance, built to be attacked and to endure. All of that's there. Instead, they have this attitude, I think in the Trump administration uniquely so, of downgrading the egg heads.

Remember that they're always cursing the egg heads in America. And the State Department and Academ, these brainy people who are. have spent all their life studying the problem, but they're just a against. We want to speak from the heart. We want to sort of be the populist sort of government, you name it. And it's just a kind of arrogance of the elected official at times to think that because they got elected and the academics did not, and the State Department diplomats, no matter how many years they had served, had never had to go to the people to get elected. Somehow they're given this extraordinary God-given. ability to see the future clearly without even bothering that much about the past.

And they believe the past is not relevant. And the Americans, the Americans are not a society that is ignorant in the past. They've got great historians. They have enormous regard for their own past. And they have great pride in many of their years conducting the Cold War. It's just a phenomenon that, you know, Anthony Eden, you could not pick a more brilliant diplomatic mind, he happened to be prime minister, he was one of the most famous prime ministers and foreign secretaries in British history before he came prime minister. And yet he stumbled into it

because I think there is also here that has to be brought into effect, a kind of racism. I use that in a kind of a cultural sense, a kind of feeling that, you know, the Brits are kind of special and the French. You know, the Egyptians have never proven themselves in war. How are they going to stand up to our paratroopers of the British and the Paris of the French? We'll just cut through them with a few tanks and the rest of it. And I think the Americans, without, you know, ever really seen that within themselves,

tend to think, you know, how much fight are the Taliban ever going to put up? They're hopeless. You know, they're clowns. So we'll go in and we'll give them a clean government. We'll reform everything in a few years and then it'll be gone. And, of course, it turns out the Taliban can endure for 18 years of war no matter what the cost is. And it's just, again, there is also the overestimation that goes on,

well, our technology is so different today. I mean, our battleships are protected, and it's so much better than they were, and our bombers have stealth, deep, and no matter how tough that enemy is, they can't stand up to our modern technology. What they do is they dig in, the bombing takes place, the bombers go away and your targets get up, fire their missiles, fire their drones, and the next thing, you know, the Americans are scurrying around trying to defend all their bases through the Gulf region.

At the very same time, they're trying to defend the cities of the Gulf because they promise the Gulf nations that if you let us have bases on your country, will defend you. So they're having to defend, what's the priority, defend their own base or defend the commercial city? I don't know. It still baffles me. I have no answer for that. By the way, another memory of Suez, if I might, in October, the world will celebrate 70 years from Suez. It was 70 years ago that the Suez crisis foreshadowed today's crisis.

And, you know, the same week, actually, weeks, I should say. Hungarians rose up in Budapest against the Russians, and you had war in central Europe, only after a few days, but there was a resistance in Central Europe. And that was 70 years ago, too. So two anniversaries we're going to be facing very shortly. Right, which will lead us into, you know, neatly into Russia, Ukraine. But just before I get there, just in a brief nod, you know, the Iran war is not over. yet.

But certain judgments are being made. And judgments are being made about the Trump presidency and Trump in particular in terms of a global leader, military leader. Is there anything you want to say about Trump on this issue alone? Well, I think he's been, I would say, uniquely off base and wrong. But then again, you have to put it. up against the whole stable of misjudgments of other countries, of how countries would react to their in being insulted or attacked or what have you, or how quickly they would bend before his bargaining talents. And he made some misunderstood it. Apparently Vance, Vice President of Vance

saw the danger. He warned the final Security Council meeting in the White House that the war was a mistake, which they should, America should not go into it. And he's now apparently, trying to bring into the White House some minds that are saying to the president, this is a mistake and you have to get out of it, sir. This war could go on beyond your own term. The next one, because the Iranians don't have to win anything particularly here. They just have to endure. Ultimately, they'll get a settlement.

