The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 112. Bill Clinton: Putin, Palestine, and Trump

Episode Date: December 16, 2024

Does Bill Clinton feel that the current Israel-Hamas war could have been avoided if former Palestinian President Yasser Arafat had accepted the peace deal in 2001? Does he regret allowing China to join the World Trade Organisation? Was Hillary Clinton unfairly attacked during her presidential campaign? And what is Putin going to do next? Rory and Alastair are joined by 42nd US President, Bill Clinton, to discuss all this and more. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [e-mail] Assistant Producer + Editor: Becki Hills Producer: Nicole Maslen Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolities.com. That's therestispoletics.com. How is my favorite former president? I'm doing great.

It's a lousy weather, and I just got back from several days in Arkansas celebrating the 20th anniversary of the presidential center. So I lost a lot of my voice down there. But it's coming back, I think. you can hear me all right uh yeah we can hear you fine we can hear that's rory you can see there rory is my partner in crime on this podcast hi rory if you're okay we're just going to go straight end is that okay yep fantastic here we go so with us today none other than bill clinton one of a relatively small group of people all men alas as hillary clinton and camillow is no to their cost who spent

eight years being described as the most powerful person in the world working class kid Arkansas governor in his 30s, president of his 40s, a role he stopped aged 54. So he's had almost a quarter of a century to adapt to the often very strange existence that is post-power politics and public life. And his account of those years, citizen, my life after the White House, shows that he's been busy and these times have been dramatic and emotional, not least because of the political ups and downs of Hillary. And also the ups and downs. and the big issues he addressed in power, like the Middle East, relations with Russia and China, Ireland, climate, and of course, the state of politics. So welcome and thank you. And can I start

with this? How on earth have we gone from the politics that made me at least feel pretty glad to be alive and involved when you were in power to the politics we've got now with populism on the march and Trump on his way back to the White House? What has gone wrong? Well, I think several things have gone wrong and we're sort of responsible for not winning when I think we should. But it's important for our friends in the UK and throughout Europe to remember that since I was elected and then re-elected, we have only lost the popular vote in America twice. Once when George Bush was given the narrowest reelection margins since Woodrow Wilson just before World War I, and once in this most recent election, when we have...

had to run with an enormous number of problems, and we lost by a minute and a half or a million and six votes, less than Hillary beat Donald Trump by in 2016. So it's not great, but it's not the end of the world. But there is a war going on in America now, essentially to try to dismantle the politics of inclusive tribalism. That is, politics that treats diversity as an asset. And no one can repeal it, but the idea is to make people around the edges feel that identity is a zero-sum game, not a positive sum game.

And I think a lot of it is the extreme income inequality that we've seen in America, beginning with a financial crash in 2008, things were getting very tough. And as you saw in the UK, the left moved left, basically saying the government can fix all this. And a lot of this is about culture, how we treat each other, how we live together, what we hold on to and what we give up. And it's highly complicated. But mostly it's about the sense that life is being constantly upended. And a lot of people want to hold on to at least what they've got and to do better without giving up social conventions and arrangements that they believe in. So people ask me all the time, is this about identity or economics? and the answer is both.

Mr. President, what's the path now, if you wanted to rebuild, a energetic, progressive center because it feels pretty gloomy. It feels gloomy in the U.S., and it feels pretty glooming in Europe, because the populists are taking elections again and again now? First of all, our tasks may be somewhat less complex than they are in the UK or in Europe where you have multi-party systems. And on the other hand, you don't have an electoral college, so if you can put together, a coalition of people who are more like you than like the right, you can still win there

with coalition politics, but it means they tend to be fragile all along the way. If we win here, at least we get four years in the White House and we get a couple of midterm elections to fight about. So the politics are different, but I think that there was a period when the center left was afflicted with two wrongheaded notions. One was that we, were somehow in a demographic majority in America because we have so much racial, I think, and religious diversity, and that people would vote predictably based on their education levels and their past and all of that. And that's only partly true. So the Republicans in America always attacked us where we're strong. And they always believe they can peel off enough people. And their base,

while smaller, is harder core. So that's one problem. The other problem is, that if politics seems irrelevant to the lives of ordinary people, they may not vote. And the people on the populist right, they always vote, or at least typically they vote in larger numbers in America than the alternative. And that's basically what happened in this last election. If you look at it, we did lose some ground, but we lost more ground among people who didn't vote at all than we did on people switching sides. You quote in the book, somebody that Roy and I talk about a lot on the podcast, which is Moises Naim and his three P's, populism, polarization, and post-truth. And you've got your own kind of version of that. He's all about your three Ds, which are divide,

