The Rest Is Politics - 532. The Trump-Xi Showdown and Putin’s Conscription Con

Episode Date: May 13, 2026

As Trump becomes the first American president to visit China in nearly a decade, will the summit bring any positive developments, or will it further deepen global disorder? Will Trump sacrifice Taiwan's security to gain concessions from Xi on Iran? With Russia losing 30,000 troops per month and Putin resorting to deceiving African workers into combat, are his war efforts finally collapsing? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more in this week's edition of Question Time. __________ Go deeper into the world of The Rest Is Politics by signing up for our free newsletter HERE, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis and weekend reads from Alastair and Rory. Join The Rest Is Politics Plus. Start your free trial at therestispolitics.com to unlock exclusive bonus content – including Rory and Alastair’s miniseries – plus ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, exclusive newsletters, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Stop overpaying for energy. Switch at ⁠https://fuseenergy.com/politics⁠ and get a free TRIP+ subscription. Lloyds. 250 years on and still backing the nation's aspirations. Get more from your business accounts. Search Lloyds Business Accounts. Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ ⁠https://nordvpn.com/restispolitics⁠ It's risk-free with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee ✅ __________ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [e-mail] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Charlie Rodwell, Bruno Di Castri Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Exec Producer: Chris Sawyer General Manager: Tom Whiter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. To support the podcast, listen without the adverts and get early access to episodes and live show tickets, go to therestispolitics.com. That's the rest is politics.com. On Iran, I mean, it may be that Trump basically has to say, I've got himself into a bit of a mess. You see, you could have a word with your friends in Iran. Then they'll be looking for a concession on Taiwan. The U.S. continues to have a formal position saying, we do not support Taiwanese independence.

And they want them to change, we oppose. Taiwan, Japan and South Korea will be watching this with incredible nervousness. You can brief him and he'll listen and he'll read and it looks like he's taking it in. But he does tend to gravitate towards what the Strong Bad Leader was. This episode is brought you by Fuse Energy. Fuse has introduced to tracker tariff designed to give customers what matters most from their energy supplier, savings clarity and a bit more control. And it guarantees that your rates stay below the off-gem price gap,

which saves you up to £200. And the tariff updates automatically every quarter. Energy prices don't move in straight lines. Global events and market pressures you can't predict, and certainly can't control, still find their way onto your bill. And if you're on the wrong tariff, you can be stuck with higher rates after the pressure has ended.

With Fuse Energy's tracker tariff, that changes. If prices fall, your rate adjusts at the next quarterly update. And it's automatic. No switching, no trying to second against the market. You're protected while prices are high and ready to benefit when they fall. Switch to fuse energies tracker tariff at fuseenergy.com slash politics and use code politics to get a free trip plus subscription. Visit fuseenergy.com for full terms and conditions. Welcome to the rest of this politics question time with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Mr. Campbell. So huge news this week.

President Trump is on his way to China. First U.S. presidential visit in almost a decade, the two great superpowers getting together at a time when the world is crumbling, are they going to be able to reshape the new world order? And in Russia, Ukraine, signs that Russia may be more on the back foot, are strains appearing in the Russian economy with Russian recruitment? Or is this just part of an ongoing saga where we change, our minds every few months about who's on the losing side. And then I think we'll get into some

lighter questions, but interesting ones too, on the spirit of trees and some sorts about books. Let's start with China. So the question, and then I'll do a little explainer, will Trump's meeting with Xi and China bring any kind of positive developments, including in terms of Iran? Basically, this is the biggest story in geopolitics. The American and Chinese economies together are now about half of the whole global economy. We're in a world which feels. like a bipolar age. Those are the two big giants. And you've got the US spending about a trillion dollars a year on defence. You've got China spending probably in purchasing power parity terms about half of that, you know, maybe $500 billion in PPP terms, a bit less than real dollars. And then

you've got countries like Germany, UK, India, who are more like $100 billion or in the UK case about $85 billion. So that's the first big fact. Really big power politics. Secondly, as we've often said on the podcast, America-China policy has been weird for a very, very, very long time. It started back in the 1940s when the communist took over and where America got incredible foreign policy shock and tried to hold on to the idea that the real government was the government, the nationalist government in Taipei and Taiwan for nearly 30 years, until older listeners will remember ping-pong diplomacy and Nixon goes to China and this breakthrough where suddenly by the end of the 1970s, the United States finally recognized the government in Beijing, the communist government in Beijing as the legitimate government. And as China took off through the 80s under

Deng Xiaoping and finally joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, China became a more and more important part of the global economy in a more and more important part of the American economy, but it never became what America dreamt, which was a democracy. And from the massacre in Tiananmen Square in 1989 onwards, problems about the Chinese dictatorial system, human rights abuses increasingly the treatment of minority populations like the Tibetans or the Uyghurs, a sense that China was unfairly helping Chinese business through manipulating currency, subsidizing business, and just the forces of that led in a 10-year period to the loss of nearly two million American jobs. This is the China shock. Finally led to the situation about 10 years ago where increasingly China was defined

as the big adversary and a bipartisan consensus. Very unusual when the Republicans and Democrats disagree about almost everything. They began to agree on one thing, which was China was the big adversary. You saw that the end of Obama, where there was a pivot to Asia, more and more resources going into trying to make sure that China was contained in Asia. That was partly about China building artificial islands in the South China Sea and trying to balance the Chinese Navy. Then Trump won, where very much in Trump won, there was a big step up in tariffs against China. Mike Pompeo basically saying that Xi Jinping was a true believer in a bankrupt totalitarian ideology.