The settlement will likely have major concessions. And out of that, concessions will also flow perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars in various held back monies and compensation and oil shipments to come, which will be able to start rewarding their people for the years of endurance. So they do have a real incentive to continue this, pass the midterms, even into the Trump presidency. I would just say that in terms of Vance, he is certainly putting out that line,

that he's been against this since the beginning. Of course, trying to protect his own potential for the presidency, himself in 2028 if he so happens to run for that. Okay, let's move off Iran and spend a couple of minutes on Russia, Ukraine. Same thing. Step back. How does history look at this that's been going on now for five years, four to five years? A brutal campaign where, you know, of late in the last few months,

At one point, it looks like Ukraine's got the advantage now. It looks like Russia's got the advantage. But it keeps on going, and hundreds, if not thousands of people are dying every week as a result of this. Where does history place this? Well, more combat in what was once called the Bloodlands area of Europe, Central Europe, and seen so many destructive wars in the past. History, I think, sees this as yet another attempt of a former imperial power, Russia, of course, seeking to retain or at least hold its imperial status by attacking a weaker country and again,

underestimating that countries you said in our prior conversation, it's not just the Americans that underestimate by any means. It's human nature, it seems. When we talked very soon after the war began, And I remember, well, I said it would last long. I said the Ukrainians would not give in. And they would fight on. And the Russians would prove a very, very difficult battle ahead. But I didn't predict. Nobody predicted it would last, you know, longer than Germany against Russia and the Second World War.

After coming up to five years, nobody predicted that. But again, the world has seen an example of a smaller country now has the ability to endure by digging in using modern technology, including drones and all manner of battlefield weapons, and they can hold out and cause immense damage to the major power. It's a badly planned war. The Russians did not plan it well. They did not conduct it well. The army was extremely weak in its attacks.

The failed attacks are still going on. The casualties you mentioned, I think they're so breathtaking. I mean, we have to really step back and say, we're talking now about the Russians having lost dead, not just the 1.5 million dead and wounded, but we're dead between 275,000 and 500,000 men having lost in Ukraine. That's four times what the Americans lost in eight years in Vietnam. I mean, it's a staggering sum that the government of Russia has tried to keep from its people,

but of course the news gets out and you can't hide things today in this age of open source intelligence and satellites and what have you. So I think we have the tragedy here of the superior country underestimating the weaker, the weaker country having really no option

but to fight it out using every method it's got. And what we have now historically is the Russians having failed to pound through in the battlefield field are going for interior battle, injuries in the cities, going after the cities with highly sophisticated missiles to cause as much civilian chaos as possible.

The old, you know, blitzkre kind of tactic where the Ukrainians are making use of the great weakness of Russia, which is size. Size is Russia's strength. It's also weakness. The size of Russia, which is half times larger than Canada, half a times again, large than Canada is, is just too big for its air force to protect all its territories. So the Ukrainians now have plenty of space to move their drones and missiles through open space into the refineries of Russia, the infrastructure of Russia, into now the increasingly into the cities

of Russia. So the pain level is going up in both countries. And you just wonder, you're left with your jaw hanging open. How much pain can both these countries stand? Again, history is less. If you go into a war, you will not be able to really honestly predict how it's going to end. The fog of war is so intense.

You will misunderstand your casualties. You will underestimate the enemy's staying power quite likely, and you will end up with a war that was easy sort of to get into, but incredibly hard to get out of now, without losing face, without having to go to your own population and say, We lost all these dead, but look, what have we got to show for? We managed to get half of one province of Ukraine. When the Ukrainians being able to say, we only seeded, you know, a small part of one province.

That kind of, how do you even deal your way out of a bloodbath like this is repeated throughout history in numerous times? You know, some of the mistakes that are repeated throughout history. You know, you mentioned a few moments ago, the Russians, basically doing the Blitzkriek in terms of Ukrainian cities now, taking it inside the cities, killing civilians, men, women, children, bombing schools, you name it, hospitals. You know, the Germans thought that was going to work in the Second World War against Britain. It didn't work, if anything, it steeled the nerves and the, you know, the fortitude of the British people.