demonise, and dominate. And you also talk, I don't think you mean this flatteringly, but you've got this sentence. Let me just read this. Trump was a genius at turning legitimate concerns into rage-fueled resentment by convincing deeply alienated people. He had mastered a system they hate. and would change it to benefit the working class. Now, I get why he's able to do that. A kind of more challenging question is, why has the progressive side of politics enabled him to do that? Well, I think we got used to winning elections

and we forgot that every one of them had to be hard fought and that it wasn't just some sort of automatic thing. I think in the United States, at least, I think we have overestimated the influence of pollsters and political consultants and underestimated the importance of connections, maintaining connections with voters. That's why I think there is very little concern that Trump seems to be appointing people of, shall we say, limited experience and highly targeted toward, you know, his message. I think it's because people have lost faith in establishments everywhere. And this is

true, I believe, in Europe. And there's just been so much upheaval. So, let's look at the European project. What was a project that seemed to offer the opportunity for people to move across borders, to live in other countries, to work together, to slowly meld their political system, became, as a result of the political and economic crises of the last 20 years, a deeply threatening thing to many people. So that the last thing they wanted was people who were highly experienced in the past. It was almost as if having been successful in one system and made you ineligible for election

in the new world that they think needs to be forged. And people are what seems to be or was once disabling behavior is no longer such a problem because people are more worried about the world they knew crumbling around them without

some certainty of where they're going to be in the new world. And I think that that is a recipe for what I would call negative populism. That is, you may not win in this new deal, but at least they'll lose. Mr. President, there's a weird thing, which is that the president in 1992, the president in 1996, the president in 2000, the president 2004, the president in 2016 and the president

in 2024, were all born in 1946. I wonder whether you can reflect a little about what it is about your generation. What was it like being born in 2046? What determined your worldview? And why did we end up in a world so dominated? I can throw in around that period, Newt Gingrich, Joe Biden, Mitt Romney, Al Gore, John Kerry. I mean, what's going on? What's with 1946 or the 40s in general? Well, it was the first full year after World War II. And we were beginning to try to build a world that would be more peaceful, we hoped. But also, we had to face forces that made it more difficult to build broad-based unity. So, for example, we had the United Nations and then we had to figure out what that was and what its mission would be and how it would affect us. And then we had the rise of the Soviet Union and then the rise of China and then all that came afterward. Africa beginning to get

appropriate notice and becoming stronger. India becoming significant economic force in the world. And I just think over time we are all playing catch up hoping we can recover a sense of purpose, direction and energy that animated our countries ever so briefly during the Second World War. So we've had to basically build a new plane to take us to the future. And the odd thing about it is that normally you imagine that a generation has similar views, but there we are in the summer of 1946. We have the birth of President Clinton, President Bush, and President Trump. Three people with very, very different views the world.

Any thoughts on how three people born within three months of each other in the same country end up with completely different visions of what the world should be like? We had different parents. We had different circumstances. And we were taught by different people. And the distance turned out not to be so great. Once someone else showed up who had a much more radical view, like George Bush and I, we used to joke we didn't think we agreed on anything. And then turned out we did. And then Donald Trump had a different one again. He was the son of a New York real estate developer and his major political advisor as a young man was Roy Cohn, who was Senator Joseph McCarthy's eminence Grease until McCarthy had to leave the Congress. And Eisenhower and the more moderate Republicans finally found a way to undo him with a little help from himself. And then Cohn came back to New York. But he had a ferocious belief. that you should always try to win by denying everything that's inconvenient and attacking your opponent and accusing them of doing what you're doing. And that's work. But that gives you

a whole different world to live and function in. I should tell you, my favorite date of birth thing is that Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the same day. We don't need to get into that. But there's one particular issue I want to get you on. And that's the Middle East. One of the high points of your presidency must have been the steps forward that you took in the Middle East peace process. He seemed to be able to bring people together. But there's this really standout line towards the end of your book. I get the sense you felt really badly let down by Yasser Arafa. You said Arab states had largely abandoned the Palestinians after Arafat squandered the best chance for peace in a generation. Just talk us through what was going on there, why you feel so strongly

that was such a kind of bad moment in the Middle East peace process? Well, I feel that way for two reasons. First of all, I had extraordinary leaders to work with. And I would include Arafat. Arafat was a positive force for many years. But Rabin, along with Tony Blair and Nelson Mandela, Helmut Cole, were the person I felt closest to in international politics. He was an extraordinary man.