Trump getting very angry that Chinese COVID as he saw it had completely. completely torpedoed his economy and his election chances. And then when Biden came in, it was pretty much continuity, very cold relationship. Biden, I think, one of the first presidents not to visit China. There was, we covered in the podcast their meetings in Bali. We covered Jake Sullivan going out and doing meetings with the Chinese foreign minister. But there were still 100% tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles. And then Trump comes in, and I'm going to speed up here because I'm talking too much, but Trump comes in Trump too, and tariffs went up at one point up to 145% China knocked back by explaining effectively to Trump that they could cripple all America's

access to critical minerals and rare earths. The tariffs came down. They've been knocked down further by the Supreme Court. And the national security strategy under Trump seems to have changed a great deal from defining China as a great peer adversary to talking in much gentler terms against it, leaving us very unsure what Trump's China policy is and what he's going to get out of his visit. Over to you. Well, yeah, I don't think we're definitely not seeing sort of Nixon goes to China in terms of the sort of history-making potential of this, but it is incredibly important, as you say, these are the two superpowers, China, which is continuing to develop both strategically, militarily, an incredible pace.

and you're right that Biden didn't go there. And so this is the first U.S. presidential visit for almost a decade. And it could be one of four times that they meet this year. You've got G20 in Miami. You've got APEC, the Asia Pacific Economic Corporation meeting in Shenzhen. And there's an expectation that one of the announcements out of this visit is going to be that Xi will visit Washington sometime this year as well. So the answer to the question, Ben's question, is it could be incredibly consequential.

and yes, lots of positive could come out of it. Whether it does, we'll have to see. But I think what we're seeing, and I don't expect Donald Trump, even to go through the motions of talking about Uyghurs and human rights, because it's just not his thing. Somebody, I was talking to somebody in the States

a couple of days ago who said, it's really interesting how I keep, he said, I keep a log of all the people, the world leaders that Trump praises or criticizes. and I bark the number of times they do each. And he said, the people who have got the most praise are Putin, Kim Jong-un, Lukashenko, Viktor Orban, Xi Jinping. Oh, and Netanyahu.

And the ones that he's attacked the most include Stama, Sanchez, Macron, Maloney, the Pope and NATO. So I don't think he's going to go there to the sort of, you know, Euro-Dictatorship, you should be more democratic like us. I think that in terms of what might come out, it won't be very interesting, will be to see. how they frame the discussions on Iran. This is a meeting that was postponed because of the war on Iran. It's a meeting that is probably a little bit shorter than otherwise would have been

because of Iran. I think without Iran, the big issues would have been trade tariffs and probably AI. I think these are the leaders of the two countries that probably have most influence and potential significance in terms of the debate about AI. And then from the Chinese perspective, They are going to really, really work to try to get Trump to change his language about Taiwan. I think Taiwan, Japan and South Korea will be watching this with incredible nervousness because they know that Trump can say things that have consequences beyond what he maybe realizes at the time. So I think it is going to be fascinated. And just in terms of the framing of it, Trump, in the advance of this, he's approved sales of advanced computer chips.

He's delayed certain armed sales to Taiwan, and he shelved some sanctions for some of the cyber attacks that have been traced to China. So that says to me he is going into this with a view to hoping to come out of it with lots of warm words and potentially, from his perspective, lots of deals and for Xi Jinping's perspective, he'll want change of approach. The big story, I guess, is as you say, first visit for almost a decade. And of course, being Trump, what's so strange about it is that normally these meetings between the US and China are preceded by weeks or even months of negotiations between officials trying to work out what a good package of deals would be. And both because Trump, just in personality terms, doesn't do this, but also because he's distracted by Iran. We're in a situation in, which he's turning up with very little staff work. The slogan, I think, is beef, beans and Boeing,

those being the three big concessions that Trump wants to get. So he wants to be able to sell planes, wants to be able to sell soybeans into China. And then they're also, Roy, he's talking about wanting a board of trade. He's got his board of peace and I wants a board of trade. And the Chinese, they're more interesting, having a board of investment. So you've made five bees for me, not three. Five bees. And he got three T's trade tariffs, technology. And you could have thrown a fourth T, which is Tehran, because Iran. I think we're talking five Bs and four T's. How about three P's?

Three P's. Excellent. Three A's. Yeah. And then China will be asking, well, what do we get in return? And one of the things they've asked for is a trillion dollars worth of investment into the US. Now, that's really interesting because normally, if he was dealing with Saudi Arabia or Japan, Trump would be saying, I've got a trillion dollars worth of investment to the US. And sometimes he signalled he's quite open to that, but China.

He said, I don't mind, you know, if the Chinese build cars in the US, as long as they're employing U.S. workers and U.S. factories, that's fine. That was pretty much the view that Mrs. Thatcher took about Japanese car factories in Britain. It doesn't matter whether you're working for Nissan. You're still in Sunderland and you're still building things there. But for the Republican right, that is an absolute no-no. They are not interested in China increasing its investment in the U.S. and they really do feel, I mean, I read an extraordinary long piece in the New York Times about this, somebody saying something, which really would have been shocking to a liberal economist even five years ago, which is we can't allow the Chinese to make cars in the US because they would just make them much better and much cheaper than our own cars in the US. So that probably won't happen.