And then the reverse happened when the... British attacked the Germans flattened cities across Europe. That was not what finally turned the war. It was kind of the Russian advance from the east that really made things happen. So you're right. You know, the lessons of history, they're sitting there staring as in the face, and yet the leaders of today either don't, you know, assume they're going to be different. The things will be different for them.

or they're just simply not aware of them. And they're not being told, and their advisors, for one reason or another, aren't taking them aside and saying this would be a colossal mistake. It doesn't work. You know,

it's like air power. They're still waiting for the... Probably the leaders giving the advisor, the historians who really know the subject, maybe 10 minutes and a photo op. That's about all they probably get. And a real briefing there. And you know, you're right.

You know, the latest polls of the Ukrainian are despite all the suffering in the horrible winter, they all know they're going into it, it's going to be a miserable winter of death and cold and breakdowns of electricity, you name it. I think it's over 65% of Ukrainians still say they don't want to cede any territory to the Russians through some kind of agreement.

They want to continue the war if necessary. That's after five years of this. People are right. I often hear from people saying, oh, Ukraine can't hold out. It's creating national suicide. It is not. It knows it will rebuild after the war.

That's the other thing. The ability of societies to rebuild after the war is often underestimated. Ukraine will come back very strong once there is a peace because there will be a martial plan of sorts to rebuild it. And a lot of Ukrainians that left to overseas will go back to Ukraine. There'll be a great blossoming. I mean, Ukraine's already gained enormous prestige. for its military techniques and technologies,

his status has gone up in the world, and Russia's status has gone down, just like Britain and France's status went down after Suez, and America's status for a while went down after Vietnam. All right. Let's take our break and come back and deal with the situation closer to home. It's a very different kind of situation. There aren't dead in the streets,

but there is a huge amount at stake. in terms of the economy and jobs, inflation, affordability, all of that. We'll talk about that with Brian Stewart right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge for this Wednesday, Brian Stewart, the famous foreign correspondent

and now equally famous author with his best-selling book on the ground. Brian is with us spending the full show with us today. You're listening on Sirius X. Channel 160 on SiriusXM, satellite radio, or you're listening on our podcast, which is available on any number of different podcast platforms. Also, I mention that tomorrow,

our question of the week is about AI, and it's not the normal question about, you know, you're happy with AI, are you afraid of AI, you're worried about losing your jobs? It's deeper than that, really. after a number of warnings in the last few days from senior AI people that it could as much as, you know, mean the end of humanity within the next five years,

what does that say to you? Is that just alarmist stuff? Or do you dismiss it totally or are you somewhere in the middle? That's the question of the week. You've only got a couple more hours to send your answer into the Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com. the time that we're cutting it off is 3 p.m. Eastern today. So if you've got something to say, say it now.

There have been a lot of answers on this question, as you can imagine already. Include your name and the location you're writing from. Please remember that. Name and location. You go nowhere if you don't have the name or location. You also go nowhere if you write more than 75 words. It's got to be under that limit. So follow all the rules.

the conditions and we'll get you on your turn tomorrow along with the random ranter. Okay. Back to Brian Stewart now. Brian, as I said, you know, the Canada-U-S story is, you know, has dominated the headlines in this country for the last year and a half. And for good reason, there's huge amounts at stake in terms of the economy, thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of jobs. and for a lot of cities and towns, communities, a whole way of life is at stake, not just in Canada, but also in the United States.

But aside from the trade thing, there's also been this sovereignty issue. And we're looking at a relationship that has been built on trust and two great allies and the undefended border and all that stuff, that suddenly all seems that's a way of the past. things have changed and they may never be the same again. When you look at this story through the lens of the historian, what are you seeing? Well, certainly many things have changed and won't be the same again.

But some things have changed for the better. It really strikes me that one profound changes Americans will never see Canada in the same light again. We have become a substantial country. all the jokes from Trump of about 51st state, we've emerged in the Canadian, sorry, the American consciousness and the world consciousness to a degree that you and I grew up, when we grew up, just didn't exist.