And as we all know, he was willing to give his life to get a state for the Palestinians and a long-term peace and stability. It cost him his life. And then it cost Ehud Barak, who was the most decorated soldier in the history of the Israeli Defense Force. It cost him and his party, not just an election when Arafat turned the deal down, but also arguably their existence is a viable political force. So, yeah, I was upset about it. Look, it was all worth doing in the four years after I left office. And President Bush, to be fair to him, tried to come up with a new idea. But in those four years, three times as many young Israelis and three times as many young Palestinians were killed in acts of political violence

as in the previous eight years. So when we were working it and working with the Palestinians, we could make progress. But, you know, now, that's a long time. And I understand, like, you had young Muslims in America voting against President Biden because we helped Israel with military weapons, and they had no idea what the strategic implications were that the Iranians and Hisbalah and the Houthis had switched to helping Gaza. They had no idea what they had turned down. You know, I talked to all these groups all the time. I said, you understand the deal was for 96% of the West Bank to go to a Palestinian state and 4% of Israel, either in the north to alleviate population congestion or in the West for agriculture. Nobody knows that. And so you've got Hamas

then later taking over Gaza and then never having another election. And I don't tell you something. They never had another, never allowed another election in Gaza. So now somebody asked me the other day, well, this is great, but where are the Palestinians going to get their state? And basically all the trust, all the work, everything was slowly destroyed. And I still believe that the best outcome, as close as we can get to the deal we pulled together. I mean, where's the land going to come from? So it was truly heartbreaking. And the only thing that I was really mad at Arafat about is I went to Gaza. I addressed the Palestinian parliament. We were working together after Camp David. He came down to see me in the Oval Office, just the two of us. And I said, you know, I can go to North

Korea and end their nuclear and missile programs. And our friends in North Asia would have a much better run in the future if we could do that. But if I do it, I'll have to be gone 12 days. And this was when I had like six weeks left in office. And it's the only time AirFad ever cried. He said, oh, you can't do that. I said, I can't do it because you're going to take the peace deal. Have it look like I made you do it. And he laughed. He said, sure. And I said, okay, but you owe it to me to tell me the truth. I said, do you think I care about your kids? He said, oh, far more than the Arabs do. He said, you know, they just need us to be victims when they want to make the United States so the EU look bad. So anyway, that was a conversation. You stayed so as you

could look the part and then you can't let you down. But it's not me. It was anybody seriously think that the Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank are better off today than they would have been if they'd taken this deal. So there's something more to it. I know there is and I don't know what it is, but I do think it has to be part of the embedded mirror. And a lot of people say, well, that doesn't justify what the far-right-wing Israeli governments is. I agree with that. But if you walk away from a deal like that where there's the body of an Israeli prime minister who literally risk his life and gave it, and then the wreckage of the Labor Party in Israel

because they stayed with a peace process. If you walk away from a deal like that, you can't come back in 20 years and something. They will, okay, now we want it. Or nothing was supposed to change. You can't do that. Something's going to happen. Just like things have happened in America, things have happened in the UK. Things happen.

What's happened over the generation since then has been a massive expansion of Israeli settlements. We now have 800,000 Israelis living in occupied Palestinian territory. We have a Gaza war where 50,000 people have been killed, which seems to have no sign of stopping. It's not clear to me at all why Netanyahu is still conducting this war at all. Can you reflect a little bit about this? He wants to stay for life too, maybe just to keep the legal dogs at bay, but he's in a position now where with the narrowest of coalitions and two extreme, you know, right-wing territorialist extremist in his cabinet, he can hold on because no one else can put together a government

to dislodge him when the number one thing they want it now is somebody who will fight. One of the things that Hamas did is to give BB a new lease on life. And if in the month or so after October 7th, there could have been a referendum in Israel, I don't think he could have won it, because they clearly weren't prepared for this. And a lot of people in the Kabutsin border in Gaza were telling the Israeli government all along that something's going on here. There seem to be practicing. There's things that are happening.

I think that it's something of a miracle, but he just kept fighting. And keep in mind, unlike the Labor Party, Prime Minister Netanyahu's L' Kud Party always opposed a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza. Gaza, they were really against anything that affected Judea and Samaria, the biblical Judea and Samaria. And Prime Minister Netanyahu's father, who just passed away at 107, was basically the bunderkind of the Lekud Party working for Jabotinsky, its founder and in opposition to David Munguri and Shimon Peres at the beginning. This stuff has a long history. But you've got to give it to the day.