So then they'll be looking for a concession on Taiwan. and that may be, as you say, where people are nervous. The U.S. formal position on Taiwan, just to remind people, Taiwan and China very much were a one country. And to add to the historical complications, Taiwan was occupied by Japan in the lead-up to the Second World War. So Japan making comments about Taiwan does not go down well in China. But when in 1949, Chairman Mao did a communist revolution in China, the previous government of Chiang Kai Shik, the nation, government kept its headquarters in Taiwan, meaning that one country had effectively been split. I don't know, on the British analogy, it would be, I don't know, as though the previous

government was sitting in the Isle of White. As a result, the US has always held to a one China policy. It's always held that Taiwan is part of China, even when it believed that China should really be ruled not by the Communist Biden lashes. And it continues to have a formal position saying, we do not support Taiwanese independence. We do not support Taiwanese independence. It's a difficult thing to get your head around, given that the whole question is what happens if China invades Taiwan.

And they want them to change to we oppose. Absolutely, yes. Yeah, exactly. So over to you on this. They want him to get changed to, we oppose Taiwanese independence. And Trump may well think, well, and American voters may well think

that doesn't make much difference. Of course, if you're Taiwanese and you're in the region, you see that as a terrifying change in position. Over to you. Yeah. And also, you've, You've seen some really interesting things happening on that front because the opposition leader recently made a visit to China. And there has been some polling, which I was reading about the other day.

Younger people in Taiwan appear less concerned about China than older people. I can see that from Xi Jinping's perspective, that would be a huge, huge win. for him. And Trump, because Trump is so sort of, you know, words just kind of spew out it all sorts of different ways. And as you say, he will get briefed. But I remember when we talked to Fiona Hill, he was his first national security, foreign policy advisor.

And she would say that you can brief him and he'll listen and you'll read and he can, it looks like he's taking it in. But the minute he gets in the room with the strong man leader, he does tend to gravitate towards what the strong man leader wants, professional. providing he can get something out of it. So I think that's where the Taiwanese will be incredibly worried. And the other point about your point about Japan, really this is something we should discuss in a future episode. There's a really interesting debate going on in Japan at the moment where the new Prime Minister, Sanai Takachi,

seems to be signaling that, well, not just signaling, she's absolutely stating that Japan has to build its own defense industry. and that the pacifism that they've deployed in the past has got to change. And part of that, I suspect, is because they are worried, just as Europe is worried, that you can't necessarily guarantee on, you rely on Trump security guarantees for the future. And Japan, as we said in a recent episode when we talked about American troops coming out of Germany, Japan has more American troops than anywhere in the world apart from the US. So, yeah, Taiwan is going to be fascinating. And on Iran, I mean, it may be that Trump basically has to say, please don't brief this out,

but do you think you could help me here because I've got myself into a bit of, I've got myself into a bit of a mess. You see, you could have a word with your friends in Iran because there's no doubt China has been tacitly helping Iran in this recent, but it's been damaging to both their economies. That's the truth. Kurt Campbell, who was Biden's China lead, wrote an article in foreign affairs, which you may have seen, which was all about the ambiguity of Trump's position. And I thought it was fascinating because it was the sort of insight into the problem

that everybody now faces in trying to talk about Trump, which is you might as well say, we have literally no idea what this guy's going to do when he turns up. I mean, you can call it ambiguity, and that might sound like it's strategic ambiguity, which was the famous old American phrase on Taiwan, that you never quite state what your position is. you could talk about ambiguity in terms of splits in the Republican Party between people who see China as the big enemy and other people who are broadly kind of isolationist, let's worry about our own hemisphere and Taiwan doesn't really matter.

Or you could just be talking about ambiguity in the sense that Trump barely knows when he gets out of bed in the morning what he thinks. But I sense a shift. And one of the signs of a shift is that it seems as though the person leading on the China negotiation isn't Marco Rubio, who's a bit of a China hawk, the sexual state. it's commerce, and finance and Scott Bessent and people like that. And, you know, it's very much we're bringing over Elon Musk, we're bringing over the head of Apple, Tim Cook, and we're going to make this more of a business trip. And that makes me feel that, again, one of the ways in which Trump has surprised people is that the difference between Trump one and Trump two is he was more of a China Hawk in Trump One. And that may have just been that in Trump one, he listened more to

the American foreign policy establishment, which is quite China hawkish. And now he's defaulting to his own position, which may simply be, I don't really get why we're so obsessed with Taiwan. And actually, it's an interesting question, because as a foreigner looking at it, you do sort of think, well, look, if America's saying Russia taking Ukraine doesn't really matter, why do they care so much about Taiwan? It's a very, very long way from the US. It's very, very close to China. If it weren't for the historical accident of all this stuff I've been talking about back to the 1940s relationship with Taiwan, looking from 30,000 feet and being Trump, you might think, well, why do we care that much about Taiwan? Isn't it about the fact that one of your favorite

stats that they have such a near monopoly in the terms of, you know, these advanced chips, and that's where part of the discussion about AI is going to take place? But you see, I think that Another guy I was talking to about this, and you're absolutely right, by the way. I think the State Department has done its usual thing of preparing, endlessly preparing big folders and big briefing papers. But one of them said to me is, you know, the chances of this stuff getting read by anybody who's actually going to have an influence on Trump in the room very, very small, but they have to sort of churn it out. But they were essentially making the point that the traditional visiting, particularly from a democracy, the visitor who, who has to sort of speak out about human rights, has to talk about the Uyghurs, et cetera.

The Chinese in their planning, they're basically making clear from a position of what they consider to be their strength that, you know, you have to show a bit of deference to them. And even Trump has to show a bit of deference to them. So you can have your grievances and you can have your criticisms, but you better make those privately.