You know, listeners will gather by now, I'm a pretty old guy. I remember sitting in a movie theater in the Halifax after the Second World War, and the movie was on, and somewhere in the war movie, of course, was on. Somewhere in it, there was a reference to Canada.

And the entire theater broke into applause because Canada had actually been mentioned. And we both know, have he worked with the American networks? My God, getting them interested in any Canadian story at all was just impossible. Well, that's out the window now. I mean, we're top of their, we're in the front page story in America and around the world. And this is given Canada, really the kind of international position that it really always in a shy way dreamt up, you know? We thought Pearson, of course, gave us some for some years of Pierre Trudeau,

but this is really given us a role in the affairs of democratic countries and the economy of democratic countries. A significant punch above our weight. We used to use that term a lot. We don't really mean it. This time we really can mean it. We have a weight out there. And it could, if we handle things well, just get stronger and stronger.

we could become from this point on a significant national force for, you know, middle power common sense, middle power, you know, show the way middle class experiments with economy and other things. That's the good part of it. Other parts of it, I wonder if we'll ever trust the American neighbor again to the degree we did. And I think through his history, you'd have to say we always. trusted it more than we would trust it right now, or are likely to trust it, maybe even under

a new president, when we can only say, well, even this is good for four or maybe eight years, but what follows him? We really have had our faith in American stability of governance, stability of international affairs tested to a degree they, I don't think they ever really were, even during the Vietnam War, even during parts of the Cold War, where we really thought they were going maybe too far, what have you. I think faith has been shattered, but it's been shattered in America, one of the upheavals in American politics, because people have lost faith in Washington, lost faith in their national government. It's been shaken across the world. People have lost faith in just how far you can trust the American. American word to last if they change on a dine. So we're going to have to dig ourselves painfully

and probably rather slowly owed to this period of historic loss of faith that is harmful in the long run. We need alliances to still function. The alliances we built up since the Second World War were the greatest alliances the world have ever seen for economic cooperation, for attempts at peace, dogged attempts at peace, even when the odds were against it, for humanitarian assistance, a military partnership of NATO, the world has never seen anything like that in terms of success. I think the alliances will endure and they will come back. They'll come back with a somewhat diminished America, but still, in every, a very important America.

And I hope a very significant Canada in the midst of the process. But where we are, I think we're in historically, not in any time I can think of, the Americans have sunk to a degree to a troth in the world where their word is not fully trusted, their direction is unknown,

their politics are so peculiar or other countries are having difficulty figuring out a two-party system that is so divided at the core, you know, it makes a multi-party parliament seem awfully sensible in comparison to what's going on in a two-party Congress and the national and federal system. All of that now has to be confronted by a very, very, hopefully, clever Canada, ambitious Canada and persuasive Canada. You know, before the Second World War, Canada's relationship with the rest of the world was, was for the most part dominated by the Canada-Europe relationship, whether it was in trade, immigration, what have you. Since the Second World War, and because of the results of the Second World War, and who prospered after the Second World War,

the relationship is tilted in favor of Canada, U.S. And it's been very, very good for both nations over that time. Now we have an interesting thing happening, and it's happening actually this week as we speak. And it reminds me of, you know, back in the 70s when we were, you and I were much younger, Pierre Trudeau tried to, remember it was called the third option, and he wanted to do a much more trade with Europe.

He wanted to open that channel once again. It didn't work out. Basically it flopped. Now we're looking at this week, the same kind of discussion taking place, a much different level, much different trade, much different things at stake. But it's basically looking at Canada as a member of the EU

or an associate member of the EU. Is that history revisiting itself, or is it just things are so different now and because of the way the Americans have played their hand in the last, well, the last decade, really, that it's forced Canada and Carney in particular to look at this again. Well, I think Canada's always had a sort of, every now and then a wistful eye over its shoulder back towards,