That's one thing they have been consistent about from the beginning. After Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated and the family of the young men who did it were part of one of those extreme settlers groups, Prime Minister Netanyahu, who did have to work with us on some things and we made a few agreements. But it was by far the worst political tragedy that, in my opinion, during my eight years. Okay, honest stick to Mr. President. Quick break. We'll come back for more. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Gollhangers The Rest is Science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

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The first stage of the trial starts this year, focusing on people at higher risk. It shows what long-term research makes possible. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancer research UK.org forward slash the rest is science. Hi, everybody, it's Dominic Samaruk here from The Rest is History. Now, some of you may have heard me on your show, The Rest is Politics when Rory was away and I was filling in and enjoy. I'm back to tell you about our new series on The Restis History, which is all about Britain in the 1970s, a period with a lot of uncanny resemblances to our own. So right now we're living through a moment when oil shocks generated by war in the Middle East are rippling through

the world economy, when Britain feels like it's sunk in a bit of a malaise. People are arguing about Europe. The government has got a few issues with the trade unions. and we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say, governing elite, a kind of political class that is really struggling to come to terms with all of these issues. And people are asking if Britain is governable at all. So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain that I'm describing, which is our Britain, and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history, we're looking at these and other issues. We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in our political life even now, whether you love. love her or loathe her. We'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1975, a subject

that I'm sure Rory and Alistair will have strong opinions about. We'll be talking about the fall of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson and we'll be talking about one of the grimmest moments in Britain's economic history, the moment in 1976 when we had to go cap in hand, as people said at the time, to the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, for a then record bailout. Now if that's sounds good to you. How could it not sound good to you? Of course it sounds good to you. We have a clip for you to listen to at the end of this episode. And if you want to hear more, just search for The Rest is history wherever you get your podcasts. Some of the most powerful parts of your new book, Citizens, some of the bits that I've found quite a tough read at times was actually when you're writing

about Hillary and you're writing about Hillary's political career and in particular the campaign. And I get the feeling that, I mean, you're somebody who always tries to see the sunny side of life. But that feels to me like it produced a visceral anger in you. I just want to know whether you're through the anger and over that anger or whether you think you're going to take that with you to the grave. No, I don't want to take it to the grave. But I was angry, not so much of Donald Trump. He was who he is. And he was entitled to run and say whatever he wanted. but it was amazing to me how the establishment political press didn't see him for the significant force that he would turn out to be. I mean, I remember the first time I saw him with 20 or so other Republicans on a stage in Florida in 2000, either late 14 or early 15.

And I told some people who were sitting there with us that this guy has got an excellent chance to win the primary. And they thought I was loony tunes. And I said, you just don't have any idea what it's like living in the parts of America where people feel there's been insufficient economic opportunity and a loss of social status and political standing. I said, you know, you just don't understand how people think out there. He does. He understands that.

And somehow he became credible as their destroyer, if you will. I think probably because of the years he spent on that show The Apprentice, firing people and knowing how they felt, and they watched them grind people down, and he said, look, I know this. I made a lot of money in the system that we have, and I know how to turn it to your benefit. It was a very clever way to say it. You mentioned the press there, and there's a lot of stuff in your book about the way that they framed Trump, the way they covered Hillary, her emails getting 20 times more coverage than any other kind of issue within the whole debate and so forth.

But then you come out really, really strong in one point in the book, where you basically say, Putin's enablers, you say, were James Comey and the political press. And again, I sense your anger in that. Just taught them through one by one, Putin, his role in the first Trump victory, and then James Comey, and why you feel that was such a kind of bad thing that he did? First of all, Putin may have, I say may, because the data's harder to retrieve and calculate there. But it may be that he turned a relatively narrow electoral victory into, an electoral college loss because the Russians are very good at this. And Trump kept saying indignantly, there was no collusion. Well, they gave him data and other stuff, but there didn't have to be

back then because back then the Russians were better than the American right at, you know, managing this campaign online. So it was just simple. And he didn't like Obama. Hillary was the secretary of state and had to play the bad guy role from time to time. and he knew, as he said in Helsinki in front of Donald Trump. They had a press conference together, and he said, yes, I did everything I could to help him because I thought it was better for Russia. And I agree with them. It was better for Russia to have Trump there than have Hillary there.

So that's that. Now, on Comey, we have very good data, and I wrote about this so much, partly, because the mainstream political media was in some financial distress. they have to make money. They get more money out of clicks and retweets online, and negative stuff sells more. But Donald Trump's State Department admitted that Hillary neither sent nor received a single solitary email marked confidential on her personal devices. And the rules under which a Secretary of State was permitted to use personal emails were clear. They could do it because they traveled a lot and they were doing 50 different things and talking to people all over the world

all the time. But they had to save any work-related emails and turn them over when they were asked. She followed the rules. And yet for more than a year, the press tried to give people the impression that somehow what she was doing was shady. And then when John Kerry did the same thing until the rules were changed, they said, oh, he sometimes did that. And if you looked at a all the explanations. They went out of their way not to tell the American people that she had followed the rules to the T, that there never was a single one, and they gave this more coverage than anything else. Why? Because they wanted a coach race. They thought she couldn't lose. And as a result of that in time passing, she was nowhere near the same person to the voters

in 2016 that she had been in 2008 when she and President Obama were running against each other, when the voters really liked her and she would have walked in her. She would have walked in her. She won the nomination. So the only thing that I was angry about, I wasn't so mad at Trump. You can't blame a guy if somebody drives up in front of your office today with the most elaborate Rolls-Royce or Bentley that you produce over there and lets you have it for a few weeks. Nobody can blame you for going around the park in it.