Because if you make them publicly, that is what they see as damaging to them. You can regularly, if you hear the hawks, this guy said to me, by the way, he says Trump is the biggest China dove in the Trump administration right now. So if you're the China hawk, you're basically saying, well, these guys, it's not just, let's say Trump doesn't really mind that much about repression and, you know, media control and weaker concentration camps. What he does mind about is the military intimidation, espionage,

massive disinformation campaigns that they spread all around the Democratic world, technology theft. And this guy was saying to me that the Chinese, even if you raise those in private, it's best not to say that they're criticisms. They basically say that we need to address some of these misunderstandings, these misconceptions. And if you think about, we talked about this when Mark Carney went to China, that, you know, Carney loosened quite a lot of import restrictions, particularly on electric vehicles. And, you know, quid pro quo, Beijing did something similar in relation to some of the Canadian food products. But what that said to China was, and I'm not criticising Mark Carney for this, because it's kind of an obvious thing to do, because

he is basically trying to develop better relations with China in part, again, because he's hedging in relation to the United States. Kiyostham did something very similar. You know, we had this great debate, one, whether he should go in the first place, and we both agreed he should. Secondly, we had this huge furore about the Chinese embassy in London. And he raised the case of Jimmy Lai, this elderly guy who's, you know, locked up in jail. He got a cut in tariffs, but not long after he left, Jimmy Lai's case went into a far worse place.

So I think that they're all just accepting China is very very, very, very powerful, and they're dealing with it differently as a result. It's amazing, isn't it? I mean, I guess it would be odd for Trump, I mean, almost impossible for Trump, to return to what the US used to do, which has accused the Chinese of committing genocide against the Uyghurs, because the word genocide has basically now gone out the window because the dispute around Gaza. So genocide, which used to be applied in Kosovo and in, with the case the Uyghurs, to persecuting another ethnic group, there's not. now a push to make it essentially mean only the Holocaust that you have to be killing, you know,

millions upon millions of people. So he probably won't focus on that. And as you say, he doesn't care much about human rights anyway. Even on the espionage side, it's a pretty mixed picture. There was quite a, I was reminded that we're talking about selling Boeing airplanes, that the Americans built an airplane for Jiangzi Min in 2000, as his private plane. It arrived in China, and the Chinese found 27 listening devices had been inserted in this plane that the Americans had sold the Chinese, including in the back of the bed, which Jiangzeman was supposed to sleep on. So I do think some of those espionage stuff's a bit weird, too, because I think the Americans are doing all they can to spy on China and the Chinese are doing all they can to spy on America. I also wonder whether it's true that America wouldn't engage in industrial espionage if they felt that China was ahead of them in nuclear secrets, AI or anything. I imagine they would, right?

Yeah. There was, again, another interesting article in foreign affairs with a very senior American professor and a very senior Chinese professor saying we're getting into a very dangerous Cold War stage where if there was an accident, a Chinese plane flew into an American plane or a bomb was dropped in the wrong place,

we'd be much closer to war than we would have been 25 years ago because both sides are becoming so paranoid. And there's a sort of weird echo, which is on the American side, you've got the China is doing all those things that you mentioned, espionage, stealing industrial secrets, threatening Taiwan, and on the Chinese side, a very, very strong sense, which is completely confirmed. It's totally, it's not even really paranoia. It's a, the Chinese accurately read the Americans as saying, we are trying to slow the rise of China. We're trying to stop them getting technological dominance. We're trying to stop them dominating their region. We're trying to make sure America is the dominant kind of, and China can't rise. And so that's not even paranoia. But put those two things together, you've got a really difficult situation. And yet, Trump, by returning to just worrying about trade, seems to have sideline the China Hawks,

sideline figures who we've talked about like Elbridge Colby, who has been running policy in the Department of Defense. Elbridge Colby, who's the grandson of the CIA director, who wrote this book called Strategy Strategy of Denial, who was the big driver of America shouldn't be doing stuff in Europe. or the Middle East, all its resources should be about denying China's opportunity to take Taiwan. We've barely heard from him for the last few weeks or months, and certainly what Trump is doing in Iran isn't an Elbridge Colby, let's just focus on China policy. Yeah. And I mean, it's hard to, look, we read and hear so much more about Trump than we do

about Xi Jinping. But it's hard to look at this without thinking that Xi Jinping will be, I think, be feeling a lot stronger and a lot more confident. about this encounter than he would have done, certainly in Trump one, and possibly even when he met Biden in the margins of a previous apex. And one of the reasons for that is that there has been this wave of visits. The Chinese talk about this wave of, so in recent, you know, not that distant past, you've had prime ministers or presidents of Australia, Canada, France, the UK, as I mentioned, Germany, Spain, Finland, Ireland, Uruguay, South Korea, Georgia, New Zealand, Slovakia, the European Union. Our friend Mr. Vucic, he's been there several times and actually talked.

People should listen to what he was saying about because he was very much coming from the perspective of people do not fully understand just how good these people are, what they're trying to do. And of course, they both also give a sense. I mean, look, Xi Jinping is not as voluble as Trump, because in a dictatorship, he don't really need to be. But my God, does he emanate strength everywhere he goes? And I think there was so fascinating how this. Trump even talks about the G2. You know, you've got a G20 and a G7 and a G8.

This is the G2. It's almost as if Gingpeng's the only one that he thinks even gets close to him. in terms of power. And I think wheeling around that very discreet-looking mind that doesn't say much, I think Xi Jinping will be looking at this. He wants at the end of this. He wants people to say, he's more scared to me than I'm scared at him. Final thing before we go to the break. In the photographs that you see, Xi Jinping seems to always face the camera and barely smile and stick his hand out to the side, making everybody from Biden to Vuchich to Star Murder

Trump looks slightly weird because they've always got a big grin on their face and they're sort of shaking hands and he looks like he's sort of slightly casually and slightly sarcastically handing his hand over to the other leader is that right or am I being unfair? No, you're not being unfair. It's very clever.