Britain and Europe is perhaps easier to deal with the often seemingly temperamental of White House to the south. But I do think it's happening not just Canada seeking new alliance with Europe, but Europe seeking new alliances now with Canada and with Asia, with Japan, South Korea. It's not just the EU that we're looking anxiously to build upon, but it's the Asian countries as well. Australia I should add and Philippines with India for certain. So I think throughout the world there's a

re-forging of different trading possibilities, defense possibilities that I think will not so much change alliances would maybe bring more links. I think Europe will be more linked to the Asian countries I mentioned. Canada will be in that mix very much. But it also, I think my hope is that the American public and there's certainly, again,

against many of the things going wrong in America, they're against Trump, they're against Iran, war. They don't agree with that at all. They think the economy is the best. And I think maybe they will learn out of this experience that it's not only other countries very dependent on America, but America is very dependent upon its allies. I mean, huge amounts of its industrial output is bought by Europe. Defense is particularly important. A huge amount of European and Canadian investment going into America is helping to build up, America's re-industrialization. But I think Americans are realizing, you certainly get the sense in talk shows

and reading editorials and the rest, that they realize now we're the only allies they have. I mean, you know, there aren't a box of other allies sitting somewhere out there in the world. They'll toss the old ones aside and open a new box. They know they're going to need Europe. They're going to need NATO. You know, already the Chinese economy is growing gangbusters. Their Navy is now larger than the Americans, more modern, more threatening. China is going to grow more threatening as time goes.

In America alone, with an aging Navy, with its own doubts about its own military capabilities, say, after the Iran experience and Afghanistan and Iraq, experiences, you know, they know they need allies. And that reforging of links and building of new ones, I think, is on the horizon. That's why I'm not one of those real pessimists. I think we're in an age of terrible disarray. This could be the age of sort of chaos and disarray. But within this age, I think a lot of lessons are being learned. I won't get into AI. That's for another today. but that is one of those fears out there that's making governments and people say, wait a minute, what is going on here?

I mean, let's get together again. Let's get some sense back into this world. Let's, for God's sake, again, these stupid wars and bring the UN back when it's needed, bring the Internet monetary fund back when it's needed, bring alliances back. I think America's got something like 65 international alliances. it's going to have to get back in touch with. All of that, I think, is pointing one way. You've gone into an age of disarray, de-globalization,

confusion, pain and uncertainty. And what's the way out of that? Well, get together, start talking, start thinking positively and with more confidence. That's why I tend rather, having seen many ups and downs of history, but the darkest really is followed by a dawn or the dawn is. off of all of my more dark times. This up and down, this in and out of crises. I think we're in one of those phases now.

But I couldn't predict how soon, let's say, the return of stability and sanity will take place. When it does, there will be new power blocks, I would say Russia, China, and then brick against the Western plus Asian alliances. These will form and balance each other out. and I hope the technology, the technological crisis of our time will bring some kind of unity to the human beings. I mean, this is a, I won't get into AI,

but this is another level of threat, such as which nobody's even dreamed of outside horror movies, right? Yeah. I mean, no, no, no, no, you're right. We're invasion by a foreign... Well, we'll hear what the people have to say about this tomorrow on your turn right here on the bridge. this has been a fabulous conversation Brian

Thank you I was thinking of doing this over the last couple of weeks I never thought it would be this fascinating I should have I should have known it having known you for 50 plus years that it would be this but it has been and it's clearly

something for you to contemplate for your next book Oh I go shoot me now take me out and shoot me. I'll take that option any time. Even though I love my publisher, Simon Schuster, even though I had good experiences, you know, at my age, the runway ahead isn't all that long,

and I don't want to spend half of it writing a book. Well, the thing is, writing a book is not as easy as some might think it is until you actually try to do it. But you did, and it's a great book. All right, we're going to leave it at that for Brian, For now, Brian, thanks for joining us. We'll do it again at some point. Thanks.

Thanks a little, Peter. Thanks a lot. Take care for now. And I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks for listening to The Bridge on this day. We'll be back tomorrow with your turn and the Random Rander. That's coming up in less than 24 hours.