So I didn't blame Trump. But if you pretend to be the referee in any kind of athletic match, you can't wear the uniform of the other team. You have to actually try to be a referee and tell the truth, and they didn't. And you can say, how can I say that with such confidence? Because we were, by the time James Comey reopened his email investigation, knowing that there was a better than 99% chance that there was nothing to it, knowing that the Republican committee was phony. We knew that. And there was a 70-year-old rule that said the FBI did not interfere with an election. within two months of the election day, if they weren't going to indict somebody.

He broke that rule, knowing that there was absolutely as close to zero as you could get chance that there was anything wrong. He did it because he, I think he was delusional about his power and wisdom, and I think he also was afraid of the Republican right and not afraid of the White House and others. But we do know that. She dropped overnight five to six points in the polls. I've never seen that happen before. her sense. And then she got, you know, give or take about half of it back, except in the swing

states where she lost by four and a half points. That would have given her Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, which she only lost by one point, two points. And Nate Silver, who used to be the darling of the political media, said that you have to turn yourself into a pretzel to think that Comey didn't cost to the election. And he had to post that article. and his analysis on an extended tweet to text it because none of the newspapers wanted his article. So, you know, yeah, they should own that. When you work as hard as they did for something, you ought to take pride in achieving it, not deny it. Mr. President, you mentioned amongst one of the three things, Putin. And of course,

Putin came into office right towards the end of your presidency, but you met him. You met him when you were president, he was present. Give us a sense of this man. What's your sense of his character? what's your sense of what he's going to do next and how important is Ukraine in all of this? Well, briefly, we worked together for 10 months. We had a good relationship. I tried not to fight with him in public. I tried to work things out. And I knew that Yeltsin got out because he wanted to be succeeded by someone that he thought had more energy and more physical strength because he was fading pretty badly. And he thought he would protect his family from the rough politics of Russia internally. I understood all that. But I also could see that he, Putin, thought Yeltsin

had worked too closely with the West and that they needed to take a harder line. And I think he thought that because he thought it, but I also think he believed that Russia needed to be a bigger player on the world stage and to do that that had to be tougher and a little more ruthless. And I remember when I saw Yeltsin not long before he died, I went out to have to be a bigger player. to his place in the country and we had a long visit. And I could tell he was beginning to worry because Yeltsin did not like communism and basically did not like authoritarianism. So he wanted Putin to be a strong leader, but he got a little more than he asked for. And it was all perfectly understandable. But still, Putin performed quite well in his first term. And then

he switched out. You remember, became prime minister and Mr. Medvedev became president. And then they switched back. But I think something really fundamental happened once Russia became basically almost a kleptocracy and even more important once President Putin decided to stay for life. Because once you decide to stay for life, if you live in a system where you can do it, it changes everything because you care most about weakening any potential opposition. That's my take on it. But I always had a really good relationship with Putin because I respected his intelligence. He's really smart. And I respected the fact that if you were respectful with him, he would tell you what he was going to do. I mean, my last meeting with him was a long time

ago. Official meeting was 2010. We only see each other at funerals now. But I met with him in 2010. And I was talking to him about Ukraine. He said, I know what you're going to say. I know you made a deal with Boris Nikolivich to protect the territorial integrity of Ukraine in return for Ukraine giving up their nuclear weapons and putting them under supervision of the international authority but within Russia. But he said, let me remind you, he never got the Duma to ratify that agreement. So it does not have a force of treaty. And I do not agree with it.