It's very clever. It relates exactly to what I've just said. He's always got the same facial expression in those photos. You'll never see him looking different. And I don't know if I think we've mentioned this before, if you go on to any of the, on the internet in China and you put in the phrase Winnie the Pooh, you'll find that it doesn't exist because he really, really, really hates this sort of cartoon image of him as Willie the Pooh. Another interesting thing somebody was telling me, Roy, about the trade and AI stuff is that you're a big fan of Deep Seek, aren't you? Yeah. Because this guy was saying to it that Deep Seek is very much part of the, it's, it's for, it's, for you.

example, if you go and try to find out about the history of the Ukraine war on Deep Seek, you're getting a very, very different version to the truth. So it's very much a kind of, it is part of their propaganda outfit. It's amazing. One of the things that Deep Seek does, which is really weird, unless you can screenshot it, is you can see it thinking through the answer and then suddenly it refuses to give you the answer. So it'll say, the listener is asking me to compare Winnie the Pooh to Xi Jinping. And I must do some search. and find this out. Reuters does it. And then suddenly it'd be like, I cannot answer this question.

Exactly. Exactly. But the reason it's relevant, though, is that China is increasingly going open source on AI. So again, there's a plug for the interview with Will McGaskill on leading, which I think people will enjoy when they listen to it, a lot of which is about AI and AI safety. If you want to listen, of course, to Wilma Gasco, just go ahead and search for the rest of this politics leading wherever you get your podcast. And you'll find so many other great interviews. I'm still trying to plug Naz Shah, who's a mesmerizing Labor MP, who I think you'd enjoy listening to.

But the big difference between what China is doing is they are gambling on providing cheap access to open source models. So you can basically, if you're a European company building an AI platform, you can essentially take over this whole Chinese model and build your system on it, rather than having to endlessly license access to a server in the United States. So they're a few months behind. I mean, these models are not as good as the frontier U.S. models, but probably only five, six months behind. But they're gambling that by going open source and cheaper, they'll be able to dominate European markets in a way that the Americans can. My final point, Roy, just to scare our listeners and viewers even more, the nuclear issue is going to be quite important because they are developing advanced arsenal of roughly 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035. huge buildup. And at a time, you know, historically when we've thought of nuclear, the nuclear powers, we've thought mainly of the Americans and the Russians. And that's why we had the START

treaty, which that's. And one of the reasons why Trump has refused to recommit to that is because it only really affects America and Russia as opposed to any arms control on China. So whether we'll see anything on that front as well. So I think this is one of those summits where we really, really have to watch it closely and analyze it from every which angle, because you've got these two superpowers, very different characters, but both all about power and all about winning. And they're coming together at a time when they probably could sort Iran between them. They probably could sort AI between them. They probably could sort some of the big economic and security issues that we face.

They probably could start to think about a new world, global lo, architecture. And it'll be fascinating to see just how far they go in any of those things or not. Well, Alison, thank you. Well, let's take a quick break. And when we come back, I know you wanted to talk a little bit about Russia, Ukraine, and maybe that's partly out of your crane visit and your conversation with Zelensky. This episode is brought you by Lloyd's Business and Commercial Banking. We hear a lot of talking politics about stability, as Gordon Brown used to call it. But I think that word means different things to different people. To me, it does mean new labor. For me, I might be tempted to say Theresa May, but it doesn't matter whether you're a business, small business owner or a government.

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Welcome back to the rest of this politics question time with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Honestead Campbell. Question from Harry. Is Putin making noises about the Ukraine war? coming to an end, just him buying time for Iran to stuff his coffers again, Alistair. Well, I said to you on the main episode that I'm in Germany at the moment, and the papers, you know, the main newspaper I got DeVelt today, which is a huge broadsheet with these sort of 5,000 word articles about all sorts of things. There was nothing about the UK,

literally not a word about Kyristama's travails. It was a little piece yesterday. Well, that's extraordinary. Wait, can I just pause on that? That is absolutely extraordinary. I mean, if you go back five years, certainly ten years, the idea that the primers for the UK is about to be toppled would have been absolutely front and centre. I was so struck by this because we'll get on to Ukraine just a second, but I was in the States at another one of these meetings and I offered to talk about British

politics and people just didn't want to hear. Literally didn't want to hear. Listen, there's a lot going on here. Friedrich Mauts has just had a bit of a defeat in the Parliament where he tried to get through this thing where employers would help out paying, reducing the energy bills of their employees and that's been defeated. But the front page is absolutely covered with stuff about Ukraine and including Putin suggesting that Gerhard Schroeder is the man to be the negotiator between Russia and Ukraine.

Just remind people a little bit about the disgrace there and how controversial that is and why most people would raise their eyebrows at that? Well, Kaya Kallas, the European diplomatic chief, she has raised their eyebrows as high as it is possible for them to go and said this is completely unacceptable. So of the Ukrainians, basically because Gerhard Schroeder, when he was transferred to Germany, and he's also now 82, which I think could be a factor.

But he basically got very, very close to Putin, including, after leaving office, to becoming, you know, how can we put this, a Russian lobbyist who made a lot of money doing so. So in answer to Harry's question, question, does it signal that he's just trying to buy a bit more time? The answer to that is probably because Ukraine do seem to be on the up at the moment. There was a piece in, I saw in one of the papers about how the Russians are actually losing territory at the moment, which is, you know, this is not exactly going according to plan. There has been huge debate about anybody you talked to in

the military says what the Ukrainians have done in terms of their drone technology and their use of drones has been huge. They are losing somewhere between 25 and 30,000 troops pretty much every month. We're up to 1.2 million casualties on the Russian side, probably half a million on the Ukrainian side. Very interesting was to watch the parade, the annual military parade that they do for their victory over the Nazis, which is Putin has turned in recent years into one of the most gigantic shows of military strength. And it was, it was minuscule. Added to which he was filmed, sort of being, you know, scuttled into a bi-security out of the way. They were worried about Ukrainian drones hitting it. They had to get Trump to Asselensky to promise not to try and drop drones on it.

So that suggests he's in a pretty weak position. But I said, the Ukrainians will be saying, hold on a minute, he's just trying to buy time. It's so interesting this. I was trying to remind myself about this narrative. So the honest truth is there's been a lot of crying wolf on both sides, going back from February 22, which is when, so the war has now been going on for over four years. There's been a number of occasions where the commentators have convinced themselves either that Russia is on its last legs and it's about a collapse or Ukraine is on its last legs and about a collapse. And so far for the last four years, neither has really proved true. So you'll remember probably the most desperate moment for Putin last time round.

Firstly, was his failure to take Kiev. And then in the year later was the year in which there was a real expectation that was going to be Ukrainian counter-offensive. And progosian, who led the Wagner group and had done all the fighting around Bakhmud, effectively tried to march on Moscow and stage a coup. And people really thought, you know, this is real trouble. But the Russian economy proved much more resilient than people predict. They found workarounds. They sold oil to China. They had shadow fleets. They were doing funny stuff with Iran. Their economy grew surprisingly strongly. They massively increased expenditure on defense. They started pouring out munitions. And so the story, if we go back 12 months, was Russia really had the initiative. Trump was coming in. He seemed to be very much on the Russian side. Ukraine was struggling to

recruit, whereas Russia was paying bigger and bigger bounties, getting lots of people in. Russia was slowly grinding forward. People pointing out, it's pretty slow, but it was advancing. And if you fast forward to where we were even two months ago with the Iran war, again, basically what Trump did would seem to strengthen Russia because he's been firing a lot of the missiles, which could have been sold to the Ukrainians at the Iranians, and he allowed the oil price to go up. So oil revenue has been going up for Putin, and Ukraine continues to struggle to recruit. They have a real problem replacing manpower up at the front line. A lot of those units are only 46 or to 60 percent full. Some of them are only 25 percent staffed. Yeah, there's been quite a lot of desertion as well.

I think there's quite a lot of desertion on both sides. And when I was in Ukraine fairly recently, one of the things I kept hearing was that the length of time which troops were being expected to serve without a break becoming a real problem. for Zelensky. But it's very, you know, Putin's definitely, he's always up to something, and he's definitely up to something on this, because he, you know,

essentially, there's, of the many kind of several thousand word articles that have been written about analyzing this, him saying that, you know, we're nearing the end of the war, we're heading towards the end of the war. Somebody's written a column pointing out how he talked about the Ukrainians four years ago

compared to how he's talking about them now. He never calls Zelensky generally by name. He's never ever referred to him as president and probably never will, but he called him Mr. Zelensky, whereas he used to be talk about, you know, the Nazi, the military operation for the denazification, the Kiev regime. So he's definitely softening his talk. I think what the Schroeder thing does, I think it's a classic Putin divide and rule. It's like I saw one columnist today saying, well, what's wrong with Goe Heard Schroeder? He's very serious. He's very experienced. He knows Putin well, in as long as he's not unkind to the Ukrainians.

So it's a classic where most of the establishment come out and say, this is a stupid idea, but then he gets a few going the other way. Roy, one other thing I wanted to raise in relation to Russia. Now, you know, you and I read an awful lot of different things. I've been reading the annual report of the Estonian equivalent of L.I.6, which is about the extent to which Russia is deceiving people from Africa to go to Russia and then go and fight. on the front line. And we're talking about hundreds and hundreds who are dead. And of course,

you've now got quite a large number of African countries who are under pressure to bring people back. We're to Kenya, we're talking around about 1,000. Just a little explainer on that. What seems to be happening is that Russians are signing up Kenyans, giving them the impression they're going to get a nice job in Russia. And they arrive in Russia. And they arrive in Russia. get their passports taken away, they get told that they're not going to have their travel back to Kenya paid for, and they're sent within three or four days to the front line without their passports. And the overwhelming majority of them are being killed.

So it's completely morally appurbed. The Kenyan intelligence service reckons of a thousand that have gone to Russia. 30 have come back alive. Are you talking Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Togo, Botswana, Mali, Guinea, Cameroon, Eritrea. And you can see it, you know, because we talk a lot about demographic change and Africa has got this extraordinary kind of growth of young people. So young, with economies that aren't necessarily geared up for that.

So people who are being offered jobs as cooks, as drivers, as builders, whatever it might be, getting their flight page to go to Moscow, then getting there and finding that they're, They're sent straight off to the front line. Because they've been made to sign a contract in Russian, which they can't read. A lot of them, yeah. Yeah, they just sign it and saying this is going to be great. And then talked a lot about how China and Russia have been investing a lot in diplomatic power within Russia.