And I will not observe it. I mean, basically he said in 2010, four full years before he took Crimea, that he was coming after Ukraine. And I dutifully reported it to the government. went on with my business, but that's where we are. He's a formidable person, but as you see, there are limits to what he can do. His obsession with Ukraine didn't leave him many cards to play with this surprising development in Syria. And he'd always been active there and he wanted to be. So that's kind of where I think we are. I can remember seeing you with Boris Yeltsin. I think it was the G8 in Birmingham. You had more than a kind of political relationship, I sense there. There was

something kind of quite deep and personal going on. Do you think he'd be, surprised at the path that Putin has taken Russia on? I think he would be disappointed that we're all estranged from each other in the way we are. Whether he'd be surprised, I'm not sure. Yeltsl was no dummy, but he wanted Russia to be stronger than he thought they were after his health began to fail. But he did not like authoritarianism, and he was not afraid of the people. He was not afraid to face the electorate in an honest election. He was a fascinating man, and better, I think, than he got credit for him. Mr. President, you also were very, very instrumental in the movement to bring China into the World Trade Organization. You're right there at the moment where China kind of explodes on its way to becoming the second largest economy in the world. Tell us a little bit about your sense of China. China then, what China became, and how people should think about China going forward.

If you want to say that I did something wrong, you'd be on stronger grounds there than on anything with regard to Putin and Russia. I like Zhang Jimend very. much. I thought he was an excellent leader. I thought he and Zurongshi, his prime minister, would basically honor their commitments in bringing them into the family of trading nations. And I thought it would, over the not just long term, over the medium term, help us to have a fair trade relationship with China than if we did nothing. Because keep in mind, particularly after I left office, when the Republicans won again, they went back to trickle down economics. So they were spending all this money on tax cuts, our deficits were great. We had to borrow a lot of money every year. We were borrowing a lot of it from China, and it's hard to pick a fight with your banker every day.

So I was worried about it. But I believed if we wrote the agreements properly, it would do more good than harm. And as it's played out, we had a hard time enforcing the agreements we made. I was more than happy to enforce them and bring a lot of trade actions. But still, if a country's as big and strong as China, it's hard to have enough enforcement to overcome the benefits of going around the agreement. And what I did not foresee was the same thing happening in China that happened in Russia in a way. When President Xi came in, he made it pretty clear that he was going to try to stay forever. You know, we're not going to have any of this two-term business, get rid of that. And he was highly intelligent and strong-willed, but he was always, you know, threatening America

if we didn't do this out of the other thing. And that's one where we took a chance and we hope we would stay on the path. And China basically said, we're big, we're strong, and we're going to do this our way. We're big enough so that we don't have to honor the commitments we made. And I think that was a contributing factor to the disorientation in the world. I'm still not sure we didn't have to try because we need to work with China. We need to work with them on climate change matters. We need to work with them on North Korea and other nuclear and militarily related matters.

We need to try to persuade them not to go any further with Taiwan and in the South Side of Sea and with the Philippines. So I'm glad I'd worked as hard as I did to try to build a constructive relationship. But you could certainly look at subsequent developments and say, well, I've made a mistake. I don't think I did, but it's a lot of closer question, given how it's all played out. I do just want to ask you finally about a lot of the book is about what you've done post the White House in terms of raising money, spending money, working with entrepreneurs, being essentially a kind of modern-day philanthropist. And like I said earlier, you left office very, very young. You've had a quarter of a century of this. How do you define the role of post-power politics

and how do you see the role of philanthropy and addressing some of the problems that we've talked about? Well, first of all, I think it's really important all the time because there are always gaps and what the private sector produces and what the government provides, just generally. At this time, when there's so much disagreement about what government should and shouldn't do, I think it can be more important. But I think that the best philanthropy is philanthropy that mixes charitable efforts with government efforts, with private sector efforts, and tries to work out a common agenda. And that's what we did with the Clinton Global Initiative.

Come to our meeting across the political spectrum, but we expect you to commit to do something, to do something that makes one of these big problems better. I think this stuff really matters. And it's been incredibly rewarding to do. And I've also been asked to work on a lot of natural disasters, and I've done that. Everything has some political traction, I guess, but not everything is primarily politics.

So I've tried to basically work wherever I can make a difference. And I think that whether you are a world leader or what are your want to be or what are you used to be, if you're still active, the truth is we all keep score in life. You keep score on this podcast. You do. I mean, whether you're conscious of it or not, congratulations on how many listeners you have and how widespread it is. But you keep score.

And I tried to say in this book that I made a decision that I was going to leave politics and spend as little time as humanly possible wishing I could still have a job I couldn't have anymore. And I just don't waste any time doing that. And instead, think of what I could still do, where when I finish, I could say what I want to say yes to people be better off when I quit than when I started. Children had a broader future. And we were coming together instead of falling apart. Now, in a mega sense, it's hard to assert, particularly the last one, but we are still living in a world with the resources to heal all of our big problems. And the problem we've got now is, however justified, all this negative populism is, whether you believe it is or isn't, however tempting it is, because it seems to be so emotionally fulfilling to some people, it doesn't work very well. Well, listen, I've got to tell you, my favorite line in your whole book is the last line,

when you said the song that matters most is the one that you sing to yourself. But, you know, look, I've been so lucky. I've been so fortunate to keep my health. And Hillary and I've had very rewarding lives in public service. So I'm glad I had a chance to live this life. And what I want other people to think about is there are all kinds of people in totally different circumstances who still have to decide what they're going to do with each new day. and they reach a point in their career where they can't do what they used to do.