This cannot be sustainable. These countries must be trying to get something done to stop their own people getting sent off there to the front line. Yeah, it's horrifying. It's horrifying. And again, you know, we don't know, because both Russia and Ukraine, are so weakened. I mean, both of them have taken such unbelievable economic damage, have suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties, are locked in this horrifying drone war at the front line. And if either of them were to collapse, we would be able to provide a very convincing reason

why, because there's so much economic and personal damage front. And yet, more than four years on, they're both continuing. And I think you'd be brave person to guess which one is going to fold first. There's a whole industry, as you can imagine, of very smart people in ministries of defense and intelligence agencies around the world, trying to come up with objective indicators on who's doing better. And in the end, the problem comes down to as it comes down to what you can count. And the thing that you can't count is morale, nationalism, political endurance. So there are 10 indicators that somebody sent me that they're monitoring at the moment. Net territorial change per month.

Russian casualty to recruitment ratio. AWOL desertion rates. Russian sign-on bonuses. Drone missile production and launch rates on both sides. Air defense interceptor stocks. Russian oil export volumes and revenues, not just oil price. Russian inflation, labor shortages, regional budget stress. I'm about to finish.

Ukraine's domestic arms output. drones, missiles, artillery shells, and finally Western aid reliability, air defense, ammunition finance. So they try to take these 10 different questions, run them through all these models, but they have consistently been wrong over the last four years on predicting which one's going to fold first, because in the end, it seems as though there are things you can't count in the question of whether Putin and Zelensky keep going. Yeah. Right, Rory, a couple of lighter things to finish off on. Somebody just wants to know what is my obsession with trees all about. You're mildly obsessive trees as well, aren't you? I am. I plant a lot of trees. I'm very good. And I might

even be better than you at the names of trees and trees species. I think you're more than a 100% you are. Oh, 100% you are. I love trees, but I don't, I deliberately don't want to be an expert on trees. Because I think if that happens, you can spend all your time thinking what they are rather than the effect that they're having on you. So tell us about trees in your life. When did you start with your tree of the day? It's just a late, late development? Have you always been obsessed with trees. I've never been upset. I've always loved trees. I think there's something about trees I've always loved, but I started posting a tree of a day quite a long time ago. Now, if you go through my pictures on my phone, it's mainly, it's mainly trees, to be honest,

and I got an absolute beauty this morning, which may well be today's winner. But Rory, I don't know where it comes from. I just, I just love, and even sort of ugly trees are quite like looking at them to think, you know, you're quite interesting. The Japanese particularly love what you might call an ugly tree. I mean, a lot of the Japanese wabi-sabby-aesthetic, a lot of what you put around a tea room in Japan, if you were going in for your tea ceremony, are trees which are warped, pine trees that, you know, are stunted

or head off in odd directions. Fabulous. And actually, I've been trying to do a bit of this planting myself, because I've been trying to do a mini Japanese garden in Scotland. You can actually try to plant the tree at an angle. You can do a very careful. bit of Japanese pruning where you take off the leader in order to create this distorted look. The most extreme, obviously, is bonsai where you're doing this in a tiny pot. But Japanese will do this

at huge scale. If you go to the great Japanese gardens, you can see trees which are three, four hundred years old where every year there are teams of people out there, carefully making it look as though it's a wind-warked tree on a Scottish cliff when, in fact, it's sitting in the middle of Kyoto. You're right, by the way, you definitely, I've been to your garden up in Scotland. I'd say you're more of a tree expert than I am. I'm a kind of very, I'm a tree amateur who just loves to look at them and sort of bathe in them. And I want to plug something called tree line. If people go to treeline.org. This brings two of my passions together, or trees and music. And this is, this is a composer called Graham Fickin, who's going to be cycling from Romania to the UK.

and on the way doing 20 concerts in and around trees and forests. And he's using, including playing inside trees, by the way, but in the sounds of trees, using music, recordings, concert performance. It's all about just sort of, you know, he obviously loved trees even more than you and I do. So, and I think it might be the sort of thing. If people have been reading and enjoying the interviews in our newsletter, I think it might be one for Izzy, our newsletter interviewer. I think Graham would be a great interviewee.

I can't resist at sort of my two normal plugs. One is you and I both great fans of the Woodland Trust, which continue to do lovely stuff. Secondly, I'm continuing to push for the new Labour leaders as they emerge, she or he, please think about turning the Greenbelt into the largest forest in England. I'm obsessed with this idea to remind listeners, you could put hundreds of millions of trees and it would transform a Greenbelt, which people don't want to develop, but which really isn't a very beautiful place into, if you planted those trees, you would have something that would be there for hundreds of years. It would improve air quality in London. It would drop temperatures in London,

be great for climate change, but most importantly of all, because it's close to our largest population centre, it would allow 10, 12 million people, including young people from inner city areas, to get out into nature and bathe in those trees. So if you're really looking for an exciting big legacy project, planting the green belt. And final thing, I had a, because, you know, now that we've become like podcast bros, we need to become wellness influences. That's our next stage. Oh, God. Development, right.

So this is my new thought. Yesterday I went for a run. Yeah. And my friend Felix has been trying to convince me I need to run at Zone 2, which means that you need to run at a kind of pace at which you can have a conversation. Okay. Keep your heart rate really low. So you're slightly plodding. And the way in which I suddenly managed to achieve it running through the park is by looking at

trees. If you're able to run at a pace where you can really absorb the canopy and the trees and look in detail at the leaves, I find you naturally adjust your pace down to zone two. Okay. I used to, when I was doing marathons and stuff, I used to use trees as rather than thinking I've got 10 miles to go, I think I've got to get to that next tree and then I've got to get in the next tree. So they, you know, I use them in different ways. By the way, we literally while I've been speaking, somebody's pinged me a video, which I actually did see last night from talking of trees and changing the world for the better, which Sadiq Khan, after 10 years of Mayor of London, put out a video sort of all the sort of stuff he's been involved in.