So now what are they going to do? And I think it starts with what you care about, what you're good at, what you're willing to invest time, getting better at, and mostly how you keep score. As I said, that's the song you sing to yourself. Well, thank you for your time. It's been great to talk to you as ever. We really appreciate it. Thank you.

You've been very generous your time. Have a great great day. Thank you, guys. I loved it. Thank you so much. So, Rory, was that your first encounter with President Clinton? Yes, I've only ever seen him on stages and shaken his hand. That's the first time I've had a decent conversation. And I'm really grateful. I thought that was extraordinary. When I saw him with you at the Democratic National Convention and seen some of his social media stuff, because his voice is getting a bit slower, I thought he was slowing down. But in fact, he's obviously still thinking hard. I mean, partly actually, I think I guess it's a communication style. It's quite a foxy communication style, isn't it, with an incredible amount of thoughtfulness and knowledge behind it. Yeah, this is sort of, you know, real inside the baseball, how these things work, thing.

But while we were getting towards the end, we were getting messages saying he had this board meeting to go to and his team were getting a bit sort of antsy. But I got the feeling he just wanted to carry on talking, because he loves telling that story, for example, about Arafat. When he tells a story, it's almost like he's reliving it, I think he feels his politics so deeply. And that's why I asked him in relation to Hillary and her defeat, this anger, because he's such a, he's a warm character, it's very rare you see him kind of losing it publicly.

But I think he feels this stuff really, really deeply. I was sort of slightly taken aback by that. And I think clearly within the Clinton household, they feel unbelievably cheated and bruised. Despite him saying, you know, I don't hold anything against Donald Trump. I think I felt this in a very, very minor way running against Boris Johnson. But the humiliation of being defeated by Trump, because you just think, how could possibly people prefer this guy to me? Well, along the fact, she did win the popular vote by some margin.

He actually says in the book, you know, that this must be the only political system in the world where you can win the election but lose the job. Of course, of course, just a challenge. It's not true. It's that, of course, in Britain, actually, there have been elections where people have won the popular vote and lost. Yeah. The anger is real. There's no doubt about that. And he's in terms in the book, he says the press, Putin and Comey lost the election for Hillary and gave it to Trump.

And, you know, I think he makes a pretty powerful case. But I'll say the other thing that I really like towards the end of the interview. So he's nearly 80. And he's still got that sort of fire. He's still got that sort of wants to encourage people to get engaged, get involved. He still thinks. And at the end of the book is a really inspiring read because he's basically saying, no matter how bad things feel, you know, you can make them better.

We can make them better. I admired him immensely and I thought it was so much impressive about him. But if I was going to be cheeky, when he's talking about Yasser Arafat, he forgets the politics. When he's talking about someone else, it's a personal failure of Yasser Arafat. Why did Yasser Arafat not sign up to that? Politics, politics, politics. He didn't feel that he could get it through his party. He didn't feel their work.

Now, is he right? Is he wrong? Who knows? Same question with Bill Clinton. Was Bill Clinton right or wrong on what he could do or what couldn't do? But the truth is that politicians, right, feel much more hemmed in by their political reality and have a tendency to assume their opponents are much freer. With Arafat, he was basically saying, this guy got me.

to cancel a pretty important trip to Korea, where I was involved in this big thing with North Korea. And we saw this in Northern Ireland, where the parties, and Clinton was, we didn't get a time to talk about Northern Ireland, but he was brilliant at this, of where there were certain points where you could bring him in and he could move somebody. So Arafat was essentially saying, if you don't go, I'll get this over the line for you. And then actually he said no. Well, I don't know who knows. We don't get to interview Arafat, but I guess what Arafat was saying is if you don't go, I'll try to get this over the line for you.