But there's one very, very good example. He set out early to tackle the idea of, you know, air quality in London and asthma. And remember all the fuss about Ulaz and he was going to lose labor, all these by-elections, all that stuff. And he just stuck to his guns. Stick to your guns. It's always a good policy. Wonderful. Final question for you, Alasda, from Cameron. You're always recommending books on the show. How do you find time to read all of these books? Good question. I think you look at more books than I do, I think. Well, partly because I've got a Kindle. So, you know, if I'm thinking yesterday I'm about to do a show with Alistair on China, and I spent a lot of time talking about Elbridge Colby and I've never read his book, I can literally,

the bath in 30 seconds, download Elbridge Colby's book and start reading it. And how much of it would you read? I would probably read the first 40, 50 pages, partly because those American geopolitics books are slightly set up like an article in Foreign Affairs with the Atlantic, where they basically set out their argument in the introduction in the first chapter. So you can be pretty confident that you've got a sense of where they're going. I wonder whether that isn't actually part of the problem with the loss of those kind of of American policy books. We in Fude Ezra Klein, who was talking about his book abundance.

And again, I wonder how many people make it to the end of the book and how many, like me, just kind of get the framing at the beginning and then go around talking about Esra Klein's buns. But you like to finish books, right? Well, I don't mind throwing a book away if I, I don't mean literally throw away, but putting it down, if I'm not enjoying it. Fiona, the number of times you'll sort of sit up in bed saying, God, I really hate this book. This book is so boring. This book is so crap. This person character and why you read it is because I've started I've got to go to the end. Whereas if I don't like a book early on,

and it's partly because one of the best feelings in the world is when you pick up a book, usually a book you weren't even aware of because you're in a book shop or a library or something, and you pick up a book and you know within a few pages that you're really going to like that book. I love that feeling. So if you spend all your time reading books that you're actually not enjoying reading, you minimize the number of times you have that great feeling. I go through phases. Your serendipity points, sorry, just quickly, because it would be my last interstitch.

But your point about serendipity is important. The problem with Kindle, I'm not browsing, I'm downloading a book that I already know I want. I'm not looking at a bookshelf and finding things. I just, by Serendipity, found a book by Henry Power, who's an academic at Exeter, called Homer Haunted, which is about his own personal relationship with Homer and the Iliad. and it's rich and beautiful and strange and quite emotional. And again, it wouldn't be like Elbridge Colby. I wouldn't be downloading it from Kindle.

I came across it because I met his sister in the street. Then she handed it over. Fiona and I have been listening on drives. If we're in the car, we have, we've been listening to Andrew Lowney's book about the Duke and Duchess of York. And my God, Roy, I don't know if you had anything to do with them. They are awful people.

I'm sorry. And if the guy's research is even 60% right, they are truly, truly, truly awful. But Fiona's loving it. I'm tolerating it because I just think why we spending so much time listening about these two clearly awful people. But it's a brilliantly, I mean, the research, the depth of research is extraordinary. Here's one you'll like, Rory. Gabrielle Rifkin. You may have come across Gabriel Rifkin because she works in sort of conflict resolution.

She's written a book. The subtitle is Turning Conflict Into Connection, but you love the title. How to Agree to Disagree. So it's a bang on message for the podcast. I think Gabriel spotted something because she keeps sending me little links to it. And I've also been looking at the book a bit. Yeah. So well done, Gabriel, for pig out of this year.

Yeah. It's a book that I'll dip in and out of. I won't read the whole thing because it's actually not about conflict resolution that you and I are very interested in. It's about marriage and it's about sex. and it's about, you know, getting on with your friends and school bullying and all that. But it's interesting how she's taken her kind of adult professional life and turned it into a book. And then the other one is by I mentioned a few weeks ago, Florence Gaupp,

who wrote the German, wrote a book about where we're going in the future. And I said this book should be translated in English as a result of which she sent me her previous book, which had been translated into English. And it's called The Future, a User's Guide. And again, it's kind of how to take what we know about now and the past and use it as a sort of active tool to navigate the future. So, but I'll read both of those. I'll probably dip in and out of Fiona will make me listen to the end of the Andrew book. God, they are awful, Roy.

Did you have anything to do with them? I'm not going to get drawn into that. I mean, come on, Rory. I didn't. I didn't. I didn't. I didn't. I didn't.

I think I've met Prince Andrew. twice in my life for five minutes at a party. I mean, I know very little about them. But I love the way you deflates anything to do with the rules. That was really lovely. Yeah, I did totally deflecting that. My serious recommendation for people who want a big book to get into, which is geopolitics, which I think I've talked about a little bit,

but I think is amazing, is Edward Fishman's choke points, how economic warfare is changing the world. And that's basically about how Trump is now using all America's handle on choke points around the world. Of course, straight of Hormuz is one big example. But how they developed a lot of that after 9-11, originally going after terrorists. And then it began to be something that you could use to put pressure on Europe over Greenland.

But anyway, Edward Fisherman choke points. Very good. Well, there we are. We've talked about Trump and Xi. We'll probably talk about that again next week, I imagine. We've talked about Russia, Ukraine, and the luring of African men to the front line, which is pretty horrible. We talked about our love for trees. I'm looking at some beautiful trees out the window now and our books.

There we are. Lovely to talk to you as always. Lovely talk to you. Have a great week, and let's talk soon. Bye-bye.