Clinton's worldview is very, very much. And it's indicative of, I think, his personality. It's a lot of his books are stories of people, his own personal charm, his own personal charisma. And it's been hugely influential. I mean, I remember David Cameron, who's a great admirer of his taking this on and thinking the key was that when he was negotiating with Angela Merkel, he needed to sort of do the kinds of things he read in these Clinton books, develop these personal relationships, watch TV with her. But of course, that's another example where, actually, there's a real limit to charm personality because you're coming up against the raw facts of politics. The same's true on climate, right? I mean, if we wanted to criticize Clinton again, he didn't do as much our Gore would say as he could have done on climate. If Gore had been elected in 2000, it would have been a game changer. Clinton wasn't a game changer on climate. And again, probably if we'd asked him, he would say, look, the politics are difficult. It's all very well, you know, you from a distance, seeing me as a kind of solo actor. But the truth is the context of America, of the rise. I mean, he was there right at the

beginning of populism. I guess that's something too we could have talked to. He's seeing in this New America stuff, and that poster that we interviewed when we were in Chicago, who was absolutely key to destroying all Clinton's majorities in Senate and Congress. Frank Luntz. Frank Luntz, absolutely. Frank Luntz is part of this story, because that guy that people can listen to it on leading, he basically ensured that Clinton, having won the Senate and the Congress when he first comes in, never has it again. He loses it in the midterms, never has it again. And he never has it again because Newt Gingrich and Frank Luntz are the beginnings of populism in the US. That's the kind of pre-T party partisanship. In the book, Clinton traces the sort of three-piece stuff. He basically says

it starts with Gingrich and then it's Mitch McConnell and Fox News thrown in, the role of the church is thrown in, and then suddenly along comes Trump. And he says Trump is, you know, he calls him a genius at what he does. It's just that what he does has destroyed his wife's campaign and has got him back in the White House after the first term that wasn't actually covered in glory. I met a lot of world leaders when I was working with Tony. And I found Clinton incredibly impressive. He has slowed down a lot. There's no doubt about that. His ability to combine big picture political strategy with intellectual curiosity and real people was what I always felt made him a very special politician. He was one of those people. He really had a touch with real people that a lot of politicians

don't. And don't underestimate the intellectual curiosity. He's kind of relentlessly interested in people, in ideas. I find him, I thought he was a terrific president. I really did. I really did. Just to finish, where did you see him at his very best? What were the moments that really impressed you kind of in a personal basis? That's a very good question, because, of course, a lot of the time we saw him in the early days, he was in defensive mode because he was just just absolutely getting bombarded over the whole kind of private life stuff. I'd say Northern Ireland was number one in terms of what he brought, and his commitment to it was extraordinary.

You know, and often upsetting his own people who were saying, hold on a minute, you know, why are you spending so much time on this? You're the President of America. Why are you sort of doing things that they're asking you to do when actually you work for the American system, as it were? He really put time and effort and energy into it, really cared about it. I think other examples of where he had this capacity to kind of make people feel good, bring people together. Some of the G8 summit, when Yeltsin was there and Shirek was there and Cole was there,

you know, it's some difficult stuff going on. And he always had this capacity to kind of find out what people's strong point was, what their weak point was and bring people together. This, of course, is also the man who had an affair with Monica Levinsky, which almost brought down his presidency, partly because he lied about it. And he's also, we're thinking at the moment, I'm very angry about Joe Biden pardoning his son. And Bill Clinton did a lot of pretty dodgy pardons, pardoned husbands of major donors, pardoned people who were being represented by Hillary Clinton's brother, pardoned his own brother. How do you, when you think about these people reconcile these kind of moments of what seem like kind of moral flaws with your loyalty and admiration?

Well, first thing is to say that he was very generous with his time, especially as his staff kept telling him it had to end. When you've had a life as big and as long and as rich as his is, it's impossible to cover everything. I've talked to him about Monica Lewinsky before, and I've talked to him privately as well. I think if we'd have easily wasted five minutes, he would have, on stuff like that, he's got a line and you know what he's going to say. So I don't feel bad about not raising that at all. And also, the one thing I did on my long list of questions I was going to go through, one was we go on about this much vaunted American constitution.

And yet you've got this electoral college system that you stay in the book is really bad for politics. I was going to raise the whole pardon's thing, not necessarily but just pardons generally. Why the hell should presidents be able to pardon people? So that's what I think about that. When you think about somebody as high profile as he has been for getting on now for half a century and all the stuff that's being thrown at him, I just love the fact that he's still standing up, getting up every day, putting a smile on his face and going out to do stuff. And that's what I like about him.

And so, yeah, no, I think you are being far too negative about a very, very, very positive political force in the world, past, present, future. Very good. I'll take that from you. He's definitely the most impressive American president, apart from Obama, I've seen. Well, Alistair, thank you for getting help. I'm incredibly honored to have interviewed him, and I'm sorry to have provoked you by asking different questions about someone you admire. Bloody Howard Stewart coming on and telling us what he thinks are built into the out day. Good. All right, Amsterdam. Thanks again. See you soon. Bye-bye.